By Catherine L’Ecuyer. Originally published in the Spanish media outlet La Razón, on November 9th 2023.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounts a chilling scene from a Communist Party meeting in Moscow in 1937. During the gathering, the local party secretary requested an ovation for Comrade Stalin:
“Of course, it being the time of the ‘purges’, every person in the hall immediately rose and began to applaud the man who, with a bloodstained iron hand, ruled not only the Party, but the entire nation.
A minute passed, and the enthusiastic clapping continued. Then two minutes. Then three. Try applauding for three uninterrupted minutes: your arms begin to ache and threaten mutiny. Yet no one in that meeting wanted to be the first to stop. Four minutes passed. Then five.
Ordinarily, it would have fallen to the very same local secretary—who had initiated the applause—to bring it to a close. After all, he had called for the tribute. But the poor man had just replaced a predecessor who had been arrested by Stalin’s political police. So he dared not be the first to yield, seeing others still clapping fervently.
Six minutes. Seven. Eight. Time stretched unbearably. The audience had passed the point of discomfort: the pain was now excruciating. Nine minutes. Ten. Everyone exchanged desperate glances, silently begging someone to end the absurdity, but none dared act.
Finally, at the eleventh minute—on the edge of collapse—the director of a local factory, who also sat on the district’s Party committee, ceased clapping and sat down.
Instantly, as if on cue, the room fell silent. At last someone had dared to do what all had longed for. The crowd exhaled in relief and reclaimed their seats, and the meeting was officially closed.”
Solzhenitsyn adds that the factory director was arrested that very night by the KGB and sentenced to ten years in the Gulag. After his interrogation, one of the agents gave him a final word of advice: never be the first to stop applauding.
This grim tale prompts reflection on the true purpose of education and the role of the school. Is it the task of education to teach us when to applaud—and when not to? Are schools and universities places to train students to acclaim ideas, or to instruct them when to feel or not a given range of emotions? Should classrooms be arenas of ideological militancy?
In his Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education, John Henry Newman writes:
“Education gives a person a clear view of their own opinions and judgements. It teaches them to see things as they are, to go straight to the point, to disentangle a complex idea, to detect sophistry, and to discard the irrelevant. It grants the truth to develop ideas, eloquence to express them, and the energy to defend them.”
For classical education, critical thinking is not an emotional impulse born of indignation, nor is it driven by a struggle for power. Rather, it is the exercise of a profound understanding of reality, grounded in sound criteria anchored in enduring anthropological constants. One can only recognise what is false in a piece of news through prior knowledge; one can only grasp a coherent narrative thread—or draw meaning from the vast ocean of information that is the Internet—through understanding. And to access knowledge and culture, one must possess a rich lexical register, in order to comprehend what one reads.
The classical education advocated by Newman and other classical authors does not prescribe what a student must feel or say according to fashion or the whims of the majority. It fosters in a person the ability to be consistent, which paradoxically leads to being both predictable and unpredictable. Predictable—because the individual lives in coherence with their principles; unpredictable—because they are not enslaved to the echo chamber of a tribe dictating their every thought. This tradition of education discourage the student to construct knowledge solely from their own perceptions of reality. Rather, it upholds that reality is to be discovered—not invented, nor constructed. It aims to help the student perceive the world as it is, and to contextualize every reality within the greater whole. It does not seek to bend the will by “motivating” the student into desiring what is beautiful. Yet it never ceases to present beauty as the visible expression of truth (understandable) and goodness (desirable).
Classical education understands the classroom as a space for serious inquiry into matters of significance, such that, as Plato writes,
“After long familiarity and intimate engagement with a question, suddenly, like a light kindled from a spark, truth is born in the soul, and once born, nourishes itself.”
In sum, classical education does not command applause. It teaches what is truly worthy of it.
Catherine L’Ecuyer is the bestselling author of The Wonder Approach.
