by Patrick Fitzpatrick

Whenever I ponder the question of whether Christian schools make “spiritual formation” a mission objective, I reflect on my own childhood education, which included fourth through seventh grade in a parochial school. These years happened also to be my first four as a young convert to Christianity.

The pastor taught our confirmation class each day, introducing concepts like eternal security, salvation, and baptism in a traditional denominational context. Concurrently, I was also active in another church in town. Unwittingly, the confirmation class pastor played a huge role in my spiritual formation, not because of the weight of material I memorized for him, but because many of his claims ran counter to what I was hearing in church. This conflict fed my spiritual formation as I tirelessly pursued the truth. My classmates were eventually confirmed, but sadly not transformed. Their experience lacked the tension that catalyzed my growth. For them, the indoctrination was drudgery—even perhaps, a necessary evil.
I share this personal anecdote to emphasize that young children can think deeply about spiritual truths, but also to challenge our Christian schools to be places where students are safely guided to the truth rather than places where teaching is reduced to simply telling the truth and assessing students for recall or understanding. Knowing truth and experiencing a transformation in the heart because of truth are two different things. If we want our students to personally embrace the fact that God loves them, it won’t be achieved through indoctrination. Instead, we need to find ways to encourage students to wrestle with truth—even if it means that they go home from a lesson in conflict or confusion.
As a school administrator, rather than making “spiritual formation” an objective of our mission, I would prefer to make “the opportunity for spiritual formation” a critical objective. This is not simply playing with words. My hope in creating these opportunities is that God will do a work in our students as they interface with the truths of scripture, as they interact with godly teachers, or as they wrestle with tensions and confusion that may crop up during a lesson. We need to offer the opportunities for students to develop in their spiritual formation, and we need to guard against all that hinders. In so doing, we need to recognize that any spiritual formation—any meaningful transformation of the heart—is the work of the Spirit of God.
Our school caters to Christian students and non-Christian students alike, and we recognize that non-Christian students will not experience spiritual formation without first becoming new creatures through Christ. When we graduate a student who has not become a Christian, despite the intense biblical literacy and integration that characterizes our curriculum, though, our mission has not failed. This is because our mission as a school is limited to what we can do as Christian educators. We can plant, we can water, we can toil in the vineyard, but God gives the increase if He wills and when He wills.

Pat Fitzpatrick is the head of the upper school at St. David’s School, Raleigh, North Carolina.

by George Sanker

I am glad to be invited into this conversation, but I need to make it clear up front that I am the Christian leader of a school instead of the leader of a Christian school— I head up a Classical Core Knowledge Charter School. While I know many might be curious about what I can add to this conversation because of the limitations that I have in a public school, I do believe that the formation of a child’s spirit plays a central role in the mission/vision of our school. My emphasis on formation, however, is implicitly shaped through the story offered through exposure to the Western tradition as discussed by the teachers and staff in the school community. Formation is also reinforced through the distinct nature (i.e., rituals and traditions) of the community.

While I started my teaching career in a private, Christian school, I subsequently decided to see if I could make an institutional impact in the public school world. Four years ago I became principal of an urban charter school. When I first looked at the academic standing of the students that registered to attend my schools, I realized that these kids had been truly let down by the district-run public schools. I would have to ensure that academic excellence was a central component of our school’s culture if these kids were going to have a chance of becoming well-educated, virtuous citizens in their community.

Part of my hope for the project came from the fact that I myself had grown up in these neighborhoods and was able to escape as a result of great mentors who stepped into my life. Solid educational opportunities ultimately enabled me to get into and graduate from a very strong college in the Northeast, something that had not been done in my family to that point. As I reflected on my journey, I tried to look for other examples of success in the black community that ran counter to the current malaise in urban public schools that we read about weekly.

I was overjoyed when I started to read about amazing work that the American Missionary Association (AMA) did with Southern blacks following the Civil War. The AMA, out of the Northeast, sent groups of teachers to establish schools and to teach and acculturate the children of freed slaves into new possibilities that didn’t exist for them before. By 1866 there were about 1,400 Northern white teachers teaching black children in 975 Southern schools. The classical education that these teachers brought, provided a solid foundation in the English language while also exposing students to the broad range of stories in the Western tradition. Through these stories, former black slaves were able to gain a perspective on their situation that they had never had before. With this perspective they gained a new sense of hope and courage to face their situation as newly freed citizens.
One of the success stories from this period was Mary Jane Patterson, whose family emigrated from North Carolina to Ohio before the Civil War. Patterson graduated from Oberlin College in 1862 and became the first Principal of Preparatory High School for Colored Youth—later renamed Dunbar High School—in Washington, DC. While most women were not allowed to take Latin, Greek, and mathematics in college, she insisted on taking these courses and brought her strength and determination into her job at Dunbar. Having this kind of person shaping the standards and traditions of the school in its early years undoubtedly had something to do with its later success. The school continued to attract high-achieving black leaders. Three of the school’s first ten principals had graduated from Oberlin, two from Harvard, and one each from Amherst and Dartmouth.
Over the entire 85-year history of academic success in this school, from 1870 to 1955, most of its graduates went on to higher education. This was very unusual for either black or white high school graduates during that era. It is also important to note that not only did Dunbar students go on to college, but many of them became successful, ground-breaking leaders. The first black man to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy came from Dunbar. The first black enlisted man in the army to rise to become a commissioned officer also came from this institution. So did the first black woman to receive a PhD from an American university. And the first black full professor at a major American university. The first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member, the first black senator elected since Reconstruction, the doctor who pioneered the use of blood plasma, historian Carter G. Woodson, poet Sterling Brown, and Duke Ellington, all attended Dunbar High.
What is amazing to me about this story of academic success and student formation is that they did this during a time when there were supposedly no doors open to blacks in the broader culture. Because of their excellence, though, they opened doors that previously did not exist. These stories stand in stark contrast to the low academic standards prevalent in many urban centers, and at Dunbar High School today.
To recover some of the academic and moral excellence that arose in the black community in the last century, I focused first on hiring excellent teachers who knew their content more than their educational psychology. But their intellect alone would not be able to do the job. Like the AMA teachers, the teachers I hired would also need to be living examples of moral excellence so that their students could see the qualities that we sought for them to acquire. I also worked very hard to develop strong rituals and traditions in the school community that reinforced a sense of “we” versus “me” while also providing for regular opportunities to publicly celebrate the embodiment of our core values in particular students.
I realized, despite all of the effort to build a haven of academic excellence, I needed to make sure that we were truly helping our students to become “fully human.” Glimpses of success in this area became evident in conversations with sixth graders as they debated some of the moral issues in The Prince and the Pauper or when seventh graders discussed what it means to be “authentic” in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I truly believe that the various works from the western tradition that we exposed our students to did make a great impact on many of our students, if not all equally. For once they were able to see a world beyond the videos of BET and the Hip-Hop music that permeates their iPods. For once, they could let down their cynical and jaded attitude toward the world and explore questions of truth, beauty, and goodness in a setting where it was cool to be somewhat intellectual.
One of the best indications for me of the formative impact we had on students took place with the enrollment of new students. As these new students came on board the existing students felt it was their responsibility to acclimate the new students into the unique culture that they had helped to build at our school. While I would love to say that massive cultural changes took place within the doors of my school, they did not. But I am very proud of the tremendous progress that I saw in the young men and women, and amongst the staff and students who worked so hard to build a counter-culture in Washington.

George Sanker is the founding Principal of Imagine Hope Charter School in Firestone, Colorado. He has degrees from Colgate University and Reformed Theological
Seminary.

By Robert Littlejohn

Since ancient times, imitation has been the best teacher of quality communication, whether speech-making, preaching, negotiating, or any kind of writing. We read for many reasons; to learn what we do not know, to improve our character, to transcend time and place, even to escape reality. But no nobler purpose exists for reading masterfully written, high quality literature, than as a model for writing.
In a former life, I served as Honors Director for a Christian university. The capstone project and final requirement for graduation was the Honors Thesis. This paper was to be the culmination of a year’s research and writing, overseen by a committee of three faculty, one of whom served as primary advisor. I served as an additional reader for all theses, and I read some very interesting papers on topics outside my own discipline. However, I often found myself wondering if the writing was really honors quality.
On one occasion, I read a thesis that was totally incomprehensible. Upon consulting the faculty advisor, I discovered that he too found the paper unsatisfactory, but because of his junior status he was reticent to challenge the quality of the paper, since this student was well thought of by
other members of the department.
When I asked the student to show me some examples of other papers he had written over the years, I found them all to be beautifully “processed” on high quality paper, with attractive fonts and formatting. Each paper bore a single red “A” or “A+” with no other marks or comments. I concluded that over his college career, no one had actually read this student’s writing. Now I had the unenviable responsibility of rejecting his thesis as substandard, denying his graduation from the program—an awful experience for both of us.
Why had this student received so little help with his writing in college, not to mention his previous high school and earlier learning experiences? My conclusion, from 25 years in K-12 and college education is simple and stark: writing is the most difficult thing to teach and, as an educational culture, we have forgotten how to do it.
While visiting my parents’ home last Christmas, I found a little book on composition that belonged to my grandfather, copyright 1907. The book was structured to teach students how to write exposition, biography, criticism, argument, description, and narration, through modeling high quality examples of each of these by authors like Stevenson, Huxley, Eliot, Lamb, Chesterton, Copeland, Hawthorne, Dickens, Conrad, Longfellow,
Scott, Irving, Poe, Thoreau, Kipling and Austen.
As teachers, we would do well to take our cue from William Faulkner who wrote: “Read, read, read. Read everything…and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write.”

Robert Littlejohn, PhD is the Headmaster at Trinity Academy, Raleigh, North Carolina. With Charles T. Evans, he is the co-author ofWisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning. Summer Conference Speaker

by John Seel, PhD

“The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people something that we have not got…
[U]nless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the children; that at present we cannot save others,
for we cannot save ourselves.”
— G.K. Chesterton

Parents have their dreams for their children. Schools largely tailor their priorities to these dreams
as a pragmatic necessity for financial survival. Where, in this matrix of supply and demand, is the prophetic voice? Where is the prophetic school asking what God wants and what the child needs? Education that makes a difference must face these questions.

Brad Green, of Augustine School in Jackson, Tennessee, wisely challenges prospective parents to identify whether the school’s goals for their child are compatible with their own parenting goals: When I am visiting with prospective families, I say to virtually every one of them some version
of the following: “You should look every headmaster or admissions director straight in the eye
and ask simply, ‘What is your goal for my child as an 18-year-old graduate of your institution?’” I then proceed, with all seriousness, to say, “If that person cannot answer that question, you
should politely dismiss yourself and head to the next school. But if they can and do answer that question, you need to ask yourself an important question. ‘Is that my goal for my child’ or,
at least, ‘Is that goal compatible with what we want for our child?’”

It is important to ask these questions because they reflect the hidden assumptions parents have in
their understanding of the relationship of education to parenting and discipleship. Often, little distinguishes
Christian parenting aspirations from those of unbelievers. In general, their aspirations boil
down to a variation of “just like me.” Parents want for their child the same approximate experiences
that they had when they were their age. Rarely does a parent have aspirations either higher or lower than
those their own parents had for them a generation earlier.

One presumes that their children’s spiritual maturity is just as important a priority for Christian
parents as academic success. Yet few parents think to ask what God wants and expects in their child’s
education. Their decisions about education are the arena where these priorities become explicit.
The most difficult idols to recognize are those that are socially acceptable and religiously justified.
Christian parents have difficulty realizing that their attachment to their child can become a source of
idolatry. Children are the glue in many marriages, the center of household activities, and the voice on
the family answering machine. Little trumps the importance of the child.
By contrast, Jesus lived in what we today call a “tribal” society. The extended family had enormous
influence over the person. No nuclear family thought of itself as autonomous from extended family
relationships. Jesus’ culture was family-centered not individual-centered, and “honoring father and
mother” was a commandment backed by strong penalties. One only has to read Deuteronomy 21:18-
21 to sense the seriousness of the matter:
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will
not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard.” Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.

Disobedience to parents is placed in the long list of sins characteristic of the last days in 2 Timothy
3:2. It is central in the list of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity outlined in Romans 1:28-32, with the
caveat that those who are disobedient deserve death. In this context Jesus’ stern warning to put God
before all family relationships is striking: “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not
worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who
does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37-38) Self-denial, taking up
one’s cross, is placed squarely in a family context. God first, not family.

We do not own our children. They are a temporary stewardship. They are not an extension of
our identities—little people through whom we can have our relational needs met and personal aspirations
realized. Yet for many child-centered families, psychological enmeshment has obtained spiritual
legitimacy. How else can one understand the story of Hannah in 1 Samuel? Barren in a society that prized
sons, she wept to the Lord and made this vow: “If you will only look upon your servant’s misery and
remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the Lord for all
the days of his life.” Moreover, when her prayer is granted, this special child, loved as only a mother
can love a child after overcoming infertility, is then given back to the Lord. “After he was weaned,
she took the boy with her, young as he was…and brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh….
[T]hey brought the boy to Eli, and she said to him,

‘As surely as you live, my Lord, I am the woman who stood here beside you and prayed for this child,and the Lord granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.’”

This passage is important for contemporary Christian parents, for we too must give our children
over to the Lord. Our children are not ours to keep. They are a temporary gift, a means to further our
growth in grace even as we seek to equip them to serve Christ and his kingdom with their lives.
When typical Christian parents come to a Christian school, they have clear goals already in
mind. They want the school to mirror their values, which too often are a child-centered version of the
American dream. They want the school to legitimize their lives. They want their children to be in effect a
chip off the old block, and, in most cases, Christian consumer-driven schools provide exactly what parents
want.
As in many churches, coming to Christ and becoming like Christ are disconnected in Christian
schools. Eager to get students into heaven, Christian schools give little thought or planning to getting
heaven into the student. Dallas Willard refers to this as the gospel of sin management: “You can have a
faith in Christ that brings forgiveness, while in every other respect your life is no different from that of
others who have no faith at all.” Every statistical comparison of Christian teenage behavior bears out
this fact. Being a Christian teen or going to a Christian school makes no behavioral difference in terms
as compared with nonbelievers. We get what we expect and what our parenting models, youth groups,
and schools are designed to produce. Few demand more. Conversion is the expectation; discipleship is
not. Becoming an active apprentice of Jesus is reserved for the religious freak, not the normal kid.

Still, parents and schools are too frequently concerned solely with behavior. We have no expectation that the gospel will fundamentally transform a life and reform one’s character. The gospel is not simply
having one’s sins forgiven, but having them forgiven so that one can become a new person infused
with the life of Christ. “In Him was life, and that life is the light of men,” John writes in his Gospel. (John
1:4) “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full,” Jesus declares. (John 10:10) “Therefore,
if any one is in Christ,” Paul concludes, “he is a new creation.” (2 Corinthians 5:17) The point of
Christ’s work on the cross is not just forgiveness, but life.

But we confuse the means with the end. We are forgiven so that we can live in a right relationship
with Christ in the here and now. This life, however, is not fire insurance for heaven—a kind of
policy we purchase and then put in a desk drawer for some undisclosed time in the future. It is daily
spiritual sustenance—“living water” and the “bread of life”—without which we spiritually starve. “I am
the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be
thirsty.” (John 6:35)

My concern is that parents’ expectations of Christian schools are generally consistent with what
is taught in most pulpits—a gospel that forgives sins but does not transform lives, a legalism that coerces
behavior but does not change hearts, and a dualism that longs for heaven but has little concern for
creation or culture. It is Christianity “lite,” or what Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as “cheap grace”—the
justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. We do not expect anything more of our children
or of our schools because nothing different is taught from our pulpits. Bonhoeffer, having witnessed the
impotence of the German church when faced with Hitler, lamented a “grace” that is no gospel.

So schools provide what parents want—mental assent and behavioral conformity, “Get my child
saved” and “Keep my child away from worldliness.” Parents’ attitudes toward education parallel
this spiritual pragmatism. Rather than being concerned for the hard work of embodiment—of cultivating
a Christian mind and captivating a Christian imagination—parents are focused instead on college
placement and career selection. For many parents, education is not an end, but a means to secure a job
that will allow their child to live life just as they do. It is merely a step in achieving personal peace and
affluence. Henry Edmondson traces this pragmatic orientation to John Dewey and warns, “In making
utility the chief goal of education, we sacrifice much of its usefulness.”
Christian schools may promote piety and patriotism, but they do not routinely graduate students
committed to the demands of radical discipleship: students who are equipped to take captive every
thought to Christ and who expect to serve Christ through their individual callings.

In the end, the fruit does not fall far from the tree. Christian schools serve Christian parents
whose values are little different from other parents in their same socioeconomic class and surrounding
neighborhood. “This, in fact, is one of the great tragedies of our time,” writes theologian David Wells,
“that evangelicals have lost their spiritual status as outsiders to the culture, those who march to a different
drummer, and who have the capacity to think about their world in ways that are completely different
from what is taken as normative in their world.” Also, for this reason, as many as 80% of Christian
parents don’t even bother with Christian education. Government schools are just as efficient in
accomplishing their goals for their child and a whole lot cheaper. We get what we want, but it’s not what
we need. Nor is it what God and the gospel demand.

This article is the second of three based on John Seel’s forthcoming book, Special Forces in Kingdom Service:
The Calling of Prophetic Schools to be published nextspring by Canon Press. Part three, “Parris Island for the
Soul: What Christian Students Need” will be published inbvthe next issue of The Journal.

by Andrew Selby

Let’s not give short shrift to the role of theological study in spiritual formation. This has always been an indispensable ingredient in the church’s recipe for healthy Christians. When we turn our eyes to the example of those who came before, I will argue that historically theological instruction played a much more prominent role than it does now. Christian schools ought to fill the gap left by our churches in this area.

To start with, I take spiritual formation to mean “having a healthy Christian life.” For most of Christian history, it was believed that growing to spiritual health primarily occurred in the church. In the Reformation, this view still pertained, but the Eucharist no longer was understood to have the same spiritual value as the preaching of the word. Exploring this shift helps us to answer the question of how to do spiritual formation.
The Reformation theologians fundamentally taught that God’s central and complete gift to us, through Jesus Christ in the Spirit, was Himself. As the Westminster Catechism famously states, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” God bestows Himself on us, so healthy Christianity means realizing more and more fully the consequences of that profound gift.

“But,” it might be objected, “surely the Reformation intended to decrease the significance of the institutional Church in light of this gift. How can the Church’s role diminish and yet remain the primary place in which believers are sanctified?”

This objection is only voiced on the other side of the triumph of individualism in the modern and post-modern period, and it would strike the mainstream Reformers and their Protestant heirs as strangely misguided. The Church—and the family as an extension of it—should continue to be the focus of the believer’s spiritual formation. It is in the church that we more deeply come to understand the divine self-disclosure through the preaching of the word, worship, the sacraments, and fellowship. Remember that individual “quiet time” is a relatively recent phenomenon. We should surely pray and read the Scriptures on our own, but such practices do not dislodge the local church, our primary community, as the source of our spiritual formation.

One of the practices that has traditionally been a crucial part of church life—Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox—was catechization and the recitation of creeds in the church service. In addition, sermons tended much more toward what we would now call “abstract” theology (the nature of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, etc.) and derived moral exhortation from it. All of these factors compounded reveal that the Church highly values theological teaching as an important means of sanctification.

Theology is the contemplation of who God is. Churches affirmed the creeds each Sunday and expected everyone to go through a catechism class in order to learn about God’s character, illustrated especially through the dramatic narrative of His saving work. If sanctification means more deeply grasping God’s gift of Himself to us in salvation, leading to forming our characters as we learn to live in His kingdom, then what better way to achieve this goal than learning theology?

Many of us think of theology as dry and boring. When properly understood as engagement with the loving God of the universe Himself and taught by someone who loves God and can communicate this passion, it will be anything but dull.

For a host of reasons, which I need not rehearse, our contemporary churches have mostly neglected the teaching of theology. If Sunday School (for adults and children) is failing to give God’s people what they need in terms of theological confessions, creeds, and catechisms, then this is a void into which the Christian school must step. Classical schools are especially well poised to fill this gap since they often already have faculty capable of dynamically teaching these things. The ethos of our schools is take knowledge per se and the past seriously.

I grant that this has not traditionally been the role of the school. However, the Christian school exists for the sake of the church; its task is to educate the next generation of members of the body of Christ.
Let me offer some brief suggestions about how theological teaching should be done. In the lower grades, students should memorize the Lord’s Prayer, the doxology, the Ten Commandments, the Apostle’s creed, along with a denominational confession if the school has one. Memorization should be accompanied with age-appropriate instruction regarding the meaning of these items. In the upper grades, students ought to take time in Bible class or chapel services to work through the meaning of the creeds, which is best accomplished through a catechism. Presbyterian schools will choose the Westminster Catechism, while more broadly Evangelical schools can affirm nearly everything in the oft-overlooked and underestimated Heidelberg Catechism.

I will admit: it is tough to sell this to parents as a solution to the demand for “spiritual formation.” Teaching theology is not the only way to accomplish this, of course, and it will be essential to integrate service to the community, corporate and private prayer, modeling by faculty and staff of a well-formed spiritual life, and the relevant practices I am sure other responders in this issue suggest.

Whether in the school, church, or home, though, let us do well by our students to see them as God’s beloved children who need to be nurtured in his life-giving truth. Let us study theology.

Andrew Selby is a student of historical theology at Toronto School of Theology. He works for ClassicalComposition.com and formerly taught at Trinity Classical Academy in Santa Clarita, CA.

by Leslie Moeller, Publisher

It certainly is a new year. With our economy suffering and a new president, things look very different than at the beginning of 2008. Drafting budgets and setting tuition force difficult decisions in the best of times. Facing a recession of unknown depth or duration can strike fear in the most optimistic leader. But times of change and crisis offer an opportunity for a school to take a hard look at its mission and to evaluate how efficiently their programs and budgets further it.

This edition of The Journal was born out of a brief email exchange on an issue related to the mission of all of our schools: the spiritual formation of students. SCL supports individuals involved in Christ-centered, liberal arts education. No doubt you and your fellow SCL members are motivated, at least in significant part, by the desire to see children grow into committed Christian adults. But what is the school’s role in this endeavor? What does this look like in your classrooms? What are your parents’ expectations and how well do they match the goals of the school? As Editor Chuck Evans puts it, “This topic is easily both the number one mission distinctive of most Christian schools…and the number one source of philosophical conflict.”

We solicited thoughts on the spiritual formation of students from a wide variety of Christian educators committed to classical education. You will find their responses in this edition. At our summer conference this year, Dr. John Westerhoff will continue this conversation as one of our featured plenary speakers.
We hope you find the views in this edition thought provoking. We also hope to hear your views at this summer’s conference. We look forward to seeing you in San Antonio!

by John Heaton

Like every concerned parent, pastor, or educator, I look at the dropout rates of young people who leave their faith in college, never to return to the Church again, and I wonder how best to stem the tide. I take little comfort in telling myself that schools rank low in the “influence index,” or that spiritual outcomes are not the primary objectives of our typical student profile. I actually take more comfort in embracing a dose of realism—life is tough; pray hard—and I pursue a few basic objectives.

“Life is tough; pray hard …”

First, I have made a mantra out of telling parents and faculty that our school does not compartmentalize matters of faith. My goal is for spirituality to be pervasive, natural, and uncontrived. As an Anglican parish school, we have Morning Prayer for our students and courses in religion, but matters of faith are not confined to those venues.

Second, I advocate teaching the Bible as the Bible. Long ago I threw out all Grammar School curriculums in this area. I told my teachers to take the Scripture and to do something novel: read it with your students, outline it, make lists of the details, memorize it, and learn chapter content. Forget about curriculums that seek to make a life-application each step along the way, and don’t moralize. I have to trust that the Holy Spirit will do that at some point, but our goal at school will be to do something I don’t think most churches do very well, which is to master the text.

Third, I try to succeed with students where they are. We set ourselves up for failure if we seek to make students the next participants in the culture war. They have their own wars to fight right now, and spiritual formation occurs when they learn spiritual disciplines applied to their problems in the present. Learning faithfulness in the present will help them to be faithful when the future becomes the present. In other words, if our goal is simply to produce students who are future cultural change agents, we may overemphasize ideas, positions, and apologetic methods, and overlook the conversion that they must experience themselves.

Finally, I think conversion is a better way to think about the whole process. Christian experience is not one, but a series of conversions or “turnings” or “re-turnings.” All of us had to learn how to hold our faith as we moved through different experiences in life. We had to re-negotiate ourselves against the Dogmatics we learned at home and in Sunday School. Each time we passed from one stage to the next, whether it was from high school to college, or from college to young adulthood, or into marriage or middle age, we had to undergo a new “conversion” of sorts. We had to move up to the next level, and our faith had to be relevant and vital.

In this way of thinking, a crisis of faith at any level is a crisis of conversion. Jesus said to Peter that “Satan has desired to have you, but I have prayed for you, that your faith fail not: and when you are converted, strengthen your brothers.” Jesus certainly wasn’t referring to a first-time embrace of faith on Peter’s part, but to an on-going and thoroughgoing navigation through a crisis of faith. These transitions can be successfully made when students find the support and encouragement in the people of God at each step in the process. In the K-12 student context, I think that means that we have to be present-oriented and focus on the challenges that students face right now.

Rev’d John Heaton is the Headmaster of New Covenant Schools, Lynchburg, Virginia, which is affiliated with the Reformed Episcopal Church. He is a past Chairman of the Society for Classical Learning, and currently serves as
co-editor of The Journal.

by Brad Green, PhD

One of the most helpful ways to tackle the question of “spiritual formation” is to step back and ask very basic questions like, “What is the goal of education?” “What kind of person are we trying to form?” If we answer them well, the answers might help us to think through how all learning and studying ultimately serves a certain goal: the formation of a certain kind of person.

Educators tend to be idealists and dreamers. Many of us find ourselves drawn into independent schools, I suspect, because we want something for our children that we did not receive, and we want to experience a different type of education ourselves. There is something very compelling and attractive about being associated with a school that has a grand vision and that is actually accomplishing that vision, even partially.

Many Christian school leaders have been approached by parents concerned that the school’s curriculum or emphases are not “practical” enough, or that the school does not place enough emphasis on “spiritual formation.” This is a dicey question to which to respond. If one says that “spiritual formation” is not a key emphasis then one seems very, well, unspiritual. But if one says that math, English, literature, and science are all peripheral, and that the “real” goal is spiritual formation, one is falling into a different kind of error—where math, English, literature, and science have no ultimate relation to the mission of a school!

Probably the wiser path to follow is to try and tease out the unique way in which a school engages in “spiritual formation.” We may need to steal back the language of “spiritual formation” and think through what such a task looks like in a school setting. I have a hunch that when parents call for “spiritual formation” they are seeking a kind of direct Bible teaching time, prayer time, moral exhortation time, etc. And all of these are entirely appropriate.

“We are working upstream amidst a culture that discourages a coherent and unified understanding of reality.”

As we have tried to hammer out a vision of Christian schooling in the classical tradition at Augustine School, we have tried to constantly ask the question, “To what end?” One of the strengths of an older understanding of education was that the key issue was often one of personal formation. As Christians wrestled with this, they often construed education in terms of shaping a person who 1) could live a wise and virtuous life in the present, and 2) was being prepared for his or her ultimate destiny—the vision of God.

With that sort of goal in mind, we should ask how any aspect of our school or curriculum helps us form the kind of student we desire. Thus, we might point out that the simple practices of reading a book or translating a Latin sentence are character-forming activities (among other things, patience and fortitude are encouraged!). Having to engage in a debate and think on one’s feet is a wonderful “person-forming” exercise where a student is being trained to think and speak well under pressure. In short, everything we do in our schools should be person-forming endeavors. And when our larger goal is person formation, in the sense of molding students into being the people they are called by God to be, we are already engaged in “spiritual formation” of a certain type.

At the same time, if one of our goals is to develop students who can think “Christianly” about all disciplines, and can bring a Christian perspective to bear on all things, more must be said. Given the nature and shape of modern culture, I believe that we are shirking our duty if we think our students will just naturally make certain theological connections as they study and learn math, English, literature, science, etc. They need many prompts to begin to see the various connections and links—connections and links that are subtly and not so subtly denied by the dominant culture. That is, if we want our students to see the unity of all truth under God, we need to intentionally help our students to see these connections, and—in a fragmented culture that has such a dominant influence—this requires some basic teaching about God, man, and the world.

That means teaching and grounding in the basics of Scripture and theology. In short, if we want our students to really see the unity of all truth under God, in every discipline, we have to work with extra diligence, because we know that we are working upstream amidst a culture that so often discourages a coherent and unified understanding of reality.

We need Hugh of St. Victor’s insight from his Didascalicon: “Learn everything; you will see afterwards that nothing is superfluous.” We study and learn many things, trusting that we live in a world created, ordered, and governed by a good God, and that, ultimately, God might show us, over time, the unity and beauty of His world. He might show us how “nothing is superfluous.” Insight and wisdom take time, and schools, at their best, provide a place for them and some of that time.

Brad Green is Associate Professor of Christian Studies at Union University and a co-founder of Augustine School. He lives in Jackson, Tennessee.

by Rob Shelton

When I was a youth pastor, I had what many would call a demanding and teaching-based ministry, so all this talk of spiritual formation reminds me of similar discussions I used to have with parents. They wanted the youth group to be less like school. Now, as the leader of a school, the parents want the school to be more like youth group. This leads me to think that “spiritual formation” is not a concern specific to Christian schools, but a trend within American Christianity.

While a youth pastor, I found myself dreaming of a time when I would not have to defend demanding discipleship or serious training of the mind, so when I took the opportunity to lead a classical Christian high school, I thought the time had arrived. Surely, I thought, these will be people who “get it.” As we all know, however, this is not necessarily the case. It seems that many of our parents still traffic in a form of latent Gnosticism: there is “real” life and there is “spiritual” life, and education is not a part of the latter.
So I find myself having to dust off the arguments and advice I used with parents in the church when they had concerns that their students weren’t “growing spiritually.”

1. It seems the city of Corinth had plenty of “spiritual” people in the church, but Paul thought it necessary to educate them: “Now concerning spiritual things, brothers, I don’t want you to be ignorant.” (1 Cor. 12:1) Paul even had to “make known” to them that saying “Jesus is accursed” wasn’t a Spirit-led endeavor. It seems that spiritual formation in the New Testament involved a great deal of instruction.

2. If instruction is spiritual formation, then some might counter that it only concerns “church” stuff and thus, the instruction that is happening in most classes at school isn’t really helping spiritual formation. I counter that Jesus claims to be “the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.” (John 14:6) If this is indeed so, that Jesus is the truth, then what we do with the truth, we do with Jesus. Learning to recognize truth, to admire truth, to defend truth, and to follow truth thus seems a highly spiritual endeavor.

3. Many might concede these two, but when all is done, the retort may follow, “Yes, but I don’t see that it’s real to the students.” By “it” they mean Christianity and by “real” they mean…well, what do they mean? Whatever it is they mean, there is a dominant view out there that seems to argue that “making it real” happens through spiritual formation.

Which brings us back to where we started. When it comes right down to it, perhaps we should admit that Jesus never talked about spiritual formation. He did, however, talk much about obedience. In fact, he said that the measure of how real this stuff is to a person is his or her obedience: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) It seems obedience trumps spirituality, or, perhaps, obedience is spirituality. If that is true, here’s the rub: obedience is an act of the will and cannot be conjured or cajoled, whether in school or a youth group. We cannot “spiritually form” students because we cannot force obedience. What we can do, however, is to educate properly so students are better equipped to obey. Knowing the world accurately conceivably helps them to act obediently and correctly within it. And maybe then we can break down the American Christian Gnosticism that motivates the concern in the first place.

There is no “spiritual” life alongside “real” life. Spiritual life is real life lived in obedience to Jesus Christ.

Rob Shelton is the Headmaster of the middle and upper schools at Geneva School of Boerne, Texas.

By Charles Starr

How can an evangelical Christian, trained in literature by a champion of classical education, himself a book loving English teacher and C. S. Lewis scholar (nay, fanatic), possibly argue that schools which ground their philosophy in a classical model of education are mistaken if they don’t include the study of film (along with television and other mass media) in their curricula? Four truths lead me to the claim: technology always impacts literacy, mass media is changing the modes in which we think, film literacy is the only way to overcome the dangers of film and television, and film production excites students to work harder and to think more deeply. Now I’d best try to prove my claims.

The Connection Between Literacy and Technology
“Literacy” used to mean the ability to read books. Then came PCs and Macs and the computer revolution made educators talk about “computer literacy.” Even before the eighties, though, we were defining literacy as having the skills one needs to make a living. For most of history, people were farmers and few of them had to learn reading skills to survive. For them, literacy (in the modern sense of the word) was knowing how to plow fields, make tools, and manage resources. The printing press changed all that. Its invention eventually required people to become literate (in the original sense of the word) in order to survive. Before the press, books had to be painstakingly hand copied and so were few in number and very expensive. With the printing press, however, books and newspapers could be cheaply mass-produced, resulting in an age which began to rely more heavily on the printed word till, eventually, every productive person had to be taught to read. If technology so influences what we need to learn, curricular design should include responsiveness to technological change.

The New Way of Thinking
It is not, however, enough to say that technology influences what we need to learn. We should additionally be aware that advances in technology also change the way we think. Consider how much faster movies are today. They cut from image to image, from one angle to another very quickly. This is just one example of how technology is changing the way we process information. Books require a kind of thinking that depends on extended amounts of time. They reveal their information slowly and in a linear fashion. When we read the sentence, “The tomb in which they laid the body of Jesus was empty,” it takes us a second or two to read down the line of the sentence and understand the information. But we would comprehend a picture of the empty tomb almost instantly.
This kind of holistic, immediate communication is what images do. As we turn more and more to film, television, and graphics-heavy computers, we are becoming a people who learn holistically and process more information more quickly. Books and reading will not disappear. But ours has become a post-literate culture, and we need to recognize and respond to the differences in thinking processes.
In the sixties and seventies, Francis Schaeffer described our thought systems as progressing toward an “escape from reason.” I am not convinced, however, that he knew what we were escaping to. In part it has been a dive into irrationality, but it has also been a shift toward those imaginative processes we associate with right brained thinking—with non-linear intuition (holistic thinking), analogy, and, especially, story. There is a significant shift toward learning through narrative rather than exposition—through stories rather than propositional explanations. When we learn from or think with stories, we do so differently than when we think about abstract concepts, ideas, and theories. It’s not necessarily a better way to think (each has its advantages and disadvantages), but it’s the way of thinking we’re using more and more thanks to mass media.

The Response: Film and Mass Media Literacy
Technology influences what we need to learn and how we think. How, then, should we respond? In regard to the latter, I believe that schools oriented toward a classical model of education are in a good position in that they both understand the importance of left brained, critical thinking (and even teach formal logic to their students), and the value of the imaginative arts. In regard to the former, I argue that even schools oriented toward a classical curriculum should acknowledge the need for film literacy and teach it.
That said, I know that parents and teachers from various backgrounds mistrust mass media, not just for its immoral content, but for its negative effects on the thinking abilities of children. They say that television turns kids into passive viewers and stifles their imaginations. But I argue that learning how to read film and television can overcome many of these problems and turn electronic media into useful tools for teaching and learning.
What then does this new literacy entail?
The primary quality of film is that it communicates on multiple levels at once. Though this can be dangerous, it can also be beneficial because film can say a great deal after the fashion of all good imaginative texts: by showing—incarnating truth into form. The secret to learning how to read film, then, is to do so on multiple levels, focusing on the variety of techniques film incorporates in its text.

1. Good movie watchers pay attention to a film’s images. Directors will use lighting and shadow to highlight key places and people on the screen, or to communicate something about the images like, “Here’s a shadowy villain.” Color is often used as a theme or symbol in a movie. Also consider framing: though there is a principle subject on which to focus, a good director fills his camera frame (like an artist his canvas) with as much information as possible and even makes good use of spaces that are outside the frame (called off screen space).

2. Editing offers much for analysis, being first of all used to regulate the emotional pace of a film. Scenes that are action packed will be edited with short sequences or cuts so that the camera angle is constantly changing. This fast pace helps the audience experience excitement, suspense, confusion, or fear. Sometimes editing will be used to connect separate images together. Using a device called parallel development, the editor of “The Untouchables” adds suspense to a train station shootout by cutting back and forth between a gun battle and a baby carriage careening out of control down a stairway in the midst of blazing guns. Suddenly the scene is not just about defeating criminals; it’s also about saving an innocent life.

3. Sound is instrumental to film. First, it provides realism. Second, it helps to establish context: if we see a darkly lit room but can hear ocean waves and sea gulls, we know where the room is. The other key sound element is the music track. Its purpose is to enhance the emotional effect of the images or otherwise comment on the action.

If we can learn the techniques and production methods used by film makers, we can become more
conscious and critical in our film viewing, gather more meaning from a film text, and overcome the
dangers of manipulation and passive viewing.

The New Literacy 2.0
In the future, schools will teach students to be proactive, not just reactive toward film, television,
music, computer games, and the internet. Such a revolution in literacy only took a decade for computer
education. Even in an age where school curriculum often balloons out of control, I nevertheless argue that electronic image literacy is a needed addition and long overdue.
It will come in two forms:
1. Technique Analysis and Interpretation: As I outlined above, current approaches to media
literacy emphasize the analysis of particulars. Additionally, informing students about propaganda techniques, marketing methods, and the way mass media industries
are structured is also important, as is applying interpretive methods students
are taught to apply to story and poetry in English classes.
2. The trend on the horizon is video production. Not elective video journalism classes where a handful of students create a weekly newscast—these have existed in schools for some time. Instead, the best way to
learn how to read a movie is to have to make one. If film literacy becomes the job of language arts/English teachers, production will become a part of their curriculum (I have made it part of mine for almost
two decades). Students may eventually do research video documentaries on Macbeth
not just research papers. Traditional reading and writing won’t disappear (in fact, the more I learn about film making, the more I realize that it’s at its best when it begins with well crafted writing), but, as video production becomes cheaper and easier, students will be taught(hopefully in a variety of courses) to do script writing, pre-production problem solving (called doing a script break down), camera operation, and post-production editing.
In my experience, assigning the average student a research paper may get ten hours of work
from him; assign him a research documentary, and he’ll put in fifty. Students will produce research
based videos as well as creative projects for a variety of classes in the future and in so doing will
exercise higher order thinking skills, dive deeply into curricular content, and put in more hours of
work than their teachers could possibly imagine.