If you hang around more than one classical Christian school for any length of time, it can quickly become apparent that no one knows exactly what they’re doing. I don’t mean that the teachers don’t know their subjects well, or that the administrators can’t fill out a spreadsheet, or that the students can’t add up a grocery bill—those skills are usually better than the average. But if you ask twenty people in those schools what on earth classical education is, exactly, you will probably get twenty-two different answers.
Some people say a classical education is about the great conversation around big ideas (unlike all those other ways of learning out there). Some say it’s about instilling virtue and despising vice (a definition that could apply equally well to life generally). Is it an educational method involving the Trivium-as-learning-stages—a formulation so “classical” that no one used it until 1981? Or is it a course in Western Civilization, warts and all? (Good luck explaining to your Chinese neighbor how math is peculiarly “Western”!) Perhaps it’s about “Great Books”…but which books are great, who says, and how many of them can you cram down a ninth-grader’s throat before he chokes? Is it about training a kid in “how to think, not what to think”? Or do the particular subjects matter? And then there are the non-academic concerns. Will a student ever be able to get a job with this sort of training? And how does the “Christian” part fit in, anyway? Broad tent? Narrow denominational focus? Do the Roman Catholics count? What about the Mormons? Both of them can claim a fair amount of influence in Western American culture, after all…
You begin to see why, if a certain carrot-crunching, wiseacre cartoon rabbit popped up next to you and wondered, “Eh, what’s classical education, Doc?” you’d be in so much trouble! Yet if you’re reading this blog, you are at least considering this education, if not immersed in it. So what is going on?
A History Lesson
In order to understand my alternative answer, we have to back up a bit and take a look at the liberal arts.
“Liberal arts” is not a common term anymore. When I ask my students what it means at the beginning of each year, I get lots of answers: “Painting or playing music, but displaying the beliefs of mask-wearing liberals,” or “The study and practice of things outside of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics,” or “Something to do with literature, or maybe college.” These are not quite right. Part of the confusion is that these words have changed definitions since they were coined. Liberal is now usually defined via politics, often as the opposite of conservative. Arts are what “creative types” do as personal expression—painting, theater, sculpture, etc. But long ago in Roman days, when the liberal arts were named, liberal came from the Latin word liber—literally, “a free man,” which meant anyone who was not a slave. The arts were any skill or work produced well—a shoemaker or a baker had his “art” just as much as a painter did. So the “liberal arts” just meant “the skills and work of a free man.”
To the Greek and Roman world, this was a crucial distinction. Slaves are people who just do what they are told when they are told to do it. Most of the ancient necessities of life—clothes, shoes, food, and the like—were made by slaves. In modern terms, slaves had all the jobs and had all the training (education) they needed to be good at them. This means going to school merely “to get a good job” is acting in a way the ancient world would have considered slavish.
Free men were on a different path. Instead of worrying about mere personal benefit, they were to be leaders in every situation they encountered—their family, their business, their city politics. A free man needed the type of education that would train him to be able to think; to evaluate, implement, and persevere in his actions; and would give him enough knowledge of the world to thrive—he could not merely “do his job.” That type of education became known as the liberal arts. Eventually, they were classified into two major categories. The first was the trivium of grammar (the study of meaning), rhetoric (the study of persuasion), and dialectic (the study of reason). The second was the quadrivium of arithmetic (the study of numbers), music (numbers in time or motion), geometry (numbers in 3-D space), and astronomy (numbers in space and in motion). Thus we can see that the modern distinction between an “artsy” or “bookish” person and a “math guy” is rather new: a free man back in the ancient or medieval world had to both know books and how to use them, for everything from building an aqueduct to drafting a new law.
Freedom Training
The next time you read the book of Galatians, watch for how often this ancient distinction pops up. Paul continually notes that Christians are to be free men and women, not slaves to various things. 1st Peter says in a similar fashion, “Live as people who are free” (2:16).
Therefore, part of my calling, as a Christian teacher at a Christian school, is to train students up into freedom. The rest of my calling, as a classical teacher at a classical school, is to do it in a rather old-fashioned way—the liberal arts. If you need a modern catchphrase for this, we could call it “Freedom Training.” How do you help human beings learn to be free?
That, I think, is the true heart of Christian classical education; not a method or a subject so much as it is a goal, a certain type of person. Of course, there are a lot of ways to reach that goal, but why keep trying to invent new ones when you have a method and subjects that have worked for over two thousand years?
What are the practical concerns that determine what goes in and what stays out of this “freedom training”? What ingredients do you need to produce a free woman or a free man? There are many, but here I would like to highlight five I think classical education here at LOS does very well: self-control, communication, curiosity, culture, and Christ.
Five Ingredients
First, a free human being should have self-control and perseverance—which is why students march through long, complex tomes, logic textbooks, or math problems that are not at all what the modern world calls “fun” and have to actually pay attention to them. Laziness must not be built into free character.
Second, a free human being should be able to accurately state what he or she is thinking to others—which is why students have to speak and write again and again and again. Shyness can be no excuse because a free human’s feelings are less important than helping others. Communication really is key.
Third, a free human should be curious. “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making,” wrote John Milton in Aeropagitica. That is, someone who never questions anything is proving he doesn’t actually know much at all; curiosity is a key component of a free man’s character. And when people are curious about things, they start arguing about them.
Fourth, a free human being should know what other human beings have argued is beautiful, good, and true—which is why most of the stuff we read is old, not new. It’s been tested for a long time. Do you really trust our modern, addictive age to recognize freedom at first glance (or even second)? If you want someone to be a leader in a culture, he or she must know that culture—what built it, what has tried to destroy it, and where “home” is. This is something that parents often notice first about modern education: it creates historical and ideological orphans. But free men have families. Know your people—all of them. Humani nihil a me alienum puto.
Finally and ultimately, a free human being must know God—which means we have to keep God’s Word (and our obedience to it) front and center. Classical education without the “Christian” just winds up producing more erudite snobs artfully quoting their way to Hell. Slaves to sin can never be truly free, and can never truly grasp a free man or woman’s education. As Paul wrote to the Galatians: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” This means lots of Bible, a fair amount of the creeds, and the occasional friendly baptism debate. Growing up into one body takes plenty of training, too.
Telos
What is classical Christian education? I don’t think it’s just a trendy method or a moldy subject; Western Civ or public school with a faint Bible wash. At its heart, it’s the time-tested process of helping students learn how to be masters—first, of themselves; second, of any knowledge they might choose to pursue; and finally of any other souls God may put in their path. It’s artes liberalis—the skills of the free man. That’s something every parent wants for their child. So the next time your puzzled friends (or a cartoon rabbit) ask you why your kid is lugging Homer around on the family vacation, I hope you can simply chuckle and say, “Oh, that. He’s Freedom Training.”
James Goode enjoys helping people discover all sorts of new things, but his first love will always remain the oddities of history. Currently he teaches at both Logos Online School (Humanities II and Writing) and New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, ID. His social shenanigans can be found @goodeguystuff on X/Twitter.