"Learning We": An Essay by Brooke A. Holmes (Keywords: Classical Education; Pedagogy; Crisis; National Identity; Humanism; Race; 1619 Project; Fanon)

From The Philosopher, vol. 108, no. 4 ("What is We?"). If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation.

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[This essay was first published in our autumn 2020 print issue. While Brooke Holmes' analysis focuses on the final year of President Trump's first term, the bigger philosophical questions she identifies in relation to education and national identity remain just as relevant.]

In mid-September [2020], President Trump announced that he was creating a federal commission to promote “patriotic education”. Its aim would be to develop a “pro-American curriculum” for use in U.S. classrooms. Trump framed the curriculum as a rebuttal to efforts to make the history of slavery and its aftermath in this country more integral to the stories that children are told in school about America’s past, efforts that have been catalysed by Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project at the New York Times. As the parent of a second-grader enrolled in public school in New York City, I fleetingly rejoiced that Trump had remembered there were classrooms that he was at least somewhat responsible for, even if the federal government can’t dictate what’s taught there. In that week and the next, I was spending a good deal of time wondering how my son was going to get a second-grade education. Was it going to be up to me to provide it? If so, had I already let him down? John Stuart Mill was taught ancient Greek at the age of three. By eight, he’d apparently read Aesop, Xenophon’s Anabasis, and all of Herodotus. Ludo, in Helen DeWitt’s brilliant novel The Last Samurai, starts Greek at four. I thought: it’s not too late for my daughter. She has another few months before she turns four.

What does a seven-year-old need to know at this moment? What is a moment, after all? A very brief period of time. An exact point of time. “A particular stage or period in a course of events of in the development of something; a turning point; a historical juncture” (OED). An appropriate time for doing something. For this last sense of “moment”, the ancient Greek language had kairos: a point of time in a chronological expanse (i.e., chronos) charged with “promise and significance”, as the artist Paul Chan has written – a turning point, a point of branching possibilities. These include the possibility of, as Chan says, “a profound change or rupture, making what happens thereafter radically unlike what had come before”. The ancient Greek medical writers, who contribute much to the kairological imagination, also speak of moments like these as “crises”. Thinking together with them and with Chan invites another framing of the question: What defines this moment? Are we on the cusp of a crisis? Have we already been profoundly changed by crisis?  If so, when did the crisis begin? Who were we then, and who are we now? Who is the “we” a seven-year-old is learning to be part of?

If I put it like this, the question of what a seven-year-old needs to know is inextricable from the community to which she belongs. If it’s a community in crisis, the stories of what holds it together become especially charged. So do the stories of how it came into being, not least because they hold within them ideas about how communities break apart, or simply break down. For if we talk about a profound rupture or change, one question that follows is whether this change happens to a single or collective subject, an “I” or a “we”, or whether it creates a new “I” or a new “we”.

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…” The Declaration of Independence begins by reading the human as the backdrop to changes in political alliances among peoples. The implicit “we” is instead built into the “one people” impelled to act by necessity. Yet the “one people” is also in a sense proleptic. It is only after the dissolution of one connection that it can assume the contours of a new “we”, under the name of the thirteen united States of America.  What defines this new “we” is a reclaiming of the human: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. The human is no longer the backdrop to change. It’s the subject of a truth claim that grounds a new “we”, the voice of the “one people” invoked earlier.

What defines the human on which the “we” of this nation was (truly) founded?

In this way a concept of the human comes to shape the conditions for testing the well-being of this “we”. Danielle Allen has called the Declaration a “very short introduction to political philosophy”. What it teaches us to ask, she says, is this: “How are things going for us? Are we living well, this group of people to which I somehow belong?” That is, it teaches us Americans to ask how we’re doing with the declaration of the human that officially founds the political community of our nation: all men are created equal.  It also teaches us to ask, I think, how we’re doing with our teaching, at this moment, about how “we” came into being. How do we tell one another and our children the story of how “we” came into being? One of the things at stake right now in the narration of American history is how a national “we” is determined by an idea of the human that precedes the “we” that speaks in the Declaration and how much by the idea of the human set out there. Should we read the human when it is articulated in 1776 through the exclusion of enslaved Black people “from the narrative of ‘we the people’ that effects the linkage of the modern individual and the state”, as Saidiya Hartman writes? Or should we read it as the guiding star of the “more perfect union” held up by the Obama presidency? What defines the human on which the “we” of this nation was (truly) founded?

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Back in the spring when the schools closed down, abruptly and yet tragically too late, the moment felt like it would be brief, a brief period of time. Just hold on. Four weeks, six weeks. Until the end of June, we were told. The moment was a pause within a life and a history that could be picked up again, where things left off. Now it’s autumn. The moment feels like it requires every last ounce of practical reasoning and embodied agency. The kairotic task at hand is manifold: hold off the entrenchment of a fascistic bio-politics founded on white supremacy and patriarchal authority; put an end to the profound harm being caused by structural racism and catastrophic climate change and start repairing the damage; and build on conditions of enormous social disruption and fluidity to rebuild – indeed, remake – institutions committed to the common good. 

This last task feels like putting a happy spin on things. It’s hard not to worry that the allure of reimagining and reinventing only mystifies the mining of creative energy for the project of making everyone do more with less. To have a child in public school in New York City, at this moment, is to have a front-row seat to a late stage in the breakdown of this society’s investment in public education. Speaking of the city’s principals when the schools were on the cusp of reopening, the head of the principals’ union, Mark Cannizzarro, said, “You can’t give them two pieces of wood and say, build a house”.  In a school system whose students of colour make up over 80% of the population, the charge to do something with nothing while vested with the deep responsibility of educating the future citizens of this democracy registers as one of the most jarring expressions of systemic racism on offer right now, one deeply rooted in histories of enforced segregation and racial disparities of wealth in the long aftermath of American slavery. The escalated defunding of public schools during the pandemic, especially in cities, goes to the heart of what’s at stake when we ask “how are things going for us”?

At the same time, the very idea of a patriotic education is a reminder of the role that modern classrooms have played in creating the “we” as a “rhetorical fiction” that is, as Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan writes, employed “perhaps nowhere as consequentially as in the construction of national identity”. Srinivasan reads elementary school celebrations of the Pilgrims and the “founding fathers” through Homi Bhahba’s account of the people as “the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy”. Here is “we” as a rhetorical fiction in the making. But alongside the pedagogical, Srinivasan introduces the other side of Bhahba’s account of “the people”. This is the people as a collective of performative subjects who disrupt the nation’s pedagogical work and, in so doing, split its “we” into “Dreamers and the Tea Party; activists at Standing Rock and billionaire-plantiffs seeking to cordon off the sea”. We might add the 1619 project and the 1776 commission.

But what kind of a splitting is this? One people dividing into two? Srinivasan suggests that what we have are different performances of a human that are learned in school as part of a specifically American rhetorical fiction. Yet if the current crisis in the US feels so intense, it’s not only because it’s unclear whether these performances can, or should, co-exist. It’s also because the national reckoning with anti-Black violence in the summer of 2020 made it impossible not to see how radically and fatally inequitable the distribution of “the human” among raced bodies has been and continues to be in America. The idea that my son would learn a rhetorical fiction that failed to reckon with that fact, historical and lived, reframes for me the very question of what it would mean for him not to receive a second-grade education.

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What would ancient Greek do to a seven-year-old’s entry into the fraught and fragmented “we” of this moment? In The Last Samurai, Ludo’s (single) mother Sibylla, an American living in London, catalogues the opinions freely offered by her fellow passengers on the Circle Line when they observe Ludo in his stroller perusing the Odyssey in the original language as he and Sibylla ride the Underground all day to avoid paying for heat at home. The opinions range widely, from “amazing” and “far too young” to “excellent idea as classics indispensable for understanding of English literature” and “terrible idea as study of classical languages embedded in educational system productive of divisive society” and “terrible idea as overemphasis on study of dead languages directly responsible for neglect of sciences and industrial decline and uncompetitiveness” and “marvellous idea as spelling and grammar not taught in schools”. (This last response is the most popular.) 

These last explanations all invoke in some way the longstanding entanglement of ancient Greek and Latin with educational systems in Britain and its colonies. Whether they’re framed as “classical” or “dead”, Greek and Latin as school subjects call up all kinds of ideas about what school is good for – grasping a national literary tradition, or making a “we” cohere in an unequal society, or preparing future foot-soldiers in the nation’s battle on the world stage for technological and economic domination – as well as what it is not good for any more (teaching spelling and grammar). Nobody says, Sibylla points out, “marvellous idea as Homer so marvellous in Greek” or “marvellous idea as Greek such a marvellous language”. No aesthetics, in other words; no untethered humanism. The Circle Line’s riders are preoccupied with how ancient Greek is metonymic of a nationalist pedagogy cloaked in both nostalgia and rancour. For in the glare of the twenty-first century London subway, a classical education appears nakedly exposed as a relic. Having lost its function in producing citizens at home and imperial bureaucrats abroad, it holds onto only its associations with elitism, uselessness, antiquated pedantry, and grammar books. That story has its British peculiarities, shot through with class and reaching back to the influence of Erasmus on English grammar schools and the rise of Oxford and Cambridge as bastions of classical humanism in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian Age of Empire, two massive wars, and imperial decline over the course of the twentieth century. But it has echoes in others.

In Germany, for example, another story could be told about classical education as Bildung, the formation of self through humanist education, and the rise of the academic discipline of Altertumswissenschaft, the “science” of Greco-Roman antiquity in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. Germany’s Philhellenist aesthetics is usually traced back to Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his monumental work on Greek art in the mid eighteenth century, with its celebration of the “noble simplicity and serene grandeur” of the Greek people, imagined as exemplary of the human. It was above all the embodied sensibility of Winckelmann, magnified by his untimely and mysterious death in a Trieste hotel room in 1768, that helped him become the tutelary ancestor of what Katherine Harloe has called the “imagined community” of classical scholarship in Germany for the next century-and-a-half. 

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the production of a “we” within Altertumswissenschaft was inextricable from the building of a new imagined community of citizens in the wake of another moment of historical rupture. When Wilhelm von Humboldt founds the University of Berlin in 1810, after Prussia’s 1806 defeat at the hands of Napoleon, he is after an educational program that can generate properly formed humans – that is, citizens. Humboldt held that language embodies the character of a people. Convinced that the Greek language was the most purely human, and influenced by Friedrich August Wolf’s remaking of philological expertise as a science of Greek and Latin (Wolf was taught Greek at a young age by his schoolmaster father), Humboldt placed the study of Greek and Latin at the heart of the university curriculum.

In both these stories, the making of the human in schools was bound up in the study of the Greco-Roman world. And in both the British and the German cases, a classical education is already under threat at the end of the nineteenth century because of the pressures of modernity – the rise of science, technology, industry. But the claim of the Greeks and the Romans on some version of the human that can ground a national “we” meets with other, more damning challenges in the twentieth. In Germany, the rise of National Socialism’s philhellenized bio-politics laid bare the work of race within nineteenth-century classical Bildung in its vision of the Greeks as exemplary humans and in its vision of the humans to be produced at school. Britain’s story is one of colonialism and postcolonialism. Although it is the educational system of the French colonies that Frantz Fanon primarily has in mind in “On Violence,” the text is a founding classic of postcolonial theory. Fanon writes there that “the colonized intellectual accepts the cogency of these ideas” – that is, the idea that “essential values, meaning Western values – remain eternal despite all errors attributable to man” – “and there in the back of his mind stood a sentinel on duty guarding the Greco-Roman pedestal”.  Yet once “the colonized intellectual touches base again with his people, this artificial sentinel is smashed to smithereens”. The colonized know, he writes, that “they are not animals.  And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory”.

Reading Fanon’s essay as part of a reading group at my university organized by the scholarly society Eos: Africana Receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome, while also teaching a seminar called “Rupturing Tradition”, the image that is fused in my mind with Fanon’s words is the photograph that one of my co-teachers, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, suggested we use for the course. The photo is centred on two 14-year-old Black ballerinas, Kennedy George and Ava Holloway standing, en pointe and fists raised, in front of the Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond, Virginia on June 5, 2020. The monument was the first to be installed on Monument Avenue in 1890. It’s the last one still standing. Though its removal has been blocked by court order, the photo was taken after the monument’s white marble had been almost completely covered in colour and graffiti – Stop Pretending Your Racism is Patriotism. Say His Name. Breathe – climbing up the Ionic columns and classical architrave to the banner hung at the top: Black Lives Matter.

There is a story to be told, too, about the entanglement of a classical education and the birth of a nation, here in the United States of America. The Puritan men who began to found institutions of higher education on these shores in the seventeenth century were products of Oxford and Cambridge. In the years after 1776, neoclassical architecture was the order of the day. The antebellum core of the education offered at the institution where I teach, Princeton University, comprised Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts. The idea of the human at the heart of the new republic was not created ex nihilo, but drew on European traditions of classical humanism. America’s post-revolutionary culture of classicism, as Caroline Winterer calls it, also held within it a “we the people” conditioned by the dehumanizing logic of racial slavery. In 1833, the adamantly pro-slavery South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun declared that only when he could “find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax” could he accept “that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man”, a reminder of the role of ancient Greece and Rome in the American idea of a human determined by the privileged claims of whiteness.

The idea of the human at the heart of the new republic was not created ex nihilo, but drew on European traditions of classical humanism.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, philological mastery in the US, as in Europe, rapidly lost ground as the heart of a liberal education with the rise of the sciences, industrial development, and academic specialization driven in part by the widespread adoption of the German research university, not least by professional classicists themselves. But classical humanism survived, in translation, at the core of the humanities and the liberal arts through the twentieth century.  The first instalment of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University was “Contemporary Civilization”. It was a course “born of the consciousness that a democracy needs to know what it is fighting for”, in the words of one of its founders in 1918, the year American soldiers arrived on the Western Front in the midst of another pandemic nearly a century ago. In this sense, it looked forward to the significance of Great Books courses in the story of America as a “Western” superpower that unfolded over the twentieth century.

I was educated in Columbia’s Core in the 1990s. Seduced by literary theory, I fell into an earlier, weirder version of classical education by accident when I took up intensive ancient Greek – what we call “Turbo Greek” at Princeton – to satisfy quickly the prerequisites for a major in Comparative Literature alongside my halting Russian. I went down the rabbit hole of French theory, entangled in its own complex Philhellenism and origin stories. Meanwhile, a battle was raging around the publication of the first two volumes of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, which dropped like a bomb into the culture wars in the American academy that had begun raging in the 1980s. Bernal argued that the racism of nineteenth-century classical scholarship drove the creation of ancient Greece and Rome as the sole, white-washed paragons of “classical antiquity” and he sought to reframe the origins of Western civilization as Afro-asiatic, that is, Semitic and Egyptian.

Much as criticism of the 1619 Project has relied on a specious distinction between metaphor and history proper, the response to Bernal in Classics aimed to relegate Black Athena to the realm of myth while claiming a demystifying positivism for the discipline. As if Greece were the fact and Africa made-up. I’m not saying that historical scholarship is not a valuable form of knowing the past. But it cannot masquerade as the demystification of a rhetorical fiction. “We” is never given in advance by a single “true” founding, however much we have to tell stories of how we came to live together as a community now. By the time I was hired into a Department of Classics in 2005, there was something like a cone of silence around Bernal. In a 2018 essay “Black Athena, White Power”, Denise McCoskey argues that the near-total refusal to talk about race after Bernal in the discipline of Classics has to be read as complicit with the enthusiastic appropriation of the Greco-Roman past by white nationalism under Trumpism. She is right.

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What does a seven-year-old need to know at this moment? Or a university student? An American citizen? A human being? I can’t say I’ve given up the idea of teaching my son the idiosyncratic expertise I have to offer him. Homer is marvellous in ancient Greek. But the good news is that my son started second grade. The first week, my anxiety slipped away as I eavesdropped on his teacher starting to craft a community from a diasporic group of children with extraordinary care, building a house on Google Meet from two pieces of wood, Spanish and English. I marvelled; I was humbled; I felt boundless gratitude, and I tried to learn. I thought about my own (single) mother, who taught third grade for decades in a public school in Anacortes, Washington. 

What does a seven-year-old need to know at this moment? Or a university student? An American citizen? A human being?

It seemed clear to me that what a seven-year-old needs at this moment is this education in “we”, in the creation of a community at the scale of a classroom, a classroom built on integration rather than segregation, that is being publicly and equitably funded at a level commensurate with the deep, vital importance of the work and play happening there, and the principals, teachers, and staff who make it all possible. This commitment to public education is demanded anew by the vast scale of harm that has been caused to children by this pandemic, especially the most vulnerable. It is the precondition of the ongoing re-imagination of the classroom not as the site of self-formation as much as the site of we-formation.

This is not only a rhetorical “we” but a lived “we”. As such, it expands to the scale of a neighbourhood, a city, a nation, we humans, we living creatures. “We” threads itself up and down the scale (the nation through the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood through the human), each instantiation refracting others that do not all overlap. This cannot be a “one-people we” born from a division that masked the bio-political division within that determined who would count as human in the first place, the “we” of white nationalism. It must be a “we” made and unmade by a range of performances that unfold within a community in which each of its members is, to quote from the Combahee River Collective Statement, “recognized as human, levelly human”. And, still thinking with the Statement, if a “we” splits in the many performances of a rhetorical fiction, the performative also splits each one of us as a “one person”, disrupting the idea of Bildung as forming an organically whole man to instead make space for the many ways in which we become ourselves through being with different others in different communities at different scales in different situations. These multiple enactments of an “I” within different versions of “we” seem crucial to a “we” learned in the classroom through stories of how “we” came to be and are coming to be.

And what of a classical education? Right before the pandemic hit hard in the US, news leaked of a draft executive order circulating in the Trump White House called “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again”, which, seemingly inspired by antebellum classicism, dictated the use of “classical” architectural styles for all new federal buildings and renovations. This kind of “iconic” classicism still drives one version of nationalist pedagogy most visible in monuments and museums but at work, too, in our classrooms and universities. This is why professional classicists have no choice but to reckon with white supremacy. It’s why the US needs new monuments, new histories, new curriculums.

But the ruins of the classical education in this country, as in so many others imbricated in a postcolonial geo-politics built on land expropriation, aren’t only relics to be repurposed as the ancestral property of white nationalists in order to legitimate racist violence. It’s true that the risk of using genealogy to try to critique iconic classicism’s production of the human as white is that you end up repeating these terms. And that risk is one I haven’t avoided here. I want to end by affirming the power of reclaiming the sites of “classical antiquity” for the forming and re-forming of “we” in a deep reckoning with the many pasts of “we the people”.

We become ourselves through being with different others in different communities at different scales in different situations.

Part of the project of remaking these sites is the ongoing undoing of not only the isolation of Greece and Rome within an interconnected ancient world but also the very identification of what gets written and transmitted in Greek and Latin as expressions of race or ethnicity. Part of it is refusing a “classical tradition” that is only “Western” or “European” – recognizing the material transmission of ancient texts and ideas and artefacts from the Mediterranean through Africa and Asia. Part of it is listening, and listening again to Toni Morrison when she speaks of the many “varieties of provocative love” that Greek tragedy makes available, citing the form’s similarity to Afro-American communal structures. It is sitting with what June Jordan means when she speaks of “the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America”. It is engaging with the plenitude of new adaptations of Greek tragedies on American stages in recent years – Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca’s “Antigona”, or Marlene Monteiro Freitas’ “Bacchae: Prelude to a Purge”, or Bryan Doerries and Phil Woodmore’s “Antigone at Fergusen”, to name only a few. These sites are also all classrooms right now, for me as for others: places of unlearning one story of what we’re fighting for and remaking new ones together.

Brooke A. Holmes is a historian, theorist, and critic who specializes in the history and philosophy of concepts, with a particular interest in the concepts of the physical body, nature, and life in ancient Greek and Roman textual sources. Her work has been increasingly addressed to the ways in which reception communities conceptualize their relationship to Greco-Roman antiquity. She is Professor of Classics at Princeton University.

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From The Philosopher, vol. 108, no. 4 ("What is We?"). If you enjoyed reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation.

We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.