January 2024
Dear Friend of Golden View Classical Academy,
If you were born in 1935, you might have a memory of World War II. You would likely not have experienced it in the visceral way of someone born in 1922 or 1923, but you’d be aware of it. Even there, you wouldn’t know as much as the mother or father who lost a child, a wife or a husband who lost the other, or as a soldier bringing home that monumental, and tragic, victory. You’d be 88 or 89 years old, and even with modern medicine and a healthy way of life, your mental powers would be fading, as they do for everyone, always. And when you pass, what passes along with you is a living memory of the greatest cataclysm known to us today. And with that vanishing experience, when it finally does come to pass, humanity will be exposed once again to the vexing question: how do you preserve order and justice in the face of tyranny? How do you recognize tyranny when it is but a serpent in its shell, as one famous freedom-lover once said?
A similar fact animated a young Abraham Lincoln as he surveyed the political landscape of antebellum America. He saw a world where the men and women of the Revolution had all passed from the scene. There was therefore no living memory to bind the country together around that original impulse for independence, the memory of which softened disagreements. The country, with that memory gone and clear vision recovered, was no longer naive. Lincoln saw what problems would unfold with this new disposition - more acrimony and less of a desire to compromise.
And we too have a chance to see this, not only in relation to WWII as our living memory of it will soon pass from our world, but as something truly permanent about our political life, something that is always at work. And when we recognize that, that memory vanishes, we see anew the driving need for classical education. Politics falls apart, countries fail, memories which make us who we are as a country and that give us an identity lose their moving power, and we are continually thrust back on our limited personal experience.
Sometimes people ask us at Golden View why it matters not just to have a “rigorous academic school” but to have a specifically classical education. It seems so remote from real concerns of career and college, which rigor can achieve just fine. There are layers to the answer, but one of the deeper ones, which is not necessarily on the forefront of our minds as we go about our business of training minds and improving hearts, is to remind us of the variety of larger cycles in which we find ourselves. All of us exist in the midst of various cycles - some daily, some weekly, some even decades long. Classical education, in its emphasis on what is permanent in nature through science and math, its emphasis on what recurs in human affairs, and its emphasis to train our eyes on beauty, remind us of longer and larger cycles. We are in them all the time, though less aware of them. And our lack of awareness, unless it is addressed directly, prepares us to be blind when dangers on a more impressive scale do finally raise their heads.
If we sell education on the benefit of finding a career or getting into college, we sacrifice awareness of these larger cycles for the one that is most apparent, most immediate, and least consequential. That is not to say college and career are not to be pursued, but that they ought to be pursued with an awareness of their place in larger, deeper, more dangerous, and even more ultimately rewarding, rhythms of human life. So as we reflect on all the living memories that fade continually, we can take solace in classical education as an antidote to forgetfulness. And with that solace, we can be more sure that what ought not be forgotten will not be.
Sincerely,
Dr. Garrow
Principal, Golden View Classical Academy
