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. 

The Quadrivium As Linguistic Arts

My third-grade teacher had to bribe us in order to get us to memorize the multiplication tables. For every table you mastered, you won one part of an ice cream party. The ones got you a bowl, the twos a spoon. If you proved proficient in the threes you won a scoop of cheap vanilla ice cream, the fours got you two, and so on until, once you had demonstrated perfect proficiency of the twelve times, you had amassed a topping laden sundae that was the stuff ten year old's dreams were made of. I coveted that sundae. Unfortunately, my sugar-coated fever dreams were dashed. I believe I earned up to chocolate syrup but was unable to progress satisfactorily past the sixes. If I am being perfectly honest, I still can not. 

As I progressed in my mathematical education, I found myself becoming increasingly bored and frustrated in turns. Long division was difficult, algebra, with its insidious introduction of abstract alphabetical symbols and values on either side of the equal sign, frequently reduced me to tears. I discovered my spatial reasoning issues in geometry, and I can boast that I never passed a single calculus test. 

My father, a nuclear engineer who crafted new equations for his doctoral thesis, would attempt to help me. These tutoring sessions would nearly always end, not in new understanding, but in shouting and tears. The best I could expect from my teachers was enough help to get me to pass classes with a B. It was perhaps inevitable that I would come to the conclusion that I was 'not a math person,' and that 'math was stupid anyway."

Far from being an isolated incident, I find as an educator that many of my students are undergoing similar mathematical experiences. I teach an honors section of eighth-grade students. They're bright children. They are incredibly gifted in nearly every single class, taking to new subjects, information, and skills with relative ease. And yet, mathematically they struggle. One girl came to class with a literal spring in her step. As she flounced through the door she greeted her peers and gaily announced that she and her father had engaged in a shouting match the previous evening as he attempted to help her with her mathematics. The others laughed. Far from being horrified or confused at her struggle, they revealed that they were also part of the culture of mathematical ineptitude. 

Not every student struggles to grasp mathematics, but those who show a natural talent for the subject have become increasingly rare. It's tempting to look at these academic unicorns as opposed to the rest of the unwashed masses and conclude that there are some people who are simply 'mathematically minded.' The best that the rest of us can hope for is to learn our basic sums and rely on calculators to do anything more complicated than single-digit multiplication for us. 

However, if one looks beyond the borders of the U.S. it becomes clear that the issue is not necessarily that there are only a very few men and women who are capable of mastering the mathematical discipline with any sort of competence. Students who live in countries that are not nearly as prosperous as the United States routinely outperform our students in mathematics by an alarming margin. A 2018 PISA study showed that United States (37/78) children test well below children from countries such as China (1/78), Canada (12/78), and even Hungary (34/78) ¹. Perhaps the issue is not that there are 'math people' and everyone else. Perhaps the issue is that American educators have forgotten what math is and other cultures haven't.

I identify myself as part of the American classical education movement. In classical education circles there's a lot of talk about returning to a 'liberal arts' education. What people usually mean when they say this is that children should read old books that comprise a made-up entity called the Western Canon and learn Latin. It is almost entirely centered on a medieval concept called the Trivium. 

Because the pedagogical tools modern classical educators use are unfamiliar to the vast majority of the citizenry, I'll attempt to offer some basic definitions of the relevant terms. When classical educators reference a liberal arts education they are referring to the traditional seven liberal arts classed into two groups - the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium refers to the three arts Grammar (the art of symbol creation and combination), Logic (the art of reason), and Rhetoric (the art of expressing oneself persuasively). The Quadrivium refers to the four arts of Arithmetic (the art of number theory), Music (the art of number theory applied to time), Geometry (the art of spatial theory), and Astronomy (the art of spatial theory practically applied). These are not definitions that are set in stone. There is a messy and dizzying debate within the classical community about the precise nature of each of these arts, their importance, how they should be understood and taught, if they should be taught, etc. 

The point I'm attempting to make, however, is that classical schools tend to focus on the Trivium - Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, placing a larger emphasis on the subjects that seem to apply to these easily - namely Literature, History, Art, and Latin. The Quadrivial arts tend to be underemphasized with mathematics and the sciences treated like embarrassing bastard children. Many classical schools simply seem not to know what to do with them. 

Classical schools may produce better test scores in mathematics than other public educational models, I am not sure. If they do, however, I would not be convinced that this was not a happy accident - that by teaching certain subjects well, the mental acumen needed to have some success in the quadrivial arts bleeds over. 

I have recently experienced a kind of revelation that has made me reevaluate my juvenile attitude toward mathematics. I have long suspected that the mathematical arts are not a waste of time, and may, perhaps, even have some value inherent in themselves. I have also come to believe that the liberal arts, all of the liberal arts, are necessary in order to create men and women who have free minds. I have struggled, however, to understand how math fits into the creation of a free and happy man. The arts of the Trivium seem obvious. Understanding how to speak well and think well can obviously help a person to avoid being taken in by jargon and propaganda. Written and verbal language can also be used to persuade one of the truth, to debate and explore the subjects that define our civilization and to some extent out humanity. They can be used to communicate deep and meaningful truths about the nature of reality and our experience of it. My understanding of the Quadrivium, on the other hand, has been hampered, not only by my deep ignorance of the subjects themselves, but by my inability to understand what they truly are.

I cannot, therefore, credit myself with this insight, if indeed it is any sort of insight at all. If there is any truth in it, it did not come from me. The Biblical picture of reality, given in the creation account, then Genesis 1:3 is the most profound statement in the whole of human history as regards our understanding of the nature of reality: "And God said, Let there be light, and there was light." Creation was accomplished through Language. 

Now, no one should suppose that the language God used in the act of creation was anything like the verbal language we use to speak with one another, to express our thoughts, ideas, and feelings. How did God communicate Being? I do not think that we will ever truly know what exactly constitutes divine language. However, God in His graciousness allows us to understand something of what it must have been like through mathematics.  I do not think that this is a new idea. I am well aware that as far back as Pythagoras number was associated with the divine. Men like Kepler and Newton knew that God spoke about His universe through the language of mathematics.

What I want to offer is this: The classical movement, in its attempts to reunify knowledge, has struggled to articulate a philosophy of education that truly unites learning into a cohesive unit. Their issue is that, for many, they still see the arts of the Trivium and Quadrivium as functionally different rather than facets of one Master Art. 

The Trivium and Quadrivium are both one half of the way human beings are able to understand and interact with Truth. Reality can only be understood by human beings through language, because creation was, at bottom, a linguistic act. It is our view of what language is that is far too narrow. The Trivium and Quadrivium cannot be divided into the linguistic arts and the mathematical arts. Written expression, verbal expression, and mathematical expression are all aspects of one divine Language. Our troubles understanding this stem from our finite natures. We are not God. We are contrained by the fall, by sin, by the inherently limited nature of our own being. Even still, we are inherently linguistic creatures. We can only understand reality through language.

All of the Liberal Arts represent ways in which human beings can master language. The Trivium contains the arts that give humans mastery over moral and relational reason and by extension human speech. Although it seems limited now, it is possible that human speech once had godlike power. In the wake of Babel and the intervening linguistic corruptions of thousands of years, we will never know for certain. However, there is still great power in human speech for good. God used human speech when he sent his prophets to declare His kingdom and to call men to repentance. He demonstrated this power in His own person through the incarnation of Christ. There is also, however, power in the spoken language for great evil. The devil used speech to tempt Eve to sin. History is littered with tyrants and demagogues who seduced whole countries to great evil using spoken language. The arts of the Trivium are truly human arts. They belong to us. They are limited in the ways that we are limited and they are corruptible in the ways that we are corruptible.

The language of the Quadrivium, however, is of a different kind. This mathematical language seems less corrupted and more universal than the linguistic arts of the Trivium. Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric give us mastery of the language of man. Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy allow us to speak the language of the universe. 

I do not know to what extent this language, in the hands of man, is corrupted and corruptible, but it seems to me mathematical language is not inherent to man. Instead, man must learn to discern and understand mathematical language as if it were a language one had known as a child but had forgotten through years of disuse. 

If, then, this is the case, let the student master the spoken, human word, but do not allow him to neglect the language of the stars. Mathematics is not a mere series of numbers and equations and theorems but is a linguistic expression of the mind of God- a reverberating echo from the beginning of time. The Word crying "Let there be Light."

¹https://factsmaps.com/pisa-2018-worldwide-ranking-average-score-of-mathematics-science-reading/

Classical Education - Ancient Answers for Modern Problems

          If you do a quick Google search for the term ‘Classical Education’ you will be flooded with links to various forums, curriculum companies, and blogs giving advice on how to best practice the system. The modern classical education movement, an educational method rooted in the traditions of the medieval university system, is enjoying a resurgence of popularity today. It bills itself as an answer to the crisis in which the public education system finds itself.

I am something of a unicorn in the public education system. I am a state certified teacher who teaches classically. I don’t teach to our state test (I don’t even mention it until the day before they take it, and they still do amazing). My students read great works of literature, we have Socratic seminars, memorize and recite poetry, engage in debate and public forums, and learn about things like logical syllogisms and ancient rhetoric. What’s more, I even teach in a public classical school! And yet, in my own sphere, the majority of my colleagues, administrators, superintendents, and board members are ignorant of or hostile to the aims of classical education (for those wondering how this can be, I work in a public charter school owned by a parent company. The CEO of our company has a classical vision, but that doesn’t mean that everyone in the company shares this, and in fact, many don’t).

 In professional teaching circles there is a doubling down against methods of teaching or ideas about education that go against whatever passes for the professional consensus, and there is a reluctance to admit that education needs to change at a fundamental level. If you ask most public school professional educators today what classical education is you'll most likely get blank stares. If you do get a reaction, it is likely to be hostile, ill-informed, or both. In the minds of many state certified teachers, classical education is associated with rote-memorization (a Bad thing), teaching out of textbooks, and learning that is derived primarily from the works and ideas of white, European, Christian men (another Bad thing).   

However, many normal people (read, not professional teachers) have lost confidence in this ‘Traditional’ model of education (educational methods developed in the 1970’s).  According to a Gallup poll, in 1973 nearly 60% of the American people had a great deal of confidence in the American education system, while less than 10% had little confidence. As the years have gone on there has been a dramatic shift in people’s perception of American education. The percentage of people who have high confidence in our education system has suffered steady decline, while the number of people who have low confidence in our system has continued to rise.

(Gallup poll) (Jack Schneider/Gallup)

Because of this loss of confidence, many educational alternatives have been developed and sought. This can be seen in the rise of the charter school movement, the increase in private schools, and the boom of the home school community. In recent years the alternative education movement has tended to turn more and more to the past – seeking better teaching methods and increased educational quality in the Classical Education movement.

          The world of education is in crisis – even if it is only a crisis in confidence. This blog is my letter to the professional educational community. It’s time to start teaching students how to think logically and critically, and not how to test. It’s time to stop focusing so much on what is relevant or useful and focus on what is timeless and valuable. It’s time to stop trying to create good citizens and start working together with families and communities to create good individuals. Modern public education is philosophically opposed in its methods and curriculum to these goals, and yet many individual teachers understand that the goal of education is to help immature people become good and decent human beings. Traditional education can’t do that. It’s time to give classical a try.