Towards Building the American Lyceum

American higher education, in its present form, is completely lost. There is no going back. That much is clear.

From Buckley, to Bloom, to Horowitz, to Sowell, to Boghossian, to Peterson, and others, the gradual degeneration of American academia has been well-documented, and for some time now; its death throes more spastic, comedic, and outlandish with each passing month.

Given the rapid, aggressive, and unremitting bleed-out of the Left’s pernicious ideas and ideologies straight from the ivory tower directly into the rest of America’s cultural institutions, an otherwise normal attitude of mockery and dismissiveness should now be replaced by one of stark seriousness and righteous indignation. The degeneration of American higher education tracks with the degeneration of the American citizen in general. And a republic lacking in the necessary attributes of proper education and proper citizenship cannot stand for much longer.

Accordingly, for those of us concerned about the next chapter in America’s history, both with respect to the culture generally and higher education specifically, the crucial question now in need of proper answering is what comes next?

And while there have been several recent initiatives attempting to articulate what a new and alternative higher educational model might begin to look like, I’d like to take some time here to offer some of my own thoughts on the matter which can be summed up as follows:

To save our country from woke, leftist totalitarianism, both within academia and beyond,  America must return to a classic model of higher education focusing primarily on the cultivation of both mind and body as well as character, competence, and virtue exemplified in the classic Aristotelian educational model.

Put another way, for America and her citizens to thrive again, we must rebuild Aristotle’s Lyceum. 

The Lyceum: A Brief History

The Lyceum, named in honor of Apollo Lyceus, was a school founded by the famous Greek philosopher, Aristotle, in Athens in 335 B.C. as a rival to The Academy founded by his mentor, Plato. Originally a gymnasium for training athletes, the Lyceum, under Aristotle’s leadership, became a major cultural hub within the ancient world for learning and research in the areas of philosophy, logic, history, biology, science, and mathematics.

During his tenure at the Lyceum, Aristotle produced many influential philosophical works, including the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics, and the Organon. Furthermore, many of his students during this time period became important philosophers and leaders themselves, including Theophrastus, Aristoxenus, and Alexander the Great.

After Aristotle’s death in 322 B.C., the Lyceum eventually fell into decline, officially closing in the first century B.C. Despite its closing, the Lyceum had a tremendous, long-standing influence and shaping effect upon both Western history and Western intellectual thought in general especially after Aristotle’s works were rediscovered in the Middle Ages and re-articulated through scholastics like St. Thomas Aquinas.

Later on, after the advent of the Enlightenment, the Aristotelian worldview began to wane. However, echoes of both the Lyceum and of Aristotelian thought in general would reemerge once again in the DNA of America’s governance and founding, within the pedagogical models of classical liberal arts colleges and service academies, and the 19th-century Lyceum Movement. This was an adult education and cultural movement in the United States, involving such thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederick Douglass, aimed at promoting intellectual and moral development among U.S. citizens.

The Education of Mind, Body, and Virtue 

Central to the pedagogical model of the Lyceum was Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism; the view that all material things are composed of matter (hyle) and form (morphe). Matter refers to the substance which makes up a physical being, while form refers to the organization of that matter. Accordingly, an oak table, for instance, would be a composite of a specific material (i.e. wood) and a specific form (i.e. four equal legs and a flat top), both being necessary for the table’s existence. Were the table made out of water or shaped like a chair, it would cease to be a table in any meaningful sense.

Importantly, Aristotle’s theory applied not just to tables and chairs but to human beings as well, having profound implications regarding the relationship between mind and body as well as human nature. Contrary to the dominant and present-day Cartesian view of man; that of a sharp metaphysical separation between mind and body, the hylomorphic view saw mind and body as fundamentally inseparable. This account directly informed and dominated the classical Western worldview from Aristotle up until the Enlightenment. From philosophy, to religion, to science, to medicine, to law, to politics, to education; the entire classic Western world was undergirded by a hylomorphic metaphysics.

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