Day: November 7, 2025

There’s a certain kind of film that weighs heavily on America’s collective nostalgia for kinder and gentler times. Yet in the same breath that we yearn for this simplicity, we often can’t help but scoff at it.

For most of us, there is a specific film that comes to mind: one that we remember fondly from childhood, or the one we watch each year on the holidays. After tearing up at human kindness, the triumph of virtue, and the redemptive power of love, faith, and family, we quickly go back to life’s little drudgeries. And while we appreciate such fine sentiments, we know this isn’t real life—as any savvy modernist will tell you. 

The Sound of Music, re-released in 4K to commemorate its 60th anniversary this year, is the quintessential example, precisely because it hits on the extremes. It’s cloyingly saccharine in both style and substance, so much so that critics initially deemed it an emotionally manipulative flop. Yet it proved the test of time, sweeping the Oscars to become one of the highest-grossing movies in history and a staple lesson in both morality and musical education. Far from taking it as an insult to their intelligence, successive generations have come to love the film and its message at face value.

The critics were ultimately wrong and audiences were right: the film is surely sentimental, but remains earnest in its aesthetic, message, and overall intent. But what have we lost in today’s cynical culture that makes this obvious truth far more difficult to see?

As the film opens, the first thing you see is the mountains. Often, sweeping panoramic shots use nature to evoke fear or dread: the opening scene of The Shining, for example, builds tension following Jack’s car up the Colorado mountain road, while Werner Herzog famously used the untamable jungle to mock man’s ambition. Yet The Sound of Music evokes the opposite feeling in its opening scene: A sweeping crescendo of orchestral music builds as the viewer flies above the peaks of the Austrian Alps, and the hills quite literally come alive with the sound of music. We’re struck by a sense of awe and wonder at man’s place within all of this—not his alienation from it—and winding down to the valley, we come to find Maria exactly where she belongs. 

Maria is torn between duty and self-realization, courage and self-doubt, faith and desire; how to reconcile her individuality with her commitment to being a good nun, or governess, or eventually a wife and mother? She’s a faithful novice, she tells us, at the convent, but at the same time she’s a free spirit inspired by love, music, and the beauty of the world around her. The tension does not arise because we doubt the sincerity of her faith, but because we understand and empathize with these earnest distractions of the soul. The nuns see the tension as well, so they test her resolve by sending her to the von Trapp estate to serve as governess to Captain von Trapp and his seven children, where the two eventually fall in love. Perhaps God has a higher purpose for Maria?

There is a parallel tension in the Captain, whose duty to his children, his Baroness fiancée, and his beloved Austria comes under strain. At first, like the nuns, he cannot reconcile his strict ways of child-rearing with Maria’s cheery and tender approach. His engagement to the Baroness offers a practical match that ensures social and familial stability, but true, passionate love—the type he comes to feel for Maria—is noticeably absent. And as the Nazis annex Austria and conscript his military service, he must choose whether to serve a regime he despises or abandon his homeland. The film has a happy ending, of course, with the now-wedded von Trapps and the children escaping over the same hills of the opening scene into neutral Switzerland. Yet we’re never meant to question whether the Captain rejects duty in favor of license. Rather, as the sound of music softens his heart, he too finds a higher purpose. 

The story is based on the memoir of the real-life Maria von Trapp, and critics latched onto the simplification of the historical record: the family’s wealth was extravagantly exaggerated; the timeline of the real couple’s 1927 courtship romantically revised against the backdrop of the Anschluss; and the suspense of a geographically impossible escape route. Yet all of this speaks only to the critics’ own cynicism—not the film’s. 

Despite its artistic license, the film’s intent remains earnest. We’re not meant to apply a “critical” lens to the characters or their motivations. Although the characters’ internal conflicts are ultimately resolved, that does not imply that duty, faith, and discipline are mere tools of social control, rightly discarded when they conflict with other goods. A similar, but far lesser film, Footloose, preached that lesson two decades later, but in The Sound of Music, we’re meant to understand that a good life has a proper balance of both higher meaning and personal fulfillment. 

Maria doesn’t give up on being a nun to “be herself” with a life of music, frivolity, or even chasing a man. The Captain doesn’t ease up on his children because they deserve license, or leave his fiancée and country because he no longer cares to uphold his obligation to them. Both see a higher calling in each other and the life they build together, in the tender vitality they feel through music, and in the preservation of the children’s innocence, which the music allows them to maintain in their escape. Their love for each other, the children, and music brings them personal fulfillment, but they still stand for faith, flag, and family—just in a different way than both originally thought. One does not have to be devoutly chaste or a military hero to lead a meaningful life; sometimes, for some people, the simple love of a family is a moral purpose in itself. 

In today’s environment, it feels instinctive to be just as cynical as the critics. Life doesn’t really work like this; meaning and fulfillment are fleeting and material, if they even exist at all. The films of the subsequent eras—even the greats and now-classics—often instruct us to this end. We can watch The Sound of Music, tear up genuinely, and then move on with our day—but can we really appreciate such a simplistic film as meaningful art with a timely, or even timeless, message?

Through a contemporary lens, it feels there ought to be a tension between simplistic sentimentality and “real life.” Surely both can’t resonate with millions across cultures and generations. Yet the whole point of universality is to reduce the human experience down to its bare framework, something we can all share, admire, or aspire to. The sentimentality of the film may feel manipulative to a cynic, someone who foregrounds the complications and injustices of life and, absent any independent meaning, finds it only in the struggle against those. Obviously, the film does simplify the messier aspects of life, and real interpersonal relations rarely play out so elegantly; we all know this in our own lives. But in centering those things which hold actual meaning while allowing the messiness to fall to the background, the film affirms where real meaning lies. The Sound of Music never manipulates us into believing something that we don’t already believe, but pushes us towards what we already feel.

In truth, the human experience boils down to how we feel, or want to feel, about ourselves and others, rather than how we coldly reason our way through the world. We all earnestly want to see our own happy ending, the fulfillment and meaning of a life well lived, however one generation or culture may define it. And when we see our own earnest desires reflected in art, we can’t help but identify with it at some intuitive level—even when prevailing wisdom says otherwise. 

It only feels as though there is a tension here because the values underfoot have shifted. It’s difficult to pinpoint a particular heyday for sappy and simple films like The Sound of Music: when and how they arose, and why they trailed off. They are typically mid-Century, but can’t fully be attributed to sheer post-war optimism; Frank Capra was piling up Oscars nearly a decade before Pearl Harbor. And while their decline coincides with the shattering of that optimism in Vietnam, they did not disappear altogether. Consider Spielberg’s E.T., for one, along with Pixar films that continued to deliver for decades. Yet it’s undeniable that the overarching current in art, particularly in Hollywood, which so greatly defines our common culture, over the last 60 years has trended towards pervasive irony and cynicism. 

The Sound of Music has stood the test of time, whereas more cheaply manipulative films of the same vein and era have faded into oblivion. That we still watch it in awe—that there’s still a demand for theatrical fanfare 60 years later—suggests there’s an instinctive way that humans wish to and ought to live. The very modern manner of cynicism and irony is not it.

This is what we can still take from the film, and any work of art—which it indeed is—like it. For centuries, Western art existed to express truth as perceived by the artist, his deeply felt reality about life, emotion, or the human condition filtered through a subjective, and ideally superlative, lens. He filters this insight, shaping it with imagination, form, and emotion, resulting in a work that communicates something inwardly personal but resonates outward, inviting others to see, feel, or understand the world in a way they might not do on their own. The Sound of Music fits into this tradition far more than the postmodernist perversion that questions, undermines, and provokes—truth be damned. Its time and place may be so hard to pinpoint precisely because it fits into this grander tradition, which, through the sheer coincidence of modernity, began to decline just as film itself became the dominant form of art. 

It’s not that the message in The Sound of Music is so simple that it lacks meaning, but that there exists a false belief that we’re too evolved to find meaning within it. The truth is that earnest simplicity and optimism can very well define “real life.” We must only recover the will to manifest it. 

In 1983, the Reagan administration commissioned a group of experts to produce a report on the state of education in the United States. The result was A Nation at Risk, which marked a turning point in educational policy, aiming to restore excellence. The report was far from complacent. The experts barely made it through the third paragraph before delivering their verdict: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Kindness and moderation are virtues neither for the surgeon nor the sociologist. Most, if not all, of the report’s signatories have passed away, but I would bet that if they were to evaluate today’s educational standards, they would be even more severe.

A Nation at Risk highlighted declining scores in mathematics, science, and reading. It noted a reduction in study time and academic rigor. It criticized the lack of preparation among many teachers, even though, at the time, they could not check teachers’ personal Instagram or TikTok accounts. Finally, it pointed out a growing disconnect between education and economic competitiveness.

Almost every generation believes the next is less well-educated, uses poorer language, dresses more vulgarly, and listens to awful music. Personal aging may account for some of these perceptions, but the shortcomings of postmodern educational systems are evident when examining many young Westerners: individual responsibility is out of fashion, an obsession with personal rights pervades everything, distrust of meritocracy is growing, and it is nearly a miracle to find a young person who has ever been told that, in society, the primary motivation in performing a job should be the desire to contribute to the common good.

There is no need to invent ingenious solutions for today’s educational systems; most of the work has already been done. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle laid the foundations for an education that could form good citizens. Fulfilling the citizen’s obligations to the polis was also the basis for exercising their rights. Life in society, prosperity, and the true progress of our nations still require the same today: good citizens. Postmodern education, however, seems focused on a notion of individual autonomy that can be enjoyed without any sense of responsibility for oneself or obligations to others.

Today’s educational models have created an atrophy that throws into the workplace and society young people who, from an early age, know all their rights but have barely heard of their obligations. That sort of freedom is illusory. They claim their status as free individuals, yet they have often been educated under the most restrictive doctrines, with a narrow worldview that only some will broaden once freed from indoctrination and able to embark on the true journey toward freedom.

Too many teachers today, perhaps because they are products of “our times,” have little interest in opening students’ minds—except to fill them with their own ideas, leaving no room for critical thinking, reflection, or genuine freedom. Witnessing teachers in American universities or European schools lecturing students about the conflict in Gaza, caricaturing such a complex war, portraying Palestinian terrorists as if they were Mother Teresa, Israel as if it were Satan, and even gathering students for anti-Semitic demonstrations during class, gives a clear picture of how indoctrination is education’s greatest enemy. Ideological polarization in the streets does not justify educational institutions or teachers conveying partisan perspectives. Education should always aim to remove the blindfold from a student’s eyes, not put one on.

“The business of education is not to make the young perfect in any one of the sciences,” John Locke wrote in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, “but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them—capable of any, when they shall apply themselves to it.” Locke’s insight is perhaps the clearest vindication of the importance of forming minds that can soar freely and exercise responsibility.

Leftist educational models imposed in social-democratic Europe, and in many public (and unfortunately some private) institutions in the United States over recent decades, have proven, like their policies, radically opposed to freedom—even if they claimed otherwise. Training automatons is not training “good citizens.” The good citizens Aristotle envisioned for the polis—and that our nations need today—are free and equal individuals, who assume their obligations before claiming their rights and seek excellence and merit as the best path for themselves, aware that this is also their greatest contribution to society and the common good.

It is no coincidence that Aristotelian education, and later all models derived from classical education, considers self-discipline—i.e., responsibility—the starting point for freedom. A Nation at Risk emphasized the same idea. John Stuart Mill, the great theorist of liberty across centuries, also argued that education should instill a sense of moral and social responsibility.

Freedom without self-control, without awareness of being indebted before being a creditor, inevitably degenerates into dangerous selfishness and plunges individuals into a kind of moral or intellectual slavery. If some thinkers argue that the great evil of the twenty-first century is immaturity, it is precisely because maturity—once the toll of youthful education has been paid—consists of freeing oneself from childish selfishness, taking control of oneself, and committing to authentic freedom.

Outside classrooms and universities, today’s perennial educator is the therapist or psychologist. Yet much of popular psychology, or pseudo-psychology, spread via forums, books, and digital platforms, far from correcting the flaws of an education based on solid ideas, only reinforces the ideological vices that afflict us. A review of self-help bestsellers reveals instantly concepts repeated endlessly without philosophical foundation: readers are told they can achieve anything by simply desiring it; to cut ties immediately with “toxic” people—as if humans were arsenic; and that they deserve all possible rights.

It is therefore unsurprising that discussions of obligations are rare, that young people are seldom told that desire without effort is futile, that life is often unfair and unpleasant, or that relationships cannot be discarded overnight without consequences. In this context, popular psychological currents seem to reinforce the immaturity many students carry upon finishing school.

In the last century, philosopher José Ortega y Gasset criticized educational models that ignore duty: “The mass of men believes his rights are infinite and his duties, none.” Ortega saw university education as a means to form select minorities who could guide society boldly and excellently. While some may reject this approach, insisting on universal education, his idea aligns with Aristotle and other classical thinkers: without virtuous and educated citizens, nations weaken, and society as a whole suffers.

Philosopher Jacques Maritain proposed in his writings on education a comprehensive education that included reason, spirit, and morality—nothing new, as it had been successfully practiced for centuries in the Christian West. One cannot claim the same success for secularist experiments in Western countries today. Could anyone claim that children educated in modern secular systems are freer, in the fullest sense, than those educated in classical, Christian-based systems? After all, Christian education was founded on a principle secularism never affirmed: “The truth will set you free.”

More recently, perhaps the most inspiring voices on the need to recover essential classical and traditional educational notions are Karl Jaspers, with due respect to J. H. Newman, who devoted himself to the same task. In his book The Idea of the University, Jaspers defends something countercultural: the goal of education is not utility but the development of moral conscience and personal responsibility. Jaspers envisions a university of greater transcendence, a space for the unconditional pursuit of truth—a space of intellectual freedom. Only in this way, he argues, can it be truly useful to the nation, from a citizen’s perspective; and only this way can academic freedom be exercised justly and effectively by the teacher for the benefit of society.

Against the notion of the teacher who indoctrinates, or the researcher who already knows the conclusions they seek, Jaspers advocates the Socratic professor, working hand in hand with students toward shared ideals: “The Socratic teacher turns his students away from himself and back onto themselves; he hides in paradoxes, makes himself inaccessible. The intimate relationship between student and teacher here is not one of submission, but of a contest for truth.”

After all, the educational excellence that is so often bandied about today is not merely a bunch of happy statistics about skills acquired during schooling. It is part of a broader project: the transmission of knowledge, human understanding, and contribution to the nation’s good. It encompasses rigor, meritocracy, and the selection of the best. Roger Scruton once wrote: “The state has a duty toward each child, and no child must be made to feel inferior to any other. Although that is true, the state has another and greater duty, which is a duty toward us all—namely, the duty to preserve the knowledge we need, which can be passed on only with the help of children able to acquire it.”

In short, perhaps it is time to return to A Nation at Risk, though repeating the research may be unnecessary. Its conclusions are likely just as applicable today and in any future period of educational crisis.