As I write on the eleventh day in the eleventh month, set to publish at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, educators should pause, especially Christian educators, and realize that bad classical education did nothing to prevent the disasterous War.
Bad classical education exterminated itself for several generations in Flander’s fields as men who learned Latin well, but were educated badly killed each other in World War I. The results were a barbaric Middle East, the monsters of Bolshevism in Russia, and a Germany that would welcome Hitler. That’s a bad war.
Now I see ill-considered Christian classical schools springing up having learned nothing from the horrors that CS Lewis faced in the trenches. If classical schools are right that we cannot get CS Lewis without his education, they forget we got Lewis because the better students died in the meat grinder of Belgium and France.
God help me, I assumed that classically motivated educators would care enough about history to avoid repeating the errors, but I was wrong. What must Christian classical educators do?
Classical education must be classical, not Latin thrown over the spirit of the age.
Christians often think they are escaping modernity, only to throw a few classical quotations over a modern business plan. A classical education that is noble will challenge the consensus of the present age, because it owes nothing to any one age (including ancient ones). A classical education is timeless.
Too many classical schools are moderns aping the ancient to make modernity palatable to conservative Christians. This can only be avoided by profound learning tied to spiritual fathers and mothers of the Church that can check the ego of academics.
Education as we know it was created in Constantinople where the Greek pagans were always read as were the Greek Christians. If you had an idea, modern or ancient, Constantinople would teach it. That is classical education. We are afraid of nothing and are not bound by anything.
We are Orthodox in doctrine, because we have seen the True Light not because someone manipulated us into affirming the right ideas.
Classical eduction must be dialectic and not merely establishment leadership training.
The Eagle of Constantinople had two heads and for me, coming to this image as a boy and reflecting on it for forty years, this has become an outer symbol of a deeper truth. There is one truth and in this age there is a need for dialog: two heads. The classical pagan dialogs with the classical Christian, the modern talks to the ancient. We are timeless and live in our time.
The best way to find a bogus classical school is to find one that insists their students come to the “proper” ideas about a text. The Christian classical school tied to her deepest roots will insist that truth will out when everything is fairly considered.
We dialog in the light of a clearly stated statement of faith. Our bias is known, what we think is true is known, and so a student can consider what we believe. The man of Constantinople has the confidence to then allow the reader, the student, to decide, conclude, reason for himself.
The false classical education twists the conclusion to support the spirit of the age, the leaders of time: right or left.
Classical education must connect globally while teaching locally.
The Church has always been many cultures gathered in the one Truth. We are global and many languages were heard in the first classical schools, Latin, Greek, and the “barbarian” languages from the Byzantine commonwealth. There was a presumption that India had people who could teach us. The people of Aksum in African were wise. The people of the Celestial Kingdom had revelation that would be worth hearing, because God loves all his children.
Orthodoxy gives answers to some questions to leave us free to ask others. There is a God known in the person of Jesus Christ and this revelation has been anticipated in every people, tribe, and nation. A bad school will lack connection to the global Church. This happens on the left and the right: the left ignoring the global consensus on morality, the right the global trans-nationalism of an international Church.
The men of World War I were Europeans fighting for European culture. They ignored the wisdom of Ethiopia, China, and India. They were doomed by their narrowness. Their ancient readings should have taught them to think globally, but their twentieth century prejudice left them too narrow to understand.
The Latins were curious about the globe, the contemporary false classical educator is only interested in dead Latins.
Classical education that is Christian must connect to the ancient Church.
Too many Christian classical schools would not recognize a classical Christian if they arrived. Nina, equal to the Apostles, evangelist of Georgia, would disturb by being so womanly while fitting none of our current categories of powerful women. The monarchs of Aksum are unknown to them: Wakanda Christian.
You cannot be classical if you have not worked out exactly how the old Christian texts you are reading relate to your Sunday service. I have friends who have done this for Evangelicals (Torrey Honors), Catholics (Thomas Aquinas College), and Orthodox, but too many “classical schools” read Dante on Monday having sent their students to a church on Sunday that Dante would have viewed as too ridiculous to damn.
Most classical Christian schools, collegiate and K-12 I visit, practice a Christianity inconsistent with their readings.
This will inevitably lead to the disasters of the World War I generation. These men were taught truths without a connection to the way they lived, deep truths disconnected to modern falsities. These educated deeply decent men did bad things.
Classical education that is Christian must connect to doing.
Never trust a school that cannot listen to the wisdom of the grandmothers. Never trust a school that does not garden as well as it talks. Never trust a school that has binders of plans, but cannot change.
And if you wish to avoid the errors of the World War I generation, do not act on the theories of the talking men cut off from the experiences of the doing men. We must never choose between the two. We need both doing and thinking. The World War I generation developed leadership that embraced all encompassing theories of everything (see Marxism) immune to the experience of gardeners, engineers, and parents.
In the 1980’s my dad tried to warn Christian educators not to cut themselves off from mainstream education for “Christian” fads that were revolutionary and not conservative! He started a school where my brother and I got an education in the best of the modern and the best of the ancient in tension. We were taught to read well, write well, be numerate, love music, and think well.
Why?
Dad was a conservative and a Christian. He was not a reactionary or a revolutionary with a reactionary agenda. A conservative ponders change and saves the best of the old in the light of what is good in the new. She does not trust herself anymore than the particular experts of her era, because she knows that in older times the experts were wrong so often.
The hallmark of Orthodox classical Christian education is that it connects to the farmer, the businessman, the politician who must govern.
This means the Christian educator is neither revolutionary or reactionary. He is careful.
In the 1990’s, I worried that homeschooling was cutting itself off from the normal flow of history, yet too many communities did so. We all made and make mistakes, but the great mistakes are made when reactionaries disguise their upending of culture, their revolutionary change, as conservative. This is always bad, see most Christian textbooks, Abeka or the worktexts, 1950’s segregationist reactionary literature disguised.
Too many saw the problems of “dating” culture in the late 1980’s and 1990’s and kissed that goodbye only to forget the lesson of Burke that we must not create an alternative culture untethered to history or global ideas. Some missed one error to create many more.
Classical Christian schools are too often lightly educated Victorians, with none of the deep virtues of that culture, and too many of the vices. That is worse than the local government school which is at least tied to a history.
This is why our School, college and and K-12, went global, classical, Christian, modern, and practical. The Church of Syria, my mother Church, paid the bill for bad classical education. Millions of Christians died in Lebanon and Syria because European classical education forgot her roots in Byzantium, the East, India, and Aksum.
God help us all.
This is the hour for the Orthodox Church, global, dying everywhere, evangelical without proselytizing, historical while yet alive.
Sign up for the classical education that learned from World War I: college and K-12.
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This is a five part series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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