📖 HELP ME Title This Book on Classical Christian Education

Introduction: The Rediscovery of a Lost Treasure

Please help me title this book.

I’m currently revising the second draft of a short seven-chapter primer on Classical Christian Education. I’m inviting you into the process by sharing “the work in progress” publicly, and asking for your feedback and help titling the book. I have numerous ideas for a title, but since I’m hoping to use this work to reach families who are unaware or less informed about this educational renaissance to recover a classical approach to education, I thought you might like to contribute to the cause. I’ll drop these short chapters, serially, so feel free to share in the comments.

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In the history of Western civilization, there was a time when education was understood not simply as preparation for a career but as something much more meaningful, the cultivation of the human soul. To be educated was to master the arts of liberty—to think wisely and deliberatively, to act virtuously and prudently, to argue persuasively and eloquently, to delight in goodness and beauty, and to live in harmony with the truth while serving others in love. Stated more succinctly, education was about human formation toward a life of flourishing and freedom. But it was not toward freedom in the modern individualistic sense. It was freedom from ignorance and vice, freedom to live the good life and become the kind of person God created us to be. Understood this way, education was a person’s ultimate possession.

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt (1653)

Today, that vision for education feels like a relic of the distant past. In our modern world, education has largely been reduced to job training or mere credentialing. Far too often, education is seen as the transactional process for securing a well-paying job or achieving upward mobility in one’s career.¹ Rarely do we hear anyone—especially educators—speak of education as the cultivation of wisdom, or the formation of character, or the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty. Instead, we have been carefully taught to measure educational success in test scores, GPAs, and career prospects.

That’s because (to use an idiom kids used when I was growing up) “We’ve been schooled!”² Modern education as we have come to accept it—that is, the Prussian age-graded model requiring full-time attendance using an obligatory, standardized curriculum approved by the State—literally creates a dependent society, not a free society. One of the clandestine ways modern education achieves this is by falsely equating services and substances—or another way to say it, processes and value.

For example, in the modern education system, students and their parents are conditioned to conflate teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, diplomas and test scores with competency, and fluency with the ability to say something interesting, intelligent, or meaningful. In other words, we’ve literally been “schooled” into believing the fallacy of equivocation regarding process and value.³

By shaping the students’ imagination this way, modern education has shaped the entire culture’s social imagination into conflating processes and services with real value. Which is why institutional achievement (a degree or a diploma from a recognized institution) is seen as legitimate while independent accomplishment (i.e., homeschooling, real demonstrable knowledge, etc.) is usually suspect. As a result, many employers have been habituated to look for degrees from their applicants, instead of competency and experience. In turn, students seeking gainful employment are conditioned to seek the degrees that provide them with marketable skills instead of a genuine education. This is all by design. But the result is a morally bankrupt society, heightened political contention, and an anti-Christian culture rooted in secularism.⁴

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Nevertheless, as the cultural breaches in our society continue to expand and the fruit of modern educational philosophies grow more bitter by the day, an increasing number of families and educators are seeking a better way. They are rediscovering the lost treasure of Classical Christian Education (CCE)—a tradition rooted in the ancient world, animated by the Incarnation, refined through the Christian centuries, and currently being rediscovered and revived in our own day.⁵ Those involved in this renaissance have rediscovered that a true education is not primarily about economic utility but about the formation of the whole person, body and soul, mind and heart.

This book is written for those families, teachers, and educational leaders who are new to this renaissance. You may have heard of classical education and wondered what makes it different from much of modern education. You may be intrigued by the idea of your children reading the Great Books, studying Latin, or learning logic and rhetoric. Perhaps you’ve sensed that something essential is missing in contemporary education, but you haven’t quite been able to put your finger on what it is. You know that education must be about more than job security or the mere transmission of information, but you’re not sure how to articulate what it should be.

My hope is that this book serves as a primer—a clear, accessible, and compelling introduction to the foundations of Classical Christian Education. Drawing on the rich Christian humanist tradition, we will explore how this approach to education seeks to cultivate wise, virtuous, and eloquent human beings who are prepared not only for college and career but for a meaningful life well-lived.

In the pages that follow, we will consider seven key areas of Classical Christian Education, each with seven guiding principles. Along the way, we will address some of the common misconceptions, clarify why the liberal arts are still profoundly relevant, and demonstrate how this form of education prepares students not just for academic success but for faithful Christian living in a complex, even complicated, and sometimes hostile world. However, this book will only lead us across the threshold of this glorious cathedral called Classical Christian Education. An Appendix will provide numerous suggested resources for further research and learning.

To be sure, Classical Christian Education is not a nostalgic attempt to return to the past for its own sake. It is not a sentimental longing for "the good old days" of education. Rather, it is a recovery of what has always been true about human formation: that education is about more than just what we know; it’s about who we should become. It’s about the proper ordering of our loves, ordo amoris.⁶ And it is precisely this kind of education that we need now more than ever.

At the time of this writing, we are living in a post-Christian age. During this age, we have passed from the Enlightenment period, which raised “objectivity and pure reason” to be the measure of all things, into the postmodern period, where objectivity and pure reason’s reign has run their course and certainty about the nature of reality has been throttled. We are currently witnessing the postmodern project collapse in on itself.

Language and literature that doesn’t affirm a certain narrative is regularly canceled, those who challenge the status quo are scapegoated, and rational public discourse is severely impoverished. Further, our political institutions are disintegrating while a concerted effort is being made to erase the past on which the pillars of Western civilization have been built. Even the basic definitions of truth, goodness, and beauty are now up for debate.

Left unchecked, the current trend will bring a new dark age in its wake. In such a time, we cannot pretend education is neutral. We are either preparing students to participate in the decline of civilization or to help rebuild it. Classical Christian Education aims to do the latter. It is about raising up men and women who will be a light in the coming darkness—who will think clearly, love rightly, and serve faithfully.

This book is an invitation to contemplate that good work and join the renaissance. Whether you are a parent seeking a better education for your children, a teacher desiring a more meaningful vocation, or simply someone curious about this awakening in education, I invite you to explore these ideas with me. I hope you find in these pages not only some practical guidance but also a renewed vision of what a humane education looks like for such a time as this.

1. It’s not by accident that compulsory, full-time, age-graded, lock-step curriculum proceeds the corporate and factory life of moving up the ladder. This footnote will expand with cited sources to briefly explain Horace Mann and co.’s work of adopting the Prussian model of education for a new industrialized nation that was desperate for national identity, political stability, and more factory workers.

2. This footnote will recommend a short film I helped create about this topic, in partnership with Roman Roads Press and Kepler Education, titled, We’ve Been Schooled.

3. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London, UK: Marion Boyars, 2019), 1.

4. This footnote will expand with cited sources to briefly explain Jens Zimmerman’s distinction between secularity and secularism. Secularity (i.e., Saeculum) in the St. Augustinian sense recognizes a liminal period and space shared by the City of God and the City of Man with a natural law, common sense approach to society and politics. Secularism rejects all non-scientific forms of insight that are not derived from objective, rational knowledge, especially religion.

5. This footnote will expand with cited sources to briefly discuss Dorothy Sayer’s essay, Lost Tools of Learning, and those, who in the beginning of the renaissance, used her insights to foster a classical Christian education movement.

6. This footnote will expand with cited sources to briefly explain St. Augustine’s treatment of ordo amoris (i.e., rightly ordered loves) in De Doctrina Christiana (1.27ff), De Civitate Dei (XIV-XV), and Confessions (Bks. II and X). "He is a just and holy person who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves more that which should be loved less, nor loves equally what should be loved either less or more, nor loves less or more what should be loved equally." -St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana (1.27).