By D. John Seel, PhD

Cracking the New SAT: $25

SAT Tutor: $150

College Textbooks: $4000

College Tuition: $140,000

Landing the dream job upon graduation: Priceless!

This parody of the well-known MasterCard advertisement captures the logic of most consumers of education. MasterCard’s ads feature sentimental episodes of families together at places such as a beach or baseball game, assigning monetary values to various activities before coming up with an activity that is “priceless.” These ads conclude: “There are some things in life money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.”

How does this ad work? First, it sets intangibles against tangibles. Then, it makes tangibles the preconditions for the intangibles. While there are some things that money can’t buy-the love of a beautiful woman, for example-don’t risk the possibility of love without the diamond ring offered on an exotic beach after a sumptuous gourmet dinner with wine, candlelight, and violins. Rather than suggesting that life is more than consumerism, the MasterCard ads advance the argument that consumerism is the means to life, that life requires their little plastic card. Things are the means to getting beyond things.

What then is the price of an educated Christian mind? Should we hire Aristotle-the private tutor of Alexander the Great? Should we seek admission to one of the elite New England boarding prep schools so widely vaunted for their success in getting students into highly select colleges and universities? Should we petition Yo-Yo Ma to teach our child the cello? Enroll in a costly speed-reading, vocabulary building or foreign language course? Or, even, start a classical and Christian school?

An educated mind is priceless in the sense that it must be earned, not bought. There is a dollar and cent price for educational services, but not for an educated mind. It cannot be commodified or made the object of exchange. This important difference is lost on most parents and students who approach education as they do a trip to the mall. For them, Christian education is a monetary exchange for an invisible service product operating solely within the logic of consumerism. They approach teachers as they would their broker or financial planner. In the end, they expect a tangible return on their tangible (financial) investment.

The formation of an educated mind, however, has certain preconditions, and these preconditions are consistently undermined today by the twin forces of consumerism and egalitarianism-from the most elite university to the neighborhood kindergarten. Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, has warned of the hidden dangers of commercializing education: “The costs [of a genuine education] are, if anything, more speculative and intangible than the rewards; seldom, if ever, can they be expressed in terms of money. More often, they have to do with the elusive world of values, and specifically, with the principles that ought to guide academic pursuits and thereby enhance their quality and meaning.” His insight is telling. The visible trumps the invisible; the tangible, the intangible; and profit, values.

The challenge, however, is deeper than mere commercialization. The real challenge is the consumer worldview. University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson laments,

Before students arrive, universities ply them with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland. When they get to campus, flattery, entertainment, and pre-professional training are theirs, if that’s what they want. The world we present to them is not a world elsewhere, an ivory tower world, but one that’s fully continuous with the American entertainment and consumer culture they’ve been living in. They hardly know they’ve left home. Is it a surprise, then, that this generation of students-steeped in consumer culture before they go off to school; treated as potent customers by the university well before they arrive, then pandered to from day one-are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertainments to be enjoyed without effort or languidly cast aside?

The American college or university education has become simply an extension of the wider “Entertainment-Consumer Complex.” What is true in higher education is even more pronounced in private schools where parent involvement in a child’s education no longer means advocacy for academics, but advocacy for the child-often in contrast to the demands of curricular standards or academic rigor. In Time magazine’s cover story, “What Teachers Hate About Parents,” Nancy Gibbs quotes a private school head, “I could summarize in one sentence what teachers hate about parents. We hate it when parents undermine the education and growth of their children.”

Those involved in classical Christian education have a passionate desire to see young men and women prepared spiritually and intellectually for the challenges of the twenty-first century. In the long term, the education we give our children is far more important for the kingdom of God than who sits in the White House. Evangelical pastor Tim Keller correctly observes, “Culture changes when a society’s mind, heart, and imagination are captured by new ideas that are developed by thinkers, expounded in both scholarly and popular forms, depicted in innumerable works of art, and then lived out attractively by communities of people who are committed to them.” Cultural change begins with education-with the transformation of hearts and minds. How does such an education counter the ubiquitous forces arrayed against it?

The challenges are significant. Contemporary attitudes of market populism among school boards, administrators, and parents make genuine Christian education impossible because they foster values and expectations inimical to the formation of an educated Christian mind. Christian parents typically (and here we are talking primarily of evangelical Protestants) want education that combines easy salvation with a sense of Christian political majoritarianism-Christianity Lite combined with Christian America, a Protestant civil religion blended with Republican politics.

Christian parents want a career-oriented education that provides religious justification for a suburban lifestyle of personal peace and affluence. They want an education that is practical, unquestioning, and status promoting. Finally, they want an education that will bring their children back to their neighborhood. They want their children to be just like them: enmeshed, affluent, superficial, and content.

This is what parents want. It’s not what Christian parents need. Christian parents need children who have been educated to think about all aspects of life from within a Christian worldview and from the vantage point of the historic tradition of the church. They need their children to be given an education that allows enough freedom of thought for children to make their convictions their own. They need an education that will stretch their children to maximize intellectual potential, to acquire the skills and disciplines necessary for a cultivated mind. They need an education that will enable their children to listen with compassionate understanding, to have empathy for others and the human project. They need their children to develop a captivated imagination enlarged by being mastered by the great works of literature. They need their children to understand God’s creation-wide redemption and to find their place within Christ’s kingdom through their own sense of calling. They need children with a global perspective that breaks them out of their own provincialism and compels them to serve Christ anywhere at any time, equipped to be purposeful agents of love in a world of hatred and meaninglessness.

In short, Christian parents ought to want their children to become discerning, reflective Christians in a broken world-salty, luminous ambassadors for God’s kingdom. I am convinced that secularization in American life has not increased atheism, but it has successfully marginalized religion to the private world of the individual and family. Consequently, the church has few credible voices within the institutions of cultural influence in American society. J. Gresham Machen warned, “We may preach with the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the relentless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.”

And this is exactly how many young and intelligent adults view belief in Jesus today. The church needs men and women of thought and action who are passionately in love with Christ, capable of drawing on the resources of heaven, armed with a Christian worldview, guided by a sense of calling, grounded in an understanding of the past, embodied with a cultivated mind and captivated imagination, and prepared to engage the wider culture winsomely and persuasively with the gospel.

The time when such formation is most potentially transformative in the life of a person is during his or her teenage years. David Kinnaman’s analysis underscores this priority: “For every one hundred people who are not born again by the time they reach age eighteen, only six of those individuals will commit their lives to Christ for the first time as an adult.”

Compounding the problem, the church’s efforts to disciple teenagers are woefully lacking. The vast majority of teenagers currently involved in church youth groups will lose all connection with the church and their faith after two years in college. They are not prepared spiritually or intellectually for the challenges they will inevitably face among relativistic professors and hedonistic college classmates. Tom Wolfe’s depiction of college life today in his novel I Am Charlotte Simmons is a bracing reminder of what our children face in their college years. Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon writes of Wolfe’s novel, “What he does not leave in doubt in this morally serious work is the powerful influence that environment can exert upon young men and women at crucial formative stage in their journey through life.” Wanting desperately to fit in, Christian students incrementally succumb to the Facebook-initiated, alcohol-enhanced, hook-up culture and to the urbane tolerant relativism of the classroom. God and the church gradually fade in significance and attention.

Our schools and churches are not forming a generation of kingdom-oriented young adults whose lives are marked by a reliance on spiritual disciplines, defined by a serious pursuit of truth, and known for their compelling love of others. Instead, self-centered, consumption-oriented, anti-intellectual, thrill-seeking, anti-authoritarian attitudes are typical of most professing Christian young adults.

Christian schools are left, therefore, to address the problems facing teenagers, education, and culture by becoming institutions where spiritual and intellectual disciplines go hand-in-hand. These transformational communities of learners seek to foster the kind of people that the church so desperately needs. Their aim is to produce elite Special Forces in kingdom service. And they are open to all who have decided to pursue Christ with abandon, prepared for the demands of academic discipleship.

Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor once stated, “You have to push as hard as the age is pushing against you.” It is time, and past time, to prepare a generation to stand up to these challenges. The status quo and half-hearted measures will not do. The cultural decay is too great and the stakes for our children too high.

Human nature has not changed; the patterns of sin remain constant-”there is nothing new under the sun.” At the same time, we must not minimize the historically unique challenges facing our children. They are the heirs of Nietzsche’s prophetic vision. Casual Christianity will no longer do. Half-heartedness is a recipe for failure. Parents, churches, and schools must forge a new vision of academic discipleship.

This article is the first of three articles based on a forthcoming book, Special Forces in Kingdom Service: The Calling of Prophetic Schools to be published next spring by Canon Press. John Seel has taught at The Stony Brook School and the University of Virginia, and he served as Headmaster of The Cambridge School of Dallas. He is also the former Chairman of the Board of the Society of Classical Learning and continues as a contributing editor to The Journal. Part two is “Just Like Me: What Christian Parents Want” and part three “Parris Island for the Soul: What Christian Students Need.”

By Charles W. Phillips, PhD

The Apostle Paul’s description of sanctification as race-running is familiar: in Philippians, one runs to “gain the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” That the running includes a great deal of striving is implied by Milton’s gloss on Paul’s metaphor: the “immortal garland” was not to be won “without dust and heat.” Thus, strenuous athletic effort in order to gain the blue ribbon is naturally associated in Pauline thought with Christian development.

Today, we commonly describe the training and self-discipline required to compete victoriously as the pursuit of excellence. The critical point is that the sustained drive to achieve excellence can only be relevant in the dynamic context of competition.

The modern school with a mission that incarnates excellence enters a no-holds-barred battle of ideas within the public square. In our larger post-Christian culture, a biblically-based argument no longer has a presumption of substance or verity simply because it is historically Christian. Thus, a school may find excellence to be a natural element of its mission if it intends to produce alumni who are well-equipped to engage our culture’s dominant worldview of philosophical naturalism with superior counter-arguments from a biblical and Christo-centric perspective.

Let it not be imagined that this challenge of preparing a graduate to compete successfully in an antagonistic public forum is merely an abstract demand for excellence. A student who is poorly equipped intellectually simply cannot compete in the contemporary marketplace of ideas. Many graduates of Christian schools have left hearth and home only to find that the college experience consists of a systematic assault on the family’s deepest spiritual convictions. It is no surprise that the abject failure to defend one’s faith apologetically may mean a real, subsequent loss of faith existentially.

Our collective difficulty with excellence is that the larger mass of Christian schools, Bible institutes, and colleges possess DNA from a separatist tradition that abandoned competition as an operating environment. It was precisely in the period of fundamentalism’s most virulent rejection of modernism that the roots of today’s Christian education were planted. Bible institutes, for example, focused on a practical evangelism that avoided the distraction of contemporary debates: there was no time to be lost as the flood waters rose. This disinclination was reinforced by a premillennial eschatology that deeply discounted the likely profit of intellectual engagement with the surrounding, corrupt culture. Generally, as Christians went about creating alternative educational structures between the World Wars, their separatist inclinations dictated a detachmentfrom the world” that often relegated excellence and competition to irrelevance.

In fact, the actual case may be far more negative: if one’s academic institution existed principally to perpetuate the values of the sub-culture that produced it, a larger competition of ideas threatened to undermine that institution’s secure foundations. Without the impetus of external competition, excellence came to be recognized as a threat to the internal status quo-its pursuit might lead students into challenging new territory. No wonder, then, that much of Christian education in the United States since the 1930s has produced truly modest academic achievement and intellectual impact on secular thought. The educational legacy of fundamentalist separatism is little different than the anatomical results of genetic in-breeding.

Like almost everything else God has made, Christian education is vital only when it is accountable, and the most rigorous testing always involves external evaluation and intense competition. If Christ-centered education is now to seize the “immortal garland” of the cultural moment, it must do so by preparing its students with excellence for the dust and heat of the Coliseum: after all, lions still eat Christians there.

Charlie Phillips is a Senior Analyst and Program Officer at the Mclellan Foundation. He has served as an administrator and development officer for several Christian colleges and schools, and he regularly consults with Christian schools on strategic planning and funding issues.

By Chuck Evans

The headmaster slumped back in his chair, exhausted by the enormity of what he had just learned about his own school.

His school was in good shape. Seven years since its founding, he had full classes all the way through sixth grade. In lower grades, he had two sections each. The faculty was strong, the school’s reputation in the community was growing. They had just moved onto a new campus with 70,000 square feet of space and plenty of acreage to grow. The school had strong financial backing from a small group of committed families, allowing him to expand quickly and to hire capable, career-oriented people.

Now, it was time to plan the high school. As some of the smaller classes had moved up and on to other high schools, the board had prudently waited, knowing that it would be better to launch into those final four years of a rhetoric-based program with larger classes. The goal was to open ninth grade in two years.

As he sat staring at the board on which we had spent a long morning outlining the program and projecting costs, his mind struggled to take it all in. It couldn’t be right. We had to be overlooking something. But there it was. In the first two years of the high school, the estimated cost per high school student would be nearly triple the current tuition. Multiply that by 30 freshmen and sophomores, and the school’s budget deficits would grow by nearly $400,000 over two years.

Compounding the problem was a call from the donor families that the school should begin to pay for itself within the next three years. They were happy to have supported the school’s operation in the initial stages, but they wanted to shift their investment from the school’s budgets to the school’s future.

Three options presented themselves in the ensuing conversation:

1. The school could remain a highly viable PreK through 8 program, providing highly qualified students to the area’s best high schools. But this was not the founding vision. Many of the school’s families had made the investment in Christian schooling on the promise that their children would be part of the best Christian PreK through 12 school in their city. The board, faculty, and parents were firmly agreed that a truly classical and Christian vision required a great high school.
2. The school could scale back the high school program to something that looked more affordable. Perhaps with fewer classical bells and whistles, it could be more efficient, more lean. But, again, the school’s mission did not contemplate cutting corners on quality. They had never done it to this point, and they weren’t about to start. Besides, the cost was primarily in the staff who would be hired to develop and lead the program. How could they have the school that anxious parents of rising high schoolers could believe in without that investment?
3. Fund it. The school had been established with a commitment to excellence. It had benefited from generous gifts that allowed for rapid growth without the impact of exorbitant pricing. Parents were enthusiastic about the value they were receiving. Now it was time to test those commitments and let the excellent school that had been born pay for itself.

Similar dilemmas face Christian schools everyday. Perhaps nothing else produces as many ashen-faced headmasters and boards. And hardly any young school I know realistically predicts the cost of a Christian and classical education. We are stunned to find that quality is expensive in education just as in every other sector of the economy.

In the face of these problems, it can be easy to despair. But a couple of important realities must be considered alongside the financial abyss.

First, the expenses our schools face derive from a commitment to quality. This is important, because it is evidence that the transcendent visions that lead to the founding of great schools are being realized. Christian schools that are committed to the full education of students, mind and spirit, through the historic liberal arts and within the context of Christian thinking, are rare. They are rare, partly, because they are expensive. But it is also true that classical schools represent a new wave of conscientious Christian education.

Second, most parents, challenged to consider what kind of life preparation they want for their children, want the best. They don’t always cooperate as we’d like them to, but their intentions are sincere. What parent would admit that, given a choice among several options, they are choosing the lesser opportunity for their child? Excellent schools continually raise the sights of parents, reminding them to want the best for their children.

Third, parents will do what they need to do to provide the best opportunities for their children. Yes, private school is expensive. Yes, many parents cannot afford what our schools must charge. Yes, there are other, less financially burdensome options. But we spend a lot of time worrying about whether parents will make the sacrifice. Often, our financial goals seem less about providing all we have to offer our students and more about making the investment decision easy for parents to make.

All well and good, but it is a lot easier to say “Fund it!” than to actually do it. There is no formula, as each school has its own priorities and circumstances. Some have strong financial backing; others have none. Some are located in vibrant local economies; others exist in the midst of foreclosure meltdowns. Some have planned well; others have managed their finances in an undisciplined fashion.

So, where does a school start?

First, we have to know how much quality really costs. What do we want for our students and what must we provide in a sustainable, long-term way to achieve those goals? Honest assessments of expenses are the starting point, and it can be a painful process. How many staff have accepted unreasonably low wages in exchange for some other benefit? These arrangements can help defray costs in the short-term, but what is the realistic horizon for how long they will last? How many staff have functions in their job descriptions for which they are either unqualified or unequipped? It doesn’t matter how many titles you efficiently smash together onto one person, he still has the same amount of time as everyone else. If we accept lower performance from our staff to save money, doesn’t that speak the lie to our excellent mission?

Second, we need to plan our finances in increments of three to four years. A balanced annual budget is great to have, but we need to know the impact of this year’s budget on next year, and the year after. It might feel good to raise tuition only three percent this year, but what pressure will that decision put on next year’s tuition? At the end of three years, how much money do we need to have in reserve for the next important growth stage? How will we plan for that?

Third, we need to be clear on who we want in our schools. In my capacity representing private schools in our state, I get frequent calls from parents looking for scholarship assistance to attend private school. My standard advice is for them to inquire at the schools with the highest tuition, as those schools often have the most money for need-based tuition assistance. If we just say that we want our school to be “affordable,” what does that mean? Often, it means affordable for people pretty much like those in the room making the financial decisions. That’s fine, if that’s your vision for your school. More often than not, though, we really want qualified students to be able to attend our school without regard to their household income. If that’s what we mean, then we must make that principle a permanent, sustainable aspect of our financial plans.

Quality is not cheap. We must match the visions of excellence we have for our schools with corresponding excellence in planning to pay for it all.

Chuck Evans is an Executive Consultant with Paideia, Inc. A former head of school, he advises private and charter schools on strategic and financial planning issues. Next issue: “Planning in a Financial Firestorm”.

By: J. Steve Lee

“If [a student’s] reading is confined simply to one subject, however such division of labor may favor the advancement of a particular pursuit . . . certainly it has a tendency to [reduce] his mind.”

— John Henry Newman

What good is a classical education? Why take classes perceived as impractical and unnecessary, when it is commonly preferable to offer more “useful” classes? After all, with the time and expense of education today, what use is it to leave school without developing any marketable skills?

One way to understand the importance of courses that broaden horizons, expand minds, and rely on good teaching regardless of the course (in short, a liberal arts education) is to recount the history of the liberal arts or classical education itself.

In ancient Greek society two classes of people went to school: the citizen and the slave. On the one hand, a free citizen of a Greek city-state, like Athens, would immerse himself in the liberal arts. Greek citizens in the democratic environment of the 5th century B.C. were responsible for the welfare of society, and Greek society needed prudent individuals. If citizens were ignorant or uneducated, then society could take a course that would inhibit freedom and end in ruins.

On the other hand, the slave learned a trade or a vocation. He was not responsible for the direction of society, thus no need to be educated in the liberal arts.

In fact, that is why the Romans came to call the Greek model a liberal education; it is an education that provides liberty and freedom for the individual. In other words, those who are free and want to remain free train their whole person, those who are not free will train for a specific trade.

I think of freedom in two respects: “negative” and “positive.” Negative freedom is defined solely by having as many choices as possible. Obviously, America and the modern West are privileged with abundant choices. Go to the cereal aisle at the supermarket and check out how many types of dry cereal you have to choose from. But just having those choices does not guarantee that we will make the correct choice. This is when we need positive freedom, or the ability to make the right choice.

For example, we can go to the car dealership and choose from a wide range of cars, trucks, SUVs, mini-vans, etc. (negative freedom). But just having that opportunity does not guarantee that we will make the right, or best, choice. One must take in consideration many factors in choosing the right vehicle (positive freedom): is it for a family or just one individual, a work vehicle or for transportation only? The right decision frees you to enjoy the vehicle you’ve chosen, but a wrong decision leaves you “bound” by that choice.

At one school that emphasizes a liberal arts education, the opening line of one of the collection of readings used in their core texts is a book called The People Shall Judge:

This book expresses the faith . . . in the usefulness of liberal education to American democracy. If the United States is to be a democracy, its citizens must be free. If citizens are to be free, they must be their own judges. If they are to judge well, they must be wise. Therefore, the business of liberal education in a democracy is to make free men wise.

In a free society, ignorance and complacency can lead to bondage in uniquely detrimental ways. The same is true, though, for the positive effect understanding can produce in the quality of liberty people experience. Citizens of a democracy possess historically unusual opportunities to influence their quality of life, and that of their fellow citizens. The relationship between government and industry, the ethics of scientific research, the essence of natural and assigned rights, are all up for consideration on a regular basis. Citizens who do not know what the issues are or the principles that will guide them as they form and voice their convictions, run the risk of choosing wrongly, leading to bondage.

We are living at a crucial time, one in which thinking is a mandate. As C.S. Lewis so aptly stated it, “To be ignorant and simple now - not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground - would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defence but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen.” Consequently, “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

We have been uniquely blessed (both historically and geographically) with the opportunity to be educated. Wouldn’t it be a shame, of all the options that we have, to choose bondage over freedom?

J. Steve Lee is the instructor for Philosophy and Theology and Director of the Lions Scholar Program at Prestonwood Christian Academy, as well as adjunct professor in Philosophy at Mountain View College in the Dallas, TX area.

By Caryn Harris

In an educational sphere where the three R’s, Latin Grammar chants, and the memorization of Scripture and the Westminster Shorter Catechism prevail, it is astounding to still feel the winds of postmodernism when talking to classical school teachers and administrators about the fine visual arts (drawing, painting, and sculpture). As classical Christian educators, it is our vocation to develop in our students the necessary tools for clear communication; language at deepening levels of understanding. We have our students read primary sources, when possible in the original language, in order that they would grasp the thoughts of the giants that have forged the great ideas of previous cultures. Our goal is that they would learn spoken and written language so well from those models that they would be able to appropriate the lessons from the past to build our future, bringing glory to God.

The “plastic” fine arts are often some of the best or only records we possess of the ideas of past cultures. Yet, sadly, there is not the same zeal for training in the language of the fine arts. It is time to put aside the laziness of our postmodern culture as we consider artistic training, and classically train our students in the language of drawing.

Mona Brookes dared to tell us in her book, Drawing With Children, that we should venture to teach our five year olds how to draw. She provided principles with which we could begin the process of teaching the art of drawing to all of our students, not just the “gifted” ones. On her advice to use graphics found on post cards and greeting cards as models for our students, though, I take issue. Using post cards and greeting card graphics as instructional models is like using Nancy Drew novels to teach literature. To develop the necessary tools for fine drawing skills, teachers should be encouraged to use master works of art, even with young students.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the British Academy wrote in his Discourses, “On whom then, can [the artist] rely, or who shall show him the path that leads to excellence? The answer is obvious: those great masters, who have traveled the same road with success, are the most likely to conduct others.” For centuries, artists have been trained in drawing by making copies from the masters before them. As a boy, Michelangelo copied Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel; Rubens copied da Vinci; Raphael copied the ancient Romans; Manet copied Raphael. These giants learned the language of drawing from previous giants.

Our postmodern culture places tremendous importance on creativity in art education. Yet, without solid skill development, students cannot be truly creative. Imagine what Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling would be without the numerous figures painted after his careful drawing studies done from the Laocoon group (discovered in Rome at the same time Michelangelo was painting the ceiling). A student can create beautiful things once he gains the skills necessary to be creatively expressive. The most effective and efficient way to gain the necessary skills for creativity is through the diligent copying of master works.

The lessons that can be mined as students copy great master works are many and varied. Starting with the “five elements of shape” found in Brookes’ Drawing With Children, the teacher can address the principles of comparative, relational, and sight/size measurement through guided practice. Source material can be found in ancient Egyptian drawings, illuminated manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, stained glass windows, even da Vinci drawings. The list of possible sources is tremendous. Learning to work with these types of measurements through observation of a two dimensional work and then transferring that information accurately to the drawing page is one of the most important skills an artist must master.

Elements of design (line, color, form, value, shape, texture, space) and principles of design (balance, contrast, movement, pattern, rhythm, unity, and emphasis) are easily taught through copying the drawings and etchings (treated as drawings) of Michelangelo, Durer, Rembrandt, Chardin, Poussin, and van Gogh. Using the masters as models, the teacher has the best examples from which to draw (in every sense of the word).

Of course, it is important to choose works to copy that are within the technical reach of students. For instance, kindergarteners through second graders should be given either simple line drawings to copy such as ancient Egyptian drawings or a more complicated source, such as da Vinci’s “Lily” study, with the drawing broken down into manageable pieces (one petal at a time). Third and fourth graders can begin to learn how to construct a still life, first using a black and white copy of a master’s work. A Jean Simeon Chardin still life as their source is a fine example. Utilizing the measurement skills they mastered in earlier grades, the young artists should be guided through an accurately rendered line drawing, and then move into building form through value. Fifth and sixth graders generally have the abstract reasoning skills necessary to understand and work with one point perspective. For these students, I recommend work by Perugino, da Vinci, and Raphael.

As students move into the later dialectic and rhetoric stages, their technical understanding can be developed through the study of the wonderfully elegant Golden Section. The ancient Greeks understood that true beauty was found in the structure of the natural world. Da Vinci understood the importance of this geometric proportion and utilized it in all of his paintings. In fact, da Vinci said, “Let no one read me who is not a mathematician.” The internal structure that the Golden Section gives to a work of art is critical in rendering the work as a work of beauty.

Without the underpinnings of a golden section grid, an artist struggles and fights with a work to make it “hang” properly on the paper, canvas, or stone. Albrecht Durer noted the importance of math in art when he said, “Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence. Now the sole reason why painters of this sort are not aware of their own error is that they have not learned geometry, without which no one can either be or become an absolute artist.” Utilizing master works of art will give your students the appropriate models from which to learn these timeless truths of artistic language.

Often, art teachers will use photographs as source material for their students. This is unfortunate because the photograph does not give the student the kind of visual information necessary to develop a solid drawing. The photograph usually makes the student want to draw with “photographic accuracy” and doesn’t give the student the opportunity to develop the necessary drafting vocabulary that can be learned only by copying a master drawing.

Translating the three dimensional world onto a two dimensional surface is not easy—it is an ultimate artistic problem. Drawing systems and vocabulary need to be put in place before we ask our students to work directly from life. We can overcome the difficulties encountered by our students by not requiring direct observation from life before the necessary drafting tools are in place in their minds. Leonardo da Vinci’s recommendation for training young artists still rings true today: “First of all copy drawing by a good master from nature and not exercises; and having acquired facility in this under the advice of his instructor, he ought to set himself to copy good reliefs; and then nature.” (from Leonardo’s Notebooks)

Leon Battista Alberti observed the important relationship between the ways in which we teach other subjects and teaching art: “I would have those who begin to learn the art of painting do what I see practiced by teachers of writing. They first teach all the signs of the alphabet separately, and then how to put the syllables together, and then whole words. Our students should follow this method with painting.” (from On Painting)

And we should settle for nothing less than this standard as we lead our students towards beautiful works of draftsmanship.

Caryn Harris received her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art. She has received numerous awards for her drawings and paintings and is a Signature Member of the Pastel Painters of Maine.

By Eric Cook

Editor’s Note: Over the years, I have interviewed many dozens of teachers. In those conversations, I always ask why they are interested in teaching in a Christian and classical school. In my experience, many began teaching in another context and found that classical schools provide the opportunity to teach in ways that they had found most effective. As learning increased in their classrooms, they began to look for a place to teach in which these methods were the norm. If you have a story to tell about how you came to classical education through your own discovery of the purpose of education, we’d like to hear it and publish it here.

I spent seven years teaching history, psychology, philosophy, economics, government, and civics at public high schools. No matter what the subject was, I believed the most valuable things students needed to understand were not readily available in their textbooks. I knew that being able to recall information and transfer it onto a piece of paper called a test was not the most important part of their education. As I asked myself what students were supposed to know and what I wanted from them, a mission emerged.

I became determined that my students would understand that education is absolutely vital to their life and well-being. If they understood the big picture, maybe they would care how many people are in the House of Representatives.

Wooing a generation of despondent teens into the “great conversation” was not as difficult as you might think. Less than half way through my first year of teaching I began putting quotes on the board every day and having students journal about them. It took only about ten minutes, but the resulting discussions were amazing. I put quotes on the board such as, “Be happy. It’s one way of being wise,” “If there were no God, it would have been necessary to have invented him,” etc. Then, more challenging quotes, like, “Freedom is the recognition of necessity” or “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”

The discussions that these quotes spawned did several things in my classroom. First, they raised more questions than answers, which made the class interesting. Second, the conversations created an opportunity for me to interact with my students on topics that mattered to them, creating a vibrant relational dynamic in the classroom. Each student could be heard on issues that did not necessarily have a clear answer, and that eliminated the perception that whoever knew the most information was the “smartest.” Third, the dialogue provided a bridge by which to cross into deeper areas related to the content I was teaching. Students began to think beyond the superficial and to ask hard questions.

I learned a great deal from my students in those journal discussions. And, interestingly enough, I found that my class was turning into a series of rich, meaningful dialogues. The content became just the means to direct the conversation.

While we were studying The Republic of the Congo, a report came out that there was still cannibal activity going on. I randomly threw out the question, “Why is cannibalism wrong?” I could not get a solid answer from anyone. I offered extra credit if anyone could tell me. They all knew it was wrong, but no one could justify the claim. These kinds of conversations were fire starters. They burned for days. Kids were mad at me and determined to give an answer that made sense. Perhaps they would soon be stopping this barbarism, I prayed. I was loving it!

The students began to beg me to have extended discussion days where we would take a topic and have an open forum about it. On occasion I would cave in and do it. The most important lesson I learned from these early days was that students care about what really matters. After all, as Aristotle said, “All men by nature desire to know.” Eventually, I decided to continue the conversations with my students, and whoever else would come, after school in a Philosophy Club. I only taught ninth and tenth graders, so I thought maybe a few faithful students who felt sorry for the new teacher would show up. However, word spread, fliers were made, and about sixty students showed up by the third meeting. Sixty students on their own time to sit around and talk about Descartes! What was going on?! By the way, what really shocked me was the diversity in the room. A wide spectrum of ethnicities, religions, and social groups showed up. It was heated at times, but always interesting. Sometimes I had to make students go home!

The next year I started each of my courses the same way: Each student would attempt to answer four questions: Where did I come from? Why am I here? How do I tell right from wrong? What happens when I die? It did not matter if I was teaching history or psychology; this is where we began. How they answered these questions would help them acquire a frame of reference for their own understanding as well as the perspectives of those we read. This was the way I hooked my students and sold education to them. Education was about finding truth, doing right, finding who we are, and what we want to become.

To be sure, there were numerous problems along the way; too many to enumerate here. As you can guess, my teaching role was to provoke controversy, which made things interesting. However, what defined my classroom-the spirit of inquiry and conversation-led me to explore other philosophies of education than those I had been taught. I eventually found people like Mortimer Adler and others who understood the value of the liberal arts. When I found classical Christian schools I knew it was where I would finally land.

Asking difficult questions with a legal constraint upon your answers is frustrating, to say the least. To now be in a context that asks the big questions within the parameters of God’s truth is a great blessing. What I perceived, with Augustine, in my students in those public school classrooms is true: God made us for himself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in him.

Eric Cook is Middle and Upper School Director at Faith Christian School in Roanoke, Virginia. He also teaches a History of Western Philosophy class to juniors and seniors.

By Douglas Wilson

I really enjoyed reading Wisdom and Eloquence by Robert Littlejohn and Charles Evans. This is a well-written book, with certain chapters that should be read and re-read by all educators seeking to provide a classical and Christian education. There is good information here for everyone involved in the work of recovering a classical and Christian education.

The book also exhibits a central pedagogical departure from the application of Dorothy Sayer’s insight in The Lost Tools of Learning. In order for me to set forth this departure appropriately, it is necessary for me to back up, and give some background history. When our founding board began discussing what kind of education we should seek to provide, we knew that we did not want a fundamentalist reactionary academy, and we knew that we did not want a compromised prep school. So we came up with the motto, “a classical and Christ-centered education.” The word classical excluded a truncated fundamentalism, and the Christ-centered excluded a compromise with unbelief. Somewhere in this process I remembered an article by Sayers that I had read some years before. We tracked down a copy, and, with the view that this represented considerably more wisdom than we knew about, we adopted it, and resolved to give it a try.

Now the heart of Sayers’s article is her application of the Trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) to the natural stages of child development. Her argument is that the Trivium is foundational, giving the kids the “tools of learning.” Now at the time, we could not have told you anything about the history of the Trivium and its relationship to child development issues beyond what we had read in Sayers. But what we did know (from Sayers), we put into practice and the results can only be described as a roaring success.

As the years went by, we read up on what we were doing, and learned a great deal more about it. In other words, we started blind, but we didn’t stay that way. And so it turns out a lot rides on whether we describe what Sayers was advocating as her historical explication of the medieval practice or, instead of this, describing it as the Sayers insight—what somebody really ought to try sometime (for the first time). Littlejohn and Evans point out (rightly, in my view) that the historical application of the Trivium did not do it the Sayers’s way. In other words, I don’t think that little kids in 1352 were taken through the grammar stage (the way they are at Logos), and then on to the dialectic stage, and so forth.

In my book, The Case for Classical Christian Education (2003), I refer repeatedly to the Sayers insight, and this is the reason why I referred to it this way. I believe that Littlejohn and Evans are quite correct on the historical point. In other words, if we look to Sayers for information on how they were doing it “back in the day,” we are going to miss the mark. But if we look to Sayers for a valuable idea on how this approach to the Trivium could and should be applied to modern education, we will find ourselves cooking with propane and extremely pleased with the results. And that is exactly what has happened to us at Logos. There are numerous indicators that I could point to here—from stellar test scores to nationally-recognized accomplishments of graduates. We have won the state championship in mock trial nine years (out of twelve years competing), and sent a mock trial team to national competition five times. In short, as the sage once put it, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

A proposed departure from this is a significant part of the argument presented in Wisdom and Eloquence, and the point is reiterated a number of times. In short, the central contribution that Sayers has to offer (in my view) is the major thing that Littlejohn and Evans take issue with. This is not the end of the world, and I am sure that both gentlemen remain very fine educators despite disagreeing with Sayers on this. But it does represent a significant disagreement within the classical and Christian education world, and every classical Christian school needs to decide what they are going to do on this point. Both are fine dances, but you can’t waltz and do the Texas two-step at the same time. For their part, Littlejohn and Evans want to “separate the arts from the question of cognitive development altogether” (W&E, p. 39).

There is a significant amount of agreement in this disagreement. I agree that child development was not in view eight centuries ago. But suppose we reject the Sayers point considered as historical exegesis but go on to accept it considered as a new proposed pedagogical paradigm. The people who tried this in the early eighties in north Idaho didn’t know any different, and so we just went after it. The educational results have been astounding, and so if it was all based on a mistake it was therefore a very happy mistake. And further, the mistake would have been ours for assuming that Sayers was talking about how education used to be, and not about how it ought to be. I am not saying that Sayers shared any of our possible confusion on the point.

There is also an additional argument against going back to the purist view of the Trivium. One of the central reasons why we should not just return to the Trivium “as it was in the medieval period” is because it used to be a pretty confusing hodge-podge. The simultaneous inculcation of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric (along with the Quadrivium) is something that could get away from you pretty easily, and in the middle ages, it certainly did. Reading this book by Littlejohn and Evans makes me think that they have it well in hand, but this is more than could be said for some early forms of it.

Just two final comments and I am done. The first is to make sure we keep this difference where it ought to be—as a matter of important emphasis, and not as a matter of fundamental substance. In other words, every advocate of a graded approach to the Trivium acknowledges that none of these three stages are “pure,” free from all contamination from the others. Spelling is taught in the grammar stage, and spelling is a rhetorical matter.

It is important for ACCS educators to recognize that it is not going to be “pure grammar,” and then “pure dialectic,” and then “pure rhetoric.” These are not watertight categories. Nevertheless the Sayers Insight means that we emphasize the grammar of all subjects in the elementary years, the dialectic of all subjects in the junior high years, and the rhetoric of all subjects in the high school years. But of course, each stage will have important elements of the others contained within them. Students in the rhetoric years still have to memorize things, and students in the grammar stage learn to make letters that stay within the lines, thus presenting a more pleasant rhetorical effect. For their part, Littlejohn and Evans retain an understanding of the importance of gradation—they just don’t tie it together with the language of the Trivium (e.g. pp. 130, 164).

Having said all this, I suppose it means that I believe that the Sayers Insight represents a better application of the medieval Trivium than was practiced in the medieval period itself. And it would follow from this that I believe schools that follow the Sayers Insight will enjoy richer educational fruit than schools that simply return to the practice of teaching all seven of the liberal arts at every age.

But this is just a disagreement, not a collision. I still recommend this book highly—there is much to be gained from it. Schools that follow the pattern suggested here will no doubt be superior to many of the typical American schools around them. At the same time, I do believe that ACCS schools should be encouraged to stay the course on this point. But of course I would say that—you don’t work for MacDonalds in order to sell Wendy’s burgers.

Douglas Wilson, author of Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, is a founder and board member of Logos School, a founder and Trustee of New Saint Andrews College, and a founder of Association of Classical & Christian Schools. This is an abridged version of the review published in the Autumn 2007 Classis, Volume XIV, Number 4, available at www.accsedu.org.

By: Michael J. Bossé

Early in my introduction to classical education, I observed a tacit assumption at work. While the classical educators with whom I spoke strongly opposed the notion, it was all too apparent through curriculum selection and scholastic decision-making that many held to the belief that “Old is Good and New is Bad.” The curriculum, thought, philosophies and practices of the ancients seemed to be accepted carte blanche, while more modern thought on teaching and learning was eschewed as being morally deficient.

Further investigation of classical education interested me in the Socratic method and dialectics. I was enthralled by teaching through questioning. I was excited to see that teachers could humbly perceive themselves simultaneously as guides and co-learners. I was encouraged to see that students learned not singularly from the teacher, but also from each other.

Yes, all the facets of classical education immediately intrigued me, but not because they were novel. They were exactly where my background in modern curriculum and instruction, educational research, and mathematics education had already taken me.

Classical and modern educational paradigms can have much in common. By delineating how the two overlap in an educational experience and by modernizing the definitions of some terms common to classical education, we can develop a conversation between the two groups.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics lists five interconnected processes through which students learn mathematics: problem solving, reasoning and proof, communications, connections, and representations.

Through the classroom experience of problem solving, students learn about the topic being investigated, the means through which that topic is generally understood, more efficient means of solving other problems associated with the topic, and generalized heuristics, or investigations, for solving problems.

Reasoning and proof transcend mere classroom skills to become habits of mind through which students are able to delve into ever expanding realms of thought.
Communications does not merely denote the dissemination and reception of knowledge (writing, reading, speaking, listening, explaining, debating, etc.); it also connotes the learning which occurs through these experiences.

Connections means both realizing and applying internal interconnections between topics in one subject (an algebraic concept may have a geometric connection) and understanding and employing external interconnections among concepts in differing areas of study (the same algebraic concept may be connected to music).

All subjects have their respective representations through which the subject is studied and communicated. In mathematics, concepts can be considered numerically, symbolically, graphically, or verbally.

While each of these features is an important component of learning, their interrelatedness may be even more so.

Envision a mathematics classroom in which small groups of students are working on a problem. As the problem develops, each group learns additional concepts within the mathematics and reasons through various possible heuristics. Some group members attempt to prove one concept while others focus on different concerns. When each student has a solution, each group is asked to demonstrate its solution and strategy to the remaining class. Using numbers, symbols, graphs, and oral communication, students from one group can reason through and assess the work of another group and can come to recognize additional connections to other concepts. Altogether, students learn through each process and learn even more through the interconnection of all the processes.

As members in a learning community (i.e., an interactive classroom) become interdependent and interconnected, a shift occurs from instructor centrality to peripherality. Student participation becomes necessary for student success. The involvement pattern becomes circular, as participant involvement leads to an identity within the community and acceptance by the community, which then leads to the individual developing a greater sense of self identity and opportunities for greater involvement in the community.

Notably, the changing roles of students within a learning community also necessitate a change in the perspective of the instructor. As knowledge is socially mediated, the instructor is simultaneously a dispenser of information and a participant within the learning community responsible to interact with, listen to, and share with the others. As a participant within the community, the instructor should anticipate acquiring more information and understanding over the course.

The preceding discussion should sound consistent with the discussions of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and dialectics which classical educators so often entertain. Classical education is defined by practices which fundamentally require a community of learners, comprised of students and teachers, who share mutual respect, interact and communicate with one another, and share ideas. In practice, classical classrooms exemplify many of NCTM’s process standards and demonstrate many of the aspects of learning communities.

As the classical education movement matures, it is hoped that sound modern educational concepts are not dismissed as antithetical to classical learning. Rather, the two can intertwine and produce more meaning for each other.

Michael J. Bossé is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Science Education at East Carolina University. This article was excerpted from a longer scholarly paper connecting classical terminology with modern educational concepts. For a copy of the complete paper, send your request to thejournal@societyforclassicallearning.org.

By Christine Perrin

I am reading Paradise Lost by John Milton right now. It is a beautiful and difficult poem and I spend much energy trying to understand it. This week when we were discussing Satan in Book IV it struck me suddenly that I am guilty of behaving like Satan. His preoccupation with himself at this moment in the text has completely occluded even his ability to think outside of how a circumstance affects him. He is sealed off from the reality of God’s majesty and the ability to worship by his absorbing interest in how all things impact him.

This is a fact with which I have such long acquaintance that it is almost mundane: when we sin we are acting like the devil. But just now, as the presence of the voice of Satan seeped into my consciousness through rhythms, images, and tone, this oh so ordinary truth pierced me with fresh awareness and intensity and application to this moment in my life.

Tolkien and Lewis believed that poetry restores reality to its mythic proportions, that we are living an epic, a lyric truth, a narrative where every action has vast consequence. Reading a myth or a poem causes the enchantment of the daily to come forth, making us conscious of it anew. Apart from that cosmic importance, there are other benefits that accrete like layers in a mountain stream. Poems reminds us that the rational alone will not take us to full knowledge.

Poetry also changes our relationship to language. It allows us to see words as more than merely serviceable vehicles. Poetry gives us an inherent sense of structure when we write. Formally or informally poetry enables us to write more beautifully and meaningfully. Poetry reminds us that metaphor is the basic way of knowing the unknown and that there are always new ways to use one thing to describe another.

Poetry gives us images that invigorate our daily experience. Never will I be able to see a fish without thinking of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.” I talk myself out of my despair for the ugliness of the industrialized world with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur.” I possess Rilke’s picture of “The Panther” when I feel caged or when I meet someone who is.

Poetry has taught me that language is unimaginably deep, even bottomless, and a record of what it is like to be human. And because I write poems in response to my love of other people, I have learned what Adam felt like in the garden of the world, naming and naming.

Christine Perrin is a professor of literature and poetry at Messiah College in Gratham, PA, and the author of the forthcoming book The Art of Poetry (Classical Academic Press, 2008).

By: Andrew Kern

It is widely believed that we are engaged in a war for our culture. More accurately, we are in the middle of a battle in a war that has been raging since Socrates challenged the sophists. As Christian classical educators, our enemies are the radical relativists. To the radical relativists, there is no law of nature to govern human conduct because there is no such thing as a constant form of human nature.

Radical relativism is the belief that everything we do, think, and even feel arises from the customs and conventions of the group of which we are members. Individuals cannot perceive the way things actually are, because we have been conditioned by our communities to experience things a certain way. We are always wearing glasses, colored by our unavoidable, individual perspectives. There is no universal nature or essence of things, and, even if there is, we can’t know it.

This revolution against objective ideas entered our schools early in the 20th century. Its leader was John Dewey, who watered down the radical relativism of Friederich Nietzsche and called it Progressivism. Dewey’s teachings were widely misunderstood and accepted by those anxious to pretend their schools were founded on scientific principles.

I’ll not mince words: radical relativism is the enemy of humanity and civilized society. Like a colony of termites, it eats away at everything it inhabits. We educators must know what radical relativism is, and we must be prepared to resist it.

How does radical relativism affect grammar? How do convention and custom overthrow nature in the teaching of grammar? Let me turn these questions a little bit: How does a radical relativist
determine correct grammar? He argues that correct grammar arises entirely from usage, convention, or custom. This position, however, doesn’t stand up to close observation. Linguists have studied virtually every language group on earth and discovered that there is a universal foundation to every grammar. Grammar is rooted in nature, not in conventions.

What does that mean? Take a close look at human nature by watching yourself think. You can simplify the act by focusing on one thing: say, a fish.

Notice, first, that you cannot think without thinking about something. We call that something the “subject.” Perhaps you saw the fish in your mind. If you did, it had properties (color, shape, etc.), and it was somewhere (in the water, floating on black, etc.). When we think, we always think something about the thing about which we are thinking. We cannot think about a fish without thinking something about the fish. We call that the “predicate” (from pre, about, and dico, I say or tell). We think about subjects when we predicate something about them. All grammar is rooted in this simple notion.

In short, we think this way because it is our nature to think this way. Therefore, the rules of grammar arise from human nature and they help us to know the world we live in. If we allow grammar to degenerate, we diminish our capacity to know and love the world around us, the one over which God has made us stewards.

Furthermore, we live in community. By converting thoughts into sentences, we enable others to think with us, and others enable us to think with them. We are able to communicate. Therefore, if we allow grammar to degenerate, we diminish our capacity to know and love the people around us.

Amazingly, we can also stand outside ourselves and watch ourselves think (like you did above)! We can analyze our thoughts and behavior, holding them up to standards (including the rules of grammar). No other creature can do that. Therefore, if we allow grammar to degenerate, we diminish our capacity to know and love ourselves!

Without doubt, the sentence—that simple skeleton with a head (subject), abdomen (predicate), and many attachable limbs (the other parts of speech)—is one of the wonders of the world. Think of the enormous flexibility, the power to move, and the ability to bless and to curse!

We have been given the capacity to use language (and to teach our students) to bless others
through the almost infinite power that words possess when structured on sound grammar.

And when we lose the power to bless, we lose the culture war. No wonder they don’t want us to teach our children grammar.

Andrew Kern is the founder and President of The Circe Institute and the author of The Lost Tools of Writing™, a program designed to fulfill the principles set forth above.