Repairing the Ruins

Classical Christian Schools: A Response to a Culture in Crisis

In the book of Genesis, we’re told that Jacob and Esau contended against one another from the time they were in the womb. Of the many details we find in the narrative, one of the most important is the meaningful difference between the two: Esau despised his birthright, but Jacob wanted it. Call it a difference in piety, perhaps, and for all his faults, Jacob still understood the good of receiving an inheritance—a heritage and a blessing from their father. Contrast this with Esau’s appetitive disregard for the birthright. According to the author of Hebrews, we find in Esau “a profane” man.

Many have pointed out that modern man is a type of Esau. Our general disposition today is to reject the wisdom of the past. Long ago, we began selling the birthright of Western civilization, and there has followed a long, slow unraveling of the inheritance bequeathed to us by our forebears. This is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the current state of progressive education and its effect on culture.

Scripture was the first to go, but it was not the only religious element removed. The Supreme Court case Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) decided 8–1 that recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. Christian catechisms were purged from classrooms as well.¹ Today the proof is in the pudding. The same government institutions that once taught children a vision of mankind situated within a Judeo-Christian metaphysic now condition children to accept false sex and gender anthropologies—women and men are no different, sexual desire is what ultimately defines us, a boy can be a girl, etc.

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

This loss of cultural inheritance has led many to turn attention to our history and reclaim lost goods. In her 1947 Oxford lecture, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Dorothy Sayers imagines how modern man might return to an older educational vision, the one to which the history of Western culture owes its life.² Sayers encouraged a rediscovery of the classical curriculum and the way in which the medieval Trivium (the “Three Ways”) happens to fit the natural stages of child development. From antiquity, grammar, logic, and rhetoric have been considered the liberal arts of language—arts that made one “free” to learn and to accomplish other tasks in life. A classical Christian scholar herself, Sayers knew that there was, in fact, no school like the old school. She knew that advantages awaited students trained in logic, Latin, and the admonitions of great authors, along with math and science.

It may be historically inaccurate to reduce classical education to the “grammar” years of a child, and it may be too utilitarian to see Latin and Greek as mere “tools” and not worthy ends in themselves. But Sayers was nonetheless a voice crying in the educational wilderness of her time. She was simply proposing a way for parents to give their children a gift—the gift of rediscovering as students the wealth of their civilizational heritage, not unlike the way Bilbo the Hobbit learns that the unused swords found rotting in the troll den possess great power. Perhaps in some mystically prophetic gesture, Sayers foresaw that future generations would need an educational compass to navigate the complicated wasteland of the modern, utilitarian world. Those searching for the “ancient paths” would find direction and wise counsel in her words.³

An Aristocracy of Anyone

In 1979, National Review republished Sayers’s lecture, and the popular revival of classical education was born. It took place not among secular elites but among common, middle-class Christians. Parents asking “where the good way is” for educating their children began to uncover a cultural trail that lay hidden in leaves and lost in the undergrowth.

In his National Affairs article, “Classical Education’s Aristocracy of Anyone,” Micah Meadowcroft recounts the history of the renaissance of classical education and analyzes why so many parents have begun to seek out and form classical Christian schools. One of the seminal organizations he identifies is The Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS). Founded in 1993, ACCS has more than 500 member schools in the U.S., with an increasing number of international schools joining every year. ACCS was known early on for its annual “Repairing the Ruins” conference. The title is taken from John Milton’s treatise on education:

The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.

Classical Christian educators from all over the world gather each June for the event. The theme of last year’s conference was “Athanasius Contra Mundum,” a fitting title for those trying to defend the family, resuscitate culture, and resist the forces of secularism. The theme for 2024 is a celebration of Anselm of Canterbury, who famously said, “I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand.”

Transferring a Way of Life

This brings us to the covenant between education and culture. Education is so much more than good test scores or ensuring college acceptance. Meadowcroft notes how the classical-school movement at the primary and secondary level was “an institutionalist response to cultural crisis.” This is true. The classical Christian renaissance began as one of the first responses to the accelerating cultural decline of the 1980s. But a turn of events such as this is not without precedent. Our English word “school” is derived from the Greek word for “leisure” (scholé), which the ancients and medievals believed was the animating principle that created a “culture.” C. S. Lewis heartily agreed and argued that civilization was not the random effect of good fortune but the result of a people’s classical education.⁴

G. K. Chesterton puts it best: “There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves.” That’s what a culture is. It is a living phenomenon that preserves its life through time by giving that life to the next generation.

This is the meaning of the Greek word paideia. Variously translated as education, training, admonition, or “the transfer of a way of viewing the world from the teacher to the student,” it is consistent with the way in which Scripture presents education. St. Paul exhorts fathers not to provoke their children, but to “bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”⁵ Paideia involves not merely the skills or facts a student must master; it involves the ideals children are taught to incarnate.

In other words, school is not just information for the brain, but formation of the soul. It is not a subject, as Chesterton says, but “the transfer of a way of life.” We have lived long enough like Esau. Classical Christian education is a chance for today’s parents to transfer to their children a rich cultural inheritance.

Notes
1. For a basic survey of this and the deliberate rejection of the “Western Christian Paideia” in public schooling, see “Battle for the American Mind,” Classical Christian Times (July 30,2022).
2. “The Lost Tools of Learning,” E.T. Heron (1948).
3. See Jeremiah 6:16.
4. “Our English Syllabus” in Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
5. Ephesians 6:4.