“Woke” Education and the Collapse of Civilization
Western Civilization has been through a period of radical educational reform before—in the year 400 AD. It produced the Dark Ages.
Photo: Rachel Claire, Pexels
This Canada Day was marked by controversy surrounding the twitter hashtag #CancelCanadaDay. Not to be left out, the ten-member board of the Canadian Historical Association issued a “Canada Day Statement,” in which it endorsed the view that European Canadians had indeed been “genocidal” towards Native Canadians over the 400+ years of their co-history.
This blanket condemnation of all Canadian history, and all Canadians of European descent, was made to my knowledge without a vote by the general membership. It is astonishing for several reasons.
First, as the board itself acknowledges, most historians argued against the “genocide” label until a few years ago. Before 2016, only a few fringe, activist historians took the notion seriously.
Second, this flip-flopping by the CHA board echoes a rapid change in public opinion, over a scant few years. This itself is grounds for caution: careful, sober reasoning is supposed to be the historian’s province, after all. (I won’t even mention how analogous this whole thing is to an evangelical revival: “See the light, confess your complicity in systemic racism, and be reborn!”)
Third, throughout Canada’s history, many Canadian governments, individuals, and institutions have acted, in manifestly humane and pro-Indigenous ways. The board’s statement steadfastly ignores all countervailing evidence—embracing instead the most negative possible stance, and giving the strong impression that all European Canadians are accessories to genocide. Happy Canada Day!
Now, the CHA board believes that this “deep, wise soul searching” and admission of guilt will lead to “reform of the ongoing genocide of Native Canadians,” as if the Canadian government in recent decades has been hell-bent on making its remaining Indigenous populations as miserable as possible.
And what happens if someone disagrees, arguing instead that such a radical sullying of the national myth and the national consciousness of Canada—picking a single side of a single contentious issue to stand for all of Canadian history; arguing that Canada is in fact one of the worst of all countries—might be counterproductive? Or that it might make life seem more hopeless and bitter, and make social conditions worse, for millions of Canadians of all ethnicities? Or that it might hobble the ongoing, extremely important work not only of Canadian democracy, but of global democracy more generally? Or that it might undermine the ability of the United States to defend Canada against Chinese and Russian hegemony, which would happen very quickly in the absence of overwhelming US military power?
Raise such concerns to any left-leaning colleague, and you will be countered with a “Ho, ho, those racist right-wingers are in a panic about so-called ‘wokeness,’ as though admitting your complicity in systemic racism can destroy Western Civilization! We’re making civilization better, not worse!”
“There is Nothing to Worry about!”
And I thought of Hypatia.
You see, Western Civilization has been through a period of radical educational reform before. One where the previous curriculum was briskly judged to be tainted, unrepresentative of the newly fashionable “truth.” You might be thinking of the Nazification of the German curriculum in the 1930s, or the Stalinization of the national curricula in Eastern Europe in the 1950s. I’m thinking of an earlier example. This one happened around the year 400 AD.
In the early 300s, the Emperor converted to Christianity. By the 370s, Christian Emperors felt strong enough to outlaw paganism altogether. Carried away in a wave of anti-pagan fervor, Christian monks became increasingly intolerant of any pagan survivals.
The Roman school system was targeted as a bastion of pagan learning. It was alleged that schoolmasters throughout the empire were “secret pagans,” and that the books they taught from—written by non-Christian authors—were vectors of non-approved, non-woke discourse.
One by one, local bishops were pressured to close down the grammar schools which had graced the cities of the Empire for many centuries. Finally, even the universities and centres of higher learning were targeted. In March 415, after years of increasing pressure, a mob, incited by radical monks, broke into the Great Library of Alexandria, burned it to the ground, and lynched the last pagan master of the library, a female philosopher named Hypatia.
Now you might argue that the analogy is unfounded: woke scholars are not (yet) burning books in university libraries. But the sea change in attitude? The zealotry? The passion for iconoclasm? The insistence that everything not “woke” is poisonously, insidiously incorrect? And should be retired, or censured, or hidden from public view? The minds of students “shielded” from all impure dogma?
Not to mention, the attack on science as a “patriarchal discourse”? And the ongoing attack on educational standards, as being too Eurocentric? This is pretty root-and-branch stuff.
So how did it go for the Romans? The results of the educational reform of the early 400s are stunningly straightforward. In the decades before 400, both Pagan and Christian authors were educated in Roman schools. The result was a constellation of world-leading authors, including Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, Ambrose of Milan, John Chrysostom, Athansius, Eusebius, and the pagan schoolmaster Libanius.
After the closure of the schools? Ahem. Well, er... there’s...
You see, we have a term for this collapse of learning, which occurred after the late Roman Elite became “woke,” and decided the old curriculum was no longer fit to be taught. It’s called the Dark Ages.
Since the days of Edward Gibbon, historians have pointed to Christianity as causing a lack of faith in Roman institutions. This is seen as causing a gradual decline, until Roman society no longer had the will to carry on.
What fewer historians have recognized, however, is that a major cause of this decline, was not Christianity per se, but the simple closure of the pagan schools. It is arguable that Christian-Roman society, if it had not caved to the educational demands of a few zealots, might have held the Empire together for much longer than it did. Certainly the post-Roman elites would have been far more literate—and the Renaissance might have happened five centuries sooner.
But with the collapse of Roman education, citizens no longer carried a unified sense of who they were, and what their purpose was. Not only that, but they lacked the discipline, logical capacity, and managerial talent to continue to administer the empire in an efficient fashion.
Now, I don’t actually believe that the adoption of wokeism in our schools will cause the collapse of Western Civilization. (At least, I hope it won’t.)
But I would like to point out the uncanny parallels between the zealotry of those early Christian monks—drunk with new-found political power and the first flush of idealism—and the radical wave of reformism which is running through our educational institutions, from the Canadian Historical Association down to your local nursery school.
And I caution, strongly, that the rapid adoption of a radical educational programme has seldom gone well historically. It did not go well for the Romans, and it did not go well for those who were forced to adopt Stalinist, Maoist, or Fascist educational curricula.
I would argue that the late Roman example is actually closer to what we’re facing now, because it was internal. It was not imposed by an occupying army of Stalinist thugs. It seemed to most people involved to be a innocuous and therefore natural—a simple “change for the better” based on the newly-discovered truth of the Gospels. What could possibly go wrong, if we just love each other more?
My advice? Take a deep breath. Follow the debates. Stay informed. But don’t be in a rush to adopt the latest twitter fad wholesale, as official educational policy. If the ideas are good, they can wait 10 years, or 20 years, before we overhaul the educational system, to make every textbook, every school name, every national anthem, and every statue conform to the “Good News” of Critical Race Theory.
There is no emergency. Things have been getting steadily better for all Canadians, of every ethnicity, for many decades, and there is no reason why this should not continue.
But if we rush into this? What if we let social media drive educational reform, and we go too far too fast? Well, at least we won’t have to worry about global warming anymore.