What is a Classical Education?
Once I entered into Classical Christian Education, I found myself regularly asked this simple question. Like most truly profound and real things, it is both very simple and very complex. The complexity makes me nervous to be too simple in my reply, while the simplicity can be hidden if I give a lengthy reply. So I am stuck. At least for this article I will try to draw middle ground between these competing extremes. The short answer to the question is that Classical Education is the path to the Good Life. Let me explain that just a little more.
We must first define our terms. Before tackling the terms of the question, let me define the concepts in “the Good Life.” I am using a philosophical concept when I use these terms. The Good Life is another way of saying the full life of a Christian. I don’t believe we can have life apart from Christ. And life in Christ is good, and moving toward the ultimate good. In many ways, the Christian life is a recovery of Eden. So we as Christians are on a journey back into Eden, or Heaven, there to dwell with our Lord forever. In my view of life, the Good Life is the wise and virtuous life of the pilgrim Christian.
So if the Good Life is the goal of a Christian, then how does it relate to this thing called Classical Education? I think it is a relationship of end and means. The end being the Good Life, the means to that end is best answered in Classical education. We must now define these terms. Education can be very slippery. It comes from a Latin word that is often translated, “to lead.” It does not connote a moment but a process. So if it is a process of leading, then it suggests a leader (what we would call a teacher), and a follower (or student). That leaves us with a process by which a teacher leads a student.
The two remaining questions are “where to?” and “how?”. To lead anyone anywhere, there must be a destination. In this case we have already named it. Teachers are leading students along the path that leads to the Good Life. This is not to say that education itself is salvation. I would cite the well established adage that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink to state that putting a student on the road to the Good Life does not mean he will arrive. It does not even mean that if he stays on the road of education that he will arrive at Heaven’s gates. What it does do is gift a student with the right “hiking apparatus” to walk his journey, even if he uses those tools to leave the marked path and go somewhere else, even to the cliff of his own destruction.
Another and perhaps clarifying way to view this would be to state that man has been placed into God’s Creation in order that he might pursue and ultimately glorify God. All about him is the Theatre of Glory, the gifts of God’s special and general revelation (the Bible and created nature). Education then helps him to make sense of what is in this Theatre so that he might not only come to know Truth in the Person of Christ, but so that he might then properly place himself in that Theatre. He is a part of the play, but he has to come to know how he is a part. Education then becomes somewhat of a rehearsal for this theatre’s production.
That brings us to a place where we have education being a process by which a teacher leads a student to the Person of Christ so that he might live wisely and virtuously in this Theatre of Glory. So now we must answer “how.” And that is a judgment call on our part, but one with accountability. As parents, we are responsible for our children’s education. And God has clearly stated that all we do must be excellent (for His glory), including and most especially considering the education of our children. So we must ask how to educate and then seek the best or most excellent form of education. There are many viable ways to educate. Our question is one of quality: “what is best?”
We use the adjective “classical” to define the type of education that our school has determined to be the best, because we are attempting to recover notions in our education that were once in place but have been lost. We are not attempting to go back in time: we live in the 21st Century. All the advances and privileges are ours for our delight and use. But we do believe that education was once better for having some things that have since been lost. In discussing a new model of Ford we might choose to compare its qualities to the classic ’65 Mustang. In doing so, we are choosing a standard of some excellence that we believe is worthy and using it as a benchmark for our current model of car. We are referring back to past standards of education when we call our school classical as well.
Many people mean many things by “classical education” but for us it refers to the recovery of several specific lost notions. We are seeking to recover lost modes of knowing and lost tools of learning. We are also as Christians seeking to rescue virtue and wisdom from the mud pile of “mere facts.” Stated another way, we are trying to form a Christian mind within our student. I will deal with each of these in turn.
Recovering the modes of knowing
Man learns through several modes. Traditionally there have been many levels of knowledge understood to reside within man which have included the sensory, emotive, volitional, and rational forms of “knowing.” As education should concern itself with the whole person, so it must take into account all these avenues of knowing truth. But education has traditionally limited itself to the area of intellectual knowledge. Classically, man has been said to learn intellectually in four ways: the poetic, the rhetorical, the dialectic, and the scientific modes. The best education will keep all four of these modes “in play” in the development of a student’s mind. I think if we unpack these even a little you will quickly see that over the last several generations we have begun to limit learning to only one of these modes to the harm of learning as a whole.
The poetic mode of learning is considered by most moderns to be superstitious at best in our day. We have largely set it aside. The Poetic mode relies upon “intuition” or innate learning through experience, through play, through coming to an understanding of the way things are by seeing them as a whole. It is what is happening when a young person plays with their dolls or their wooden sword out in the backyard. It is also the primary means of learning when you see the delight of a child in a good Dr. Seuss story or the far away look when a great poem takes us to other thoughts. We are not breaking down the play or poem into “facts” but allowing the whole to move us.
The rhetorical mode is the learning that occurs as we form concepts, as we build upon what we already know by adding new ideas. It is the mode of learning by creating. The mud pies and play dough of youth are really an excellent example of attempting to recreate what we already know so that we might know it better. In the classroom, rhetorical knowledge is thinking by creating “arguments.” We develop a “thesis” and then seek to prove or disprove it.
The dialectic mode is when one mind helps to form another. It is in the dialectic mode where we use logic or reason to gain new knowledge by questioning and working with premises and conclusions to build our knowledge. Learning by conversation might be the best way to explain this mode. Socrates is well known for his “Socratic method” of questioning a student to the truth and good education has a long track record of this kind of learning. A student’s mind is formed by great questions in a way that cannot be pursued apart from the act of questioning.
Then finally we come to the most misunderstood mode of knowing in our day, the mode of scientific knowledge. It is a common confusion that much of what we call “science” today is really more closely related to rhetoric or dialectic. Both of these modes have to deal with probability, that my thesis or the conclusions I have gained from my questioning may be right, but they may also be wrong. In the mode of true scientific knowledge, we are seeking ultimate answers: those things that are so. They are the unchanging first principles of the world in which we live, and move, and have our being.
Classical education is an education that seeks to keep all four of these modes present and constantly at use in the classroom.
Recovering the tools of learning
Apart from learning how to seek knowledge, there is the issue of forming the proper habits of thinking about knowledge once it is found through all its proper modes. Again, traditionally, the tools for learning are passed from teacher to student through the Seven Liberal Arts. That knowledge comes to us both in word and number means that the tools must be in place to deal with both.
Traditionally, these arts or habits must be developed prior to the pursuit of “science” or the student may really become confused or in error regarding the “First Things” if he is not somewhat of an accomplished student, or in other words, one who has the tools for working with knowledge. The Seven Liberal Arts have three tools for dealing with words, The Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. It also bequeaths to its owners four tools for dealing with number, The Quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. An education that wishes to bring a person to the good life must give him the liberty found in facility with the Liberal Arts.
It must be emphasized that there is less benefit in recovering the proper labels for these skills than there is in recovering the skills themselves. What education must be concerned with is the recovery of the habits of learning that once produced a large number of “self educated” entrepreneurs and leaders. Far too often today you have to go off to some guru, some professional lecturer to receive your instruction in being a leader or agent of change rather than simply pursuing wisdom and virtue on your own two feet because you have the necessary habits of learning. A major discussion in the current community of classical educators is rediscovering just what the seven liberal arts contain within them regarding the habits of learning.
Rescuing virtue and wisdom from the mud pile of “facts”
In part, the loss of both the modes knowing and the tools of learning have resulted in a murky pool of “facts” being learned without meaning or any means of interpreting them. Rather than being content to simply pass along the “facts” a classical or traditional education seeks to keep the knowledge in its context and to steer the student to the wisdom and virtue that is inherent in that knowledge.
Perhaps a helpful way to view this is to discuss the current discussion in education of “integration.” Usually what is meant by this term is the fitting of various disciplines into fewer separate categories and instead into a more organic whole. This is often fleshed out by having history and literature taught together rather than as separate subjects, or having spelling and English grammar taught in a composition class. Since the Enlightenment man has sought compartmentalize or disintegrate truth in a desire to keep fact with fact and opinion away from it. The end result is a modern amalgam of unrelated and disconnected facts. If we accept that God has made all Truth, then it is already integrated by its very Source. We are not seeking to integrate disparate ideas, but rather reintegrate that which we have pulled apart erroneously. Thus classical education seeks to mold the whole student into a whole pilgrim on the path to the Good Life as found in Christ.
Re-entering the world of Christian thought
I leave this notion till last because I think it is a good summary of what we have been saying. A classical or traditional Western education is nothing more or less than teaching a student to think as a Christian. That is our inheritance from Western culture. The culture birthed in the lives of Greeks and Romans was brought to its fruition in the Person and Work of Christ. The culture that flourished in Europe thereafter and eventually was brought to our shores is that of biblical Christianity. We are simply trying to pass that culture on to the next generation.
To do this means we must learn to seek knowledge in all the God-given modes of knowledge, not allowing ourselves to be limited by post-Enlightenment error. And we must have the tools necessary for such thought, brought to our use by exercise in the Seven Liberal Arts. Only when we have such abilities and modes at our disposal are we able to build minds that think in biblical ways. This allows us to bring all things revealed to us to help us place ourselves in the great story God is writing throughout history. When we think rightly we are then able to know there is a Good Life, and that there is a pathway to that Life, and that we are on that Path, and that we have purpose, direction, and resources for that pilgrimage. This is the gift given to one who has a good solid traditional “classical” education.