Classical Education Depends on Classical Liberalism

There’s a growing strain on the right that praises classical education while quietly discarding the classical liberal principles that make it possible. A recent essay does exactly this, and in doing so, misunderstands both the American founding and the very purpose of classical education.

In an essay at Chronicles, John Howting waves away principles like free enterprise, limited government, and individual liberty as mere money-making tools. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are dismissed as “old legal documents.” These ideas, we’re told, are spiritually thin compared to the deeper work of preserving “heritage.”

This is not a serious critique. It’s a caricature, and one the American Founders themselves would have found not just wrong, but dangerous.

Let’s start with the author’s metaphor, because it does a lot of work – and collapses under even mild scrutiny.

We’re asked to imagine Western civilization as a house on fire. In the author’s telling, classical liberals would save “tools for earning money” like limited government and a “drawer full of old legal documents” like the Constitution, while letting the family Bible and heirlooms burn. Liberty and constitutionalism are dismissed as soulless abstractions; heritage is reduced to keepsakes and sentiment.

This gets the relationship exactly backward.

The Constitution, individual liberty, and limited government are not objects inside the house. They are the ground on which it stands and the freedoms that protect who and what are inside of the house. Without property rights, rule of law, and protection from arbitrary power, you don’t own the family Bible, pass down heirlooms, or curate culture. The state does.

History is unambiguous on this point. In societies that dismiss these principles as morally trivial, the family album doesn’t survive because the family is made obsolete. Heirlooms aren’t cherished, they’re seized. The Bible isn’t passed on – it’s banned, censored, or treated as subversive.

So no, the toolbox isn’t trivial. It’s how families remain independent of power. Economic independence is a precondition for moral, individual, family, and religious independence. When livelihoods depend on the state, beliefs soon follow.

This isn’t “Conservative Inc.” rhetoric, as the author sneers. It’s Madison, Jefferson, and Tocqueville. It’s the basic insight that pluralism, conscience, and culture collapse when power is centralized.

And this is where the argument takes a truly strange turn: the attempt to elevate classical education as somehow existing above – or even in opposition to – classical liberalism.

I’m a fan of classical education. At its best, it emphasizes the liberal arts, great books, logic, rhetoric, moral reasoning, and deep engagement with the Western tradition. For many students, it can be a rich and humane form of education. I value it precisely because it connects students to enduring ideas and inherited wisdom.

But here’s the crucial point: classical education is not an alternative to classical liberalism. It is downstream of it.

The author frames classical education as the keeper of heritage – family Bibles, wedding rings, heirlooms – while liberty and constitutionalism are dismissed as thin, procedural, or spiritually empty. This is incredibly wrong.

Absent liberty, classical education becomes either a luxury hobby for the elite or a regime-approved aesthetic, stripped of its formative power and bent toward political ends. You cannot have genuine liberal education where dissent is constrained, authority is centralized, or the state decides what “heritage” means.

Anyone truly steeped in classical education would recognize this. They should have read the thinkers who informed the American founding: Locke, Montesquieu, Cicero, Hume, Sidney. These were not merchants obsessed with wealth. They were moral philosophers grappling with human nature, power, virtue, and freedom. To dismiss individual liberty and constitutional restraint as spiritually hollow is not a defense of Western tradition – it’s a rejection of it.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American founding, this may be the work in front of us: explaining, again, why these principles matter – even to those who claim to revere the Western canon. The American founding was not an accident of paperwork. It was an unprecedented attempt to build a political order that would allow culture, conscience, faith, and education to flourish without being dictated from the center.

If we want classical education to endure, we should stop pretending it can survive apart from the liberal order that protects it – and be deeply skeptical of anyone who claims to love heritage while discarding the principles that keep it free.