Getting Oriented

What to do if you are new to classical Christian education . . .

As the disintegration of our culture continues apace, many parents of school-aged children are finally starting to question their assumptions about the education of their children. But questioning assumptions is not the same thing as having a thought-through philosophy of education. And the problem with this is that the desperate need of the hour is for parents to regain a thought-through philosophy of education.

Suppose the Smiths have finally pulled Billy from their local government school. There could be many reasons. It could have been the porn that was in the school library. It could have been the ungodly treatment that Mrs. Smith got at the school board meeting when she tried to say something about it. It could have been their idea that Billy, being ten-years-old, ought not to be witnessing drug deals in the parking lot. It might have been the suggestion to little Sally that she start considering hormone blockers, a suggestion made by her PE teacher. All of these are good reasons for questioning your assumptions about government education, but they are not in themselves a positive philosophy of education—not even if you stack them all on top of each other.

You cannot beat something with nothing. And, as my father drilled into me, our responsibility is to always act, never to react. Reaction to horrendous practices in the government school system, while certainly understandable, has no sustaining power. In order to educate your kids, in order to build a school, in order to establish a course of education that your grandchildren might benefit from, it is necessary to know what you believe about the role of education in the economy of salvation, in the course of culture building, and in the task of bringing your children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

This means that if you want to educate your children with a positive philosophy of education, the very first thing you will have to do is to educate yourself, and there is no decent way to do this apart from reading books.

When you leave the government thought control system, you will find yourself confronted with a bewildering array of options. Homeschooling, unschooling, Montessori, Charlotte Mason, university model, online classes, classical Christian online classes, and then, occupying the place of honor here at the end of my sentence, brick and mortar classical Christian education. You also have to budget for the option that your cousin will tell you about that I left out.

And like I said, there is no way to make an intelligent decision without educating yourself. What remains of this post is my attempt to share some resources with you that describe for you how we educated our children, and are blessed to see as the education being provided to our grandchildren. What I am describing here is basically one of the above options, with some overlap with a few of the others. So take it for what it is worth.

We founded Logos School in 1981, basing our approach on a lecture given by Dorothy Sayers, a talk called The Lost Tools of Learning. About ten years into this process of building the school, I was privileged to write a book about what we had learned, and that book was called Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning. The Sayers essay is included in the back of my book. My book describes the basic outlines of the classical Christian approach.

The book caught fire, and we started to get inquiries from all over the country. The questions started to pile up, and so I thought we ought to hold a conference on the topic, record the lectures, and then use the recordings to answer the FAQs we were getting. And so we held a conference here in Moscow, and a bunch of people came to it. It occurred to me that we were going to need an association, and so I drafted the papers for the founding of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. The first three ACCS conferences were held here in Moscow before we took the show on the road. The first two conferences happened within the calendar year 1994, and the theme of all our conferences has been Repairing the Ruins.

Then in the spirit of answering FAQs, we published a book called Repairing the Ruins (1996), which addressed how classical Christian education related to the specific subjects to be taught in school—along with a lot of the practical nuts and bolts.

And then, around ten years after the publication of Recovering, in which time we had learned a lot more about what we were trying to accomplish, I wrote The Case for Classical Christian Education (2003).

So here is the breakdown. If you are parents who are contemplating enrolling your child in a classical Christian school, then I would recommend that you read The Case for Classical Christian Education. It is a good one-stop shopping experience. If you are involved in starting up a classical Christian school, you should read all three of these books, and consider it a reasonable start on your reading. In addition, for those involved in a start-up, you should also read Wisdom and Eloquence. This presents some foundational assumptions that lie underneath an alternative classical Christian school association called The Society for Classical Learning (SCL). If you are just starting your research, this is something you should factor in to your calculations.

Wisdom and Eloquence is quite a good book in many ways, but it differs from the ACCS approach in the way it approaches Dorothy Sayers proposal for the Trivium. ACCS stands for certain very particular pedagogical commitments (what I call the Sayers Insight). I should also mention the work of John Milton Gregory and his wonderful book The Seven Laws of Teaching, another book you should read. For those interested, I write more about both Sayers and Gregory in this month’s Substack for subscribers.

The end result is that ACCS is more decidedly what it is, and SCL is more generally what it is. ACCS is decidedly Protestant, for example, and decidedly committed to a particular approach to the Trivium, and to a particular and defined understanding of the seven laws of teaching.

As a consequence of all this, I would also add that ACCS is in possession of numerous antibodies that make us resistant to the woke virus, which in these fin de siècle times of ours is quite an added bonus. Another way of saying this is that ACCS has clear and defined edges in many areas, not to mention a clear commitment to the older binary ways, like the hate crime of boys and girls having different bathrooms assigned to them.

Almost forgot. You really need to read this one also.