Christian Teacher, Secular School

Disclaimer: I'm a Protestant Christian, so I'll be addressing the topics in this post from that lens.

Something that classical educators talk a lot about are the three transcendentals - Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. One day I'll do a whole series about them, but they raise some interesting dilemmas outside of their definitions. If, as many classical educators claim, the goal of education is to guide students to know truth, to do good, and to love beauty, then shouldn't it be the goal of an educator to lead children toward Christ, toward the Truth of God as seen in his Word? As a Christian, is it possible to really educate students without being able to talk about Christianity? Basically, is it possible to actually teach in a way that's consistent with Christian beliefs in a public school? 

This has always been a bit of a struggle for me personally. I teach at a classical school, yes, but it's a charter school. For those not familiar with charter schools, they're essentially public schools - they're tuition-free, they receive federal and state funding, and they have to subscribe to all the rules and regulations of normal public schools - the upside of a charter school is that it has a bit more freedom than local ISD schools to choose its curriculum and its teaching methods. Still, charter schools are legally required to be secular institutions. Because I teach in a charter school I can teach how I want (classically), but I can't teach what I want (to be fair, there is no school where you can teach whatever you want).

So, if one of my main goals as a teacher is to lead students to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and if as a Christian I believe that God is the ultimate embodiment of those three things, how can I successfully teach my students and guide them toward truth, beauty, and goodness if I'm not allowed to teach Christianity explicitly?

Well, the conclusion that I've come to over the years is that it's not really possible to be a successful Christian educator in a secular school if we define success in education as instructing students in Christian values and in Christian theology. And maybe, if we assume that Christianity is actually true, a truly successful education is one that produces young men and women who can think well, speak well, love others well, and love God above all. I think, however, there's space for an excellent education to be had outside of an explicitly Chritstian context.

Christian thinkers, almost from the outset of the faith, have struggled with the question of whether it was even possible for anyone to know anything outside of the light of the Christian faith. The general answer to that question has been that there are two main categories of knowledge. There is the category of general revelation, and this includes most things that can be known - science, mathematics, history, language. This is essentilly the entire foundation of an education. The idea behing general revelation is that men are created in the image of a good God. They were created to fill the earth and subdue it. In order to fulfill this mandate men need minds that are capable of understanding and interacting with the woeld that God created. Christians and non-Christians alike, then, using the reason and sensory capacities that they have are capable of gaining real knowledge about the world we live in.

There's more to general revelation, however, than just the observations of the natural world that are the foundation of science, or the relationships between numbers that make up mathematics, or the mere facts and sequences of events of history, or the rules and intracacies of language. Even the most skeptical Christians will grant that a specialized knowledge of God is not necessary the excell in these subjects. General revelation, however, extends even to truths as important as the appreciation of beautiful things, human ethics, the existence and basic nature of a god. Don't take my word for it. Christ himself says in the Sermon on the Mount, "For he [God] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect," (Matthew 5:45-8). The implication of these verses is there even people who do not love and honor the Judeo-Christian God are given the grace to know what good and evil are, and are given the grace to choose to do good things in, quite frankly, a broad range on contexts. General revelation shows us the difference between truth and lies, good and evil, beauty and ugliness and our natural capacity for reason can help us seek and pursue those things. 

So what, then? Can our reason tell us everything that's worth knowing on its own? Is the Bible, are Christian teaching and doctrine, just fun little add-ons to the great amount of knowledge we can amass on our own? The traditional Christian response to that would be no. The human mind, the human senses, and human reason are great gifts, but in an ultimate cosmic sense they're meaningless. The great human problem is not physical death or human suffering (and I do not say this to mitigate those problems). The great human problem is the sin we carry as individuals and as a species that consigns us to eternal separation from God. Our minds, however great they are, cannot solve this spiritual problem. In comes special revelation. Special revelation is knowledge that our reason could never give us, it is the knowledge that God Himself gives us to solve our cosmic problem. It's the most important knowledge we can ever get, by far. 

So, where does that leave the Christian teacher who can't teach the faith? God has given human beings an enormous capacity to know in the arena of general revelation. The Christian teacher can teach the core subjects with just as much effectiveness as anyone else. But it's important to remember that classical education in particular is interested in training students to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful - to train their affections if I may insert a bit of jargon. There is so much space within general revelation to do this as well. Pagans as well as Christians have created great works of art, have crafted glorious songs, graceful dances, and works of literature. In short all men have the capacity to love and see beauty. Pagans as well as Christians have thought great thoughts, have had bursts of insight and flashes of genius. All men have the capacity to seek and understand truth. Pagans as well as Christians love their familes and their friends, have consciences, know to strive to do virtue and avoid vice. All men know and try to be good. All with varying rates of success. 

Is it worth it to teach in a secular enviornment? Yes, but only if we really belive it when we say that we think that God is real, that God is good. We can teach students the subjects we've been given because that is a great and noble task. We can teach students to be virtuous, both in their minds and in their souls. We can teach them to believe in beauty and to long for it. And most of all we can teach them to be truth seekers. Because if God True, if he is Good, if he is Beautiful, if God IS, then those who seek after those things should find them in him.  

Back to Basics - What is Classical Education?

 I recently attended a professional development conference for educators who have experience teaching at classical schools. Despite the collective experience in the room, the first two sessions, totaling over three hours, were devoted to an attempt to define classical education. I won't dwell on the eye-rolls and mild agitation of the more seasoned classical teachers, but will instead offer an explanation as to why basically everywhere people go in the classical education world people feel the need over and over to try to explain what classical education is. The answer is very simple - no one, including the people giving their definitions, knows. 

Thank you for your time, you've been a wonderful audience. 

Ok, in all seriousness though, in all my time as a classical educator I have never heard two people give the same explanation or definition of classical education. I've heard it described as, "the way everyone was educated until one hundred years ago," "a distinctive education based on the Greek and Roman tradition," "An education that produces good men who speak well," "an education that shapes the thoughts and pleasures of its students toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful,"  "An education that produces joy and wonder and creates students who are a light to those around them," or "an education that leads students toward Truth, Goodness, and Beauty and seeks to pass on the soul of a society from one generation to the next." I actually heard all of those different definitions last week. There were twice as many as which were floated, but honestly, I got bored and stopped writing them down. You feel like you know what it is yet? I know my struggle has always been that these so-called definitions that people frequently float have no shortage of jargon but are somewhat lacking in actual substance. 

So, how, then, are schools able to describe themselves as classical, to claim that they're providing a classical education if there's not a clear sense of what a classical education actually is? I've sort of discovered that when most people talk about classical education, they're not really talking about a real pedagogical thing. They're more talking about a sort of pedagogical zeitgeist, a feeling, a movement.

 

Over the next few weeks, I'd like to explore some of the ideas, methods, and courses that tend to be shared by schools that call themselves classical. It should be noted, however, that because there's not an actual clear-cut definition of classical education, there's not an actual set of rules or pedagogical prescriptives that can be produced and pointed to, that the list I'll be exploring is built on generalizations and tendencies within the so-called classical community. Not every school or co-op will do everything listed, and that's ok. 

So, what makes a school 'classical?'

According to my observations, a classical school tends to, in broad strokes: 

• Connect itself to a perception of a more moral and more academically rigorous past
• Describe itself as a liberal arts institution
• Require its students to learn Latin
• Use older books and use primary texts as its main teaching tools
• Focus on producing students who can use language well

Over the next five weeks, we'll look at each one of these:

1.  Is classical education really the way everyone was educated until a hundred years ago? Here
2. What is a liberal art, and where can I buy one? Part One, Part Two
3. What is the point of learning a dead language (no, really, what is the point)? 
4. Should we only read things by dead people?  
5. And finally, Who is the 'good man speaking well?'

I Can Classical... And You Can Too

I’m a classical educator, I guess. I never set out to be one. I was originally going to study and teach philosophy at the university level. Or if that didn't work out, I was going to get married and volunteer at a zoo. However, my senior year of undergrad I realized that the plan I had crafted for my future had become intolerable to me. I was a philosophy major, and while philosophy texts were fun to read when you could understand them, philosophers were no fun to talk to (you all know what I mean). I could no longer imagine spending the rest of my life trapped in conversations about the place that quantum mechanics held in the debate about the B theory of time. Also, it turned out that zoos wouldn't let you volunteer to just hang out with the animals without some kind of useful degree in biology or exotic veterinary science So, what was I to do?

A friend conveniently mentioned to me that fateful December that it was possible to teach in a classical charter school without an educational degree. I figured that could do that for a year while I reevaluated. And here I am, seven years later, still reevaluating. I fell into the world of classical education, despite never having received one myself. I’ve even been ‘converted’ to its methods and ideologies so far as I or anyone really understands them. I like teaching, and if test scores mean anything (which is debatable), I’m pretty good at it. I still feel a lot of times, however, that I’m just kind of floating aimlessly down a path I sort of fell into.

I know that classical ed. has no shortage of defenders, most of whom are far more eloquent than I am, and honestly, I’m not really interested in defending the style. For one thing, it’s hard to defend something that barely has a definition. For another thing, classical education has become something of a fad in recent years. The amount of metaphorical ink that has been spilled describing, and defining, and defending the style is literally astronomical.

So I’m left with a problem: I’m a child of the internet age and I fit the type well. I have no real skills or interesting hobbies – I’ve finished one cross-stitch project, I’ve knitted half of a scarf, and I draw badly, so I can’t really call myself a crafter. I say that my hobby is reading when asked, but by that I mean that I liked to read when I was younger and now I binge-watch Netflix, listen to podcasts while I drive, and listen to one audiobook a month on audible. I’m overeducated and have a masters in classical education, so I guess that in the world of credentialism, I’m qualified to talk about something. I don’t have Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok - I got rid of all my social media accounts - and I’ve never been very good or consistent about journaling. So, now I’m stuck with the only philosophical question that really matters – if I don’t post my thoughts on the internet for strangers to read, does my life have any real meaning or value at all?

This post was meant to act as a sort of ethos for myself, as well as to provide a sort of vision or mission for this blog. So far I hope that I have shown that I am not really the most qualified person in the world to talk about anything with any sort of authority. I fell into this life by accident. I’ve been trying to figure out what everything is as I go, and I’d like to invite you on this journey with me as I attempt to discover answers to the perennial questions surrounding classical education.

What is a liberal art? Where can you find a quadrivium? Did Dorothy Sayers ever find her tools of learning?  Does anyone actually know what classical education is anyways? I’ve been a classical educator for a laughable seven years, but if these past years of exercising copious amounts of unearned confidence have taught me one thing, it’s that with a little bit of humility and a lot a bit of patience (and some research) I can classical… and you can too.