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Charlotte Mason argues that all education is ultimately self-education. Unless a student makes the choice to assimilate knowledge into himself, he will not learn anything. If this is so, what role is there for a teacher? Can a student actually be educated into virtue or wisdom?

In this episode, Jonathan and Ryan read and discuss the opening chapters of Charlotte Mason's book A Philosophy of Education.

Charlotte Mason's A Philosophy of Education: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781922348050

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780060935467

Ambleside Online: https://www.amblesideonline.org/

Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781402782831

John Senior's The Thousand Good Books: https://seascs.net/documents/2017/10/John%20Senior%20The%20Thousand%20Good%20Books%20List.pdf

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New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

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Properly understood, politics is an expression of culture. But the politician would like to use culture for political ends. In doing so, he boils his people's culture down to the merely aestheticized: food, traditional dance, music, dialect or accent. But this is culture as mere costume, not as a vital force that incarnates the total, religious experience of a people's life. 

Similar to the way a shallow version of culture gets deployed for political ends, so education too gets used for "levelling the playing field," so that everyone has equality of opportunity to succeed. But true equality of opportunity is a fiction; it could exist only in a state of the most radical communism which not only levels all social and economic distinctions, but also attacks the family and goes to war against nature.

In this episode, Jonathan and Ryan read the closing chapters of T.S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture: Chapter V - "A Note on Culture and Politics," and Chapter VI - "Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion."

T.S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (in Christianity and Culture): https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780156177351

Alan Jacobs's The Year of Our Lord 1943: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780190864651

John Le Carré's Absolute Friends: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780316159395

John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780143124757

John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780143119760

Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address: https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html

Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781931859165

Previous NH episode on selections from "Notes on Education and Culture": https://newhumanists.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/9884564-t-s-eliot-s-praise-for-privilege-episode-xvi

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New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

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Since the time of the Reformation, England has had an established Church alongside a rich variety of Protestant Dissenters as well as a group of Roman Catholic hold-outs. The country exemplifies the tense but productive diversity in "sect and cult" which T.S. Eliot describes in his book Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. A proper balance of unity and diversity in religion is one of the three necessary conditions, Eliot says, for a thriving culture. In this episode, Jonathan and Ryan discuss how to distinguish the tangled categories of "religion" and of "culture," the salient differences between a Protestant and a Catholic country, and the homogenization of American religious life due to suburbanization.

Alan Jacobs's The Year of Our Lord 1943: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780190864651

T.S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (in Christianity and Culture): https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780156177351

T.S. Eliot's Vergil and the Christian World: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27538181

The Ad Fontes podcast episode "Welcome to Hot Dog Church": https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/welcome-to-hot-dog-church/id1557560666?i=1000621387100

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Download and subscribe to Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/

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New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

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T.S. Eliot argues that cultural vitality depends in part upon a balance of unity and diversity in a nation with respect to its various regions. But this raises all sorts of questions: What distinguishes a nation from a region? Isn't a nation just a region with guns? Would it be better or worse for high culture for a thriving region to get political independence? Jonathan and Ryan consider Eliot's argument for regionalism in light of Sparta, the French Revolution, American political history, the English colonization of India, and more.

T.S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (in Christianity and Culture): https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780156177351

Ross Douthat's interview of Ben Sasse: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/opinion/ben-sasse-death-pancreatic-cancer.html

The Anti-Federalist Papers: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780451528841

New Humanists episode "All Education Is Religious": https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-education-is-religious-episode-lviii/id1570296135?i=1000638713097

Two ways to support the show and unlock bonus episodes:

Download and subscribe to Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/

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New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

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Two ways to support the show and unlock bonus episodes:
Download and subscribe to Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/
Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribe
Plato's Academy was not just a philosophic debating society. It was, in the words of the historian H.I Marrou, "a seminary that provided councillors and law-givers for republics and reigning sovereigns." The Academy was small, elite, and functioned like a fraternity whose members could take concerted political action. 
But creating a secret society of philosopher-politicians was probably not Plato's original goal. He was born into a reactionary clique of the Athenian aristocracy which had attempted to destroy democracy and refound the city on Spartan political forms. But the defeat of his cousin Critias and the rest of the Thirty Tyrants destroyed this political movement and gave a permanent ascendancy to democracy in Athens. With no place left in Athens for his politics, the execution of Socrates, and the subsequent failure of Plato's own efforts to turn tyrants in other cities into philosophers, he settled for the philosophic education of the young as a form of "politics in exile."
In doing so, Plato became one of the "masters of the classical tradition" alongside Isocrates, in the sense that both figures laid out the forms, content, and priorities education in the West would take in antiquity thenceforth. Plato's educational vision is on the one hand quite conservative, preserving the musical and gymnastic education for the young which the "old Athenian education" had centered upon, but also revolutionary in ultimately envisioning a complete transformation of society in order to be fully instantiated.
In this episode of New Humanists, Jonathan and Ryan discuss H.I. Marrou's chapter on Plato in the study "A History of Education in Antiquity."
H.I. Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149
Plato's Republic: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780465094080
Plato's Laws: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780226671109
NH episode on Martin Luther's "To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany": https://www.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/13419426
New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/
Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.
Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
Support the show