"The Best That's Been Thought And Said"

Some Thoughts on the Classical Education Movement & The Heritage Foundation's "Phoenix Declaration"

“Students should study the best that has been thought and said, engaging in the great conversation among the competing viewpoints that comprise our intellectual heritage, so that they freely make the best views their own.”

There’s a lot of good to say about a vision for education that cultivates in students a respect for “the best that has been thought and said.” And this quote, which I pulled from Heritage Foundation’s “Phoenix Declaration: An American Vision for Education,” makes clear that it is not only respect and reverence that is being asked of students. Schools with this vision and the teachers that staff them are inviting young people into a “great conversation” that spans generations, millennia even.

My own college experience, at the University of Dallas, resonates with this valuing of traditions—literary, theological, linguistic, and philosophical. As my old literary hero G.K. Chesterton put it, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” Left to my own nineteen-to-twenty-one year old devices, I doubt I would have read and studied Plato’s Republic, Dante’s Commedia, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Certainly not anything by Immanuel Kant. And certainly I wouldn’t have studied Latin or memorized the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid.

But everyone else at the University of Dallas was reading these texts, and coming to opinions of their own about them, and so I wanted to as well. This education I received, as I have tried to make clear in other places on this platform, was a gift. Wrestling with powerful voices from the past, especially ones whose artistry is apparent (even in translation) in every line, cannot but help foster artistry in the reader. This wrestling deepens some lines of inquiry and opens others. It’s an initiation into a rich (or richer) inner life. I wouldn’t be writing or teaching as I am today without that education.

At the same time, as I look back at this education now twenty years later, my gratitude has been complicated by the passage of time and my experience of living in a world that I can see shaped (and in some ways warped) by this explicitly Western vision of life and human flourishing. So, to talk back to Chesterton: yes, please let’s give votes to our ancestors. But let’s expand the “democracy of the dead” to include those that Greco-Roman empires and their descendants—the “West”—have sought to exclude: indigenous voices, Black and Brown voices, voices from the margins of empire, traditions and lines of heritage that challenge a simplistic view of what is the “best” that has been “thought and said.”

It is no accident that the Heritage Foundation (the same Heritage Foundation thought by many to be the institutional source of Project 2025) has authored this Phoenix Declaration at the outset of Trump’s second term, and at the same time that his administration is censoring student and faculty speech at colleges and universities, cutting funding to public schools, and cracking down on anything, and I mean anything, that could possibly be construed as related to “DEI.” Apparently, at West Point, the writings of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin are now suspect. So much for the “best that has been thought and said” in these United States and in its colleges and universities.

The principles outlined in that Declaration—"Parental Choice and Responsibility,” “Transparency and Accountability,” “Truth and Goodness,” “Cultural Transmission,” “Character Formation,” “Academic Excellence,” and “Citizenship”—all sound lovely in the abstract. And in particular ways represent a healthy challenge to real problems with contemporary schooling. I think especially here of the “Phoenix’s” focus on cultivation of wisdom and character, aspects sorely lacking from most schools’ visions of education. But these principles and their many supporters (check out the signatories, it’s a who’s who of conservative education) are not appearing on the educational landscape in a vacuum.

The architects of new—and destroyers of old—American education have explicitly named replacing a conception of education as a public good with that of “school choice”. Insofar as there is a shared conception of what good education is, these schools must “foster patriotism.” The Pledge of Allegiance and national anthems are explicitly named as elements in schools to be respected and revered.

So. How democratic will this democracy of the dead be? There are scholars like Angel Adams Parham and Anika T. Prather, who are definitely strong (and to me) inspiring voices in a newly resurgent “classical schools” movement, and who in their scholarship are clearly looking to expand the frame around what gets to be considered the “best that has been thought and said.” (I recommend their 2022 book The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature in this context.) But their signatures, and other scholars and teachers I’ve studied looking to “broaden the frame” of what might constitute classical learning are noticeably absent from the signatories section of the “Phoenix Declaration.”

Also noticeably absent from the “Phoenix Declaration” is any “principle” related to responsible use or non-use of AI, particularly on how that technology might relate to the teaching of the “best that has been thought and said.” For an educational vision composed in 2025, this is very strange, and a pretty big blind spot. Or maybe not that strange, considering that the agents of the “Phoenix’s” implementation, the Trump Administration, have issued executive orders mandating and incentivizing the use of AI in K-12 education.

Considering that Heritage Foundation is behind this “declaration” as it is behind so much of the sweeping changes proposed in Project 2025, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the “classical schools” movement gets a big boost of financial support from the Trump administration. At any rate, the signatories of the “Phoenix” seem determined to make friends and common cause with the administration, all while that same administration seeks to destroy public schooling, censor the curricula of K-12 schools as well as universities, and deport those who disagree with their policies. My message to the principled classical educators in the movement, of whom I know there are many: please do lift up your voices against this administration’s madness. What you say and do in this moment really does matter.

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NOTES:

-I’ve mentioned in different contexts about teacher/writer, Annie Abrams, who wrote the brilliant and incisive Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. That book makes it clear how seriously Abrams takes literary texts students and their teachers might study together, and how AP actually undermines that serious study through its programming. I’ve continued to follow Abrams’ writing since that publication, and also highly recommend her 2024 essay, Teaching Ellison, which shows a teacher engaging with some of “the best that has been thought and said” but not in a way that forecloses critique of the United States and its history, as the Heritage Foundation and its many Trumpian “projects” do.

-Along those lines, I just discovered a beautiful and nourishing conversation between Annie Abrams and a Houston high school English teacher,

Frank Strong

, at his Substack Anger and Clarity, on her book and how it lands with him and his own work as an educator. Check it out here.

-I don’t know much of

Zena Hitz

’s writing beyond this deeply challenging and thoughtful Commonweal essay, “Renunciation and Christian Happiness”, but friends tell me the classes of her Catherine Project are worth looking into. At any rate, the way she communicates about “great books” and great texts resonates with me in a way that does not when I hear the big movers and shakers in the Heritage Foundation orbit talk about them. I’m going to dive deeper into her work(s).

-For those interested in a deeper dive into

James Folta

’s LitHub article I quoted from at the top of Substack, on the Trump Administration’s decimation of arts funding, specifically the NEA and the NEH, click here.