In today’s educational landscape, one looks in vain for points of agreement—even for points of meaningful disagreement—amid invective, innuendo, and ascriptions of bad faith. Americans seem to be deadlocked about what and how their children learn, which has opened the door to irresponsible grandstanding on one hand, and on the other to an insidious focus on soft skills and therapeutic approaches. Moving forward, we will need to revisit old questions and escape existing prejudices, and to that end I would like to offer a modest suggestion:
Conservatives should reconsider the lessons of Romanticism.
I realize that this is not an easy claim to affirm. Conservatives have long opposed Romantic education and its underlying assumptions—from the totalizing utopianism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the indeterminacy and potential anti-intellectualism of John Dewey. Even today, critics complain that teachers celebrate children’s potential and spontaneity over reason or adult authority, confining students to shallow forms of self-involvement; replacing contemplation with roving distraction; and encouraging types of rebellion that “mostly poison the young people whose intellectual and spiritual thirst they mean to quench.” Whenever sentimental and softheaded adults trap children in their own immaturity, it seems, Romanticism is to blame.
These are all valid concerns, but they overlook an important, countervailing aspect of the Romantic tradition: namely, its attention to moral sincerity. In our age of knowing cynicism, the Romantics remind us that young people are not only a sea of possibility but also a bedrock of belief, and indeed that the latter quality sustains the former. While children’s goodness can be overstated, I would argue that sincerity comes naturally to them, that it is inescapably spiritual, and that any education worth the name proceeds on the same assumptions. And I think that most conservative parents and teachers would agree with those propositions.
To get a sense of how we might move beyond caricatures of Romantic childhood and education, consider two passages from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843).
The first half of the book opens with a collection of aphorisms written by an arch, ironic young man. In one, he writes, “I prefer talking with children, with them one can still hope they may become rational beings; but those who have become that—Lord save us!” Here we see the typical Romantic glorification of plasticity and potential, as well as the corresponding rejection of moral responsibility. More interesting, however, is the second half of the book, in which an older friend, a judge, finds the young man’s papers and responds with a series of cautionary letters. He counters the young man’s groundless emotion not with mature wisdom but with memories of his own childhood. “I think back to early youth,” the judge writes,
when, without properly grasping what it means to make a choice in life, I listened with childlike trust to the talk of my elders and for me the moment of choice became solemn and august….[When] my soul was matured in the hour of decision.
For Kierkegaard, spiritual maturity is a lifelong process that ends where it begins, with “childlike” trust and solemnity, whereas what most people consider maturity is in fact a creeping form of estrangement, “of losing one’s own self.” Thus, paradoxically, Kierkegaard argues that the core of education is not imparting knowledge but conserving a preexisting union—between oneself and God.
Kierkegaard is specifically concerned with the challenge of becoming a Christian, but secular forms of education must also be religious in this sense. Authentic learning relies not only on the teacher stimulating interest or conveying relevance—the old standbys of educational psychology—but on deeper sources of selfhood within the child: inner movements of holiness, grace, and love that remain beyond the teacher’s grasp and can never be fully rationalized or reproduced.
From this perspective, what traps children in superficiality is not a focus on feelings or introspection as such, but a denial of their spiritual depths. It is sincerity that sanctifies feelings by rooting them in these depths. Even when the stakes seem low, even when the decision is not entirely the child’s own, it is the ability to commit oneself—to be earnest—that reveals one’s soul and becomes the basis for all subsequent moral education. The soul emerges from a ground of wholesome volition that Kierkegaard calls “purity of heart.”
The same phrase appears in William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, “The Prelude” (1798), which, in subtler language, can help us understand the path of an individual’s education. As in his famous “Ode” (1807), childhood reflections lead Wordsworth to “intimations of immortality”: a dim but deeply felt sense of his own eternal being. It is a “hard task to analyse a soul,” he writes,
in which, Not only general habits and desires, But each most obvious and particular thought— Not in a mystical and idle sense, But in the words of reason deeply weighed— Has no beginning.
From his earliest experiences, Wordsworth perceives his existence as an “interminable building,” constructed (in typical Romantic fashion) from “naked feelings” and sympathetic perceptions of nature. However, he soon realizes that this structure is too sturdy to be the product of play or passing fancy alone, for even when “the props of my affections were removed”—following the premature death of his father—“the building stood as if sustained / By its own spirit.”
Feelings may elevate experience, but they are insufficient to constitute a durable self. Instead, emotion must direct us toward transcendent truths. As Wordsworth puts it, one must establish a “bond of union betwixt life and joy,” fitting the “first-born affinities” of childhood “to existing things”—joining “to duty and to truth / The eagerness of infantine desire.”
This sounds surprisingly similar to traditional forms of virtue education, in which one teaches children to do the right thing for the right reasons—to want to be good—but Wordsworth directs our attention to the beginning of that process rather than the end, emphasizing children’s innate ability to perceive God. “I deem not profitless these fleeting moods / Of shadowy exaltation,” he writes, for “they are kindred to our purer mind”:
The soul— Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not—retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity, to which With growing faculties she doth aspire.
Or elsewhere:
How oft the eternal spirit—he that has His life in unimaginable things, And he who painting what he is in all the visible imagery of all the worlds Is yet apparent chiefly as the soul Of our first sympathies—oh bounteous power, In childhood, in rememberable days.
The point here is that, for Wordsworth, our “first sympathies” are not merely naïve sentimentality but an expression of essential humanity that becomes the basis for all subsequent growth, a standard against which we must measure ourselves in adulthood.
All of this confronts educators with a quandary. For if childhood is a moment when the self comes into being through introspection and subtle sensations, does that mean that any attempt to guide the process from the outside is nothing more than interference and (a telling term) adulteration?
As seen in the Romantic excesses noted above, it is the fear of stifling children’s unique potential that leads many educators to soften or obscure adult authority altogether. In doing so, however, they mistake the basis and purpose of education. Here, too, Wordsworth and Kierkegaard are helpful. For both writers, it is personal relation—one soul encountering another—that awakens selfhood, and this relation begins with a primordial connection to God. For Kierkegaard, it is “becoming God’s confidant, the Lord’s friend, and–to speak humanly–in addressing God in heaven as ‘Thou’” that “[draws] men to heavenly places” and sets the pattern for all their other relationships. Authentic learning occurs when divine love resonates through the love of earthly parents and teachers.
On this point, too, it is worth quoting Wordsworth at length:
Blest the infant babe (For with my best conjectures I would trace The progress of our being), blest the babe Nursed in his mother’s arms, the babe who sleeps Upon his mother’s breast, who when his soul Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul, Does gather passion from his mother’s eye. Such feelings pass into his torpid life Like an awakening breeze, and hence his mind, Even in the first trial of its powers, Is prompt and watchful, eager to combine In one appearance all the elements And parts of the same object, else detached And loth to coalesce. Thus day by day Subjected to the discipline of love, His organs and recipient faculties Are quickened, are more vigorous; his mind spreads, Tenacious of the forms which it receives. In one beloved presence—nay and more, In that most apprehensive habitude And those sensations which have been derived From this beloved presence—there exists A virtue which irradiates and exalts All objects through all intercourse of sense. No outcast he, bewildered and depressed! Along his infant veins are interfused The gravitation and the filial bond Of nature that connect him with the world. Emphatically such a being lives An inmate of this active universe. From nature largely he receives, nor so Is satisfied, but largely gives again; For feeling has to him imparted strength, And—powerful in all sentiments of grief, Of exultation, fear, and joy—his mind, Even as an agent of the one great mind, Creates, creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds.
Selfhood may proceed in the solitude of conscience, as individuals find and test their character, but it originates in an encounter between persons and against a background of love, in which the teacher’s love of the student, the subject matter, and the world itself reflects and strengthens the child’s native love of God. As Wordsworth puts it in his poem’s conclusion, “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.”
All of this to say that Romantic educators are not wrong to celebrate children’s creativity and potential. Rather, their mistake is to pull those qualities away from the existential commitment and moral seriousness that give them meaning and in which the soul takes root. Those grounds do not (or should not) leach away in adulthood, which is why authentic intercourse remains possible between individuals and generations. It is in this respect, as the preservation of culture and objects worthy of devotion, that education remains fundamentally conservative. As educators, we must call forth the sincerity that we find latent in our students and that, at our best, we can offer them in return.
Image Via: Justice Everywhere
