3.       What misconceptions do you encounter re classical education

I think that some see learning as a means to an end–the end being Christian dominion. Too often we have some pretty unbiblical ideas about this “dominion”. Christ’s work is typically accomplished through suffering and love. We tend to think that we can come into the kingdom by our wits and by crushing down our enemies. This is just another (snootier) iteration of the political mythology that claims that things would be right if we just elected the right people. I have seen some parents that were saddened because the first wave of CCE educated people have not demolished unbelieving culture and set up the New Jerusalem yet. I think that this is very short sided. Classically educated kids are doing great things. I see a lot of hope in them. I just don’t think that the way to cultural influence looks like a corporate takeover.

Another misconception is that classical Christian education is salvific or at least highly sanctifying and that it works sort of ex opere operato. So parents believe that our school will make their kids love the things that they themselves do not love. I feel at points like I am working to reunite not parents to their children, but grandparents to their grandchildren (i.e., the parents are from a different culture than their children and grandchildren).

2.       What obstacles does classical education confront now and will it confront in the future?

At present, I think that main obstacles are a lack of wisdom (for all parties involved—wisdom being earned by painful failure mainly), a lack of support particularly from the church, and a lack of patience which will seek to find final answers and methods too quickly.

First, there is the lack of wisdom. This is being corrected, but we are still very inexperienced and very naïve. We learn by suffering through budgets, clinging to core commitments, cutting away things that either do not matter or matter no longer, and continuing to learn about how to do this well. The main dangers are twofold. First, we can fail to recognize our lack of wisdom. This is a fairly straightforward sort of pride. Pride keeps you from learning. The antidote to this pride is difficulty and failure. We face these now, and they should be goad to us encouraging us to learn. Second, we can see our lack of wisdom and fall into despair. This despair can cause us to look for wisdom in the wrong places. I see this in the trend of schools recently hiring headmasters who know a lot about business or education, but (professedly) know little about classical education. I think that this sort of person will help the school become more financially stable, but what sort of school will it be in the end? I think that the real challenge is learning the real world truth (balancing a budget, etc.,) that we need to learn without giving into to drink from the trough of worldly wisdom while discarding the very truth that was important to us when we started this thing.

Second, we face a lack of support—especially from the church. This lack of support is causing (forcing? Tempting?) our schools to become what they should not be. The poor are being excluded from a classical education because the schools do not have the resources and the churches are politically hamstrung. The poor are forced into homeschooling (even if the parents are not gifted at it) or sending their kids to low cost and/or low quality schools. Schools seek to meet these needs, but quietly we are morphing into prep schools that serve—not the community that we had in mind at the beginning—but instead the needs of the wealthy who are tempted to look at this sort of education as a means to power (some poor are tempted by this as well).

Third, we have to face down the obstacle of patience. We want things not to be messy. We want to come to definite wisdom. We want a machine that runs at a steady, cool temperature where all the meaningful questions are answers. This, however, is not possible if we want to do it right. We are 30 years into a 1000 year project. If we are blessed, we are not even done with the beginning of the beginning of this. We have to be patient so that we can continue to learn about how to do this.

2A. What does classical education need now and in the near future?

It needs God’s grace (we need His blessing to sustain our work—in spite of the fact that it is imperfect, shortsighted work done by broken, sinful people). We need patience to let the work develop and to help us learn what we should. And we need love. We need to love our students and families. We need love to grow in our communities and churches. We need to continue to ask hard questions and to be content with whatever results accrue from following through on the callings God has laid on our lives.

1. 1.       What do you see ahead for classical education?

I am not as sure about this. The way that our culture does education is changing. In many ways this change must come and I see it as a positive development. People are beginning to be forced to think through the economics of the government run systems and the insanity of bureaucracy of this system. What will come of this? I do not know. Changes like vouchers and defunding of public schools could radically change the environment. Economic difficulties for families could make a classical Christian education (at a school) harder to afford.

All of these concerns, however, are secondary. The underlying question that we will learn the answer to is this: do we have communities (churches and families) that will support classical education. If we have this, then we will see schools (in a myriad of forms stretching from homeschooling to fairly regular looking schools) grow and thrive. If love has grown cold (my greatest fear) or if our love is too narrow (which is just coldness to all outside of a narrow family or church), then we will turn in on ourselves. The best families will do homeschooling well. Others will be left to do the best that they can or will end up finding some other (non-classical option). We need to love one another enough to continue to reach out to others and to make sure that more and more have the opportunity to have this kind of education.

Last night, I spent some time listening (more than talking) to a few very bright guys. I enjoyed the time greatly. Their thoughts, at least in the main, were ones that I found myself disagreeing with. Listening to the discussion really helped me gain some clarity. It made me consider the education that classical Christian schools work to give to their students! We spend time in discussion. Working to help students listen and respond. Seeing the truth that is sifted out as ideas sharpened against each other. I want to help students have the experience that I had last night. In classical education, we look different in secondary school. We argue with each other. We discuss. We wrestle with idea, and try to pin many of them. The skill that we are teaching is grappling.

Just another confirmation that classical Christian education is the right answer for what our kids need now.

I have a lot of thoughts about the project. I might fill them in later, but, first, I would like to thank those involved. I have been blessed by my interaction with them. Here is my dedication to the last volume:

Dedication

To Marlin and Laurie Detweiler, thank you for supporting this project. Your hard work was crucial and your judgments were stellar.  

To Carl Petticoffer, thank you for your patience. We’d have blown it without you.

To Ned Bustard, thank you for your brilliance. You made us look good. 

To Doug Wilson, thank you for your wisdom and humor. It’s been a nice decade working with you. 

To Gene Veith, thank you for your insights and wit. I promise I’ll sign the Augsburg Confession now.

To Emily, thank you for your patience. I will be down from the office in just a few minutes.

Now, we can just sit back and see what happens! I am excited.

Steve Jobs life and impact is a great argument for classical Christian education—an education with encourages the students to think through what it means to be human.

Let me set aside a few objections at the start. Of course, Jobs was not a believer. He was in fact an amalgamation of a 60s radical flower child (prone to some of the weirdest diets and fads and superstitions believing in them to the obvious harm of his body at points) and an Islamic Imam who was only content with ultimate and absolute control. He was not orthodox in any way. His treatment of people was at points reprehensible, rude, and unrighteous—and necessary in order to achieve the results he desired. His life and beliefs were far from the faith.

How then, you might ask, can his life and work form an argument for classical Christian education?!?! Here is how! He was conscious of why he created such earthshaking products. He was a good engineer. He was not a great engineer. Steve Wozniak, with Jobs the co-founder of Apple, was much more of an nuts and bolts (or RAM and circuit) engineer. Jobs surrounded himself with the best engineers, but his talent was in having the vision to see how products must be made in order to work well for humans. He humanized products. He demanded that they be usable and even intuitively usable by regular human beings. He pushed his engineers and designers past their ability and into their imagination to produce machines that fit humanity. In this way, his closest analog is a guy like Frank Lloyd Wright—another genius whose brilliance grew from an understanding and rabid commitment to building human-useful buildings.

What is very interesting is that Jobs, who lived in and transmitted a sort of distortion of reality (called by friends and foes the “reality distortion field”), knew why he could create better, more useful products than his competitors. It was because he understood the Liberal Arts. He knew that by asking the question: “How will a human use this?” and “Can a human use this intuitively?” He was bound to outstrip (by miles) what others who mainly focused on technology and only secondarily on the interface of technology and humanity. He was self-aware of this difference and gloried in it.

This is exactly the sort of education that we hope to give to students. Not all will receive all that we wish to give (more on this later) but it give them a chance and pushes them toward the junction of the liberal arts and whatever else they are producing. Who knows what the future holds? We can know this, however, if you have a good grasp on what humans are and have a deep commitment to creating products that are winsomely useful for real live humans. If you are able to win people over rhetorically by the intuitive feel of your products, you have a great advantage over your competitors…and you have a better chance of creating something that reflects the glory of God because it will reflect the glory of image of God.

Blog Thinkwell

The project, however, is not over. It is only at the beginning. The goal of the project is to reintroduce our children (and ourselves) to our fathers—in the faith and in the flow of things called Western Civilization. We are still just learning how to do this. We have a lot of work to do. That said, I am proud of what we have accomplished. I am proud mainly of our students (both at Veritas Academy and in other schools and homeschools who are using Omnibus). They are becoming something more substantial than I was at their age (something more than what I could have even contemplated at their age) they are becoming culturally more whole and complete. They know their own story. This does not mean that they are immediately more mature. Sometimes, as parents, we imagine that our children can cut short childhood if we just give them a rigorous Christian education. This is a misnomer (and thank God that it is). Children (even ones who have read Boethius) still need to learn by doing and still make poor decisions—this means that they reflect us not just their education.

Here is what I am thankful for, however (especially in light of our recent Christmas Concert). Our children understand their identity better than we did. They know who they are and they know who the most pertinent stories that help them understand who they are much better than we did. And (or AND) they are beginning to love some things that we did not love. They see the beauty is complex and difficult thoughts, songs, pieces of music, poetry, theological concepts, proper dress, literature, and political philosophy. They still understand this immaturely, but they are beginning to value these things. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis talks about forming the tastes of the youth as being the most crucial and critical part of their education. Classical Christian Education supplies the content and philosophical rationale for taste formation. You are (or should be) a follower of Jesus Christ and you should value the culture produced by the work of your forefather’s in the faith who suffered for your sake and gave you a glorious inheritance. You should strive to learn this inheritance and live up to it. As you embrace it, you will find in it deeper and deeper delights, joys, responsibilities, burdens, callings, and work. These were the work of your fathers; they are now yours; you must  improve them where you can and hand them on to your children.

Will this work? I hope so. It is, quite frankly, our only hope culturally and nationally. God can (and may) wipe away the West and send His spirit to raise up new sons in far flung places (Africa, Asia, and South America). When he does this, however, they will begin to become more and more like our fathers—tempered by the rule of law based on God’s Word; affirming of and practitioners of monogamy, fruitfulness, and familial faithfulness. They will look back to our theological heritage, and it will become theirs. Classical Christian education beckons us to look back to our own heritage before it is too late.

This is not the end of an era (I pray) but only a beginning.

Before I begin, however, I should mention a few things. First, it was my wife, Emily, who first did Macbeth with 4^th graders. At the time I was concerned about whether our kids were ready to handle the material academically. I still remember the first time we did the play. It was a blast. As some might have heard, two of the students that participated in that play (there were only ten students) have now been on nationally syndicated television programs. (This, of course, was not part of our strategic plan, but it delights me none the less.) Also, I am the father of one young lady who played the most troubling role in the play—the murderous, ambitious, and eventually insane, Lady Macbeth. So, I have faced the play as a father, a husband, and as headmaster.

Let me deal with the easiest objection (the academic objection first): “Can 4^th grade kids really read and interact with Shakespeare?” At many schools, sadly, the answer is no. The children would not be able to read the material, comprehend it, enjoy it, or love it—as many of our students have come to love it. We are blessed, however, by the work that our Kindergarten through 3^rd grade teachers have done with our children. They can enter in the work and understand. I have seen this again and again year after year. One of the great inducements of our 4^th grade literature list is that it begins to read books that are things that adults might choose to read and for 4^th graders reading the books that their parents love is cool. This book—and Beowulf—which their read aloud in 4^th grade—are stretches. They invest substantial time in Macbeth. They read Beowulf together out loud. So, can our kids handle this book academically—yes, they can!

When one considers the content of Macbeth, particularly the violence, I think that asking whether this content is appropriate is a responsible and important question that parents should ask. First, note that we read a children version of Macbeth—there is still violence, King Duncan is still murdered—but some of the language is updated to make it more appropriate and understandable. (This is helpful for our parents who come to watch Macbeth as well for our children who do the acting.) Even with the scrubbed up version that we use, it is still important to know that learning this material will be helpful to our children rather than damaging. As a father whose daughter played Lady Macbeth, let me tell you the three biggest reasons why doing Macbeth in 4^th grade was a blessing to my daughter. My assertion is that: Reading Macbeth helps our students become better Christians, and more mature people. 

First, the material is very useful to help students understand how sin destroys relationships and lives. The glory of Shakespeare is that he views the world biblically. He does not candy coat sin or make it seem more palatable than it is. Sin destroys lives. It wrecks the moral order. It leads to ruin and destruction. These are the points that we are bringing out to the students as they read about the murder of King Duncan and the subsequent unraveling of Lady Macbeth’s sanity and Macbeth’s rule. Sin has a price and that price is terrible. Fourth graders do not often get the chance to murder kings. They are, however, not too young to begin to murder people with their actions and their words. Studying Macbeth was an excellent time for my daughter (under the thoughtful guidance of Mrs. Arrick) to understand this terrible price. (This has not resulted in her living sinlessly, of course, it has made for some good conversations where I can talk with her about the damage that sin causes.) Reading Macbeth helps 4^th graders to be better Christians.

Reading Macbeth also helped my daughter to become more mature (in a really good way). She did not have nightmares. She did, however, begin to see through other forms of entertainment. We were once watching a movie as a family and someone was injured. She said to her sisters, “The blood is fake. It’s not real.” This sort of stuff has been a great blessing to my family and, rather than scarring her, the study of things like Macbeth, Beowulf, and the Bible has helped my daughters mature.

I have written a number of times about this sort of thing to the school community. My words, however, are much less effective than hearing from a parent who has walked down the road at Veritas. Here I attach a recounting of a phone conversation that I had with Violet Chen about some of her post Veritas experience. What she recognized as her son went into a very challenging environment is that what we were doing with him at Veritas prepared him to be able to stand faithfully. Her son, Jeremy, was our Convocation speaker this year:

The email popped up rather innocuously one morning last week.  A mother of one of our alumni had called and wanted me to call her back.  I was curious.  Families—like this one—usually have a full schedule and do not often call up the headmaster of the school from which their child graduated just to chat.  I called wondering what was up. 

After we exchanged greetings, “Hello,” she said, “I just wanted to call to thank you for all you did for my son.”  She continued to explain the reason for the call.  Her son has gone on to an incredibly challenging and intense academic environment.  Some of the Christian mothers at that university have joined together to pray for their children that their faith would be strong during this challenging time.  One of the young men, sadly, had fallen away from the faith.  His rejection of Christ resulted from reading some powerful unbelieving philosophy (Frederick Nietzsche, to be exact) with his college professor who despises the faith.  In this environment, the young man’s faith wilted. The mothers, of course, have continued to pray for this young man who has lost his way. “That’s terrible,” I said, still wondering about this story’s connection to the phone call.

The mother continued.  Her son, the Veritas alumnus, had the same classes with similar unbelieving professors and similar books to read.  His faith was not destroyed.  Instead, he is involved with campus ministries and is contemplating a life of Christian service.  Now the mother arrived at her point for the call: 

I did not understand everything that you were doing with my son when you were doing it.  In grammar school you were reading Beowulf and other difficult material.  Sometimes my husband and I wondered why you were doing it.  When my son reached secondary school, there were books that you read with him that were both challenging and, we knew, full of philosophy that challenged Christianity.  Now, I understand what you were doing.  He studied these ideas and philosophies in a believing environment with your faculty at Veritas.  Now these ideas do not frighten him. He is able to learn in this challenging environment without it destroying his faith. Thank you.    

I was so thankful for her call. I assured her, however, that a lot more went into her son’s faith and courage than what we did with him at Veritas.  He has a supportive family praying for him.  He has involved himself in worship and fellowship opportunities.  At the root of all of it is the grace of God. Still, I said, “Concerning Veritas’ part, however, you are exactly right. That is exactly what we were doing. We wanted to help your son stand strong in dark places and not be afraid of the darkness around him.”  

I was so thankful for her call. It blessed me.  Know that this is exactly what Veritas will give to your son or daughter.  We want them to be academically competent to have access to all that their God-given gifts and abilities will allow, and we want them, as they stand in these places, to be able to stand strong for Christ with faith that endures.

Douglas Wilson Video