What is Classical Christian Education?
THE TRUE, THE GOOD, AND THE BEAUTIFUL
John Milton once described the purpose of education as the task of “repairing the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him.” His vision for education is one of restoring what was lost in Eden by cultivating wisdom (right knowledge) and virtue (right affections) in the souls of students, thus reorienting them away from their fallen natures and back toward their full humanity. This is a lofty mission and utterly impossible in our own strength. Therefore, no educational project can be ultimately successful without the grace and power of Christ awakening and restoring the distorted image of God in man.
Our knowledge of God comes through three distinct means: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. These cosmic realities have been traditionally referred to as three transcendentals, universal, objective realities accessible to man that reflect the character and nature of God. The classical world studied these realities as they appear in the cosmos and noticed how they match with three concomitant properties in man: reason (logos), morality (ethos), and aesthetic desire (pathos). In essence, these properties proved mankind to be a thinking, feeling, moral agent (unlike plants and animals).
Education, then, was the process of aligning man’s natural faculties with their corresponding expression in reality. Truth appeals to man’s intellectual capacities, Goodness appeals to his moral capacities, and Beauty appeals to his aesthetic capacities. This quest for the true, the good, and the beautiful constituted the crux of a classical education with a disciplined study of music, athletics, poetry, history, Latin, Greek, mathematics, politics, philosophy, and theology that satisfied man’s innate longing for meaning and purpose.
WHAT HAPPENED?
In the medieval world, this classical approach was codified as the liberal arts, seven “arts” divided into two categories: the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). These categories, coupled with the spread of Christianity throughout the known world, led to an education both classical and Christian that flourished in the West for centuries. From universities to cathedrals, the Renaissance to the Reformation, the printing of books to the lively discourse in coffeehouses, classical Christian education encouraged a love of the true, the good, and the beautiful as reflected in the person of Christ and produced magnificent artistry and cultural development along the way.
By the early twentieth century, however, modern experimentation with education, coupled with the emerging acceptability of atheism and Darwinian naturalism, created a sharp fork in the road. Now, pragmatism, efficiency, skepticism, and individual autonomy began their slow march through the institutions. In response, Dorothy Sayers, an Oxford scholar and close friend of Lewis, Tolkien, and the Inklings, suggested a recovery of classical education, what she termed “the lost tools of learning.” One of her most remarkable recommendations was for educators to map the three parts of the medieval trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) onto the three natural phases of child development (poll-parrot, pert, and poetic).
THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING
In the poll-parrot stage (approximately kindergarten through fourth grade), children are primarily sponges, absorbing large amounts of information at a rapid rate. They naturally enjoy memorizing, singing, chanting, dancing, and reciting their way through lessons. In the pert stage (approximately fifth through eighth grade), children are increasingly inquisitive, asking “Why?” about a hundred times a day! They naturally enjoy arguing, comparing, disagreeing, debating, analyzing, and understanding. By the poetic stage (approximately ninth through twelfth grade), children strive for individual expression, opinion, collaboration, and ownership. They naturally enjoy crafting their own take on an issue, exploring creative alternatives to an interpretation, expressing their views with their own style, and owning the responsibility of education for themselves.
To Sayers, these three stages coincide with a student’s process through the trivium. In the grammar stage (K-4), the student learns the fundamentals of a discipline; this would be the “basics” of a course of study that are memorized, reviewed, and built upon like subjects and verbs in English, musical scales on a piano, dates and battles in history, sums and differences in math. In the logic stage (5-8), the student advances from the basics and begins putting the pieces together, seeing how they compare or contrast, and evaluating them analytically. The student learns the tools of reasoning in order to understand the data they’ve already gleaned. In essence, they graduate from the who, what, and when to the why. Finally, in the rhetoric stage (9-12), the student responds to the work he has studied with his own input. He argues eloquently and persuasively for the best interpretation of a novel or the implications of a particular technological innovation. He has acknowledged the essential information of a given discipline, analyzed it carefully, and now is equipped to offer a cogent and compelling argument in return.
Here’s an example:
Grammar Stage: The student memorizes the presidents song and sings it weekly in class (“Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison…!”). She knows all of the presidents by name and in order.
Logic Stage: The student must explain the difference between John Adams’ administration and Thomas Jefferson’s. She already knows Adams came before Jefferson, but now she must analyze their similarities and differences.
Rhetoric Stage: The student must present a ten-minute argument defending which administration was better. She already knows the differences between the two but now must defend a specific claim based on evidence with rhetorical eloquence and skill.
Educating a child in accordance with these stages “cuts with the grain.” By teaching a child in the context of his natural development, his heart is already bent toward the manner in which he is being taught, making both the material and the learning environment a matter of the heart, not only the head. This allows education to be formative, not merely informative. This formative education hearkens back to the classical model of pursuing the true, the good, and the beautiful as a means of becoming fully human, or, as Milton had it, “repairing the ruins” of Eden.