The Great Forgetting

A society that no longer transmits its foundational narratives is a society suffering from a kind of cultural Alzheimer's—still physically present but increasing unable to recognize itself.

The most astounding feature of our age is not what we have invented but what we have lost. This paradox stands in plain view, like Poe’s purloined letter, too obvious to be noticed. We have erected gleaming academies of unprecedented size, established departments of education sprawling with accredited “experts,” and produced mountains of research on pedagogical methods, all while steadily forgetting the purpose of education.

This curious amnesia is not an accident but an achievement, requiring the sustained effort of generations. It deserves a name: The Great Forgetting.

There is an odd sort of modern fellow who, having heard that men once believed the earth to be flat (which, incidentally, educated men rarely did), concludes that all inherited wisdom must be similarly mistaken. This fellow does not merely doubt tradition; he prides himself on doubting it. He considers skepticism of the past to be identical to intelligence and dismissal of ancestors to be synonymous with progress. He has been educated into ignorance and schooled in forgetting.

The madness of our educational decay lies in this: we have mistaken movement for advancement. Like a man furiously rocking in a rocking chair, modern pedagogy generates tremendous activity while remaining in precisely the same place—or rather, a place increasingly distant from wisdom.

We have crafted elaborate systems to measure what students know without asking whether what they know is worth knowing. We have developed sophisticated methods for transmitting information while systematically destroying the conditions necessary for wisdom.

Consider the peculiar inversion that has occurred: We have made the means of education its end. Technology, once a tool to serve learning, has become its master. Assessment, once a method to gauge understanding, has become the purpose of instruction. Relevance, once a natural byproduct of genuine education, has become its sole criterion. We no longer teach subjects; we teach strategies for subjects we never teach. Like a chef who spends all his time sharpening knives but never cooks, modern education has become splendidly equipped for a task it no longer performs.

What has been forgotten in this great educational amnesia? First and most profoundly, we have forgotten that education concerns the formation of souls, not merely the training of minds. The ancients understood—whether pagan like Aristotle or Christian like Augustine—that learning was inseparable from character, that knowledge without virtue was not merely incomplete but potentially monstrous. The modern educator, having dispensed with such “metaphysical” concerns, speaks blandly of “social-emotional learning” while avoiding any mention of the good, the true, or the beautiful. It is as if we have determined to build houses without foundations because foundations are bothersome things that take too long to construct and cannot be easily measured.

Obfuscation 101: The Lexicon of Empty Ed-Speak

Next, we have forgotten that education is the transmission of civilization itself. What Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead”—the great conversation across time in which the finest minds of every age participate—has been replaced by the tyranny of the trendy. Students encounter fragments of texts divorced from context, selected not for their enduring importance but for their alleged “contemporary relevance,” which is precisely the quality least likely to endure. Having denied our students their rightful inheritance, we express surprise when they behave like orphans.

We have forgotten, too, that difficulty is not an obstacle to learning but its essential precondition. The modern educational establishment, seized by a misguided compassion, has systematically removed obstacles from the path of students, failing to recognize that the obstacle is the path.

Learning to parse a complex sentence in Latin, to follow the elegant proof of a geometric theorem, or to discern the subtle arguments in Plato’s Republic—these tasks demand effort precisely because they develop intellectual capacities that cannot be developed without strain. Yet we have built educational systems dedicated to the proposition that learning should never cause discomfort, never require struggle, never demand discipline. This is like attempting to build muscle without resistance or endurance without exertion, a physical impossibility mirrored in our intellectual training.

Perhaps most perniciously, we have forgotten that words matter. Language, once understood as the vessel of thought, has been degraded into an instrument of manipulation. In our schools, grammar—the art of arranging words according to their proper relationships—has been abandoned in favor of “self-expression,” as if one could express a self that has never been formed. Rhetoric, once the noble art of persuasion through truth beautifully articulated, has devolved into a collection of techniques for emotional effect without ethical foundation. Logic, the discipline of valid inference and coherent reasoning, has been replaced by its counterfeit: the appeal to feelings, to consensus, to anything but the merits of the argument itself.

This linguistic decay reflects a deeper intellectual corruption. We have forgotten how to think because we have forgotten the conditions necessary for thought. Concentration, that sustained attention to a single subject, has been shattered by devices that interrupt and fragments that distract. Contemplation, the patient consideration of an idea from multiple perspectives, has been surrendered to the cult of immediacy. Memory, the storehouse of wisdom acquired, has been outsourced to silicon, as if having information at one’s fingertips were the same as having understanding in one's mind.

The consequences of this Great Forgetting are not merely educational but civilizational. A society that no longer transmits its foundational texts, its essential ideas, its defining narratives, is a society suffering from a kind of cultural Alzheimer's—still physically present but increasingly unable to recognize itself. Citizens who cannot follow an extended argument, who have never wrestled with great thinkers, who cannot distinguish between assertion and evidence, are citizens in name only. They may cast votes, but they cannot exercise the reasoned judgment that self-governance requires.

Moreover, a people severed from their intellectual tradition become vulnerable to whatever ideology speaks loudest in the present moment. Having no internal compass calibrated by the accumulated wisdom of civilization, they drift with every cultural current. The vacuum created by forgetting does not remain empty; it is filled with the crude simplicities of demagogues or the seductive banalities of technocrats.

Yet in this dire assessment lies a curious hope. The great educational truths we have forgotten have not ceased to be true in our forgetting of them. They wait, like buried treasure, to be rediscovered. And herein lies the radical promise of classical education: not as a retreat into antiquity but as a recovery of what is most essentially human.

The classically educated student learns that freedom is not the absence of constraint but the capacity to choose rightly, that equality does not negate excellence but demands its cultivation in all, that democracy requires citizens formed in virtue, not merely informed of their rights. These truths have not grown antiquated; they have grown urgent.

What I propose is not nostalgia but revolution—a turning again to the permanent things that make us human, a reclaiming of the intellectual heritage that belongs by right to every student. The subversive arts of classical education—grammar, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, history, literature, and all the rest—are subversive precisely because they undermine the shallow presumptions of modernity. They challenge the notion that the new is always better than the old, that progress is inevitable, that tradition is inherently suspect, that efficiency is synonymous with effectiveness, that utility is the measure of worth.

We stand at a crossroads, facing a choice between continued amnesia and recovered memory, between The Great Forgetting and what might be called The Great Remembering, a radical act of reclamation, an intellectual resistance against forces that would diminish both education and humanity itself.

For education, properly understood, is not merely the acquisition of useful skills or marketable credentials. It is nothing less than the shaping of souls capable of recognizing truth, creating beauty, and choosing goodness. It is the cultivation of fully human persons who can think deeply, feel nobly, and act wisely. It is, in short, the art of helping students become who they are meant to be.

That we have forgotten this purpose is a tragedy. That we can remember it again is our hope.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human, Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.