Turning a Ship Around

I stare out my cabin window to watch the western shore of the Rhine pass by. The morning clouds, thick in our overnight port of Koblenz, disperse with each kilometer. At the river’s edge, snappy German trains weave in and out of tunnels in the cliffs, reminding us that real residents must get efficiently to real places.

Yesterday we sailed through the heavily castled stretch of the Middle Rhine—the region that draws visitors from around the world. Tomorrow morning, we’ll leave Father Rhine to sail the final forty-five miles along the straight lines of the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal towards the open skies of Amsterdam.

After one more festive day, including a bike tour of the Dutch countryside, this “Family Cruise on the Rhine” will end. An early departure will sweep us off the ship. The hard-working crew will strip our cabins briskly and clean them. Hours later, this same crew will put on enthusiastic smiles as a new roster of jet-lagged passengers stumbles aboard the Amadeus Silver II and the ship heads back up the Rhine.

As for me, I’ll be headed to Kentucky to speak for the Memoria Press 2019 Teacher Training Conference. Educators and headmasters will gather on the stunning campus of Highlands Latin School in Louisville. A drastic change of venue, you would say? Not as drastic as you might think.

Precisely the kind of learning valued by that Louisville audience takes place on tours like these, although it surely looks different. Generally speaking, people on Smithsonian Journeys represent an older demographic. They were raised in an era when education was solid, even classical. They tend to take their travel seriously, consuming books on Smithsonian reading lists, packing maps and journals, and arriving ready to experience as much as possible. Learning shaped their early lives, and continues to be a priority.

When I get to Louisville, I’ll stand before attendees who cherish the same kind of traditional education, plus are willing to fight for it. These headmasters, teachers, and homeschool parents stand in the front lines of a war to stop the precipitous decline of American education. They have committed themselves to restoring the quality standards that once were offered to every American child: cursive writing and good penmanship, memory work, traditional arithmetic drilled until it sinks in forever, Latin as a basis for understanding grammar, real classic literature, and rigorous training in composition. Virtually everything I listed has been wiped from the curriculum in far too many public schools.

But it isn’t easy to turn around the ship, is it? Turning a ship around has become a real concept for me (or at least being on a ship that turns around—no one has put me in the wheel room yet). Everything depends on the vessel, the traffic in the port, the current, and the wind. It takes time. It’s awkward to do. But few dispute the need to turn the educational ship around, no matter how hard the struggle against the downstream flow of debris.

Still, hard as it is, let us remember one comforting thing. We cannot, as adults, undertake this mission by expecting to read all of the Great Books or hear all of the masterworks of music written since 1400. Nor can we study every language, absorb every masterwork of art, or see every classic play. But we can start with one significant book and penetrate its depth. We can come to cherish the paintings of a single artist.  We can choose an opera or great symphony and take it into our hearts. We can undertake one language, perhaps even Latin or Greek, or at least absorb the wonderful books available now that detail Latin and Greek roots.

More importantly, we can speak with enthusiasm about education to our little ones.

We can effuse about the benefits, if not joy, of learning cursive once a child gets old enough. Cursive handwriting remains a developmental milestone, no matter what the “newspeak” media preaches.

We can drill arithmetic in creative ways with our kids and grandkids, nieces and nephews, even the neighbor children, beginning with simple manipulatives and continuing by setting an atmosphere of expectation that people need to be literate in simple mathematics, at the very least. We can look askance, if sympathetically, at the young cashier who clearly doesn’t know why an item costing $3.04 can be paid for easily with a five-dollar bill and a dime. Then, back in the car, we might say: “Let that be a lesson to you, Susie and Bobby. That poor gal really did not know. But you do.”

Nostalgia clouds a lot of things, I admit it. But when we were young, adults around us talked about education. They came from the Depression Era so most of them didn’t get very much of it. But they knew the benefits that education would bring. The talk wasn’t about high SAT scores or which prestigious college to get into. The talk was about making sure one did not grow up stupid. It was about training the mind to be competent and skilled, able to learn what is needed, no matter what life brings.

My older travelers are products of this same conversation. So, am I, fortunately. We were blessed with a rigorous approach to the basic educational skills—the real ones. Now we are in the fight to restore them for every child. Fight we must, and fight we will.