A common problem of education in postmodernity is that of “fragmented knowledge.”1 In most schools today, subjects are taught as discreet units. Literature, history, science, and philosophy (when it is taught at all) are treated as disciplines that can be studied nearly in a vacuum. Some reference might be made to complementary subjects, but the active study of, for example, history and literature together is often absent, as the school system, with its tidy system of periods, shuffles students off to different teachers for each subject.

The history of ideas, however, is not neatly divided into subjects. Ideas in science, literature, and philosophy, for instance, are tied together with history by innumerable interwoven strands. One cannot thoroughly understand modern scientific practice unless one knows the history
of the Enlightenment, one cannot fully understand our modern political system unless one understands Hobbes’ Leviathan, and one cannot understand Stoker’s Dracula unless one knows a bit about Queen Victoria and her England. As John Henry Newman says, “[The various subjects] are necessary mutually to explain and interpret each other.”2 Thus, the postmodern problem of “fragmented knowledge” is that while students may know things about subjects, they often do not fully understand them because they have not been trained to think of knowledge as a unified whole.

The idea of knowledge being a unified whole is ancient and Christian; thinkers from Socrates to Montaigne to J.P. Moreland have asserted that no subjects can be properly understood in isolation from one another. Indeed, Newman says, “A University, I should lay down, by its very name professes to teach universal knowledge.”3 The same standard can be applied to any institution claiming to teach general knowledge, including high schools. Though one may go on to specialize later in life, it has traditionally been foundational to first get a “liberal” education: one that gives students a broad understanding of the history of ideas.

An additional problem of the fragmented method is the way that the subjects are taught; not only are students not making connections between areas of study, they are often not actually learning anything of value within subjects. Literature, and to an even greater extent, history, are often taught using anthologies, textbooks, and lectures. Facts are often emphasized over ideas. Certainly learning facts is important; Sayers emphasized the acquisition of a great deal of facts, formulae, and skills in her articulation of the grammar stage of education.4 The problem occurs when this emphasis on facts extends beyond elementary school when students ought to be learning logic and rhetoric.

Classical teachers believe that students are not receptacles to be filled by the transmission of facts. The purpose of education, according to Sayers is to teach students to think5. She says, “Is not the great defect of our education today—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned— that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.” In short, students know facts but fail to know what to do with them. Opening up the disciplines to inform each other provides dissonant content that will help students move from mere consumption of facts to dealing with conflicting ideas and come to a deeper understanding of them.

Going beyond the goals of teaching students to think and to re-integrate knowledge, learning about the past, specifically, does something particularly important. G. K. Chesterton, in his column in the Illustrated London News once said, “Education is simply the soul of society as it passes from one generation to another.”6 The article in which this quotation is found is urging the readers to maintain good traditions that are worthy of being passed down to future generations. As he says in the same column, “…we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.” Chesterton believed that education, when done well, will maintain civilization and inspire virtue in students. The modern focus on science, however, cannot do this alone, because it has little to say about society’s “soul.” He argues that without a thoroughly good “soul” society can only hope to produce barbarians.

What then does this passing on of the Western “soul” look like? Robert Hutchins argues that, “The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to this present day.”7 The Great Conversation, according to a classical philosophy of education, is the dialectic between the authors and artists who produced or recorded ideas. It is St. Thomas’ dependence on the Philosopher Aristotle; it is T. S. Eliot’s allusions to Dante; it is W. H. Auden’s poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” in which he comments upon the painting The Fall of Icarus. If these writers and artists are dependent on each other, it would be difficult to understand any of them without looking at the books that, as Hutchins says, “… are the means of understanding our society and ourselves. They contain the great ideas that dominate us without our knowing it. There is no comparable repository of our tradition.”8 This tradition is similar to Chesterton’s idea of a “soul”; one could say the “soul” is passed on through participation in the Great Conversation. We could certainly chuck the entire thing and choose to pass on a very recent iteration of that soul, but we would be the poorer for it. The historic soul is hard to escape, at any rate, when new television shows about outlaw bikers are a retelling of Hamlet, popular science fiction writers use Dante’s Inferno as direct inspiration, and our basic beliefs about our current economic system are rooted in authors from the 18th century.