A common charge against classical education—education that is rooted in the classical texts of the Western ancient world and that seeks to develop the moral and intellectual character of its students—is that it is inextricably racist, sexist, and quite generally offensive or alienating to members of historically marginalized communities. The #disrupttexts movement, to take one example, seeks to get rid of the traditional canon in school curriculum because it supposedly centers White, male perspectives, excludes minority voices, and has nothing to offer non-European students.
No one has argued more passionately against this caricature of classical education than Dr. Anika Prather, Ph.D., who teaches classics at Howard University and runs her own classical school, The Living Water School. I recently sat down with Dr. Prather (who serves with me on the academic board of advisors of The Classical Learning Test) to discuss how she became interested in classical education, and why she sees classical education, Black history, and Black identity as essentially intertwined.
Dr. Prather told me that she came to a love of classics through her understanding of the Black intellectual tradition in the United States. She had an epiphany while reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks, which enabled her to see how classics could be essential to the Black American experience. Du Bois, a Black intellectual and early civil rights leader, argued that a proper education is the training of a person for life. Unlike Booker T. Washington, however, Du Bois thought that Blacks should have the freedom to pursue higher learning in order to be able to have full equality with Whites.
For Du Bois, a proper education is a liberatory endeavor, and that the vocational training offered to Blacks in the industrial schools favored by Washington was inadequate because it did not meet the higher aspirations of the human heart. Du Bois argued passionately that Black Americans also needed to be educated in the “liberal arts”—those studies which are aimed not at specialized work or earning wages, but the cultivation of a person’s mind and inner life, thereby allowing a person to be free to think and speak for himself and to make himself properly understood by others. A true education, he argued, will evince a “respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world”; it will match the longings of the human heart, which is to cultivate the inner life so that man may both bring forth new knowledge and also be able to communicate the deepest parts of themselves to others. Du Bois explicitly connected liberal learning with the study of the sources of American culture—the classical texts of the ancient world.
Dr. Prather was struck by the fact that Du Bois was steeped in the texts that she had assumed had nothing to say to her. She was especially moved by Du Bois’s own account of his classical education. At the end of “The Training of Black Men,” he wrote: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension.” It was his training in the liberal arts, Du Bois argued, that enabled him to “dwell above the Veil,” which was his metaphor for the condition Black Americans were forced to endure, by prejudice and ignorance, to live during his own life. Behind the Veil of ignorance and poverty, Black Americans were outsiders looking in on a free world around them—exiles in their own country.
Dr. Prather’s encounter with Du Bois started her on a journey that led her to earn her masters at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where she studied great books, and then to writing her dissertation on the Black classical tradition at the University of Maryland. It was during her doctoral research that she learned how classical education was foundational for many esteemed Black Americans, including Frederick Douglass, Phyllis Wheatley, Anna Julia Cooper, Martin Luther King Jr., Huey Newton, and Malcolm X. Dr. Prather came to see that serious study of the ancient canon and the struggle for Black liberation were inextricably intertwined.
Although she started off as a skeptic of classical education as “too White,” these days Dr. Prather is completely invested in carrying forward the Black classical tradition. At The Living Water School, she teaches her students to participate in “the great conversation” with classical texts and ideas that played such a formative role in her own life.
When I asked her what positive character traits classical education inculcates in her students, she spoke about their deep capacity for empathy, careful reflection, thoughtful deliberation, and problem solving; their civility and ability to get along with those who disagree with them; and their strong sense of self-transcendence, or ability to recognize goods that are greater than their own selves.
Dr. Prather is currently writing a book, titled The Black Intellectual Tradition and the Great Conversation, which she hopes will help to dispel the prevailing myth that classical education is too White. As far as Dr. Prather is concerned, this myth neither fits with the facts of Black history in America, nor does it serve the cause of Black struggles for freedom and human flourishing.
