My family moved from the suburbs of Wisconsin to the suburbs of Dallas/Fort Worth in 2014 because we decided giving our children a classical education was of the utmost importance. It had become the priority. We knew what a classical education was. We knew how the “movement” in America had begun. We believed it was the best way to educate a child. And we were willing to uproot ourselves for it.
That is likely not your story. But that doesn’t make you any less important to the Classical school your children attend. It just means you might not know what you’ve gotten yourself into or what you’re considering. Still, you are in the right place.
There are a lot of things to consider when you choose a school. Uniforms or no uniforms. Sports teams or no sports teams. Which sports teams? College prep? College guidance? Five day or Hybrid?
A school can be any of those things without being classical. So, while a classical school will have answers to those questions, those answers will not tell you if a school is classical, why they are classical, and how classical they are.
But there are two things that will.
First, what formula is the school using to produce its students? A classical school will have one formula and one formula only. Family + Church + School = A Free Person
Your family has a culture. It is made up of the decisions you make in your home about what you will spend your time doing and your money pursuing. It includes the values you espouse and the myriad of influences you allow into your home.
You also attend a church with a certain point of view on everything from baptism and communion to pop culture and youth group. And you chose it for those reasons.
Finally, your children attend school. I intentionally ordered it that way. School ranks third.
Your family, your church plus your school are all working together to make your child into a person. A classical school and the families who go there aim for a whole person, with an intact soul, who is free. This child is not a slave to his desires. He is not a slave to the world. He rules himself under the lordship and authority of his King, Jesus Christ. This is the goal of a liberal education, which is the aim of a classical school: to make a free person. Remember, school is the third influence in the formula, so most of this work is done at home and at church. The weakness of any one of the three impacts who your child becomes because it changes the formula.
Second, a school has three weapons in its war chest: atmosphere, ideas and habits. That’s it. That’s the whole of its weaponry.
The atmosphere is the environment or the culture of the school. It is made up of things that are intangible and things that are embodied. Both communicate to your students, in a myriad of ways, what the school believes is important. Important about the curriculum, but also about God, nature, and man. Culture undergirds the entire education process.
The atmosphere of the classroom is either conducive to learning or hostile to it. The atmosphere in the hallways is either building up a student or devouring her. The atmosphere on the sports field either teaches perseverance and teamwork, or idol worship and self-glorification. The choices a school makes about technology, ceremony, discipline, extracurriculars, and routines all contribute to its atmosphere.
Classical schools are intentionally and purposefully hostile to contemporary culture. There is no place for certain ideologies and practices in the classical school. Those choices have been made on purpose, and they should be obvious when you tour. By definition, a classical school maintains an ancient tradition believing that a former way of doing things is superior to that which came after. While this is unequivocally true, it does not mean that your student will not have to interact with controversial ideas or discuss moral conundrums. This love for the Western tradition and respect for the Western canon is a vital component of a classical school’s atmosphere, and to maintain it we oppose much of contemporary culture by teaching students to understand it in order to arm them against it.
Next, in its arsenal is the commitment to living ideas. In classical schools, great books are read for their ideas, not merely for their difficulty. Class discussions are arranged to wrestle with those ideas. Students are expected to interact with a text intimately and aggressively. There will be a lot of reading of hard books that are old, but not just because they are hard and old.
Once the books have been read, students will be asked to speak and write eloquently about the ideas encountered in those books. This also will demand a lot from the student, but it will produce a certain kind of person. Because a truly free person, who is not enslaved to the lies of the world in which he lives, must know how to see an idea for what it is, compare it to the truth of scripture and argue for or against it—logically and eloquently. Only when a man can do those things is he truly free.
Finally, a classical school labors to inculcate habits to order loves and form virtue. Certain practices are repeated daily, weekly, quarterly. The aim or end of that repetition is to form a person by passing on to her what is the most important and most beautiful in what she is learning and about the God she worships. These rituals are loaded with what James KA Smith calls Ultimate Story—a story that points beyond the individual to what should be our first loves. Habits, liturgy, and ritual remind us of who we really are by showing us who we worship.
Parents, you truly are at war for the hearts, minds and souls of your children and choosing a classical Christian school is part of how you must wage that war. But a classical Christian school is not a cushy, safe place to hide from the world. Rather, it is a training camp where students are prepared for battle. Not in this generation or the one previous has a man had to fight so hard for basic human liberty—the right to care for his soul and the right to free his mind from the shackles of misinformation and anxiety. A classical education frees a man by equipping him to do battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil with the timelessly effective weapons of reason, imagination and joy.
