Once upon a time, Moby Dick was required reading for American high schoolers. It is, after all, arguably, one of the greatest American novels ever penned. Sadly, most students today will never read Moby Dick, and sadder still, neither have, nor will, their teachers.

There is something uniquely sublime about the great beast of the sea that universally captivates the human imagination. Recently while re-reading it, I began to ruminate on the theme of conquest and how the white whale has become ubiquitously symbolic of that “thing” we face which beckons to be conquered. Naturally, as a teacher and parent, my thoughts veered to education and the general state of our system. Our system is failing our students. How can this be when we reside in a world which is supposedly teeming with “experts”?

The misguided efforts of our nation’s experts are an exercise in futility because they have failed to pursue the right whale. And what is our cultural white whale? Ignorance. We are plagued by rampant ignorance. An ignorance our experts, themselves, are victims of—an ignorance of the past, and of our Western heritage as a whole, and of all it teaches about the machinations of our world and the human condition.

If ignorance is bliss, then why are our students floundering in a morass of immorality and fallacy that leaves them confused and promoting causes they little understand? They rant on social media that they are anti this or that country but couldn’t point the countries out on a map. In classrooms across America, students have mastered the latest TikTok dance craze but haven’t mastered the multiplication table.

Gone are the days of poring through books as a means of research or agonizing over the writing of a term paper as our students increasingly rely on the use of AI. My intent in articulating these observations is not to denigrate our youth but rather to illustrate the magnitude and urgency of the crisis that is before us.

Education is failing because it is pushing agendas and ideologies over true knowledge.

According to a recent publication put out by the Pew Research Center, a vast majority of teachers (82 percent) say the overall state of public education has gotten worse in the past five years, and more than half are not optimistic, believing that it will continue to decline. These are the people currently on the frontlines of education!

But the powers that be and the machine that is currently academia, rather than training teachers to supply students with useful knowledge, indoctrinates students in the newest methods that regard all the wisdom of old as obsolete. And instead of cultivating virtue and promoting good citizenry, they advance the latest fashionable ideologies.

Our students are no longer being endowed with the most basic of skills in reading and arithmetic, let alone the vast and rich panoply of the cannon of the arts. In lieu of learning the liberal arts, students are taught to be liberal by worshipping at altars of equity, diversity, tolerance, and inclusion. Our children are not being furnished with the fundamental facts necessary to function in society—much less are they being equipped to ponder the more profound truths of reality. They will not even be able to identify the good, the true, and the beautiful when they encounter them and are in peril of being swept up by the current tide of ideology and swallowed by the whale of ignorance that seeks to devour them.

Still, we are not without hope. There is an antidote to stem the tide of this rampant cultural ignorance. We must return to the model of ages past; we must go back to what was, before the experts “fixed” education, to a proper model of education where students were made to face their own ignorance rather than being taught, as they are now, that they are sufficient in themselves and must only seek inward to mine for greatness. For greatness comes not through introspection but through the rigors of reflection—ad astra per aspera.

Author Tracy Lee Simmons, once said in a lecture, “It is a liberation to know that there are people greater than you, not an oppression.” Bringing this truth to bear on our students is a gift.

There is no greater inoculation against the perils of modernity than stepping back and surveying it from the vantage point of civilizations and cultures older than our own, the civilizations from which ours was birthed. And for this we have a vehicle: classical education, not a newfangled educational plan repackaged as the great solution, but that which has been tried and found true, that which has equipped humans for millennia past.

Engaging with the classics provides a superior means of judging ourselves and the culture in which we have been formed. As scholar Richard Winn Livingstone so profoundly wrote in his book A Defense of Classical Education:

A man who knows the origins of the world in which he lives, looks at it with more understanding, walks in it with securer and more certain steps; he is less intimidated by words, for he knows their history, less inclined to either excessive respect or contempt for existing institutions, for he sees how they came to be there.

This battle for the hearts and minds of our students may begin in elementary schools, but it must first originate with us: the parents and the teachers. By immersing ourselves in the best that has ever been thought and said and written, we are able to stand on the shoulders of giants, for they have given us the platform from which we can propel ourselves out of ignorance into the lofty pursuit of truth.

I was a victim of the whale of ignorance until well into adulthood. I wasn’t gifted this type of education as a child. I did, however, have a few first-rate teachers, to whom I am indebted. One such teacher would regularly read poetry to us, usually beautifully rich poems, but on occasion, she would read silly poems (because sometimes third graders need a dose of silliness).

One poem in particular imparted to me the merits of tenacity, an insight that would anchor itself in the recesses of my subconscious and guide me. It is of little surprise that it has to do with a whale. “Melinda Mae” by Shel Silverstein tells the tale of a little girl determined to eat a whale because she was told she couldn’t, and to consume the whole beast, it only took her a scant 89 years. I can still see the eerie picture of a wizened old lady holding up her fork with the carcass of a gigantic whale spread out on the table before her. Melinda Mae conquered her white whale and so must we endeavor to conquer ours.

We must seek to abolish ignorance. We must be ever in pursuit of the whale in our own lives, seeking to educate and equip ourselves so that we can lay out the feast that is true education before our children and students. Perhaps then they will find their own voices and be able to contribute to the great conversation. They must be made to face the whale, and for that, they need to be given the tools to, not only, unearth the vast treasure stores of wisdom but also to cultivate virtue through their toils. They must have the right forks for the feast.

No one man or one society will ever finish the whale, but let us continue to strive so that we will be found in our sunset years having never left the feast and with our forks still in the air.

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Image credit: public domain