The cry for myth

My path toward Classical education did not begin with a love of antiquity, but with disillusionment. While studying psychology, I sensed that no matter how diligently I applied myself to its methods, the discipline could not account for the fullness of the human person. The problem was not psychology's concern for wellbeing, but its confidence that the scientific method could finally explain humanity.

Alongside the popular lectures of Jordan Peterson, I encountered existential thinkers such as Carl Jung and Viktor Frankl, whose work resisted reduction. They spoke of meaning, symbol, archetype, and myth-concepts treated with suspicion by a discipline increasingly defined by measurement, data, and replicability.

This tension became unavoidable in my own research. Psychology will claim to measure love, identity, or wellbeing-yet these are concepts that are irreducibly lived, relational, and moral. Measurement lends such ideas scientific authority, but it does not guarantee understanding or insight. One may quantify behaviour without ever grasping meaning.

Here the deeper problem emerges. When knowledge is restricted to what can be measured, meaning is reduced to superstition. The quantifiable is privileged over the significant. What should be the most humane of disciplines, education, psychology, politics, society and culture become inhospitable to the human person.

Psychology's promise to explain the human condition begins to resemble the Sirens' call to Odysseus: we know all the deeds of men. But the result is not wisdom, but fragments of reality - truth flattened into data, transcendence reduced to immanence.

It was in this impasse that I encountered Rollo May, whose writings began to clarify the conundrum. May argued that myth is not a primitive error to be overcome, but a fundamental mode of human understanding. Myth, he insisted, is how human beings locate themselves within reality. Without it, we do not become more rational-we become lost.

This insight illuminated what modern education so often forgets. Human beings are not primarily data-processing machines. We are meaning-seeking creatures who understand ourselves narratively. We live inside stories before we analyse ideas. We recognise courage, justice, sacrifice, and love long before we define them.

Classical education begins with this anthropology.

Within the Liberal Arts tradition, myth and narrative are not opposed to reason; they pre-requisite disciplines. Story does not replace logic-it furnishes the imagination so that logic may have something real to work upon. Before students can analyse virtue, they must first recognise it. Myth forms moral perception and orders the heart before moral argument.

This is why the Liberal Arts tradition places story at the centre of curriculum design-not as enrichment, but as foundation. Epic, legend, sacred narrative, and great literature shape the imagination, which is not an ornamental faculty but the framework for meaning. Without a well-formed imagination, reason is procedural rather than contemplative-efficient, but shallow.

CS Lewis captured this danger memorably in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader through the figure of Eustace Scrubb: informed, competent, and incapable of wonder. Even Albert Einstein acknowledged the imbalance when he observed that imagination encircles the world, while knowledge remains limited.

Modern education, dictated by the social science paradigm, increasingly treats learning as the acquisition of measurable competencies detached from meaning. "Evidence-based practice" governs curriculum and pedagogy, yet the evidence it produces repeatedly fails to produce human flourishing. When education is severed from narrative, it informs without forming.