This series of articles will ask 12 questions of curriculum. These are questions that you ought to ask when assessing your school’s curriculum to know that the course your students follow will truly take them where they need to go.


“Since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.” (The Screwtape Letters, 151)

It is fitting, I think, that the above words are placed in the mouth of a demon. It is tragic that the average American school is utterly impervious to the danger the demon describes. Their characteristic errors are as safe as they can be from serious questioning and challenge, for they read nothing from generations other than their own. 

Does your school’s curriculum promote chronological snobbery? It’s a question you simply must ask. But then, what is chronological snobbery, and how will you know if your school’s curriculum is guilty of it? 

C. S. Lewis (the same man who created the fictitious demon cited above) defined chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” (Surprised by Joy, 254) In other words, chronological snobbery is the attitude that what everyone believes nowadays (on the “right side of history”) is—on the basis of its present-day consensus—therefore unquestionably true and right. Conversely, what everyone believed back then requires no further disproving; the mere fact that they believed it back then—before the great illumination of the present—will suffice. 

The simplest way to assess whether or not your school’s curriculum promotes chronological snobbery is to evaluate the old books your students read. If the students at your school read zero books written before 1900, you can take it to the bank: you’re cultivating chronological snobs. If, as is perhaps more common at private Christian schools, the only old book your students read is the Bible, there is a good chance you’re not doing much better. Though you’re rightly privileging the Bible’s place in your curriculum, you might be unintentionally undermining your students’ confidence in the Bible by implicitly teaching them to be chronological snobs in every other field of study. 

If your school does read pre-20th century books, you’ll still want to probe further. What is the oldest book your students read? How many pre-20th century books do they read, and in how many different grades do they read them? In what areas of study do you read ancient texts—you’re not restricting all old books to your literature courses are you? These are just a few possible diagnostic questions that you should subject your curriculum to in order to assess how snobbish it is (or isn’t) with respect to our own age. 

In this chart, I’ve shown how the Classical Core Curriculum answers those questions. We certainly don’t claim that our curriculum is perfect, but it does include over 30 books from before 1900 and readings from at least one such book in every single year of study. Although our reading of old books does not begin in earnest until 8th grade, the books we read in the grammar school have been carefully selected so as to prepare students for the difficulty of the old books we want them to read in upper school. I think, therefore, that we can say with some confidence that the Classical Core Curriculum is not promoting chronological snobbery.

How would your school’s curriculum answer the above questions? In order to really know, I would encourage you to take an hour and make a simple chart like the one I’ve made, in which you account for every pre-20th century title in your curriculum.

In summary, both the wisdom and the virtue you seek to cultivate in your students will be enfeebled by the blind spots of our present age if your curriculum does not regularly place old books before your students. Lewis used the metaphor of “climate” for what I less eloquently called the things “everyone believes nowadays.” His metaphor rightly suggests both pervasive influence as well as decreased perceptibility due to a long process of acclimation. The intellectual climate of our present age is everywhere. The beliefs and values of modern men resound in our students’ ears from a thousand different sources. Both they and we ourselves can so easily acclimate without pausing for thought. 

Old books protect us from a serious and, if Screwtape is any indication, even a devilish danger. They keep us from being cut off from prior generations who lived and died in freedom from the tyranny of our historical moment (though they of course had their own). And for that reason they provide us with an indispensable tool for detecting the characteristic errors of our own day.


Ethan Gotcher serves as the Assistant Director of the Classical Latin School Association, and in that capacity endeavors to organize, improve, and expand the CLSA’s resources and training initiatives for schools around the country. He also teaches classical studies at the Highlands Latin Cottage School in Louisville, KY, and writes for CLSA’s Exordium and Memoria Press’ The Classical Teacher. He holds an M.Div. in Biblical and Theological Studies from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Categories: Exordium

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