By Dr. Steven Hein

When we ponder the kind of education that the next generation in the Church will need for a responsible walk of faith in the Church and in the world, it could be said – for parents and for Christian educators -We are really up against it. How are we to get the job done with so many elements in our environment working against us? Much of contemporary culture and the trends of progressive education seem to offer less and less in the way of needed resources. Indeed, they have become a major part of the problem. Let’s face it. Neither the presuppositions of Christianity nor even those of the once popular rationalistic naturalism have much impact on the tenor and ethos of contemporary culture. Indeed, it might well be said as we have begun a new millennium, we also seem poised to preside over the collapse of Western civilization as it has existed for 1500 years. The problem for the Church and its citizens is not simply that Christian truth and its power to shape our culture has evaporated; the real challenge is that much of Western culture has ended its belief in, and commitment to, any rational understanding and ordering of what could be considered true, or good, or beautiful. Pessimism about absolutes reigns supreme in our contemporary Post-modern culture.But this is not even the half of it. Today our young people are being bombarded with two powerful forces that are shaping their lives and identities – yes even those baptized in the Lord. The first of these powerful forces, ironically, is something that used to be an ally to education and enlightenment – information. Today information has become an enormous threat. With the advent of the computer and the information highway of the Internet, a numbing explosion of information is taking place in all sectors of our lives. Information, which once was a friend, has now turned against us. Information is now a commodity to be purchased and used as one chooses. It can be used as a form of entertainment or as a style of dress for status. And it is! Moreover, the connection between information and action has been severed.

Yet the biggest problem today is that we haven’t a clue how to determine what information is true or important. Neil Postman has made the point in his definitive essay, “Informing Ourselves to Death,” that “in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable, nothing predictable and therefore nothing comes as a particular surprise.” We are free to believe or disbelieve most anything today because we no longer have a comprehensive or consistent picture of the world which would make any claim or alleged fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. “We believe,” asserts Postman: “because there is no reason not to believe. No social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that, for the most part, makes no sense to us.”

The more we cloak ourselves in technological glory, yes even the development of the computer and the explosion of information, the more the human dilemma is as it has always been: How can we conduct successful inquiries into what is true, good and beautiful so that we might acquire the things that we need for the world’s fight and the soul’s salvation? Here is where we are up against it. For although equipping learners to carry out such inquiries has been the primary task of education when shaped by the Christian world-view, contemporary culture which has despaired of the existence of such absolutes has turned the task of education and its resources into programs of self- esteem, cultural assimilation, and pleasant experiences that train for secure lucrative jobs.

The second powerful force that is affecting all levels of education both in the secular world and in the Church is our contemporary cultural ethos which is absorbed with personal consumption and entertainment. Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia has typified the general state of affairs of the American higher education as “Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students.” He writes that the “university culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images.” Education must be made fun and entertaining. The central goal of education for so many students today is to acquire a good job and make lots of money.

Schools are not marketing rigorous academics these days; rather they are appealing to students on the basis of how many facilities they have for leisure activities and entertainment – refurbished student unions, sports complexes, and the like. Edmundson put it this way: “before they arrive, we ply the students with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland. When they get here, flattery and nonstop entertainment are available, if that’s what they want.” And what should be said of the academics? There has been a progressive dumbing- down in grading and an ever-increasing number of choices of which courses students would take for their individual programs and fewer standard required courses. Don’t like a course or would you like to blow it off? No problem. You can take the class pass/fail or drop it even up to two weeks from the end of the term with nothing but a “W” showing on your transcript.

It is into this culture and this state of progressive education today that the voice of an alternative has been increasingly raised among disgruntled educators and parents both in and outside of the Church. When the call for a classical approach to education is sounded, this is not simply another educational program being advocated in the name of educational reform. Classical education is not a program nor is it a reforming movement within contemporary educational circles. The call for the classical approach in education is a call for an educational renaissance. It is a call to return to well- established educational goals, methods, and strategies that flourished in western civilization for over 2000 years, and in this country up until about 75 to 100 years ago.

Classical education’s methods and strategies are different in significant ways from those of the progressive model because its character and goals are different. The goal of classical education is to raise up a virtuous educated person who knows in a normative way, himself, his world, and his God. This virtue is grounded in the righteousness of faith and Christian maturity. It is anchored in the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, but also includes the worldly virtues; wisdom, courage, temperance, prudence, and chastity. Classical education at its core is normative education It seeks answers to questions about the meaning, purpose, and value of things. Whereas contemporary progressive education has limited learning largely to analysis, quantitative distinctions, and causal relations within a naturalistic framework (having no interest in first or final causes), a classical education seeks to explore the meaning, purposes, and value of knowledge. It believes that learning is shallow and ultimately boring when it is not able to ask questions and receive truthful answers especially about the ultimate issues of human existence: What is life? What is death? And, how can we secure the future?

Today’s post-modern education drowns the learner in a cultural relativism, insisting that language simply connects with meaning and usage, not the truth of how things actually are. Quantitative analysisgoverns all scientific questions as if this kind of inquiry yields all the information that can be known, or simply all the information that is worth knowing. Such inquiries acquaint the learner with sterile dissected pieces/parts and quantities connected by intermediate causal relationships. For instance, contemporary science deals only with questions of the intermediate causalities of how water moves from a liquid to a crystalline solid state that is less dense – ice floats. The more interesting questions of meaning and teleology are ignored as unscientific. Unlike most all other molecular compounds, why does water move to a less dense state when it becomes a solid? Why does ice float and water freeze from the top down?

Answer: to preserve marine life.

In this sense it is the task of education, according to the classical model, to liberate the learner from formal education and instruction.

Classical education engages an extended conversation among students, instructors, and the great thinkers and writers of the past and present. It nurtures students to become efficient, effective, life- long learners. In this sense, the task of education according to the classical model, is to liberate the learner from formal education and instruction. It is to equip the learner with the fundamental skills and arts to enable independent, significant inquiries into knowledge – especially to ask questions and find answers about the meaning, purpose, and value of things.

A classical education nurtures the basic language skills necessary to determine what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful on more profound and comprehensive levels. This equipping begins at the earliest levels of education. The ancients believed that there were seven skills or arts that an educated person needed to be an effective, efficient learner. In the middle ages, these skills were divided into three primary skills of learning (The Trivium) and four secondary (The Quadrivium). The three primary language skills are of central concern on the primary and secondary levels of education. They involve a three-part process of training the mind’s facility and use of grammar, logic (or dialectics), and rhetoric. These language skills exist in a logical, building-block relationship with one another. Teaching these skills works best when instructional strategies are employed at stages of intellectual maturity when children have the greatest interest and ability to learn them. The early years of school are spent in absorbing facts; systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. In the middle grades, students learn to think through arguments. In the high school years, they learn to express themselves. This classical pattern is called the Trivium. The word trivium and its close associate trivia; do not mean what is often implied by them today. Something that is trivial is foundational, not insignificant. Tri (three) and via (way) reference the foundational three ways of learning with the use of language. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric – the basic language learning skills – are what Dorothy Sayers has called in her most influential essay, The Lost Tools of Learning.

“Oh, we handle these poor young people who are committed to us for training and instruction in the wrong way! We shall have to render a solemn account of our neglect to set the word of God before them. Their lot is as described by Jeremiah in Lamentations 2 [:11-12], “My eyes are grown weary with weeping, my bowels are terrified, my heart is poured out upon the ground because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, for the youth and the children perish in all the streets of the entire city. They said to their mothers, ‘Where is bread and wine?’ as they fainted like wounded men in the streets of the city and gave up the ghost on their mothers’ bosom.” We do not see this pitiful evil, how today the young people of Christendom languish and perish miserably in our midst for want of the gospel, in which we ought to be giving them constant instruction and training.” – Martin Luther – “To the Christian Nobility” (Luther’s Works, American Edition (AE), vol. 44, p. 206)