It has been about a decade since my husband and I pulled our seven year old son from the private school he was attending to homeschool him. Five years later, we placed him in the classical, Christian school he still attends.
Reading books like C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man and Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture moved us to make such decisions.
Join us for a night of contemplation and reflection in the May 2015 installment of our new CiRCE Free Lectures series. This month our academy headmaster and consulting director (and local pastor), Dr. Brian Phillips, will present a lecture entitled The Child is Grown, the Dream is Gone: Cultivating a Lifelong Moral Imagination.
Open to the public but space is limited.
Where:
The Piedmont Rennaissance Center, Downtown Concord, NC,
57 Union Street South, Concord, NC 28025
Time: 7:30 pm
Of the three general forms of education, classical, traditional, and conventional, the greatest contrasts are between conventional and classical education. What I mean by conventional is simply the way things are done in schools, generally speaking, these days. It has philosophical roots, but people tend not to think about them.
In this post, I am going simply to list a few areas that classical and conventional education have in common and then express some differences. In future posts, I will try to develop some of these thoughts further. We'll see what happens.
I got to meet a neighbor today and we struck up a conversation about his business and what we do at CiRCE. When I started to talk about education and how we don't focus on wisdom and virtue, I expected him to tune out. Instead he described how one of his employees didn't know what a customer meant when she was asked to divide something by 1/3.
He said we need well-rounded people who can make "educated decisions."
One of the unique features of the history curriculum at Regents School of Austin involves taking our entire junior class to Europe for 12 days every spring. This serves our school’s mission by giving students the opportunity to see and experience places that they have only been reading about during their classical education here.
How ought reading be taught? Notice that the question asks “how ought” not “how can”. The question bears a subsequent inquiry: what should my students read? One technique I have grown increasing aware of is children sitting in small groups reading little paperback pamphlets about animals, the seasons, plants, and daily life bearing lots of pictures and few words. Another characteristic of these pamphlets is that they are “graded”. That is, they are leveled from easy to hard by use of a number or alphabetic code.
The Iliad, Homer tells us, is about the rage of Achilles and the will of Zeus, and about how these two interact with each other. Quoting Lattimore:
Sing goddess the anger of Peleus son Achilleus
And its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
Hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished...
The mind rooted in faith operates differently from the mind rooted in doubt.* Doubt, interestingly, comes from the Latin "dubitas," which can as easily be translated "fear." In Elizabethan times, that correlary was not obscure, as you can see when you read, for example, Hamlet.
The classical tradition has been polluted by four streams of thought, each of which is ultimately rooted in conscious or unconscious antipathy to the human soul.
Naturalism, which took its educational form as Utiliatrianism, is a rejection of anything transcendent. It arose in the 17th and 18th centuries out of the fear that somebody might learn something that everybody else can't easily see for themselves. It leads to the idea that learning is measured by its usefulness and validates itself, for the most part, through measurable assessments.
When the course of my life is run and I am tied to a stake or lying beneath my final shroud, it will be among my sweetest consolations to be able to say that I knew the man who wrote these words:
The mission of the CiRCE Institute is to support teachers and parents who want to cultivate wisdom and virtue in their students through the truths of Christian classical education. Your gift enables this work.
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