In this post, I want to answer the question, What is a Classical Christian Education?
But first I want to mention that under the fairly broad umbrella of the expression, Classical Christian education (CCE), there are likely as many micro-persuasions as there are eyes on Argos. And this is true for at least three reasons.
First, what we call CCE today has looked differently in different epochs of history. So, depending on who is answering the question, one may get a slightly different answer if they are focusing on pre-Christian classical education, or CCE proper (i.e., education as it functioned during Christendom and the Scholastic period), The Renaissance or Neoclassical period of the Middle Ages, the education of the modern CCE Renaissance that started in the early 1980s, or what some are now calling Christian Classical Education.
The second reason is during this modern age of recovering CCE, educators have continued to grow in their understanding of what CCE is. For example, in Ravi and Jain’s book, The Liberal Arts Tradition, they discuss four periods of growth in the CCE movement.
The third reason is directly related to the first two. As understandings of what CCE has been and how it was implemented in ages past have grown, so have disagreements about which historical expression is most important to recover in the modern world (i.e., do students in the modern world still need to study Latin to get a CCE? Wouldn’t studying modern languages do just as well? Also, where does the study of things like biology or ecology fit into CCE?).
In a nutshell, while Classical Christian education has a fundamental tradition that stands in opposition to the modern progressivists’ pedagogy and agenda, that tradition is mildly dynamic, developing over more than two millennia of Western civilization. Because of what I have noted in these prefatory remarks, I take the the position that a truly CCE strives to glean the best of Western liberal education in every epoch.
Defining Classical Christian Education
The Association of Classical Christian Schools provides one of the most concise and yet accurate definitions of CCE:
Classical Christian education (CCE) is a time-tested educational system which establishes a biblical worldview (called Paideia), incorporates methods based on natural phases of student development, cultivates the seven Christian Virtues, trains student reasoning through the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric), and interacts with the historical Great Books.
And, the folks from Well Trained Mind give a far more expansive definition, then summarize it thus:
A classical education, then, has two important aspects. It is language-focused. And it follows a specific three-part pattern: the mind must be first supplied with facts and images, then given the logical tools for organization of facts, and finally equipped to express conclusions.
While these definitions are both accurate and sound, they still require some unpacking to fully answer the question, What is Classical Christian Education?
Therefore, in what follows, I will unpack these definitions by highlighting seven characteristics of a CCE:
Characteristic 1
The first characteristic of a CCE is the development and cultivation of a biblical worldview or Paideia; see Ephesians 6:4. While the word worldview brings its own set of baggage to the conversation, I use it here to mean thinking Christianly about world in which we live and move and have our being. A student with a biblical worldview possesses a comprehensive vision of the cosmos as having been created and (still being) redeemed by God as well as a moral imagination informed by the truth of Scripture. Later we will see that this Christian worldview falls into the stage of education addressed as piety.
Characteristic 2
The second characteristic of a CCE is its focus on a liberal or humane education. In opposition to the modern and slavish approach to training mere workers for an institutionalized and crony-capitalist society, CCE seeks to educate the whole person, human qua human. This is what liberal (libere) in the liberal arts refers to; a CCE is the education of a liberated man, or the education that makes for a full and free human being.
Regarding education oriented to job training in a world where vocations ebb and flow like the tide, John Gardner said, “We must train our young people in the fundamental fields of knowledge, and equip them to understand and cope with change.”
And to the point of educating the whole person, Robert Maynard Hutchins famously said, “Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining.”
Characteristic 3
The third characteristic of CCE is a pedagogical method that follows the order of the medieval seven liberal arts, mainly as it relates to a child’s development but also as an approach to teaching all subject matter. The seven liberal arts are described by the medieval divines as the trivium (three ways) and the quadrivium (four ways).
First, following the trivium, students learn grammar (language), then dialectic (logical thinking), and finally rhetoric (expressing oneself accurately and persuasively) before moving on to studying the quadrivium. The quadrivium treats four universal truths: number, geometry, harmony, and astronomy.
Early in the modern renewal of CCE, those seeking to recover the classical model of education relied on an essay by Dorothy Sayers, titled, “The Lost Tools of Learning.” It was an extremely helpful essay and many schools adopted her pedagogical model. But the recovery didn’t stop there.
In the midst of “repairing the ruins,” more about classical pedagogy was uncovered (Sayers’ pedagogical insights were just the tip of the iceberg, to use a worn-out metaphor), revealing how important poetic knowledge was to the formation of the whole person.
Today, we can recognize a much fuller expression of CCE, referred to as the PGMAPT paradigm (i.e., piety, gymnasium, music, liberal arts, philosophy, and theology), where the A stands for the liberal arts (trivium, and quadrivium) and is bookended by poetic knowledge and modern consummate studies.
Characteristic 4
The fourth characteristic recognizes the pedagogical approach must be applied to something. In other words, CCE is more than a pedagogy, it is a pedagogy applied to a specific pool of knowledge, the best of what has been thought and written in the last two-and-a-half millennia of the Western tradition. Sometimes this pool or canon of knowledge is referred to as the great books. When referring to great gooks, we don’t mean Mortimer J. Adler’s 60-volume set, per se. His are merely a collection of the kinds of works to which I refer (and a fairly good but incomplete collection I might add).
CCE makes a point of exposing students to these primary sources in an integrated fashion finding in both the classical and Christian traditions that all truth (i.e., reality) is one. In other words, knowledge of any subject is only a partial knowledge of the one truth.
Instead of studying textbooks of disintegrated subjects like social studies, history, or English, CCE students study the humanities in an integrated manner. This means they read and discuss in Socratic fashion the best primary literature, philosophy, theology, and historical records for a given historical period.
Characteristic 5
The fifth characteristic of CCE is the study of classical languages, including Greek and especially Latin. While a few have made a somewhat-meritorious argument of substituting Latin with modern languages, there are many stronger arguments for the continued inclusion of classical languages in a CCE. A few of those arguments are:
- Learning Latin gives students the ability to read many of the important primary sources in their native Latin as well as texts not yet translated into English.
- Learning Latin provide students with a fuller understanding of the English language since about 40% of English is derived from Latin.
- Many of the professional vocations still do and probably always will rely heavily on Latin languages (e.g., law, science, medicine, theology).
- And one ancillary and pragmatic reason is that students who study Latin overwhelming score higher on standardized tests than students who have not studied Latin.
In any case, CCE emphasizes the learning of not only modern languages but the classical languages as a fundamental staple of a person’s education.
Characteristic 6
The sixth element is teaching students with the goal of fostering virtue and wisdom instead of helping them merely accumulate disconnected facts. While modern education takes what it claims to be a secular approach, wrongly believing education can only consist of the is and not the ought, CCE emphasizes what a student ought to be by highlighting what David Hicks, in Norms and Nobility, calls the Tyranny of the Ideal Image. This Ideal Image is exemplified by the seven Christian virtues (i.e., prudence, fortitude, wisdom, justice, faith, hope, and love) as revealed in the person of Christ (Ephesians 4:11-16).
Characteristic 7
The seventh characteristic has already been alluded to in relation to at least two other characteristics, namely in that students read primary sources and classical languages are essential; but it would be remiss not to emphasize the fact that CCE is language-focused learning rather than image-focused learning. This does not mean CCE excludes the plastic arts (i.e., painting, sculpting, etc.); quite the contrary. It simply means it emphasizes language-based learning.
In other words, CCE emphasizes learning through words, written and spoken, rather than through videos or other types of imaging. This short excerpt from Dorothy Sayers’s essay, “Lost Tools of Learning” is apropos as much to the entire enterprise of recovering CCE in a world dominated by pixels as it is to this seventh characteristic. She writes,
By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school—leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
- Learn more about Classical Christian education at Kepler Education.
- Learn how “We’ve Been Schooled” by modern progressive educators.
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