College: The Modern Agoge

Mike Gee, 28 Aug 2024

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” – Cicero

The Spartans lived for one purpose: to fight. As soon as they turned seven, children became the property of the state. They were starved, taught to lie, and trained only in skills necessary for war through a program known as the agoge. After statesman Lycurgus introduced the agoge, their single-minded fixation on war propelled them to become Greece’s dominant power.

However, their prosperity was short-lived. When political factions arose in Greece’s cities like Thebes, the Spartans failed to adapt. They knew how to fight, but not how to govern. Ultimately, Thebes revolted and defeated Sparta in the Battle of Leuctra. The days of Spartan prosperity and influence were over.

Today, much like the Spartans, our best colleges produce sharp graduates skilled in only a single domain. I went to Carnegie Mellon University and had perhaps one of the greatest Spartan educations in the world. We were pushed to work 16-hour days in dimly lit rooms on computer science, mathematics, and logic—the most glorious Spartans awarded quantitative trading jobs starting at no less than half a million dollars a year.

Our modern agoge has brought us undeniable prosperity. Ever since James Morill proposed the first technical colleges during the Agricultural Revolution, we have produced millions of farmers, engineers, and scientists. However, we have also created a society of highly productive, narrow-minded worklings blind to the world around them–individuals who are ignorant of history and have never studied the economic and political systems that govern them.

The consequences of this specialized education are far-reaching. We’ve lost touch with our history and rejected those who once fought for our prosperity. Credentialed education has become a replacement for knowledge, leaving our graduates unprepared to pursue truth and vulnerable to the ideologies peddled by their equally uninformed colleagues, politicians, and online influencers. Most recently, we saw this first-hand in the blind support of Biden’s recent proposal for federally mandated rent control, a complete rejection of basic principles of supply and demand.

Our colleges were once a place for intellectual debate and discourse. Students arrived to pursue knowledge, not to receive it. This empowered people to contribute big but sensible ideas, like our 20-year-old Alexander Hamilton once suggested Washington fight like the Roman general, Fabius Maximus. Or our 36-year-old James Madison drafted our Constitution by studying all republics of the past.

Times are changing. Social media echo chambers spread misinformation rapidly, artificial intelligence is changing the nature of work, and the West continues to face growing threats abroad. We cannot take our prosperity for granted. We must prepare our future leaders to uphold the systems that created our wealth, understand our financial and economic systems, and be emboldened by our history to face new challenges. After all, Jefferson, who drafted our Declaration of Independence, wrote, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

But Jefferson is now long gone. So are Hamilton and Gallatin who laid the foundation for our financial system. And so are countless others who have updated our systems to meet the challenges of our evolving world and defended our rights to life, liberty, economic freedom, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our world is changing, and it will soon become clear which countries and individuals are prepared and which have blindly taken their prosperity for granted. We must educate and inspire our young people with our history–not for the performative worship of ashes but for the courageous transmission of fire. The time to act is now, lest we become the modern Spartans, masters of a single domain but blind to the changing world around us.