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his talk will
attempt to answer three questions; what is classical education,
why is it necessary in our day and what are its benefits?
The word "classical" or "classic" is used in many contexts
and often without specific meaning: Classic Coke, classical
music, classic rock; however, classical usually means something
that through time for various reasons has been proven worthy of
our respect and interest. In music, the work of certain
composers has been recognized as worth saving while that of
others, even though perhaps popular in its own time, has been
tossed aside to the dust-bin of history. The same is true of
books; some books are more worthy of study than others because
of the profundity and clarity with which they express the ideas
that they contain.
The study of the great books has been the backbone of good
education for centuries. If you look at the books read by the
intellectual giants of our culture, you find that there are
particular books that come up again and again. These books were
required of most schoolboys until the rise of Dewey and the
democratization of education through the public school system.
The public school system saw these books as elitist and not
easily comprehensible by the masses and therefore not
appropriate for public education.
Another influence contributing to the demise of the great
books was the demoralization of the Christian intellectual
community. Most of the institutions of learning in this country
were founded by Christians who saw it as their duty to conquer
the intellectual arena for Christ. However, since the rise of
secularism and especially since the humiliating defeat that
biblical Christians saw at the Scope's Trial, the evangelical
community has been in full retreat from the intellectual arena.
Before the turn of the century, most institutions of learning
were dominated by those who thought from a biblical worldview;
however, this consensus quickly began to crumble and in 1925 at
the Scope's Trial, through the public humiliation of William
Jennings Bryan's creationism, academia as well as the general
culture came to hold biblical Christianity as unworthy of
intellectual regard. Even though the trial was in no way a
rigorous debate of the creation issue, its effect on the
Christian intellectual community was nothing short of
disastrous. From that point on Christians felt as though the
intellectual community had humiliated them and, to return the
favor, they abandoned the intellectual community in droves. The
intellectual pursuit came to be seen as not only of little value
for Christians but also as simply antagonistic to the faith. At
this point in history the church saw an unraveling of the
Christian intellectual tradition. No longer would Christians
apply themselves to the study of the great thinkers; that would
be a task left entirely to those with a non-Christian world
view.
Christian education has become something of a lost science.
Not only have Christians done very little to prepare their
children to become godly intellects, but intellectual
incompetence has been seen as the true helpmate of vital
spirituality. A soft mind has been seen as a vital tool in the
pursuit of a soft heart. In our day, mental rigor and a vigorous
intellectual pursuit have became equated with doctrinal rigidity
and cold spirituality.
However, by God's grace, with the increasing interest in
classical education, we are seeing a revival of the Christian
intellectual tradition. Classical education differs from most
educational philosophies in that it attempts to step back from
the parade of educational theories that seem to keep us in a
state of continual bewilderment and asks, "What was education
like in the past? What books were used? What goals were thought
important?"
Dorothy Sayers, in her well-known essay, "The Lost Tools of
Learning" attempted to answer these questions and in so doing
gave us some very sage advice for education in our own day. She
began by investigating the medieval model of education and found
that it was composed of two parts; the first was called the
Trivium and the second, the Quadrivium .
The Trivium contained three areas: Grammar, Dialectic, and
Rhetoric. Each of these three areas were specifically suited to
the stages in a child's mental development. During his early
years a child studies the Grammar portion of the Trivium. The
Grammar period (ages 9-11) includes a great deal of language,
preferably an ancient language, such as Latin or Greek, that
will require the child to spend a great deal of time learning
and memorizing its vocabulary and grammatical structure. During
their younger years children possess a great natural ability to
memorize large amounts of material even though they may not
understand its significance. This is the time to fill them full
of facts, such as the multiplication table, geography, dates,
events, plant and animal classifications; anything that lends
itself to easy repetition and assimilation by the mind.
During the second period, the Dialectic period (ages 12-14),
the child begins to understand that which he has learned and
begins to use his reason to ask questions based on the
information that he has gathered in the Grammar stage. It is
during this stage that the child no longer sees the facts that
he learned as merely separate pieces of information but he
starts to put them together into logical relationships by asking
questions. No longer can the American Revolution merely be a
fact in history but it must be understood in the light of the
rest of what the child has learned. For example, how do we
understand the actions of the American patriots in light of what
we know about our responsibility to obey the governing
authorities? How can the fact that Washington and Jefferson are
both held up as great men be reconciled with the fact that they
were slave-holders?
When a child comes to the age when he has the ability to
reason, he usually puts his reason to use by making a nuisance
of himself back-talking to his parents or trying catch them in
some error or fallacy, but during this time the young mind's new
abilities should be directed towards profitable mental
exercises. Formal logic and the proofs of geometry can be a
great aid during this time, so that the student learns the rules
that guide sound thinking. There are many areas that can be used
to provide good practice material for the young mind.. History
supplies many events that involve questions of morality which
require a good deal of discussion and careful reasoning to work
through. Theology also gives many opportunities for debate; even
though our discussion must be seasoned with reverence for the
subject matter as well as our opponents, fundamentally we can
see theological debate as a very healthy and beneficial
activity. A less controversial area is that of mathematics; for
thousands of years the geometry text written by the ancient
Greek mathematician Euclid has provided a beautifully
constructed series of geometrical proofs that, with guidance,
any perceptive child can work through with great benefit to
their thinking skills.
The third period Sayer mentions is that of Rhetoric (ages
14-16). During this period the child moves from merely grasping
the logical sequence of arguments to learning how to present
them in an persuasive, aesthetically pleasing form. Dorothy
Sayers also calls this period the Poetic Age, because during
this period the student is to develop the skill of organizing
the information he has learned into a well reasoned format that
will be both pleasing as well as logical. During this period the
student can begin to specialize in particular areas of interest
and is equipped to move on to the Quadrivium, which involves
specialization in particular areas of study. At this time,
students that are more inclined towards either mathematics and
science or literature and the humanities can pursue the area of
their natural abilities. The pursuit of particular subjects is
appropriate at this point because they have been given the tools
of learning that are necessary for the study of any subject. By
this stage, a student who had been given a classical education
would have the thinking skills and mental discipline that are
necessary to tackle the difficulties associated with most any
area of study.
Why Classical Christian Education is Necessary Today
In modern education, we have put the proverbial cart before
the horse by expecting students to master a great number of
subjects before they have mastered the tools of learning. Even
though the study of language and logic may seem dull in
themselves, they are the tools that one needs to develop to be
able to approach the task of mastering any particular subject
whether it be Scottish political history or carburetor
maintenance. Sayers ends her essay with this line, "The sole
true end of education is simply this; to teach men how to learn
for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is
effort spent in vain."
"Learning to learn for oneself" certainly well summarizes the
pedagogical goal of classical education; however, once one can
learn for one's self, where to go from there? Another
educational truism is helpful, "Education is merely selling
someone on books." To be able to learn for oneself does not mean
that you no longer need a teacher, but rather, you are capable
of making books your teachers without the aid of an instructor
to explain the books to you. In our day and age we seem to be
quite impressed by the number of years one has spent in the
academic institutions obtaining degrees. However, the ancients
probably would have thought that our institutions must be quite
poor since after so many years they had not produced students
who were able to learn independently. That a student still needs
an instructor to explain the works he is reading shows a sad
level of intellectual dependency. We seem to think that
intellectual adolescence must be indefinitely prolonged before
granting a young scholar the right to stand on his own two feet.
The fact that you leave the academic institution should not be a
sign that your education has come to an end, rather it should
show that you are ready for it to begin.
To this end we must ask, "Which books are worthy teachers?"
The answer to this question usually lies in what we are
attempting to learn; however if we are merely to ask in general
"Which are the truly great books?" we find there is
actually fairly broad agreement on the answer to this question.
There are books that through history have shown enduring value.
With the Bible we have a canon which comprises those books that
God has directed the Church through His Spirit to acknowledge as
authoritative; so also with the great books there is a canon of
sorts. Through time certain books have generally come to be
viewed as central to the development of western culture and have
had an unusually large impact due to the profundity and
eloquence with which they have expressed their ideas. These
books form the core of the western intellectual tradition; it is
the ideas contained in them that has formed the saga that we
know as western history.
Anyone who has grown up in the West and desires to understand
the cultural milieu in which he has been raised should read
these books. In order to come to a self-conscious understanding
of the ideas that have shaped the culture around us, we need to
face the ideas at the source from which they came. Francis
Schaeffer had an excellent sense for the top-down flow of ideas.
He was fond of explaining how ideas began with the philosophers,
worked down through the universities, into the popular media and
finally onto the dinner table. Because ideas progress in this
manner, it behooves us to become acquainted with ideas at their
fount so that we may understand their manifestations in our
present culture. Thus, the reading of the great books serves an
important apologetic function for Christians; the books allow us
to grapple with the ideas that have shaped the thinking of those
around us who we are called to minister to as evangelists.
Often when I describe the study of the great books as a tool
in apologetics, people visualize their study as somewhat of a
brutal secular gauntlet the Christian must run in order to gain
intellectual credibility. This is a mistaken understanding.
Certainly there is much in the western intellectual tradition
that must be consciously rejected and put under biblical
criticism; however, it is the non-believer and not the Christian
who must fear the reading of the great books. Those who through
the promotion of political correctness would return us to
polytheistic paganism have come to realize that they must
entirely throw out the study of western culture if they are
going to reshape the thinking of our students. Western thought
has been permeated with Christian monotheism and thus a
persistent concept of objective and universal truth. It will
always be dangerous territory for the mental slugs that
political correctness would raise up on its diet of insipid
relativism.
Certainly the study of the great books should not be taken
lightly. There are serious hazards to one's faith that lurk;
however, studying through the great books often is like the
trouble-filled journey of Christian in Pilgrim's Progress; just
about the time it appears all is lost and that the darkness is
certainly coming in, an author who is a friend of the faith
comes to your side and helps guide you back to the path of
truth. For every Aristotle, there is an Augustine; when you are
in the throes of a skeptical Descartes, the brilliant faith of
Pascal comes to your aid; when under attack by Hume, you have a
friend in Calvin; when besieged by Kant, you fight back with
Lewis. God in his providential care has given us a bountiful
number of voices who have stood in the gap at crucial periods of
our history and spoken for His truth. The men God has raised up
to speak His truth to our culture are a testimony to the
tremendous care with which He has guided the West.
We live in the continuum of western history. In order to
evaluate this stream of which we are part, we must step back
from it and discern the ideas that have shaped it. To attempt to
ignore the ideas that have shaped our cultural history is to
guarantee ourselves not only cultural irrelevance but also
entrenchment in the Christian ghetto. This position will not
only lead to our own intellectual poverty but will also disgrace
the Sovereign God who needs not be mocked by the cowardice of
His children. The King's children do not hide in the alleys but
walk confidently knowing that the sun that shines belongs to
their Father.
The Benefits of a Classical Christian Education
I would like to present to you the benefits
of a classical Christian education.
I thought I understood this topic, but as I continue in
its path, it continues to reveal riches to me that I did not
foresee. My initial
interest in classical Christian education was the desire to help
young Christian minds to understand the flow of history, its
effects on our own day and how we should speak an effective word
back to the critics of our faith in society- an effective
apologia. However, as
time passes, I have seen that a classical education not only
allows you to understand the past, but it also gives you great
aid in understanding and living in the present.
I used to think that the common themes focused on in the
great works of literature were melodramatic and distant from our
daily experience. The
young may ask, “How often do we experience, war, marriage,
death, familial strife, grief, the mishandling of justice, the
confusion of truth and falsehood?
Are not such themes unfamiliar and too heavy a burden for
our young minds?” Yet, if
we unweave the tapestry of life, we find the warp and woof made
of just such material. It
has not taken many years for me to see that in life we must face
death. We must endure
disappointment even from those to whom we looked for security
and sound guidance.
Our media generation would like to hide
from us the realities of life or at least convince us that the
totality of life’s meaning can be found in a sequence of images
flashed before us in high-resolution color on a flat-screen.
We have a generation that wants learning to come through
fun- yet the voice of Aeschylus rebukes us when he says we must
"suffer into truth” We entertain our minds to death and then
find ourselves confused when our young people discover truth to
be a superfluous nuisance impeding their pursuit of the blithe
and happy life.
Yet, what will sustain us when we hold our
first-born lifeless in our arms?
Does the picture of a doting God vainly attempting to
arrange for us a pleasant life really comfort?
When it comes, will we be so shocked by tragedy that we
must retreat from life and fear such a loss ever coming on us
again? Have we been told
that tragedy and grief are to be unexpected and when found, best
hidden away in order to keep the illusion that life does not
contain such burdens?
Why is it that we moderns have such
difficulty seeing that life comes with a veil of tears?
The last hundred years have seen more war and cruelty
than most any century and yet, one might think we have forbidden
the memory of the past.
Does an event not exist unless we are watching it on the six
o’clock news? If it
hasn’t happened to me, do I think it never will?
Jesus Himself wept in grief over the loss of His friend
Lazarus. Over and over
again, God exhorted the Israelites to remember.
They were quick to forget the great works of God’s hand
and the mighty deeds that brought them out of their torment in
the wilderness. When we
do not remember, we do not see the whole of life, but create a
worldview that is solely the product of our own fancy.
A classical education makes us face that
which is not our immediate experience.
It forces us to look at life in all its complexity.
Though a classical education gives a student the tools of
learning that are foundation to logical thinking, a classical
education is not just about developing clear thinkers.
A classical education also gives a student the
opportunity to develop the depth of understanding and broadness
of experience that are foundational to true wisdom.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but this
does not mean that piety narrowly defined is the sum total of
wisdom. Often we tell our
selves that wisdom is the application of moral principles to
daily experience. This
notion reduces wisdom to a type of applied morality, however, we
must understand the fullness of the Biblical concept of wisdom.
The biblical concept of wisdom is much broader than our
usual understanding of what wisdom contains.
Consider Isaiah 28:27-29 “Caraway is not threshed with a
sledge, nor is a cartwheel rolled over cumin; caraway is beaten
out with a rod, and cumin with a stick.
Grain must be ground to make bread; so one does not go on
threshing it forever.
Though he drives the wheels of his threshing cart over it, his
horses do not grind it.
All this also comes from the Lord Almighty, wonderful in counsel
and magnificent in wisdom.”
Now, why does the prophet Isaiah think that detailed
bread making instructions are such a wonderful testimony to
depths of the Lord’s wisdom?
Isn’t bread making just “worldly knowledge”- necessary,
but not really that important?
If these are the questions that naturally come to your
mind when hearing such a passage, listen again and take a
spiritual mind. Proverbs
6:6-8, “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be
wise! It has no
commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in
summer and gathers its food in harvest.”
We might think that being wise means being so
spiritually-minded that we might let such details as when to
plant our seed receive only minor attention.
Proverbs exhorts us otherwise.
Godly wisdom requires we apply ourselves to an
understanding of the world and its ways.
Consider Ecclesiastes 8:1, “Who is like the wise man?
Who know the explanation of things?
Wisdom brightens a man’s face and changes its hard
appearance.” Does it seem
an odd notion to you to think of a young man who has just
understood a geometric proof as making an important advance in
his acquisition of wisdom?
If so, I would challenge you that your division between
worldly and spiritual knowledge is actually quite unspiritual.
If we truly believe that the world we live
in was made by the hand of God, than experiencing and
understanding that world must be seen as a vital aspect of our
gaining God’s wisdom.
Even grief itself must be seen as one of the ways God
teaches us. Ecclesiastes
7:3-4, “Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is
good for the heart. The
heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of
fools is in the house of pleasure.”
All of life must be seen as the book from which we learn
the mind of God. God has
been merciful to give us the scriptures as a guide in this
process to keep our minds from being overcome by the vastness of
what they must learn.
How does this broad understanding of wisdom
tie into the need for a classical education?
It has been wisely said that reading is
accelerated life experience.
We could learn entirely from our own experience, but this
path is slow and full of many painful lessons.
Reading allows us to learn from the experience of others.
If we are to see reading as so important, we must ask,
which books should we read.
We should find those books that have looked most intently
at human life and will guide us towards asking the important
questions about it.
Before saying more about what books help us
develop life experience, I would like to address a common
question regarding the reading of the great books.
Many ask why we need a classical education when we could
exclusively study the scriptures.
The question is understandable for if we forsake the
study of the scriptures, we run the dangerous risk of developing
thoughts that are uninformed by God’s truth.
On the other hand, if we do not study the world, both
past and present, we will read the scriptures without the
context that God chose to speak them into.
The more we study both the world and the Bible, the more
we will understand both.
Let us not confuse the Bible, which is the norm of knowledge,
and the world, which is the stage whereon we accomplish the
pursuit of knowledge.
In contrast to Christianity, many religions
are based on books that are simply collections of moralisms that
demand no historical context or understanding.
In His sovereignty, the God of the Bible chose to reveal
Himself in the context of the fullness of time.
Because God chose to break into time and space, He
produced a complex and involved relationship with secular
history. A moralistic
religion might have us think that the study of history, though
an interesting hobby, is not truly essential to the religious
life. In the Bible we
find a very different situation.
To fully comprehend the biblical books Daniel and Esther,
you will need to read the Greek historian Herodotus.
The Apostle Paul himself quotes ancient Greek poets and
Peter quotes from Jewish apocryphal writings.
These few examples show that the Bible cannot be read
without seeing its ties to the history into which it was
revealed. The Bible
points us towards itself as our final authority, but it also
assumes that when we come to read it, we know the context from
which it speaks. If we do
not study history, we risk turning the Bible into a mere
collection of moralisms from which we derive daily guidance for
our lives.
God is not a distant moralist who has
simply given us a list of precepts to follow and then sent us on
our way hoping we will follow them.
He is the sovereign Lord who is intimately involved in
the entire flow of history.
If our very steps are according to His plan, are not the
twists and turns of history also His design?
When authors create a story, they put their thoughts to
pen and paper, when our God chose to write His story, He chose
as his medium, time and space.
Our temptation is to view the expanse of history as a
realm within which God’s hand is only dimly seen.
There is sin in the world and much we see that goes
against God’s law, but this should not make us think for a
moment that His will is not being accomplished or His providence
does not attend. In our
day and age, we tend to have a healthy appreciation of the fact
that when we study math, geology, chemistry, physics- the
various natural sciences, that we are studying the work of God’s
hands. Yet, we must also
understand, when we read Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon,
Shakespeare, Plato or even Spinoza, we are studying what the
work of God’s hand has brought about.
C.S. Lewis noted that the greatest
difficulty he faced in convincing moderns of the truth of
Christ’s historical resurrection was not intellectual arguments
against it, but the sense many moderns have that besides idle
curiosity, all of history has no significant relation to them.
It is almost as if we think it is only the present that
exists and history is just an ambiguous mirage.
In contrast, Augustine, the early church theologian,
wrote his Confessions as an exercise in sanctified memory-
recalling his life in order to see the hand of God bringing him
to salvation. He held
memory to be so crucial to the Christian life, he spent a entire
chapter at the end of the Confessions discussing its nature.
If we desire to raise a generation of young
Christians who hold firmly to the truth of their faith, we must
not forget to exhort them to study and remember what the Lord
has done. The works of those authors who have looked most
closely at human life and attempted to give expression to its
profoundest mysteries provide our best opportunity to develop
the experience in which wisdom can slowly take root.
If you are
interested in tutorials in classical Christian
education taught by Fritz Hinrichs, please see
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