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updated 10/21/2008
 Purpose:
The purpose of
Classical Education is to cultivate virtue and wisdom. The
classical Christian does not ask, “What can I do with this
learning?” but “What will this learning do to me?” The ultimate
end of Classical Christian education is to enable the student
(disciple) to better know, glorify, and enjoy God.
Since we are
able to know things with which we have a common nature, the more
we are like God the better we can know Him. A student gives
glory to God when he is like Him. “The glory of God is the man
fully alive.” St. Irenaeus
Our enjoyment of
God is derived from our ability to see Him and to see His
handiwork.
Grace:
In a Christian
school, learning is not an end in itself. Instead, the
classical Christian teacher asks God to use his teaching,
dispositions, and actions as an instrument in His hand to
cultivate the students’ souls toward holiness. In this sense,
learning can be a means of grace
Ordo Amoris (the order of
affections):
To fulfill a
lower order good, one must proceed to the good of the next
highest order (i.e. to fulfill the good of finishing homework,
the student must proceed to the slightly higher good of trying
to get a good grade; to rightly gain food and shelter we must
seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness; to get
into the most appropriate college and to do well when we get
there, we must seek wisdom and virtue).
Failure to
recognize this principle in every area of education and life
leads to a disordered soul and a school that cannot succeed in
what it values most highly. To nurture a rightly ordered soul
requires the cultivation of the moral imagination.
Subordination
Schooling is not
the purpose of life or of childhood, and it has value only to
the degree to which it enables the child to fulfill his purpose
as a particular human being. It is not fitting for a school to
dominate a child’s life or to ask a child to perform exercises
that have no value beyond school.
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Every curriculum
is guided by metaphysical commitments and every teacher, school,
and parent lives within a metaphysical vision of reality. The
classical Christian is committed to an idealistic,
logo-centric metaphysic. Christ is the Logos, or unifying
principle of the classical Christian curriculum. The quest for
wisdom and virtue is a quest for unattainable ideals; the degree
to which we attain these ideals is the degree to which we
fulfill our humanity.
Epistemology
Education is an
epistemological exercise. This means that everything that
happens in education is the enactment of beliefs and assumptions
about what it means to know and how a person comes to know.
Every school is an apologetic for the epistemology it
represents. Classical Christian epistemology is rational,
moral, and personal (i.e. it is not the mind, but the person who
knows and knowledge is gained personally). It recognizes that
students come to know ideas by seeing them embodied in
particular instances.
Christian
classical education recognizes that the world we live in is
knowable and that our soul is ordered and designed to know it.
Knowledge is an apprehension of the truth.
The modern
approach to knowledge treats it as the adaptation of an organism
to its environment. The knower is in a continual state of change
and so is the known. Therefore, knowledge is not stable and
cannot be of anything permanent. It's highest reach is the
practical application.
Consequently,
Christian classical education focuses on the permanent ideas
that can be known while conventional education focuses on
immediate applications.
The classical
world sought for centuries for an integrating principle of all
that is and all that can be known. They called this principle,
the Logos.
Classical
Christian education integrates all teaching in Christ. He is
the “logos” that binds every subject in a universal harmony,
makes sense of all things, and lifts learning and knowledge to
the realm of eternal meaning.
He is the
creator of the orderly universe and the Word who explains all
words. He is the sun of the solar system, giving order and
meaning to the planets, and making them knowable in His light.
In Him are contained all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Human thought
begins with the God-given desire for harmony or unity. When the
curriculum does not reflect that harmony, not only is the world
misrepresented by the way it is studied, but the child's soul
becomes discouraged and loses its appetite for learning.
To integrate is
to honor the nature of each subject or science and to rightly
order each subject in its relations to the other subjects.
When a unifying
principle is applied to the entire curriculum and philosophy of
education, the result is a program characterized by integration,
harmony, and a consistency controlled by principles.
Ideas
Only when ideas
are the focus of learning can a curriculum be integrated. Only
when a curriculum is integrated can it help the souls running
its course attain the integrity suited to it.
The soul feeds
on ideas, and the great ideas are most perfectly expressed in
great books and great artifacts. Content and skills must be
mastered in order for the student to absorb ideas, but they
cannot serve as adequate integrating principles.
All learning
depends on prerequisites being mastered before going on to the
next level of knowledge. Poetic knowledge is the foundation of
all knowledge, academic or otherwise.
The seven
liberal arts serve as the base of the curriculum.
Next come the
natural sciences. A person can master the natural sciences only
to the degree to which he has mastered the seven liberal arts.
After the
natural sciences come the humane sciences, or the sciences of
human behavior and the soul. The student’s ability to master the
humane sciences is dependent on his mastery of the natural
sciences.
Following the
humane sciences in the nature of learning come the metaphysical
or philosophical sciences. The student’s ability to master the
philosophical sciences is dependent on his mastery of the humane
sciences.
The capstone of
learning is the theological sciences. Again, by the nature of
the case, a person is able to master the theological sciences
only to the degree to which he has mastered all the lower arts
and sciences.
The removal of
Christ as the Logos of the curriculum has led to the
disintegration of learning and the specialization of subjects
without regard for the prerequisite studies or the relationships
and interdependences of subjects.
Practically,
Classical Christian education seeks to integrate and order the
elements of the curriculum around the issues raised in the
Humane Letters program. Education is a humane activity, not
merely naturalistic scientific; therefore the humane studies are
recognized as universally prioritized;
Consequently,
the ideal classical Christian teacher will have attained mastery
at least to the level of the humane sciences (literature,
history, ethics, and politics). This mastery need not be
theoretical. It is more important to be able to “do” than to be
able to explain how to do something.
“Multum non Multas” (Much, Not
Many):
Christian classical education deals deeply with few subjects, rather than
hastily with many. The subjects reflect her emphasis on the
seven liberal arts, mastery of which develops the content and
skills that flow through all of the modern subjects.
The Classical
Christian opposes premature specialization (specific training in
a given subject or skill for its own sake or for practical
purposes, e.g. literature, drafting, etc.) or meaningless
generalization, seeking instead an education that consistently
recognizes the relationship of all skills and subjects to each
other and teaches the foundational skills that every later
subject requires.
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The child is a
living and eternal soul to be nourished, not a product to be
molded. In general, organic metaphors are much more suited to
reflection on the nature of a child than industrial metaphors or
statistical data.
Stages of Growth:
Education should
correspond to the growth of the child (which Dorothy Sayers,
among others, outlines generally), but in so doing the quality
and depth of the instruction must not be sacrificed to the
interests or even the skills of the child. The purpose of
childhood is training for adulthood, not amusement.
Education
begins with the cultivation of good taste—that is, a taste
for truth, goodness, and beauty. Good taste includes a taste for
the virtues of diligence and order. Order is emphasized in the
environment of the Classical Christian School, the souls that
live in it, and the relationships among the people in it.
Moral greatness:
As A. N.
Whitehead said, “Moral education is impossible apart from the
vision of greatness. If we are not great it does not matter what
we do.” Artificial greatness as expressed in vanity and
vainglory is strenuously resisted. The greatness the Classical
Christian seeks is the true greatness of wisdom and virtue. This
vision of greatness guides the Classical Christian in his
curriculum decisions and the conduct of his school.
Discipline
Discipline is
the foundation of every kind of creativity and maturity.
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Education is the
cultivation of the soul and is not to be reduced to the molding
of behavior. The soul feeds on ideas, and the great ideas are
found in great books and great artifacts.
Mimesis:
Humans learn through imitation and
contemplation. When they contemplate an idea embodied in a
concrete form perceived by the senses (such as a great book a
great work of art, a great teacher, etc.), they take the idea
into their soul and express it in their behavior. All
instruction is mimetic, but the Christian classical teacher
recognizes and applies this idea in every artifact and activity
presented to the students senses.
The curriculum
guide, the actual content of the teachers instruction, the
learning context, and the
substance and modes of assessing what is learned must be aligned
by working to the same end: virtue.
Assessment:
Student's work
and performance should be assessed by instructors who are
qualified to assess what has been taught. Assessment should
include but must not be limited to analytical, numeric
assessments. Assessment is dangerous.
Unspeakable
disruption has occurred in American schools by their adoption of
assessments and measures derived from industrial management and
military theories. If teachers are unable to assess student
performance they should not be teaching. If they are able, they
must be trusted, for only a person with judgment can exercise
the discretion necessary for successful instruction.
Instruction
From the most
ancient times, teachers have recognized that teaching moves in
one of two directions: from the particular instance to the
universal idea (induction), or from the universal idea to the
particular instance (deduction).
Two modes of
instruction were developed to optimize the power in these
movements: the Mimetic (Didactic) mode and the Socratic mode, each of
which incorporates elements of both induction and deduction. The
classical Christian teacher will strive to master both of these
modes of teaching, fitting his own individual strengths and
tastes into their parameters.
Speaking
precisely, there is no classical methodology when a method is
understood to mean a strictly repeated process with a
predictable outcome. There are no strictly repeated processes
that can educate a human soul and there are no meaningful
outcomes that are sufficiently predictable.
Authority
The ideal
Christian classical teacher will have attained mastery to the
level of the humane sciences (literature, history, ethics, and
politics). This mastery need not be theoretical. It is more
important to be able to “do” than to be able to explain how to
do something. Every Christian classical teacher needs to be
committed to growing in his mastery of all seven liberal arts
and the school needs to provide opportunity for that growth.
In addition, the
ideal Christian classical teacher speaks with authority on the
arts and sciences he teaches. To speak with authority is to
speak with judgment, a capacity made possible when one
understands the causes of a thing.
No skill should
ever be free from further development. The teacher models this,
and sees to it that the student never stops developing. The
environment of a classical Christian school cultivates a
community of learning. All instruction in the early years looks
to the instruction of later years.
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The classical
Christian community is driven by the demands of the
vision and mission, not by the circumstances in which it finds
itself (though one cannot reach one’s destination while ignoring
the road he is driving on and failing to keep gas in the tank!).
The tone of the
school, the conduct of the teachers, the relationships among all
members of the school community, and the language used in the
Classical Christian school are characterized by reverence. Awe,
sublimity, and joyful solemnity describe the atmosphere and are
the foundations of submission throughout the school. “Dignitas”
and “nobilitas” are demanded of every member of the school
community;
"Without
controversy, the lesser is blessed by the greater.” Teachers do
not seek to reach down to the level of the student but to raise
the student to the level of the teacher. A wall of separation
is maintained between the teacher and the student. Submission
and deference guide those who are lower in the hierarchy, while
humility and duty guide those who are higher; authority is
derived from the role and people are hired only when they have
the qualifications, i.e. the prerequisites demanded by the
nature of the position, to fulfill the duties implied in the
role.
Historical Perspective:
The Classical
Christian recognizes that he lives in a historical continuum and
that his duty to give honor to whom it is due extends both to
his ancestors and to his descendants.
The Classical
Christian deliberately cultivates a formality in the atmosphere
of the school. He seeks, not the artificial formality of the
arrogant, but the true formality of the wise who continually
seek to give every idea its fitting expression. The
guiding principle of Classical Christian formality is the
appropriateness of the form over the convenience of the
expression.
The knowledge,
insights, or experiences we are given lay on each of us the duty
of stewardship. “To whom much is given, much will be required.”
What we do with what we are given is the principle of our
accountability.
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