On Classical Education and Why We Bet On It

The most countercultural decision we’ve made as a family isn’t anything dramatic. It’s simply choosing how our kids are educated.

Classical education — the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric applied across every subject — isn’t new. In fact, it’s how the West educated itself for a thousand years.

It’s how you produce people who can think, not just recall.

Honestly it’s the anti-theory of modern education. It doesn’t treat education as a means to an end, in service of society’s needs in its present understanding. It doesn’t view the child as a useful tool that just needs to be shaped, molded, directed, simply as a vessel that needs to acquire skills and produce income. It doesn’t promise to make your child a genius. It doesn’t guarantee a high-paying job. It doesn’t even promise to make them happy. But it does promise to form them into a well-rounded human being, capable of thinking deeply and critically about the world around them.

The Classical Christian approach adds a distinguishing critical layer, providing the ultimate well-rounded education: that the universe is intelligible because it was made by an intelligent God, and the study of mathematics, Latin, logic, history, and literature is itself an act of worship. There’s a coherence to it that the modern fragmented curriculum simply can’t match.

Colossians 2:8 is the operating verse for my life. Naturally, the verse and the directive included extends to raising my kids.

“See to it that there is no one who takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception in accordance with human tradition, in accordance with the elementary principles of the world, rather than in accordance with Christ. Colossians 2:8 (NASB)”

When you look at the universe, you see God’s handywork. CCE invites every student to discover that universe for themselves, to push past the cultural influences around them. CCE forms a human being to think well, to think deeply, and to think critically. It teaches a child to recognize Goodness, Truth, and Beauty in the world around them. It teaches them to love learning for its own sake, and to see the pursuit of knowledge as a Gift from God.

This learning applies equally to the sciences, the arts, and the humanities. The outcome of a life in the CCE system is a well-rounded individual, that has explored every realm of learning equally. It’s a human that reads deeply, writes clearly and speaks persuasively. It’s a human that can be fascinated by planets and stars, future space travel, geometry and the arts, the natural world, history, and the great works of literature, all at the same time.