I was taught in Christian schools in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s to embrace Booker T. Washington. I learned that he was a Christian, that he worked hard, and that he was a respectful young enslaved boy who continued to work hard after emancipation. He was presented to us as an example of how Black people should respond to injustice: work hard, respect authority, obey the laws of the land, and wait on God to bring equality. At the same time, I was taught to reject Martin Luther King Jr. because he did not obey the laws and disrespected the authorities God had placed over him by protesting. Sit-ins were sinful. Civil disobedience was sinful. Booker T. Washington did not do those things. He worked, obeyed, and waited. There are some who still teach this today.
When I seek to understand and trace the story of classical education in America, I try to stick closely to Mortimer Adler’s philosophy. Adler generally called it a liberal education, and according to his Paideia Proposal, this was the education of the free person, an education that should be available to every American citizen. One of the things I appreciate most about Adler’s work is his understanding of the Great Conversation. Adler and other scholars spent an extraordinary amount of time tracing common ideas across major works. This was even cataloged in the Syntopicon, where we can trace books, authors, and common themes that thinkers have discussed across time.
The other important part of this is that no matter how much time has passed, we see authors referencing authors who came before them. These “citations” reveal how authors seem to be talking to one another across generations. They engage earlier thinkers, challenge them, expand upon their ideas, and show how writings of the past inspired them to think about the problems of their own time. That is part of what makes the Great Conversation a conversation.
I know there are those who struggle with my belief that we should learn about the American Founders and, even with all their flaws, honor their contributions to this country, even as many, though not all, enslaved my ancestors. Through them, we can trace the formal development in America of ideas about liberty, citizenship, equality, government, and human freedom. Using Adler’s approach, we can then trace who else engaged in this Great Conversation and was inspired to continue the unfinished work of creating a truly free country. The Founders themselves could not fully see the implications of what they had created because of their own sinful nature and limitations, but they established a blueprint containing ideas that later generations could pick up, challenge, expand, and demand be applied more consistently.
This is where my concern about Booker T. Washington comes in. If we are specifically talking about classical education and the Great Conversation, Washington is a complicated choice. He tells us something about his educational philosophy himself in Up from Slavery. He was deeply skeptical of an education for Black people centered on Latin, Greek, and the traditional liberal arts. His emphasis was practical and industrial education. This is why it is also important to study the debates between Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as the writings of other Black intellectuals who disagreed with Washington’s educational vision.
For formerly enslaved people and their descendants, access to literature, history, languages, philosophy, and the intellectual traditions from which they had long been excluded was not simply about becoming “educated” in some elite sense. This was access to a literacy that had been kept from them for centuries. That literacy helped them understand how this foreign land worked. It gave them intellectual tools for interpreting America, challenging America, and claiming their place within its promises of freedom and equality.
That is why I think we need to be much more thoughtful when we begin integrating diverse voices into classical curricula. The question cannot simply be, “Do we have a Black author on the book list?” We also need to ask, “How is this author participating in the Great Conversation?” What writers shaped this person? What ideas are they wrestling with? How are they responding to the intellectual traditions that came before them? How are they using those traditions to wrestle with questions of truth, justice, freedom, citizenship, human dignity, and the good society?
Simply putting Booker T. Washington on your reading list does not automatically make your classical school more welcoming to diversity. There is actually an irony in choosing him as the primary Black representative of classical education because Washington himself questioned whether the traditional classical curriculum was the best educational path for Black people. He believed much more strongly in practical and industrial training as the pathway toward Black progress.
Now, I want to be fair to Washington. Outside of this particular educational question, there are things about him that I deeply admire. In many ways, he is one of my heroes because I believe he had good intentions. I understand why his philosophy developed as it did, especially within the historical circumstances in which he was trying to help Black people survive and advance. But that does not make him the best representative of Black engagement with classical education, and that distinction matters.
If we are building a classical curriculum and want Black voices in the Great Conversation, why not Frederick Douglass? Why not Anna Julia Cooper? Why not Martin Luther King Jr.? Dare I say, why not even Huey P. Newton? These are writers who can be examined in relationship to the broader intellectual traditions that influenced their thinking about freedom, justice, citizenship, education, and human dignity. That does not mean students have to agree with everything they wrote. That is not what classical education requires. Read them. Question them. Compare them. Put them in conversation with other thinkers. Examine their assumptions and challenge their conclusions. That is the Great Conversation.
My concern is that classical schools can include all kinds of classically inspired European and American writers, but when it is time to include Black literature, they sometimes choose the Black thinker who was deeply skeptical of giving Black people the very liberal education the school itself claims is essential to human flourishing. We should at least stop and ask ourselves what message we are sending.
If we believe classical education has the capacity to equalize and unify us, then we should introduce students to Black intellectuals who also reached into the intellectual traditions of the past and used them to wrestle with the meaning of freedom. Black intellectuals entered the Great Conversation. They read the ideas that had come before them. They wrestled with them. They challenged them. They expanded them. They took ideas that had often been denied to them and asked America to live up to them. This is part of the beauty of the Great Conversation.
Those are the voices I want our children to encounter in classical classrooms. So, the school year has not started yet. 😊 There is still time to look at that reading list. Maybe instead of assuming that including Booker T. Washington means we have included the Black classical intellectual tradition, we should ask a deeper question: Which Black writers actually entered the Great Conversation and used it in the ongoing work of making freedom more fully true for everyone?
Now that is a conversation worth having.
Anika Prather 