“AFFIRM TRANS KIDS!”
“MATHEMATICS OPERATES AS WHITENESS! DISMANTLE WHITE NORMATIVITY!”
“ABOLISH THE NUCLEAR FAMILY!”
These are the imperatives we are charged to heed if we are to listen to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Smithsonian Institute, and Black Lives Matters respectively.
There are four “core color groups” for K–12 students to learn as a prism through which to see the racialized minority peoples of the world (the P in “BIPOC”): African Americans; Asian American and Pacific Islanders; Chicanas/o/x and Latinas/o/x; and Native Americans. Arabs might be covered—under the Asian American group. And the unique plight of “Palestinians”—as an “indigenous people dispossessed of their land”—earns them a place with the Native American. But, as a separately marginalized minority worthy of inclusion in the spectrum of black, brown, and othered brothers and sisters in need of special recognition, the Jews are nowhere to be found. Israelis are named—but only as “colonizers.” That is, if we are to follow California’s State Board of Education’s “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”
Flags of “Gay Pride,” Antifa, and BLM must be allowed to hang in public schools across America. But the “Appeal to Heaven” flag and the Gadsden flag, both dating from and designed to evoke the liberty-loving ideals of the Revolutionary War, as well as the American flag itself, should be banned as they may make some students feel “unsafe.”
In place of equality of opportunity as an aspiration for all, we are teaching “equity” of results as a requirement and on behalf of a few, their diversity extolled as a virtue in and of itself.
These are just a few examples of the inversions, perversions, and divergence from the values that served to make the United States’ education system a paradigm for the world. In place of equality of opportunity as an aspiration for all, we are teaching “equity” of results as a requirement and on behalf of a few, their diversity extolled as a virtue in and of itself.
Where once we studied and distinguished natural rights vs. human rights, now we ignore and conflate them. Everything we want we deserve.
Instead of literature, history, philosophy, art, and the ancient languages that conveyed them—taught together as a coherent, integrated disciplinary system that singles out and promotes mankind’s accomplishments, and that made possible the developed civilization we currently enjoy (whose affluence allows us to quip about it at all)—we now have “multiculturalism,” which insists no preferences be made; and, nonsensically (and incongruously), we have “anti-racism,” which demands (racial) preferences be enforced.
With all its claims to ecumenicalism, egalitarian progress, openness, and accessibility, and all its professed goals of fairness, transparency, and sustainability, the “newthink” that pervades Western academia is ironically (if unsurprisingly and tragically) parochial.
The impending result is a generation of children indoctrinated with an anti-thinking, anti-idea ideology that says all actors are oppressed or oppressor, all action exploitation or resistance, all societies colonized or colonizers. It says all history is a progressive march toward justice—singular, inevitable, and violently ruptured and discontinued from all that came before it. It says, “Freedom is non-negotiable,” even as it qualifies the absolutes that safeguard freedom to “make up for past wrongs.” It says, “Obey,” because: reasons.
Another, unintended result is a generation of parents now disengaging from the groupthink and rejecting the forced decline of the once exemplary American public school system. Where they are turning instead is to the once revered, undeservedly discredited, classical education. And they are finding it in new institutions, mostly opened in just the last 20 years—in both private and public charter schools across the country.
It says, “Freedom is non-negotiable,” even as it qualifies the absolutes that safeguard freedom to “make up for past wrongs.” It says, “Obey,” because: reasons.
Nashville Classical Charter School, Washington Latin Public Charter School, Hózhó Academy, and South Bronx Classical Charter Schools, are just a few examples. All of them rely on the (truly core) features of a classical education: teaching independent, critical thinking to apply oneself to the historically-based canon of time-transcending works either generated from or adopted by Western civilization. The goal is to build in students the value not just of proficiency but of excellence in reading writing, thinking, and discussing; and such virtues as self-reliance, responsibility, curiosity, sympathy, leadership, and (gasp) patriotism, inter alia.
That a liberal arts curriculum being provided to primary school students in America should be, in the year 2024, “news” is, by itself, a problem. That the story is one of revival rather than disappearance makes it welcome news. And while there are existing prep schools that claim to teach the classics, that the attitude now being brought to these subjects is positive is a significant departure from the prevailing ideology elsewhere.
But what makes a few of these schools stand out especially is their inclusion of religious studies, not just as supplementary subjects, but fully integrated with, and supportive of, the secular American experience of which its student body is being prepared to be an active participant. In Michigan, Hillsdale Academy offers a “Christian classical education in the liberal arts and sciences with instruction in intellectual, moral, and civic virtue.” Civic virtue! This sounds like enough to get you booted from any number of institutions of “higher learning” making the news.
And, in Manhattan, Emet Academy opened its doors just weeks ago as a “Jewish preparatory school” proudly advocating the “perpetuation of Jewish, Zionist, and American exceptionalism,” and focusing “on the best of Western culture, the foundational ideas of Jewish civilization, and the advanced study of math, modern science, art, and music.” We’d be hard-pressed to arrive at a mission statement more at odds with the predominant antinomian sentiment currently posing as pedagogical “innovation.”
Emet Academy is a project of the Tikvah Fund, a think tank and educational institution creating student programs inspired by this very mandate at various levels from the 5th grade to post-graduate students. It’s perhaps unique among Jewish day schools in not being formally affiliated with any one denomination, while, at the same time, observing the Jewish calendar, and teaching Tanakh (Torah, Prophets, and Writings), Jewish history, and modern Zionism—all of which entail the teaching of Hebrew (Biblical and modern), under the rubric of “Jewish civilization.” Also required are Latin or Greek, to better engage directly in the study of non-Jewish, Western civilization, from the Socratic method and the origins of democracy through the Great Books, fine arts, modern science, and advance mathematics (without color). Sort of puts the “civil” in civilization.
While Emet is a first of its kind for New York City, it seems only a natural outgrowth for Tikvah’s defining strategy of Jewish education—elucidating the virtues and evolution of the modern liberal democratic state in which we live. That which stands at the apex of civilizational history, while revealing and probing the ancient and still-living core Jewish values that were so formative in that development.
All of which can be found, almost as a Tikvah introductory taster’s course, in the recently released six-part online lecture series, “The Artistic Legacy of the Hebrew Bible,” produced by Tikvah, and taught by Yeshiva University art historian Dr. Jacob Wisse. The course is intentionally accessible for anyone without an art or a religious studies background.
Rather than attempting a comprehensive survey of any one subject or period, in the six roughly 60-minute illustrated lectures, Wisse introduces a way of looking at art that equips the viewer for further investigation and consideration of the whole historical body of works that took as their starting point the texts of the ancient Hebrew Bible—the Tanakh. Wisse stresses the flexibility with which artists treat the same story. Some focus on the story, others use the subjects and figures for their own portraiture as characters. The effect is that we are treated not only to analysis of visual art, but also to a primer on Torah. And since the history of art is predominantly a visual anthology of Christian culture’s spreading influence on society, we encounter many key tenets of the Christian Bible, too.
We’d be hard-pressed to arrive at a mission statement more at odds with the predominant antinomian sentiment currently posing as pedagogical “innovation.”
For reasons obvious but very much still worthy of elaboration, the overwhelming portion of visual works—from ancient through medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and early modern art—rely on the landmarks and narrative highlights of the Hebrew Bible, but mostly as a point of departure to tell other stories, make other points, draw other conclusions than those with which the original texts started. What becomes clear from the investigation is that while artists and patrons did not intentionally conspire to alter the literal accounts of ancient texts, they did take license to reinterpret their meanings and significance. One of Wisse’s central contentions is that the familiar works that so frequently feature Biblical stories use them to show the chronological and epistemological continuity of the so-called “New Testament” with the older (newly renamed) “Old Testament.” If apostolic succession was not always the artist’s ultimate proof point, surely the events and derived teachings of Christian doctrine could be shown by this method to be preordained.
By this right, for example, the story of the Binding of Isaac as a source of numerous works can, in early Jewish contexts such as the murals of the synagogue at Duras Europos or the mosaics at Afra in the Galilee, be made to hold to the rabbinic discussions, interpretations, and priorities: the trials and struggles of Abraham and Sarah, the fears of Isaac, and the demands, the judgement, and the redemption of man by God among them. But when taken up by Christian artists centuries later, and from the very first works, even the title of the Binding of Isaac is transformed to the “Sacrifice of Isaac,” the better to serve as a “prefiguring” and parallel of the story of the crucifixion—the sacrifice—of Jesus. Where Isaac was placed on the altar to test the faith of Abraham and then spared, in Christian hands, Isaac is a symbol of what will be Jesus’s death and resurrection. In all the variety of interpretations, however, and in all the examples chosen by Wisse throughout the course, the protagonists, the plotlines, and the voluntary actions of man are probed for their significance.
Unsaid outright by Wisse but expressed succinctly in another of Tikvah’s online courses, this one entitled “The Four Pillars,” is the corollary suggestion: that Western artists didn’t just use the Hebrew Bible to serve as content creator; but, by its exposure and its use, it’s made itself structurally indispensable to the cultures of which it was a part. In every story of man’s wrestling with God and every instance of exegetical possibility about its meaning, there is light shined on the tradition of responsibility that the Hebrew people place on the individual, and the role of the community in man’s relationship with God. And, by those, the focus of the Hebrew Bible on the actions of man as a free individual. Whereas in Greece and Rome the story of man’s actions is entirely a function of Fate or the caprice of distant gods; for the Jew, a human’s life is what he makes of it.
This quietly underlying assumption of the material and the compelling lesson it draws out is what raises this lecture series above the typical Biblical Art class, and what spotlights the special sophistication into which Emet Academy’s new students will be initiated.
And that is that the teachings of the Hebrew Bible, unlike any other urtext of any other ancient religion, have served to inform not just Christianity and its reach across oceans and time, but the entirety of Western society’s lasting values, beliefs, and institutions.
