Eh, What's Classical Education, Doc?

 

If you hang around more than one classical Christian school for any length of time, it can quickly become apparent that no one knows exactly what they’re doing. I don’t mean that the teachers don’t know their subjects well, or that the administrators can’t fill out a spreadsheet, or that the students can’t add up a grocery bill—those skills are usually better than the average. But if you ask twenty people in those schools what on earth classical education is, exactly, you will probably get twenty-two different answers.

Some people say a classical education is about the great conversation around big ideas (unlike all those other ways of learning out there). Some say it’s about instilling virtue and despising vice (a definition that could apply equally well to life generally). Is it an educational method involving the Trivium-as-learning-stages—a formulation so “classical” that no one used it until 1981? Or is it a course in Western Civilization, warts and all? (Good luck explaining to your Chinese neighbor how math is peculiarly “Western”!) Perhaps it’s about “Great Books”…but which books are great, who says, and how many of them can you cram down a ninth-grader’s throat before he chokes? Is it about training a kid in “how to think, not what to think”? Or do the particular subjects matter? And then there are the non-academic concerns. Will a student ever be able to get a job with this sort of training? And how does the “Christian” part fit in, anyway? Broad tent? Narrow denominational focus? Do the Romans Catholics count? What about the Mormons? Both of them can claim a fair amount of influence in Western American culture, after all…

You begin to see why, if a certain carrot-crunching, wiseacre cartoon rabbit popped up next to you and wondered, “Eh, what’s classical education, Doc?” you’d be in so much trouble! Yet if you’re reading this blog, you are at least considering this education, if not immersed in it. So what is going on?

Commonplaces: September 2024

 

“A negative holiness is far from being acceptable to God.”— John Colquoun, The Law and the Gospel

“My head is just a hat-place.”—Rogers and Hart, “A Ship Without a Sail”

“Now before I set about arguing these things, there is a cloud of skirmishers, of harmless and confused modern skeptics, who ought to be cleared off or calmed down before we come to debate with the real doctors of the heresy.”— Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“Quid enim est aut tam admirabile, quam ex infinita multitudine homium existere unum, id quid, quod omnibus natura sit datum, vel solus, vel cum paucis facere possit?”[For what is so marvelous as that, out of the endless multitude of man, a single being should arise, who either alone or with only the help of a few can make effective a faculty that nature has given to all?]—Cicero, De Oratore I.viii

“For what faithful schoolteacher, or teacher of any discipline or art, thinks that it is enough to have recommended good authors to his students, or to have handed on the rules of disciplines and arts, and does not also examine his students on what he explained or shared in an effort to get them to learn better, questioning them to see how each has understood the matter and giving them an opportunity to ask him about anything that has not been well enough understood?”—Bucer, De Regno Christi

“In all ages of the world men have dreamed of a state of perfection, which has been, and is to be, but never is, and seems to disappear under the necessary conditions of human society. The uselessness, the danger, the true value of such political ideals have often been discussed; youth is too ready to believe in them; age to disparage them.”— Benjamin Jowett, Introduction to Plato’s Statesman