The Place of Paideia

Going over some of the basics again . . .

The story is told about Vince Lombardi, legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, who was exhorting his team after a humiliating loss. He told them that it was time for them to go back to emphasizing “the basics.” After that, he held up a ball and said something like, “Men, this is a football.”

In the classical and Christian school movement, what is “the football?” What is our starting point? I would argue that it is the idea of the paideia. Once this is grasped rightly, everything else flows out from it.

“And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).

The word rendered here as nurture is our word paideia. The word that is paired with it is nouthesia, and is very close in meaning. The ESV renders this phrase as “discipline and instruction,” but the idea of paideia is much more all-encompassing than what we call education. It includes education, but it is a wide-ranging word, one that described a central feature of ancient life. I have a set of volumes in my library that is a three-volume treatment of that word. It is no common noun.

Paideia is the process of insinuating a child into the customs, mores, traditions, heritage, and worldview of his people. Clearly the lesson plans of a child’s third grade teacher are part of this, but what else might be?

Also included would be the child’s Spotify play list, all the movies they have seen, the books they have read, the fact that they play sandlot baseball, the fact that they ride a yellow school bus to school, the form of the worship service at the church they attend, the fact that his family drives by a huge stadium on the way to church, and the fact that pretty much every family of that child’s acquaintance has a green garden hose in their back yard. Speaking of architecture, Winston Churchill once said that we first shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us. This would be yet another aspect of paideia.

A child in Ancient Rome would be walked to his school by a slave assigned to keep him out of trouble (a pedagogue—Gal. 3:24-25). While he was being taught there was likely a bust of Homer up front, just as my elementary classrooms had that famous picture of George Washington up front. All paideia. On the way home, they would walk past the temple of the god of his city. Also paideia.

Now the thing that is significant about all of this is the fact that Paul instructs the fathers of Ephesus to bring up their children in the “paideia of the Lord.” Now if paideia is the process of enculturation into the ways of your people, then the paideia of the Lord would have to be an enculturation into the customs and culture of a Christian people.

But what if the Ephesian fathers turned to Paul and said, “But we don’t have any customs. We don’t have a culture.” My supposition is that Paul would reply, “Exactly. But this is how you get one.”

Henry Van Til once observed that a culture is a religion externalized. Man is a culture-forming creature, and nothing can be done to stop this. He is going to do something to keep the rain off, and that roof will have a particular design, a specific pitch. He is going to have a doorway into his home, and that doorway will be a particular color and shape. He is going to sing songs, and those songs will have a particular set of lyrics and a melody. These things are going to happen, and when Christian people gather together and instruct their children, they are going to happen in ways that reflect those Christian commitments. That is a Christian paideia.

Now this is going to happen even if everyone is being pretty lazy, and is just hanging out together. If you have some woods next to the village, nobody needs to plan where the path is going to go—a path will just form, and it will seem like magic. If somebody thinks ahead, and does plan, they might put the village in a more sensible place, and the women who have to haul water from the well might be most grateful. In other words, a distinctive culture will form regardless, but if the group is Christian they should want it to form in ways that are thoughtful, careful, and most of all biblical.

The center of all this is the worship of God. This is the place where we should be most intentional. The word cultus refers to religious worship, and cultus is always upstream from culture, just as culture is upstream from politics.

This is why healthy classical and Christian schools are schools that have the strong support of a church or surrounding churches. One of the reasons why classical and Christian schools struggle, especially in urban areas, is that they have the paideia of the Lord going on between 8 and 3, but then the kids are sent out into a world that has a strong undertow of a secular paideia. Just as Penelope used to weave her fabric, but then undo everything every night to keep her suitors at bay, so also many hard-working classical Christian school teachers carefully weave a biblical worldview in their students minds, only to have it all unravel every night, every break, and every summer vacation.

It doesn’t take much for an impressionable young student of literature to do his assignment on George Herbert, only to have Cardi B curb stomp them both—I am speaking of both Herbert and the student. A lot of parents don’t know how much of their tuition money gets washed down the paideia drain every night.

This is why the goal of Christian parents, board members and school administrators alike should be to form a culture of like-minded people, all of whom are all rowing in the same general direction. And that, when it starts to happen, is a classical and Christian paideia.