Michael S. Rose’s The Subversive Art of a Classical Education: Reclaiming the Mind in an Age of Speed, Screens, and Skill-Drills is the latest addition to the growing genre of books about classical education. Rose combines theory and practice to create a compelling, yet challenging, vision showcasing classical education’s opposition to modern pedagogy.
Rose takes the adjective “subversive” in the book’s title seriously. Throughout his volume, Rose frames modern, progressive education as the reigning paradigm of a technological age that trains students to forget information because it can always be looked up, to value stories only because they express contemporary values, and to reject the importance of language itself. In opposition to same, Rose posits that the practitioners of the timeless liberal arts become “subversive.” He refers to classical education as “a quiet rebellion” within the “shadowed corners of modern education, where a band of pedagogical heretics dares to champion the unfashionable.”
Rose is aware of how this language can strike the reader within classical education who has ample reason to resist seeing himself as a revolutionary:
To call this pursuit subversive is not to romanticize rebellion. The classical educator does not seek controversy, nor does he delight in being contrary. The subversive nature of classical education lies rather in its fidelity—in its refusal to abandon the permanent things for the fashionable, its quiet devotion to what is true even when the world forgets. To teach Homer and Plato, Augustine and Dante, is to root students in a tradition that transcends the fleeting and offers them a standard by which to judge the present. It is to give them the cultural inheritance necessary to see clearly, choose wisely, and live nobly.
The dream of the revolutionary, fighting oppression and speaking truth to power, has been owned by the intellectual and political left since the French Revolution; its modern proponents, from Che Guevara to Zohran Mamdani, show that the myth retains its power. Rose looks at that myth and seizes it for the classical educator, who is engaged in a countercultural activity, seeking to recover a meaningful reality as a warrior fighting in a noble cause: “It is a rebellion fought not with swords but with sonnets, not with guns but with geometry, not with shouting but with Socratic questioning.” Modernity has “outsourced our memories to machines, as if the mind were merely an inefficient version of a computer. We have convinced ourselves that knowing where to find information is the same as knowing the information itself.” The classical school, in contrast, sees in memory, and the requirement for memorization, “an affirmation that the past matters, that knowledge is cumulative, that wisdom can be inherited as well as earned.”
Classical education, moreover, insists on slow meditation and Socratic dialogue. It values boredom as a space for mental connections to be made; it teaches cursive, linking students to previous generations who wrote in this script. Annotators of a text become “literary insurgents” who “arrive at the text not as humble supplicants but as active interlocutors, pen in hand, ready to converse with the author across time and space.” In so doing, they “transform reading from a passive activity into an active engagement. … They make the book not merely something they have read but something they have thought with.” Those who embrace classical education as students, parents, teachers, and school leaders become revolutionaries against the zeitgeist. “To read slowly is to insist, against the prevailing winds of techno-capitalism, that some things cannot and should not be optimized, streamlined, or accelerated—that understanding, wisdom, and insight emerge not from velocity but from patience.” Rose successfully casts classical educators as standing against the machine of modern living.
This volume accomplishes two significant tasks. First, it is an excellent survey of the educational ambitions of a classical school. A classical school really does believe in the great books; in primary-source-driven history; in Latin, math, science, and grammar; in beauty and architecture as necessary for a full education. Consider some ways Rose speaks about what is studied in a classical school:
- On literature: “The great book, encountered at intervals throughout a lifetime, becomes a measure of our own development, a mirror reflecting our changing capacity to perceive, understand, and resonate with its depths. We discover, in returning to such works, not only new dimensions of the text but new dimensions of ourselves—capacities for appreciation and understanding that were not available to us in earlier encounters.”
- On geometry: “When geometry is reduced to a collection of formulas for calculating areas and volumes, its power to shape the mind’s perception of order and beauty is lost.”
- On history: “The classical approach to history brings together both chronology and meaning. It treats history not as a list of facts or a set of skills, but as a story to be understood.”
- On sentence diagramming: “Sentence diagramming proceeds by analysis and structure rather than by sentiment. It embodies the radical notion that language is not merely a vehicle for self-expression but a system governed by logical principles.”
- On logic: “To teach logic is to perform an act of intellectual liberation. It is to provide students with tools of discernment that no algorithm can circumvent and no propaganda can overcome.”
- On moral formation: “Moral understanding emerges through narrative encounter, through stories that engage both the intellect and the imagination of the developing child.”
Rose contends that the classical educator sees each aspect of the curriculum as shaping the student’s soul. None of these are optional; all these curricular choices matter. Because “children are not formed by slogans or procedures [but] by the worlds they inhabit through the imagination,” the classical school must take great care in what texts, ideas, and skills it sets before them.
A final successful element of Rose’s book is its firm articulation of the convictions that classical schools must hold. “The inheritance of human genius and beauty—from Athens and Jerusalem, through Rome and the Renaissance, to Shakespeare’s London and Lincoln’s prairie—is what now stands in peril.” Classical education affirms a traditional understanding of human nature and sees its task as transmitting culture from one generation to another. Such a conviction entails moral formation. As headmaster of a classical charter school, Rose affirms these convictions from a place of nonreligious endorsement. He affirms a high number of explicit intellectual commitments that the classical school makes, yet the commitments that a Christian classical school makes go beyond Rose’s claims.
Since the COVID pandemic, parents and new-school founders have flocked to classical education. Such growth poses its own dangers: How many schools use the language of “classical” yet have no conception that they are signing up for a series of epistemological, pedagogical, and ontological claims rooted in a specific anthropology? Rose argues that “the classical educator, then, becomes something of a heretic—insisting, almost quaintly, that events have order, that causes precede effects, and that civilization is not a series of unrelated accidents but a long and difficult conversation across generations.” Anyone who wants to launch a new classical school, whether public, private, Christian, hybrid, or “home,” ought to read The Subversive Art of a Classical Education to know the intellectual tradition within which that school will be located.
The Subversive Art is far from a perfect book, however. By this reader’s count, at least six chapters could be combined to reduce the number of topics covered: Logic and critical thinking, history and Western civilization, and architecture and beauty each get overlapping chapters. At 315 pages, this volume asks much from readers. That being said, there are places where this volume could benefit from expansion. Rose makes many assertions about progressive education and modernity broadly construed; these sections would benefit from specific examples being cited. Consider the following passage contrasting social studies with traditional history:
The replacement of coherent historical instruction with fragmented “social studies,” grievance-based content, and abstract “skills” training does more than weaken academic achievement. It cripples democratic capacity. It deprives citizens of the ability to understand their society in context, to evaluate present claims through the lens of experience, or to discern true progress from fleeting trends.
Such passages would be strengthened by examples that support the trend Rose identifies. As it stands, his rhetoric counts on the reader resonating with the accusation he levies against progressive education.
Colleges, publishing houses, and supporting institutions are gearing up to enable the growth of classical schools. That support depends on schools with leaders who understand what they are doing as classical educators and why their approach is both unique and necessary. Michael S. Rose is such a leader, and his Subversive Art of Classical Educationadds a worthy volume to the growing discourse about classical education’s ability to renew a healthy civilization.
