Pursuing Classical Education: Summary of the Parts
Pursuing Classical Education Series
Pursuing Classical Education: Introduction Pursuing Classical Education: Personal Influences Pursuing Classical Education: Summary of the Parts Pursuing Classical Education: Keeping Education Forefront
Pursuing Classical Education III
I don’t think I can improve upon Andrew Kern’s definitions, and I must credit him with first giving me the idea to separate out each word of the term Classical Christian Education. Each is distinct and worthy of being treated separately. So, I give you Kern’s definitions, and then bullet points of my own musings.
Education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty. It must be distinguished from training for a career, which is of eternal value but is not the same thing as education. Classical Education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty by means of the seven liberal arts and the four sciences. Another way to define classical education might be as follows: “Classical education is the logocentric, idealistic quest to cultivate virtue in the souls of the student.” Christian Education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty so that, in Christ, the student is enabled to better know, glorify, and enjoy God.
So, education is the matter, classical is the method, and Christian is the manner & end.
Education
Education is not school. I am still working out how the two sometimes do and do not fit together, but you can have school without education (as most modern schooling is). Education is paideia. Education is enculturation. Education has to do with forming, shaping, cultivating the student as a person, an individual, and as a whole. School deals with subjects and facts and tests. Education deals in people and ideas.
Education is relational: Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Luke 6:40. Education is more about teachers & students, pedagogies, and discipleship than about curriculum and book lists.
Since education is about shaping and developing persons, in the early years I have chosen to focus more on tastes, appetites, and habits than facts, content, or “what every first grader should know.” Grade levels are an institutional scam. Knowledge is graded, is cumulative, but all children do not learn to read at 6, not all children must have American history at –th grade, not all children must start algebra in 7th grade, etc. Students should be begun at the beginning and lead through areas of knowledge as they acquire mastery. Children are not objects that can be run through a set of wooden standard practices to emerge a finished product. Here, homeschooling has the upper hand to conventional schools. However, to balance that compliment, I must add that it is an advantage that can also become a drawback: “adaptability” can become inconsistency, “tailoring to the student” easily becomes catering to the student, and often being the mom means your view of your child’s ability is biased and inaccurate.
Christian
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.” Proverbs 9:10. Christian education is the only true education, because Christianity is the only source of Truth. Any truth encountered elsewhere is stolen, and only whole when restored to the context of Reality. The world is the way it is because God made it that way. Understanding God is the only way to understand the world, and understanding the world is one avenue toward understanding God. Creation and the Creator are connected. You cannot have one without the other. No matter what someone may believe, that is simply True, The Way It Is. The more your education is in touch with True Truth, with Reality, with The Way Things Are, the more complete and full your education will be. There is no knowledge without God; there is no world or science or literature or anything without God’s sovereign Word keeping it so. One may act as though that isn’t true, but it is. Education does not come into its own until it has taken its place under Christ’s Lordship.
Christian education does not mean school + Bible class. It is an all-encompassing worldview and approach, not merely the addition of piety and another subject. Keeping the Bible and God out of any subject is a form of lying, for “all things were created through [Christ] and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” There simply cannot be cohesive education without submission to and love of the One who made it all, who rules it all, who it all is created for, and who is even now actively holding it all together. And, again, that doesn’t mean adding a Bible verse to the top of every workpage or at the beginning of every textbook chapter (Heaven help us!). It does mean you may not act or teach or think as if God were irrelevant in any sphere or subject.
Christian education is discipleship, and will also steep its students in Scripture, “that the man of God might be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:17) “The glory of God is the man fully alive,” claimed St. Irenaeus. And Milton wrote, “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection.”
Classical
Classical education is not a specific curriculum, not a particular book list or to-do list. It is not about chanting facts or combining subjects. There are 4-6 different versions of education out there right now laying claim to the term classical, and most of them indeed have right to the term. Those who use it as a marketing buzz word, of course, do not. Classical can mean many things. It can mean a classicist’s education, it can mean a “Great Books” education, sometimes it means only a certain position on child development that was given a classical term 50 years ago, and it can mean a return to the education and ideas that fostered the best in Western Civilization. This last meaning is the closest to my own meaning. And, incidentally, that’s also what Dorothy Sayers was talking about, too, and if you boil her essay down only to be about child development, you’ve missed the point.
Now, how far back one must go to recover classical education is another dividing line. Do we return to the education our founding fathers received? Do we return to the education of the Puritans? Do we return merely to pre-industrial education? Do we return all the way back to antiquity? I think we should return to education’s mission of creating civilization. Western civilization was born in Greece & Rome, Christianity was then born into Rome, European barbarians overcame Rome but the culture and the gospel eventually overcame them. We are those European barbarians. Classical education partakes of that stream of history, becomes a part of it as it studies it and pursues it and hopefully expands it. Instead, modern (post-Enlightenment) educational theory has abandoned and even hated Western civilization and culture. However, in the past, periods of bleakness have, in the end, been found to be pregnant with new developments and revitilizations ready to burst forth when their appointed hour comes. Classical education is an education that fosters the seeds and the soil needed for such blossoms, whether it bursts forth into culture through that student or quietly passes on, working like a few tiny grains of leaven in the lump of mass culture. We partake of our heritage, consciously loving it with our students and handing it down. That, to me, is classical education.
The educational heritage of the West has given us general concepts, categories, pedagogies, and some few standard materials. There have never been mass-produced or standardized curricula until modern education. The more one wishes to be classical, the more one will study what has lasted in our history, that is, what was begun in Greece and Rome, Christianized in the Middle Ages, and gradually and periodically refined down to the present day — and the more one will seek and reject post-Christian modernism and all its ugly children. The CIRCE Institute has a brief yet thorough explanation of the classical terms, categories, and pedagogies.
Classical education has become trendy, the latest educational fad. That is the way our culture kills what it touches. Classical Christian education as a movement, as a recovery of true education, is only in its babyhood, though, and the rumblings of further maturity are happening now, in ways they were not 4-5 years ago when I first began researching it. I am very excited to be beginning now, when more focus and depth is beginning to be available. And the recovery depends not on the right publisher putting together the right package, but on teachers and parent-teachers knowing what they’re doing, knowing where they are going, and loving what they’re doing.
