“Why do I have to learn this?” is the high school student’s favorite question. In that moment of pregnant silence that follows, the teacher stands as an abstract villain, ready, the student supposes, with answers of algebra being useful “in college some day,” and that reading is an important skill, and “one day you’ll see why.” G.K. Chesterton, in his classic work on Christian apologetics, Orthodoxy, invites the student to challenge the “small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” But the student has misidentified the villain and the oligarch. It is not the teacher, or the subject, but the idea that learning must be useful, and proved so, in order to be worthy of attention.

It is proper to ask “why” at school. The drive to question lies in the fundamental nature of what it means to be human. It is an invitation to the teacher to provoke wonder. But first, something must be proved to the student. In order to catch all of the wonder of what it means to exist as a
person in this world, the student needs, as Italian priest and educator Luigi Giussani proposed, “a working hypothesis which nature uses to launch people into the comparison against all things.” The teacher has his task: now, he can educate in the classical sense of the word—educere: to lead
out. By asking the question, the student invites the teacher to lead them on the journey out of Plato’s cave of shadow figures and false images and into the light above.

The entryway to this kind of education is surprising and provocative, and altogether anathema to most modern sensibilities: it is tradition, which G.K. Chesterton calls the “democracy of the dead,” a way for the sensibilities and stories of the past to demand something of our judgments
now and into the future. And it is tradition that is Giussani’s “working hypothesis,” a framework for us to use, and which in fact we do use, whether we know it or not, to measure the things put before us. The teacher, then, guides the student toward an understanding of tradition as framed
by Chesterton and Giussani as a mode of discovery, and not as a muzzle.

Teaching students who have been trained to be suspicious of tradition can seem like a monumental task if we know the truth of the matter. Explaining it outright rarely works, though we should be ready with a sturdy explanation for what tradition is and is not. The more impactful
method is for teachers to show their students the power of tradition to make sense of the world. This can happen practically, through classroom liturgies and other “traditions” that may naturally develop in the schoolhouse or home – we do things this way, and it works; it elevates us – but
also by more expressly linking tradition in its many manifestations to what we see before us in nature, history, the mind, the person. Most important of all, the teacher can demonstrate through their own authentic witness—expressed through their own personal love of God and of the very
person [student] before them—how tradition informs the student’s discovery of themselves as a subject to behold and not an object to be analyzed.