EDUCATING NARCISSUS
Bryan Smith

There is a charming and frightening old Greek tale about a young man who saw his own reflection in a pool and became so infatuated with the image that he vowed never to marry. He even forgot about the lovely nymph, Echo, who had brought him to the place, leaving her to wander off alone until she at last pined away to nothing. The young man’s name was Narcissus, and he has become the image of the excess of self-love. When we say that a person is narcissistic, or that we live in an age of narcissism, we are alluding to the self-absorbed young man who sat, day after day, staring at his own reflected features while ignoring the rest of the world around him.

The story is, of course, a parable of one of the many pitfalls to which humans are susceptible; and though the danger is present to people of all ages, it is no accident that the Greeks made Narcissus a youth. One of the most basic sensibilities a young person forms is that of either looking outside himself or else remaining inside himself; of judging himself and the world around him by something “outside”, or of judging all things according to his own opinions, moods, and natural inclinations. This latter condition is one that, in its full flower, acknowledges no objective truth and even questions the validity of perception.

Unfortunately, we now have behind us several decades of educational practices which, in their methods as well as in their results, could be called an education to narcissism. Child-centered learning, multiple-intelligence theory, and whole-language practice have taught countless children that nothing matters which originates outside the self. Though perhaps not overtly, the lesson has, nevertheless, been taught. It has been taught in stream-of-consciousness “journaling” where external forms such as spelling and grammar are of no consequence; it has been taught in anti-knowledge schools where memorization is belittled as “rote learning” and administrators declare glibly that they have no way of predicting what children will need to know in the future. It has been taught by teachers telling students there are no right answers, and by the cheap teen novel once hidden from the instructor but now is given as assigned reading because she believes the young people can “relate” to it better. It has been taught in social studies where students learn nothing of the sacrifices of Washington and Adams, but everything of their own personal entitlements. In these and so many other ways, “progressive” schools encourage children to gaze no farther than their own images.

There are many problems with this approach. Most practically, it simply fails as a means of education—a fact by now so well documented that only those with careers rooted in the old theories still echo their empty tenets. Moreover, this approach to education assumes a Romantic optimism about human nature that is unjustified by practical experience, denies our flawed nature, and robs young people of the noblest ideas and examples of human kind while forcing them to wallowing in the low, the base, and the mediocre. It can easily squander the best opportunity—that of the early school years—to instill a body of objective factual content that can become a network of epiphanies in later years, and to inculcate habits of diligence in the attention to minute details that must always accompany successes that are not accidental. But the most dangerous effect of all, I think, is that this popular “progressive” approach to education gives children the idea that the universe orbits around the parochial world of themselves and their peers—that the world will forever reconfigure itself around their desires, moods, and natural inclinations.

The education we offer at St. Peter’s Classical School has as one of its intentions to lure Narcissus away from the pool. Our focus on Western Civilization is an attempt to ground young people outside themselves in a legacy of ideas, actions, and aesthetics that span continents and millennia. We want them to see society as comprising the dead, the living, and those yet unborn. Our studies of the American Founders are intended to impress upon the students how greatly their own lives and options have been shaped by the prudent foresight of another generation. Even in our study of other cultures we are not so impressed with the insular cults of folk-ways as we are with our common human nature which acknowledges one natural law—the great lesson here being the existence of a standard higher than the assumptions of any one self-approving group.

The great works of the Western literary canon also act as windows to a wider world, showing young people an incredible spectrum of options for thought and action, while also providing the benefit of an opportunity to reflect at a distance on the consequences of these actions. Finally, as Lewis said, we read literature to know that we are not alone; and it is an indisputable benefit for any student to read in the lines of an ancient poet the very agonies that torment his young American soul.

Our focus on languages, and especially the highly inflected classical languages, works along with mathematical studies to offset the infection of subjectivity and narcissism. Apart from the practical benefits of improving facility in language, logic, and problem solving, both of these disciplines take the emphasis away from the self by demonstrating to students that natural canons exist which are absolute, unchanging, subject to no private interpretation, and belonging to a world not of their own making.

Finally, and most profoundly, our Christian identity works to pull students out of themselves by the insistence that God is transcendent, that certain crucial truths rely neither on personal discovery nor on individual inclination, that it is we who must conform, who must sacrifice the self, and who must declare with the Forerunner: “I must decrease, that He may increase.”

Our city and our nation are rife with schools that would leave Narcissus to languish by his pool, with teachers asking little more of him than, perhaps, an interdisciplinary account of what he saw reflected there. At St. Peter’s Classical School, we will ask more. We will ask, first of all, that he come away from that narrow, and limiting pool—that he lift his eyes to better images, and that he open his heart to eternal verities and the tongues of angels.