Trade is all very well in its way, but Trade has been put in the place of Truth. Trade, which is in its nature a secondary or dependent thing, has been treated as a primary and independent thing; as an absolute. The moderns, mad upon mere multiplication, have even made a plural out of what is eternally singular, in the sense of single. They have taken what all ancient philosophers called the Good, and translated it as the Goods…
When God looked on created things and saw that they were good, it meant that they were good in themselves and as they stood; but by the modern mercantile idea, God would only have looked at them and seen that they were The Goods.
-G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows
As I am transitioning from pharmacy life into the field of education, I see this more and more. We really are at a point at which we think education is simply about learning a trade in order to ‘contribute’ to society. We are more concerned about the goods than the good.
It is an absolute must in this environment that the church, and individual Christians, strive to be different. We must not look at creation and culture and simply see ‘goods.’
This is one of the reasons why I focus on technology to the extent that I do. Technology can kill the existential. I am not saying that it always does. I am saying that it is capable of doing so. It can rob the beauty of ‘being.’ It can turn a beautiful sunrise into a mere photo op. It can turn friends into icons on a screen. It can turn wonderful things into internet equity – that is, into goods.
It’s not just technology though. We can turn anything into goods. Spouses, kids, art, whatever. As we brush back against this, the idea is to see the innate good of things without seeing them as things to use as a means of gaining equity. Enjoy the world and life without putting it on our socially constructed eBays.
Anyway, it’s a great quote from Chesterton.
I was wondering if you might be able to speak briefly as to the place of classical education in non-western cultures such as Asia or Africa. With such a strong emphasis being placed on western culture/history it appears that it might not have a 1-of-1 applicability (lest we run into similar problems as were demonstrated in colonialism).
The humanizing benefits of such an academic modality would appear to transcend nationalities, and with a correct understanding of its place in the context of the the Christian life, it would appear prudent that we intentionally employ it in missionary endeavors. However, while we embrace our “western heritage” it may not be prudent to force it upon someone living in Japan.
There are numerous Christian school initiatives in places all over the globe, and yet they are all most certainly “progressive” in nature. If we as Christians have no interest in applying classical education globally, then it would appear that we are attempting to “repair the ruins” of America, only to participate in missionary programs overseas which often export our broken and destructive “progressive” education unto their ruin.
Thank you very much,
I took a seminary class on missions a few years ago and our teacher made us watch a movie. I can’t remember the name of it right now, it’ll come to me in the next couple of days hopefully. Anyhow, the movie was about some American missionaries in some third-world (two-thirds-world if you want to be politically correct) country. They were making the indigenous folk learn to sing English hymns. I remember them specifically singing, ‘Guide us, O Thou great Jehovah.’
He wanted us to watch it to make precisely the point that you are making. I do think one of the beauties of Christianity is that it can take shape in any culture.
As far as Classical Education…
I am not one who believes necessarily that Classical Education is the end all be all of all education. I did not necessarily set out to be involved in it. In God’s providence, it has just sort of turned out that way. To me the most important things that have guided me in my views on education are these: 1) passages like Deuteronomy 6 and Ephesians 6 and Matthew 28 and Proverbs and a plethora of other passages. The clear message of Scripture, I think, from front to back is that we are rearing up our children to love the Law of the Lord. By Law I don’t simply mean the commandments – I mean ‘the ways of God.’ And specifically the ways of Christ. First and foremost, in my children’s education, I want to serve as Christ’s ambassadors. I want to make disciples of my children. That’s one of the reasons we Reformed-types baptize our children – to us, it signifies that they are our disciples under Christ. 2) One of the most life-changing experiences I’ve had was having a certain professor who told us his job was not to teach us what to think but to teach us how to think. I used to have debates with my instructional technology professor about this. From a worldly perspective, this sounds semi-blasphemous. But I want my children to be able to think, from a Christian perspective, when they come across things I won’t be there to help them with. It’s my job to try to cultivate that.
Now I bring those up for this reason: making disciples of your children and teaching them to think can be done in any culture without any sort of imperialism. That should be the goal. In respect to Classical Education, any culture, under Christ, has things that are True, Good, and Lovely. I would want to encourage those folks to exalt such things. Now we might have disagreements to how good or lovely something is in another culture, but we shouldn’t simply be imposing ‘Western’ constructs on everything. It probably wouldn’t be right to force a group of Asian Christians to read all of Mortimer Adler’s list of the classics of the Western tradition. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to read some, but I think that would simply be going too far. The question becomes whether they have classics in their own culture. What valuable things can the dig up from the past that will enrich the present? Books like Peace Child, and Eternity in Their Hearts (both by Don Richardson), and the Man with the Leather Hat (by Paul Long) might be helpful here to provoke some thought.
My last thought is this: I’ve begun working at a secular school and I’ve already seen that the Asian students score higher in math but naturally struggle with English. I wouldn’t want to discourage their abilities, and perhaps love for, mathematics. Math is logic. When I went back and took a couple of math classes in college after becoming a Christian, I found myself being provoked to worship God because of the beauty of his ordering of the world in such a way that math is possible. That’s a point of contact with lost people who may be unaware of the beauty of order and logic, or even desperately seeking it. The same goes with science. When I was preaching through Romans 8, I learned more about Romans 8:20-22 from a natural geography class I took than I did from any commentaries that I read. Creation is seeking order and balance. Hence little things like wind and big things like hurricanes. Our science classes aren’t likely mentioning such things, at least from a Christian perspective, but it is something that any Christian in any culture can express.
I don’t have any kind of definitive answers and I know you don’t expect that I do. I don’t want to be some kind of apostle for classical education. If anything, I want to encourage the discipleship of children. If classical education can help foster that, then I’m all for it. In our case it has be helpful, and so we press on.
Thank you very much Heath. I’m going to check out those books you referred to. I appreciate that you brought the conversation back to the Biblically informed point regarding education’s ultimate purpose, which is to train children in the ways of the Lord.
From my perspective I’ve observed the following qualities about Classical Christian Education, which I DO think are timeless and translate globally:
1) the grammar-logic-rhetoric paradigm (trivium), to help understand the WAY people learn best
2) the emphasis on virtue formation as being integral to intellectual formation
3) the emphasis on learning “how” to think over merely “what” to think
4) the liberal arts as a vehicle to to “liberating” a person, so that they might make good decisions in illiberal pursuits, (ie: most vocational pursuits).
I’m not solid about this list by any means, but it seems like a good place to start. Essentially, the Classical Education world typically says that Progressive education has largely ruined the world, and thus it seeks to “repair the ruins”. So I suppose one question I have for you is whether or not you agree with that assertion. Is Progressive education bad, and CE good? Or Progressive education good, and CE just better?
If we are to assume that Classical Education is good medicine for approaching the human condition via scholasticism, then we start running into problems when we realize that the WAY Classical Education does a good job at this is not merely by understanding pedagogical methods, but by doing so intentionally within the context of the cultural history that has brought us to this point. We run into problems here, because our answers being culturally dependent, cannot be offered “just as they are” to other cultures. Our answers are OUR answers. Those other cultures have to take Classical Education’s principles and apply them into their own culture.
If I understood you correctly, this was largely what you were saying; namely, that anything technically or philosophically good in CE could be translated into a non-western culture by generally abandoning the western-heritage dependence which we currently use here in our system, and utilizing the culture of the people in question. Sounds like wisdom to me. It only leaves me with two questions:
1) What good ideas specific to Western culture SHOULD be preserved if one starts a Classical Education school in a non-western place? How do we go about judging such things and extracting them?
2) How do we implement the techniques and philosophical values of CE into a DIFFERENT culture?
I believe the answers to these two questions will require a lived-through exploration of Christians who are willing to love the non-western world by attempting to give it an education that sees God in everything, rather than a God-denying modern education. I certainly don’t believe this is an issue that I can solve in one day, via a few blog-post replies. However, I appreciate you entertaining this conversation, and am happy to hear if you have any further insights into this matter you wish to share at this point.
First, yes, I do believe modern education is pretty much jacked up. I’ve never even been comfortable with the mere idea of allowing my kids to be a part of normal, modern secular education in this country. The idea that I am going to make disciples of Christ by allowing them to be formed by anti-Christ institutions is just ridiculous in my mind.
Does this however mean that Classical Education is necessarily the answer? Does it mean that our job is to form a movement and thrust Classical Education back into prominence? I don’t know.
I do know that the traditional Western emphasis on the humanities seems absolutely vital (learning ancient languages, studying literature, philosophy, and music). The question becomes whether or not a culture can do that on its own without relying on the West. In most cases I think they probably could. I do believe that the myths, stories, and music of all cultures teach valuable things. It’s a question of getting people to look for the right things in those things.
Now, the climax of your question was getting at what we need to actually import from the West and how to go about doing it. For one thing, if we are going to teach church history and historical theology, there is no way to get away from studying the West. If we are going to study early novels, there’s no way to get away from the West. The question that still looms here though is how other cultures can go about studying those things. Will they have to learn English? Latin?
I don’t know. I’m stuck at this point. If you can ask something really, really specific, I’ll try to answer. I simply haven’t thought deeply enough about these questions to do justice to your questions without writing a couple of thousand words and working my thoughts out as I go…
Obviously, humans have not done anything perfectly since that day with The Apple, so anything is subject to improvement or replacement, including Classical Education. I think Classical Education doesn’t HAVE to be the antidote to modern secular education, but it is the best one we have right now which I have observed- atleast for the Western world.
Yes, I agree that potentially other cultures don’t need a WESTERN style emphasis on humanities, but that it is as you said “a question of getting people to look for the right things in those things.” I’ve been wondering lately what it would be like for asian nations to gaze back toward ancient China much like western Classical Education does with the Romans and Greeks.
Those are great points about church theology, church history, and novels requiring a certain degree of delving into Western scholasticism. I am in the same place you are, regarding “how” one might implement this, and what else might need to be implemented for Christian education overseas.
I guess at this point all I have to say is that I hope the Church begins to see a need to address how we approach education in other nations, because as missionaries, we are involved in ALOT of education initiatives. If modern secular education is destroying our own people, why are we dumping this pollution on those whom we are attempting to be a light unto? As our conversation has demonstrated, the answer isn’t as easy as offering up western Classical Education “as is”, but if we are going to love these people then we must offer SOME answer that isn’t pure secularism.
Thanks for helping me think through some of this.
You’re very welcome, as always. I appreciate your thoughts and questions.
I recently got hired as the Curriculum Manager for a school that has an online wing that offers high school classes to dropouts and people working with Job Corps. I graded my very first paper yesterday. It was by an immigrant whose English is very broken.
The paper was terrible in every way imaginable. The grammar, as would be expected, was rough. The paper was supposed to ‘objective,’ based solely on research and it turned out to be wholly an opinion piece. But there is such a big problem with plagiarism that 60% of the grade is simply based on originality. Due to that fact he ended up getting an 80% just because he didn’t plagiarize (even though the actual meat of the paper got about 50%).
I say that to say, there is a whole world of terrible education, and I have no idea what we’re going to do about it. Our average student, who is trying to get a high school diploma, has math and reading scores that equal about an 8th grade level. My 8 year old reads on a 9th grade level and she is being Classically educated. I see the power of it, but I really have no idea how on earth we are going affect the world in the short term. We just have to keep working and pray that our children, and children’s children, will continue to press on to improve education in this country. It’s got to be a long term vision I think.
I have a sense that my new job is going to make me think about this sort of thing a lot. Perhaps that’s why God has led me in that direction for the time being.
I also struggle with one of my rural churches. I am only there once or twice a month, but the kids (ages 10 and under) are basically functionally illiterate. I’ve encouraged the church to start a library and stocked it myself with all kinds of great kid’s books. I’ve encouraged them from the pulpit, repeatedly, to take advantage of it. I’ve been doing this for about two years and don’t think I’ve made any progress at all. I sound like a Debbie Downer today, but as I get older I am starting to truly realize the peril we are facing, even in the church. It’s going to take some workers and a truly gracious act of God to revive our culture, much less the cultures that surround us in the world.