Doug Wilson is not a fan of charter classical schools, to say the least, and I am.
It’s an odd form of disagreement because in so many ways I completely agree with him, in an ideal world. Of course, he and others would argue that without agreeing with him, we’ll never get close to that ideal world. They could be right, but I don’t think so, or I wouldn’t be writing this.
The title of the piece is typical brilliant Doug Wilson metaphor: “Classical Charter Schools as a Cut Flowers Display.” We all know that as beautiful as cut flowers can be, their beauty is fleeting; no soil, no roots, no life. His argument is that charter classical schools without Christ are like cut flowers, or to change the metaphor, like a dead man walking, on death row not long for this world. He believes Christians in charter classical education are in effect trying to prop up the failed experiment in secularism that has been such an unmitigated disaster for America and the Western world.
I think the reason for the disagreement is because of an approach to apologetics, defending the veracity of the Christian faith, called presuppositionalism, which Wilson embraces.
Three Broad Approaches to Defending Christianity
From the first Easter, Christians have been under attack. When Jesus’ followers proclaimed he had come back from the dead to establish a new religion out of a very old one, pagans and their fellow Jews did not give them a warm reception. So, Christians had to defend the veracity of their faith from the beginning.
Prior to the 20th century, Christians just defended Christianity without thinking of apologetics categories. That changed with the rise of presuppositionalism starting with a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Cornilius Van Til (1895-1987), the founding father of presuppositionalism. Because he and his followers declared their approach as the biblical and only correct approach, other apologists were compelled to identify and defend their approaches. I will briefly outline them here before I get to how I think this discussion impacts how we look at charter classical schools.
Before I do, I will say I am personally a whatever works apologist. In practice, I’m presuppositional because a fact of existence is that we can’t escape our assumptions in every thought we have, and those assumptions determine what we think and often the conclusions we come to.
Presuppositionalism —This approach teaches that we must start with the assumption that Christianity is true and the Bible is the revelation of the Triune God because we can’t escape our assumptions about God and the ultimate nature of things. Wherever we start will determine where we end up. If we argue outside of specifically Christian presuppositions, whatever knowledge we present to a sinner, they will suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Romans 1:18). So, any other approach than theirs will be futile. At least that’s the concept.
However, I’ve found over the years having listened to hundreds of testimonies that people very often come to the right conclusions from very wrong assumptions. So I ask, how can there be only one right, biblical way to defend the faith if other approaches accomplish the same thing? My flexible understanding of apologetics separates me from the doctrinaire presuppositionalist.
Classical — I was introduced to this approach in seminary by a book called Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics by R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley. It frustrated me because they were as dogmatic as the presuppositionalists that theirs was the only proper way to defend the faith. Basically, it starts with the proofs for God’s existence going back to the brilliant Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, what Thomas called the five ways. It argues that we must first establish God’s existence, theism, because any historical evidence will only make sense once we’ve established God exists.
Evidential —This approach leans on historical and philosophical evidence but focuses primarily on the former, defending the reliability of the biblical text, and the stories it contains. Philosophy contributes to the evidence, while the classical approach is more purely philosophical.
We could add a fourth approach that takes from these three called the cumulative case method. As in a court of law, an argument is developed with different strands of evidence developing a beyond a reasonable doubt case.
Wilson Believes Charter Classical Schools are Destined to go Woke
Doug Wilson is a doctrinaire presuppositionalist, and I believe this determines his understanding of the frailty of the charter (public) classical education movement. I’m very familiar with this movement because my daughter, Gabrielle, a graduate of Hillsdale College, taught for eight years at a charter classical school, and has worked for two years in their Barney Charter School Initiative.
I believe something like this is of great value as Christians learn to battle and defeat the poison of secularism toward re-Christianizing our nation. I would point out that Hillsdale College would not agree with me that that is the ultimate goal, but challenging that is not the point of this post. Arguing for the value of their project is.
The reason Wilson thinks charter classical schools are destined to go woke is because they are not confessionally and overtly Christian. That’s basically his argument.
Charter schools remove Christ, the gospel, the holy apostles, and any mention of this astounding grace of God. And so when you take Christ out of this story, what do you have? Now all you have are dead, white guys, and nothing in the story whatever about unmerited grace.
This assumes, however, that the only revelation of God to man is in Christ, and as a good presuppositionalist, Wilson believes without Scripture and Christ, any other knowledge is of no ultimate value. I doubt he would put it that way, but with presuppositionalism it is all or nothing.
I, on the other hand, I would argue that Romans 1 tell us that creation reveals God:
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
Material reality reveals God, and He cannot be escaped. Paul says, in effect, that people suppress the truth because they love their wickedness more. I don’t believe, contra the presuppositionalist, that this suppression means they don’t in some way possess real knowledge of God, even if it is not saving knowledge.
Does Christ Inoculate Against Wokeness?
If an organization, or church, is avowedly Christian, does that mean, as Wilson says, that they are protected from going woke? History tells us it does not.
Christian organizations that proclaim the unmerited grace in Christ, as Wilson insists charter classical schools must, have gone woke. One infamous example is CRU, once called Campus Crusade for Christ. In fact, this headline at Not the Bee tells us just how woke they’ve become, “CRU, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ, fired two of its employees after they voiced concerns about the group’s stance on LGBT issues.”
Many Christian denominations and organizations have gone “woke” throughout post-Enlightenment history. J. Gresham Machen, the founder of my Alma Mater, Westminster Seminary Philadelphia, fought the Presbyterian Church for much of his life until he was basically kicked out for being an orthodox Bible believing Christian. The Presbyterian Church, started by the great Scottish Reformer John Knox, most certainly didn’t start out “woke,” and wasn’t for much of its history until it embraced Enlightenment inspired German biblical criticism of the 19th century. Then the inevitable result was a different religion, as Machen wrote about in his 1923 book, Christianity and Liberalism. We can see from the experience of the New Testament Church that people proclaiming the Christian faith doesn’t mean they won’t infect the church with heresy. Speaking of antichrists among the people of God the Apostle John says in his first epistle:
19 They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.
Unfortunately, as history shows, the heretics don’t always go “out from us,” but pervert the teaching of the gospel from within. The once dominant mainline denominations are a lamentable example, but because of their heresy they are a shell of their former orthodox selves.
Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: Another form of Apologetics
Which brings us to the classical education mantra of goodness, beauty, and truth. If a classical school is actually classical, it takes its marching orders from the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Christians via the Middle Ages. Classical education by definition is rooted in Western history, which is primarily Christian history, and solid charter schools do not ignore that fact, but charter schools are public schools so they can’t proselytize the Christian faith.
What they do proselytize, however, is the objective nature of goodness, beauty, and truth. C.S. Lewis, certainly not a presuppositionalist, wrote about the concept of what he called the Tao in his classic little book, The Abolition of Man. This universal concept of objective values in reality is also known as natural law, or in specifically Christian terms, creation law, or natural revelation. I don’t like the term natural law because in our secular age natural means without God, regardless of what the person believes using it. Lewis wrote this book in the early 1940s when secularism’s influence was becoming ubiquitous, but not yet affirmed as the default worldview of the West. He decided to use the Tao because his argument about the objective moral values in reality is found in every culture on earth and in every time. This specific passage is relevant for our discussion:
Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny, or an obedience that is not slavery.
In other words, something beyond mere human preference is necessary if we’re to escape the inevitable tyranny produced by a merely material universe in the will to power, might makes right, dominating peoples and nations. Put another way, God’s moral law is the only source of true liberty.
As I argue in Going Back to Find the Way Forward, the dividing line in Western culture is truth. Those who believe truth is real, that there is an objective nature to reality, in Lewis’s word, the Tao, believe there is something to which the state, those in power, are accountable, the truth. To those who don’t believe in truth or the Tao, “the narrative” is all, and anything is justified toward its ideological ends.
This brings us to the objective nature of values, or to the concrete reality of goodness, beauty, and truth, and it’s apologetics value. The triune reality of these three values can’t but point to the Trine God who is those things. Those who see them and believe in them and fight for them whatever they believe, are closer to God than those who don’t. They build in a person’s mind what sociologists call a plausibility structure, or a state of mind in which these things actually exist, are believable; they are not mere preferences. God to such people is far more plausible as the explanation of all things than mere chance and matter colliding. I would further argue that people immersed in a worldview of the Tao and its objective nature are less susceptible to going woke than Christians who uncritically swallow the secular zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, the climate of the times. Ours is not only distinctly chilly to God, but it inculcates materialist assumptions into Christians without them even being aware of it.
This is why Wilson’s argument against charter classical schools doesn’t hold any water. Again, I do agree with him that the ideal is for parents is to send their children to a Christian classical school, or home school them, but that is simply not an option for tens of millions of Christian families. And what about all those children who come from secular families? Do we just abandon them to Marxist indoctrination? Keep in mind, fifty million children every day attend public schools, and that isn’t going to change in the foreseeable future. At some point government or “public” schools must be, in Marx’s term, abolished, but in the meantime, charter classical schools are a possible option.
But is It Really Classical?
As I said, my daughter worked at a charter classical school, and her husband still does. Neither of them have been satisfied that this school is fully classical. I’m not talking about schools like that. I’m talking about schools like those Hillsdale College establishes that understand and teach the Tao in all they do. Here is what the Barney Charter schools believe and teach:
Classical education is a model of K-12 instruction that is rooted in the liberal arts and sciences, offers a firm grounding in civic virtue, and cultivates moral character:
- It emphasizes the centrality of the Western tradition in the study of history, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts.
- It features a rich and recurring examination of the American literary, moral, philosophical, political, and historical traditions to equip students for citizenship.
- Its curriculum is balanced and strong across the four core disciplines of math, science, literature, and history, with explicit phonics instruction leading to reading fluency and explicit grammar instruction leading to language mastery.
- Well-educated and articulate teachers are central to the classroom, in contrast to conventional “student-centered learning” models.
- The school culture demands moral virtue, decorum, respect, discipline, and studiousness among the students and faculty—and simultaneously produces a spirit of wonder and a desire to know that which is good, true, and beautiful.
In short, classical education offers K-12 students the sort of rigorous education that undergraduate students receive at Hillsdale College.
I would suggest students who graduate from such schools are far more open to the gospel than their unfortunate compatriots at regular public schools, and are less susceptible to woke indoctrination.
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