Goodness, Truth, and Beauty paint the horizon towards which we sail our ships.

Okay, that’s me, trying to write a poetic sentence worthy of your attention. If it did catch your eye, it’s because the sentiments are true. The three verities (Transcendentals) have fueled the creation of an unfathomably rich heritage of music, art, dance, theater, and poetry. Individually and collectively, they really do propel our sails. Consequently, many of us spend significant portions of our waking time (and creative night-dreaming) seeking ways to bring students into an awareness of that heritage.

“And as we do this, are we are fulfilling our mission?” A teacher could reasonably ask this, although let me suggest that another, harder step awaits our attention.

But first, the answer is: “Yes, absolutely! Fulfilling that mission is a massive achievement,” as will be exemplified by the tireless work of an extraordinary group of foot-soldiers gathering in Phoenix for next week’s annual National Symposium for Classical Education. I’ll be making my fourth appearance before this assembly of passionately teachers, writers, artists, and administrators engaged what is popularly known as the Classical Education Renewal.

Speaking to this group in the past, and particularly in the keynote I gave last year, my goal was to exhort them to grasp and trust the power of the Western artistic expression that we have inherited. These people need little exhorting from me, though: they already know that a small dose of beautiful, true art—no matter what the form—can change a child’s life. Daily they live that much-quoted phrase in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas:

[T]the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.

A child whose life is surrounded by a parched landscape will respond to the drop of dew that emanates from even a morsel of beautiful art: a buoyant movement from Vivaldi’s The Seasons; the sentiments in “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost; a piercingly beautiful seascape by J. M. W. Turner; or the hypnotizing flutters of “The Dying Swan” on the balletic stage.

Hold on! That last example flips the script for me. “The Dying Swan”—famously choreographed in 1907 by Mikhail Fokine to the poignant music of Camile Saint-Saens—achieves its power through the movements of an expert dancer as she expresses the death of a swan. And that bears witness to the fact that not all beautiful art is about a beautiful subject, or even pleasing to the eye. Nor does true art always paint something uplifting. Nor does good art express solely goodness.

Oh dear, I’ve done it now. Here is the harder step I mentioned above—one I announced two years ago when I programmed a new talk for the conference season called What to do about Ugly Art?” My own hill to climb in this respect had been difficult, beginning when I hit graduate school, knowing little music beyond Chopin, Beethoven, Rachmaninov, and (fortunately) Prokofiev. Alas, my knowledge of visual art also was pathetic. My exposure to theater was limited to my fourth-grade play, reading Shakespeare in high school, and a Neil Simon play I saw at a barn-dinner theater on a date in college. As for ballet . . . well, there I had had the benefit of one informative year at North Carolina School of the Arts where I had witnessed real dancers go through the exhausting rigors of their day.

Over decades, while grappling to heal my lack of exposure (yes, that’s what all teachers do), I learned a lot. Particularly, I learned the value of analyzing artistic expressions that, initially to me, at least, seemed off-putting. So, it is time to share what I have learned, or at least incorporate some of it in my work as “Professor Carol.” Scheduling the “ugly art” talk was a first step. While it didn’t fill the hall at each venue, those who came left with a better tool chest for parsing, dissecting, evaluating, discarding or incorporating what they would discover while exploring challenging works of art.

My talk at this symposium in Phoenix will be the next step. Entitled A Classical Approach to Radical Modernism in the Arts, it will address highly experienced educators who spend nearly all of their waking time in the cause of renewing education and promulgating the values of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. With such listeners, I can take a strong stance and consider the best ways to approach and teach artistic creations that have shaken audiences (and society) across time. For them, as for me, it will be important to discern what truths such art can hold, particularly prophetic truths about our past or our future.

So, I’ll let you know how it goes. Meanwhile, kudos to the personnel at Great Hearts Schools, an astonishing development in modern education that is soaring in the states of Arizona, Texas (and, if the momentum continues, may be coming to your area one day). The list of speakers contains so many people I simply adore, from the “usual crowd” of inspirers—Martin Cothran, Andrew Pudewa, Christopher Perrin, to people like the inimitable Jim Weiss (oh yeah!), the not-of-this-planet, glorious Frederic Turner, revolutionary pedagogue Katharine Birbalsingh, and a host of eminent writers, mathematicians, philosophers, scientists, Latin-specialists, and creative artists including Mark Bauerlein, Eliot Grasso, Dana Gioia, Vigen Giroian, Nick Hutchison, Matthew Post, Greg Wilbur, Michael Zuckert, plus a long list of others, all brought together by the magnetic energies of Rob Jackson. To quote a dear friend and fellow chorister back in Bowie Texas (she said this humbly at each rehearsal, despite her lovely voice and exacting musicianship): “I’m just happy to be here.”