Why Classical Education is the Future of the US, Russia, and the World, by Steve Turley.

There is an interesting term that’s developed among scholars over the last several years: retraditionalization. While certainly a bit cumbersome, it is a rather simple and indeed profound concept.

In the face of threats to a sense of place, identity, and security so often posed by globalization, populations tend to reassert historic identity and security markers — religion, custom, and tradition — as mechanisms of resistance against secular globalization’s anti-cultural, anti-traditional dynamics.

Scholars are increasingly noting that as people feel vulnerable and experience existential anxiety, it’s not uncommon for them to assert their customs, traditions, culture, language, and ethnicity as bulwarks against threats to their sense of existential security.

And so, the anti-traditionalist dynamics inherent in globalization have elicited a renewed interest in a culture’s ancient traditions of wisdom and virtue that have proved their validity through the test of time.

These, of course, tend to be found in the great historic religions and spiritual traditions and practices that seem to transcend history, and therefore can be valued as authentic resources for not only resisting the anti-cultural, anti-traditional processes of globalization, but also as a basis for the spiritual renewal of a nation, culture, and religion. …

More and more nations are turning to premodern beliefs and practices as frames of reference for the revitalization of a classical education. And this retraditionalized turn promises that classical education may, in fact, be the wave of the future.

hat-tip Stephen Neil