Classical education as I’ve described it in previous posts is the antidote to secular progressive education. Too many Christians think that if they add religious words and concepts onto the progressive education model, that will make all the difference. It’s better than doing nothing, but it won’t address the fundamental challenge to Christian families in our rabidly secular age. We are, as I’ve argued, in a battle of worldviews that are in every way mutually exclusive. The basic assumptions about the nature of reality are what’s at stake, and who determines those for our children: the culture or us.
For Christians, and Americans in general, the assumptions and teachings of classical education are a necessary corrective to the postmodern, relativist influences that threaten to daily drown us. Just reading our Bibles and going to church will not protect us or our kids from the pernicious, evil influence (the idea of plausibility structures I discuss in the book) of these ideas. Most Christians, as shown in a recent survey, think much the same way as their secular fellow citizens. That is tragic in so many ways. Classical education could keep this from happening, but most Christians are educated in government schools, and it shows.
When I first started thinking seriously about writing a book on Christian parenting, I thought the most important idea I could convey given our postmodern, relativistic (“true for you, but not for me”) moment was a defense of Truth. So I titled a chapter on this, “It’s All About Truth” (since, all the chapters became “All About”). Simply put, the necessity for Christians to embrace and defend Truth is why classical education is so necessary. J.P. Moreland in his book, Love God With All Your Mind, argues that
in a certain sense, the believer’s commitment to the truth is even more basic than his or her dedication to the Christian faith in general or some doctrinal position in particular . . .
If they were convinced either were false, then they should reject them. For Christians what is true is everything. The most counter cultural thing one can do today is affirm that there is a true, objective nature to reality that we can discover, and that our preferences, and subjective interpretations of things have no bearing on the nature of things. Our subjective feelings and notions respond to the things, the are not the things. That is the biblical and Christian view, and yet many Christians too easily accept that morals and the good are mere preferences, like our taste in ice cream.
Classical education is an educational philosophy that embraces and teaches something I’ve taught my children all their lives: it’s not about you! Jesus himself warns us, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” If we want to flourish as creatures made in God’s image, we’ll listen to Jesus. Classical education helps us do that.
Evan outside of a specifically Christian context, classical education is culturally subversive. My wife and daughter work at a charter, thus public, classical school, and where our youngest son also attends. Not only does it embrace the assumption that there is objective goodness, beauty, and truth, it also teaches the development of character, that true human flourishing can only happen when we learn and embrace the ends, the telos, for which we were created (the ancient Greeks and Romans were not atheists).
I will finish this short series with an anecdote as to why a classical approach to education is so powerful. My daughter, Gabrielle, is lower school academic dean, and this week she was teaching the k-5 teachers about the importance of the “moral imagination.” I promise you those teachers would never hear such a lecture in a normal public school, and they were inspired by it (most don’t totally get classical education yet). The point is to present through great literature a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself, and that it is presented in a way that is attractive and stirs the imagination. Goodness and the good are made attractive to the children, inspiring them to pursue goodness rather than evil, and thus true human flourishing. Such doesn’t exist at normal public schools.
I believe the teachers were inspired because they got a glimpse into the true nature of reality, and that is exciting. In typical government schools, they’d get a bastardized version of reality, and that ultimately satisfies no one. The reason, in my favorite metaphor as you may know by now, is that puzzle pieces in and of themselves don’t inspire if there is no big picture into which they fit. Puzzle pieces alone only distort and confuse, and public schools teach there no puzzle into which the pieces might fit. No wonder most kids are bored and uninspired; all they’ve got is pieces! Classical education is the need of the hour for the Church, and our culture.
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