Background
I have been up to my neck in educational issues for over forty years now. My wife and I first got involved as concerned parents of preschoolers, feeling ourselves to have no viable options for our kids. But God was kind to us in our ignorance, and so we started Logos School, which opened in the fall of 1981. This enrolled us in a crash course on classical Christian education, through which we learned many things, some of which looked suspiciously like angry bruises. And then when my oldest daughter was a senior in high school, she who had been a kindergartner when we started Logos, we were confronted with the same challenge again, only with higher stakes. We consequently started New St. Andrews College in 1994 with a total of four students. God has blessed that endeavor as well, for which we are most grateful. And a little over a decade after we started Logos, I was privileged to be given the opportunity to write Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, which led directly to many people writing to me with educational questions. This led to my decision to host an education conference so that we could record the lectures and use them to answer FAQs. The response to the conference was so robust that I made the decision to start the Association of Classical Christian Schools. We held the first three ACCS conferences here in Moscow, and then took the show on the road. God has blessed that endeavor greatly as well. So, like I said, I have been directly engaged with educational issues since the late seventies.
But all the issues that were in play over this last generation or so have come to a head in the last two years. We had educational challenges before, but the last two years have seen our various cancers metastasize. In this new era of educational crisis and challenge, I decided to start something else.
Educator in Residence
Educator In Residence is intended to be a Substack newsletter where I can provide encouragement, teaching, resources, and support for Christians engaged in the critical field of education reform. I want to write for board members, administrators, teachers, and parents. I do so with a sense of urgency. When we started this task of educational reform, we undertook the challenge of remodeling a decrepit old house. We still have the old house to remodel, but now it is on fire.
Douglas Wilson is the senior minister of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. He was a founder of Logos School, a founder of New St. Andrews College, and a founder of ACCS. He is married to Nancy, and has three married kids and seventeen grandkids, all of whom have received or are receiving the kind of education being discussed here.
