An Education for Our Time
by Josiah Bunting II - published by Regnery Publishing, 1998
A Book Review by Father John McCloskey
Josiah Bunting III has written a bold, provocative book An Education for Our Time, Regnery Publishing, 1998. It's subject is education, which after religion, and along with the family, ranks at the top of any society's priorities. If these are not healthy, the society is in serious peril of dissolution. Bunting is a man of impressive accomplishments: Army Major general, novelist, and, above all, educator. He has been President of three colleges and headmaster of one of the premier prep schools in the country, Lawrenceville in New Jersey. Presently he is president of the Virginia Military Institute. To judge from this book, he not only must have had an excellent education but has gone way beyond that in the depth of his reading in literature and history as they pertain to character and leadership. Bunting's intellectual interests clearly range beyond the simple administration and fund-raising so common to the majority of present day college presidents. "An Education for our Time is his ‘Utopia.'" His ideas appear unrealistic but are intended to shake up those serious about education in the classic sense. He sets a standard that will provoke changes in those few colleges capable of reform and more importantly, set the bar high for the founding of new colleges throughout the United States. Happily, there are plans for new small liberal arts institutions who will be able to draw inspiration and practical suggestions from this book.
The book is discursive fiction although its conceit is so effective it has already fooled more than one reader. Bunting's speaker is a John Adams. The name is no accident. President John Adams had the largest personal library in colonial America and appeared to be a deist more in love with the classics than with God. Bunting's Adams is a mid-westerner graduate of the University of Chicago (one of the first Great Books programs following the example of Columbia), Rhodes Scholar, seriously wounded Marine Corps veteran of the Battle of Iwo Jima, Pentagon policy planner, and eventual high technology billionaire, who is dying of cancer. He has sold his company and plans to leave behind the proceeds as a permanent endowment for a personally designed small liberal - arts college in the High Plains of Wyoming. He wants to do what Newman attempted to do at the University College of Dublin in a Catholic sense, and Hutchins at the University of Chicago in a secular sense: to design the perfect college according to a Platonic ideal and make it into an Aristotelian reality. He wants to establish through his legacy and specific directions a permanent institution which will provide a coterie of future leaders for the United States and the world. This college would appear to be a cross between a military academy and a Great Books' program conducted with the spirit of a strict Cistercian monastery.
The chapters, largely in the form of letters written to Adam's attorney, lay out his plans for the new college according to its vision, student body, way of life, program of study, faculty and administration. Adams writes in his first chapter that "colleges, you know, are not capable of reforming themselves," and states his belief that those "whose life is dedicated to discovering how radical change can address ancient challenges." He bemoans the decline of the early liberal arts American colleges from their original emphasis on religion and the cultivation of both character and intellect into the vocational schools they have largely become. Adams believes that "the business of undergraduate education remains the cultivation of character and mind, of instinct, and ability to lead and serve...I see the education of character and virtue at least as high among our obligations as the preparation of intellect for a life-time of self-education." He goes on to say that "this quiet credential for our graduates must proclaim that the bearer is an American citizen of integrity, of an avid and cultivated patriotism, of intellectual self-reliance, of a willingness to earn and re-earn wisdom, indifferent to the blandishments of celebrity and money and things."
The student body, all resident on campus, would be made up of men and women. The inclusion of women is curious given both the almost unbelievable physical and time demands to be placed on the students. Aside from the moral question and the physiological and psychological differences involved in coeducation, very few women would choose such an education. Bunting was a fierce opponent of co-education at VMI from the onset of his administration. Could he be going soft? The student size would be approximately 1500 in a five-year course of study that includes a compulsory one year of military service. The students would be selected not on the basis of intelligence and extra-curriciculars but rather "for a compound of practical intelligence, mother wit, determination, courage, certain early signs of selflessness and a demonstrated willingness to go against the grain of expectation...What we want is an admixture of mettle and demonstrated independence of judgment and character." Adams's students would enter at 15 or 16 years of age, after their sophomore or junior high school year so they could be more easily formed.
The students would live in households of approximately 50-60 students with three or four mentors. They would take meals in common and their shared life would center about a "willing commitment to do their duty to the community, to their colleagues and friends before they attend to their own needs or wishes...All aspects of college life would be centered around an "ethos of responsibility rather than privilege, of duty rather than impulse, of need rather than want." There would be no money on campus. All their needs as to transportation and the ordinary common expenses of frugal living would be provided. The schedule would allow for three or four hours of classes and study, meals, physical training, and a required one hour of "contemplation," preferably out doors to better reflect on the beauty of God's nature.
The curriculum would be made up approximately 30% of history, survey courses with an emphasis on ancient Roman and Greek, American and military history. The rest of the course load would require students to master two foreign languages and to take courses in science, logic, philosophy, theology, and ethics, composition and rhetoric. They would require computer mastery in a month-long orientation and students would take courses in what he refers to as "Atonement with the Machine," teaching students how to do practical and useful things with a basic mastery of modern tools, construction techniques, etc. As mentioned earlier, all students would spend one of their five years at the college on active duty as private soldiers in the Army or Navy. Each student would also be required to commit to memory two thousand lines each academic year, in increments of not less than two hundred and recite these lines before their mentors.
As for the faculty, Adams wants "persons passionately devoted to the pursuit and propagation of the truth wherever it leads them, and who are loyal to our students and the mission of the college." He wants no university departments, nor ranks, nor tenure. He divides the faculty into two classes: mentors, who would live in villages with the students and would spend time directly with the students and academic professors. Adams would want "men and women who have not been afraid to tackle the larger issues in their disciplines, and who are committed to communicating their conclusions and arguments to lay citizens as well as other scholars."
It is no surprise that the book has received such ringing endorsements from the likes of Lewis Lapham, Bill Bennett, and David McCullough. Bunting's dream college and its purpose is totally at odds with American's reigning self-absorbed and hedonistic culture. His vision sets in stark relief the current political tragedy that is playing itself out in our nation's capital before our astonished eyes. The central figure of this farcical drama is another Rhodes Scholar educated at elite institutions; his moral education was so clearly and sadly a failure.
What is wrong with this book? I would say its lack of religious vision. His educational philosophy, from a Christian point of view, is inadequate in order to prepare the students for their proper end of eternal life. Bunting is eclectic in his choice of many sources for his ideas, both in terms of books and persons. However, it is highly questionable at this particular millennial moment if such an institution could begin, much less survive or flourish without a strong Christian commitment as the founding principle of the college and with sacred theology at the center of the curriculum as the queen of the sciences. Today it is virtually impossible to build men of virtue and character if their formation, intellectual and otherwise, is not based on both the natural law and divine revelation with the help of the sacramental system and magisterial authority found in the Catholic faith. Unfortunately, General Bunting disparages Cardinal Newman and his ideas several times in his book, showing a lamentable misunderstanding of the Newmanian project and Newman's famous "idea of a gentleman." Without the Church's millennial wisdom the college envisioned by John Adams might produce some leaders but also men who might find their role models in Neitszche's ubermensch rather than in Saint Thomas More.
First appeared in Crisis Magazine in the December, 1998, issue.
