The classical tradition cannot be unwound from the Christian tradition.
The classical tradition cannot be unwound from the Christian tradition.
‘V irtues are hard things,” quipped National Review writer Daniel Buck in a recent opinion article entitled “The Virtues of Classical Schools.” Buck continued: “Fail a test of courage or act unwisely and virtue will demand justice or forgiveness. Values are subjective, virtues objective. The former is a preference, the latter a firm statement of right and wrong, true and false, good and evil.”
Examining one Hillsdale-launched classical charter school, Lake County Classical Academy (LCCA), Buck argues that although classical schools bear some similarities to their public counterparts, classical educators stand apart from our culture in that they are not afraid to incorporate structure and objective values into their pedagogy, policies, and classroom life.
As a graduate of a K–12 classical Christian school and a current teacher at another classical Christian school, I appreciated much in Buck’s article. Indeed, while much of public education rests on slippery, subjective foundations, classical education can rest on objectivity and uphold structure and hierarchy in the classroom in a way that benefits students and prepares them to comprehend truth and virtue.
Yet, as I finished Buck’s article, I couldn’t help feeling that he failed to explain significant attributes of the school he profiled and the classical-education movement in general. For instance: Who gets to define what virtue is, what “right and wrong, true and false, good and evil” are? What is the foundation from which these schools draw the objective truths they teach? For public charter schools such as LCCA, these questions cannot be fully answered, since such questions require a religious framework. One cannot define goodness and truth apart from an ultimate source of goodness and truth.
Classical charter schools like LCCA have bloomed around the country, thanks to Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative and to the success of programs such as Great Hearts Academies and Valor Education. But the origins of today’s classical-school movement — origins that Buck did not mention — lie in a distinctly Christian understanding of classical education. As Emma Green documented in an extensive New Yorker article published earlier this year, today’s classical-education movement began with four Christian schools inspired by the vision of education held by Dorothy Sayers, a Catholic, and launched in the 1980s. In the 21st century, classical education has grown more pluralistic, thanks to the rise of classical charter schools and private classical schools without religious affiliation.
These schools, as Buck recognizes, offer an alternative framework to many modern schools, one based on the Western tradition and directed toward the cultivation of virtue. These schools benefit American children insofar as they provide a richer and more rigorous education than mainstream public schools. But as Green acknowledged in her essay, “The tricky thing about truth, beauty, and goodness is that, for all their supposed timelessness and objectivity, not everyone agrees on what is actually true, beautiful, and good.”
Devoid of religion, classical education cannot find its footing in a moral framework grounded in a transcendent order and must rest instead on what Charles Taylor termed the “immanent frame” — a natural order as opposed to a supernatural one, a human standard as opposed to a divine one. Devoid of religion, classical education bases what is true, beautiful, and good on simply human tradition. But the trouble with this basis is that the classical tradition cannot be unwound from the Christian tradition.
Though the roots of classical education lie in Greece and Rome with the Socratic method, Christendom preserved, refined, and substantially added to the work of the ancients. Since the medieval period, the liberal-arts education of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) has always been Christian. It was the Christian statesman and scholar Cassiodorus who codified these seven liberal arts and established them in monastery schools; it was Alcuin of York, Charlemagne’s adviser, who later made liberal-arts learning more widespread; it was from the monastic and cathedral schools created by Cassiodorus, Alcuin, and many others that the first universities blossomed. As scholars Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain have detailed in The Liberal Arts Tradition, piety, “the proper love and fear of God and man,” provided the roots of the Western tradition. The men of the Middle Ages understood theology to be the “queen of the sciences,” the foundation of all study.
But classical charter programs, because of their nature as public schools and by their own admission, uproot classical education from its queen, its foundation. Green narrated how David Scroggin, co-founder of Great Hearts, observed, “It wasn’t hard to arrive at a version of classical education that was appropriate for a public charter school. ‘You take out the theology,’ he said. ‘You keep a focus on the Greeks, keep a focus on the classics, the great American tradition as the capstone to the classical story.’”
Secular classical education divorces itself from an essential element of the tradition it tries to impart. But classical education without Christ is not only oxymoronic, it is futile in an ultimate sense. Without a shared understanding of what — and who — the truth is, education cannot impart a deep understanding of truth. Without a shared vision of morality, education cannot produce the fruit of discipleship in virtue. Both “discipleship” and “discipline” come from the Latin verb meaning “to learn,” discere. Learning, classically considered, ought not only teach facts but also disciple souls.
John Milton held that “the end, then, of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest, by possessing our souls of true virtue, which, being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection.”
Christians and conservatives alike should laud the attempts of all classical educators to honor our heritage. But we must recognize that reforming public education through classical charter schools is not enough: Education that, in Milton’s words, “possess[es] our souls of true virtue” will require much more. Such education will not only teach American children to revere the great men of our history; it will teach who made such men great and how our children themselves can be great. Such education cannot rest on religious neutrality; it will require an explicitly Christian framework. We would do well to remember these words of the most eminent voice in the history of the West — who himself created and ordered history: “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.”