Like Going Home…
G.K. Chesterton once said, “There are two ways of getting home; one of them is to stay there. The other one is to walk around the whole world till we come back to the same place.”
Or similarly, T.S. Elliot was quoted saying, “The end of [all] our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”
In many ways, explaining classical education is like that. It is a refreshing return home. Modern progressive education (following in the footsteps of men like Horace Mann and John Dewey) has taken us all around the world with inadequate aims and alternative methods of education, and classical education seeks to take us home and:
Return us to the riches of our educational past;
Restore us in our pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful; and
Reform students with a love of learning and a high regard for Christian virtue.
To quote another one of the greats, C.S. Lewis says it like this:
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.
So we are going back. And we are seeking to preserve and protect the best of our educational inheritance. And we are seeking to revitalize the philosophy of education that really helped to form free people and to shape civilization as we know it (think “Liberal Arts”, the arts of the free man). And this endeavor that we are on takes a lot of diligence and effort. It won’t happen passively or without a fight.
Pastor Douglas Wilson, one of the pioneers in the resurgence of classical Christian education in America, says it like this:
...there are no pacifist traditions left. All worthy traditions must be militant in order to survive this time of upheaval. And in such a time, Christians must be conservative when it comes to everything that the Spirit has accomplished in the history of our civilization. And we must be progressive with regard to all the things He has yet to do.
Somewhat similarly and related to the first part of the Wilson quote, Robert Conquest’s Second Law of politics says that “any organization that is not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”
As a school, we want to intentionally guard ourselves against mission drift. We want to make sure that 10 years down the road, we are still working toward the same goals and objectives, while maintaining and defending our conservative Christian convictions. And we want to do this without becoming ideologues.
We also recognize that we need to help students have a positive vision for the future. We need to know more than just what we are against, we also need to know what we are for, so we want to play a little bit of offense too. We need to help our students see how their faith and learning equips them for progress in culture building and evangelism.
So if this is what we are after, what are some of the distinctives of classical education?
Well, for one, it goes against the prevailing zeitgeist. You could say that it bucks against the status quo. Our era is dominated by these prevailing ideologies: materialism, nihilism, relativism, naturalism, scientism, and socialism—and we could now add critical and queer theories to the list.
Classical education stands against all those modern developments and it stands for the pre-modern concepts of truth, goodness, and beauty. It seeks to restore virtues like honor and courage and integrity and honesty. Classical education rebels by being traditional, and it seeks to avoid what Lewis called “chronological snobbery”—which is the idea that our contemporary generation is the best and doesn’t have anything to learn from previous generations. So we want to avoid that posture.
Second, rather than simply seeking conformity with the present culture, classical education strives for excellence and it helps students to learn to discern between good and bad, true and false. It isn’t afraid of making appropriate judgments and saying that some things are better and some things are worse.
Third, in some ways, classical education is also considered small, grassroots, and communal. And that’s true. But, oftentimes, big schools can become too standardized and students can become reduced to a number or a statistic. Our smallness makes our education personal and unique. Small classrooms also allow a student to have more intentional interaction with his or her teacher. And it is our hope that our students will grow to become like their virtuous and wise teachers (cf. Luke 6:40).
And lastly, classical education isn’t just pragmatic or specialized. It doesn’t just teach job skills or STEM classes (and I’m not saying those are necessarily bad things). But classical education aims at wisdom, not just wealth or a career in the corporate world. It helps students to grow as mature human beings before they think about being millionaires. Classical education teaches students how to think well, how to communicate well, and how to live well.
So like Lewis said, classical education seeks to get us back on the right path, a path that leads us somewhere. And at the end of the educational journey, it’s our hope that students will have arrived home and found the place familiar. And by grace, it’s our hope that they will learn to know and trust their Heavenly Father in the process as well.
