The Classical Education of George Bailey
If, like me, you consider Frank Capra’s Christmas masterpiece to be the greatest movie ever made, and you also happen to be a classical educator, there’s an obvious charm in trying to prove that George Bailey embodies the principles you hold dear.
But, lest we be charged with being mere enthusiasts, recklessly projecting our own minds upon everyone and everything we love, let me admit up front what the skeptics have right: if by “classical education” we mean something along the ancient lines, i.e. “an education in the classical languages aimed to prepare one for attending a prestigious liberal arts college and become a part of a governing elite,” there is, as you might suspect, little evidence that George Bailey received anything but pieces of a “classical education.”
The problem with taking such a tack is that it renders almost all of the graduates of our own contemporary classical, Christian schools—if not all of them—something less than classically educated as well.
As you bask in the convivial warmth of the Christmas season, your heart aglow with charity, I assume that this is not the tack you wish to take (dear reader). Nor is it mine.
Let’s admit, then, that George is a man of few books and modest intellectual achievement. He prefers the sphere of action and worldly ambition to philosophizing (in that, he ironically shares more in common with the graduates of older, more literally “classical” schools than graduates of many modern classical, Christian schools do, but that’s neither here nor there). When George has his choice of reading material, he chooses travel magazines. When he soliloquizes about building towering piles, he talks about skyscrapers, not church steeples.
Now, the same candor also obliges us to admit that it was not uncommon for American high schools in the early 20th century to offer Latin; George may well have taken such a course, especially since he intended to go to college. He almost certainly read through a basic survey of Greek and Roman history like most American schoolchildren (when telling Mary the places he wants to see after “shaking the dust of this crummy, little town” off his feet, he does first list “Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Coliseum”).
Whatever you make of George’s love of travel stories as you clutch your Homer (something Plato himself, remember, would have banned from his ideal city), remember that National Geographic in the 1920s featured photo essays like “The Glory that was Greece” and “Ancient Carthage in the Light of Modern Excavation” alongside its paeans to coconuts.
But if this is all still rather speculative for you, allow me to rest my case on something deeper.
What can be deeper, or is more the result of careful and intentional education, than a man’s affections? And what reveals a man’s affections, and how well they’ve been formed, more clearly than a succession of crises (Horace even says something to this effect)?
The story of It’s a Wonderful Life is the story of George facing crisis upon crisis: Harry nearly drowning, Peter Bailey’s sudden death, Harry failing to return after college, the Great Depression, World War II, bankruptcy, and Potter all the while scheming to put the Building and Loan out of business and even throw George in jail.
It’s not just that George weathers each crisis, but that he does so by scrupulously hewing to the path of duty and virtue (however much he may grumble along the way)— particularly on the virtue of piety, the parent of all other virtues. Consider the board meeting following Peter Bailey’s death: George restrains himself when Potter insults himself and his friends, but he leaps (Aeneas-like) to the defense of his father when the latter’s honor and character are impugned.
Though George doesn’t know it at the time, he here gives the reason he'll devote the rest of his life to the Building and Loan: “this town needs this measly, one-horse institution if only to have some place where people can come without crawling to Potter.” Keeping alive his father’s legacy isn’t a matter of stubbornness or pride, but love for Bedford Falls. Over the rest of the movie, George shows that this wasn’t an idle statement uttered in the heat of passion, but the expression of a fierce, and clear-burning charity for his fellow citizens. He will dedicate his life to making good on those words and resisting tyranny, even though it costs him his honeymoon, worldly comfort, a high paying job, and much else besides.
George’s public-spiritedness, combined with his piety, are his distinctive virtues. They are also the essence and end of classical education, particularly the Protestant branch of the tradition inaugurated by Luther, who so strongly urged the liberal arts as the essential way to form youth consecrated to the service of God and the state. “You will ever remember,” John Adams wrote to his son John Quincy in 1781, “that all the End of study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen.” [1] Or, as Milton put it, a “complete” education is what “fits a man to perform justly, skillfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War.” [2]
And while it takes an exceptional wife to help make George’s life “wonderful,” and divine intervention for him to avoid an eminently Greco-Roman death (what classically educated hero hasn’t benefited from divine intervention?), it should be no surprise that he eventually comes around to Clarence’s way of seeing things. From the beginning of the film, George has shown that he glimpses past the world’s veil to its eternal verities. He doesn’t chase after women or riches or comfort as other men do. As Solon rebuked Croesus, so a young George rebukes Potter: “In my book he died a much richer man than you’ll ever be!” George has an inkling of what true riches are long before Clarence has to teach him that “no man is a failure who has friends.”
So, are we to read between the lines and conclude that George has been classically educated? It’s undeniable that he excels in the very virtues that are the primary end of classical education. And could there be a more “classical” ending to a film than its hero lifting his voice in praise of “auld lang syne”—faithfulness to the bonds created by old friendships, and times long past? But I’ll leave the final verdict to the reader.
Endnotes
[1] John Adams to John Quincy Adams, 18 May 1781.
[2] Of Education, John Milton.
