by Christopher Perrin, PhD | Jan 13, 2011 | Articles
“Education” is a hard word to define. Even “Christian” is hard to define. And certainly “classical” is a tough word. Put all three of these words together and you have a three-layer cake that is very hard to eat. I have read a lot of books about education, and find it remarkable just how many different “aims of education” exist among educational writers. Read ten books on education and you will find at least five different “purposes” for education. And simply because a school calls itself Christian doesn’t mean you can know a whit about what way the Christian faith comes to bear on the culture, curriculum and pedagogy of the school. We Christians have to constantly qualify what kind of Christians we are and have trouble doing so. Words like “fundamentalist,” “conservative,” “liberal” and even “evangelical” have become stretched, ballyhooed and therefore problematic. I call myself a “classical protestant” which avoids the confusing connotations of other adjectives, but still leaves the listener wondering just what kind of animal I am. Alas, it usually means further conversation when we want to classify each other quickly and move on. It is no surprise that classical Christian schools find it challenging to define themselves well.
Classical Christian education (CCE) cannot be classified too quickly. Sure, we can offer a decent first level definition of CCE like the following ones:
- CCE is a form of education rooted in the best educational practices of the past.
- CCE is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty.
- CCE is is an educational approach rooted in Christian conviction and theology employing the historic curriculum and pedagogy of the liberal arts in order to cultivate men and women characterized by wisdom, virtue and eloquence.
All of these are good definitions, yet they are by no means the only legitimate ways of crafting a definition. Definitions can be short or long, they can include multiple sub-definitions or connotations. One level down from a “dictionary” definition is a paragraph statement (which many classical schools have); the next level might be an essay or and encyclopedia article. Finally, we arrive at the level of a book on the subject, and of course such books do exist–short ones and long ones.
I have written a short book of 45 pages (a pamphlet?) on CCE and given frequent seminars on the subject. I will be writing more about defining CCE on this blog, but here is audio link to a seminar I presented on the topic of “What is CCE?” It is edited and 16 minutes long. Those interested can also download a free ebook of my pamphlet An Introduction to Classical Education: A Guide for Parents by going to the following web page: ICE Book Download
Here is the audio clip:
What is Classical Education
Ideas for effectively defining classical Christian education…are welcome.
by Christopher Perrin, PhD | Dec 15, 2010 | Interviews & Podcasts, Uncategorized
This November (2010), I had a chance to spend about two hours interviewing Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio. Ken is the author of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes and the host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. The academically-inclined admire and envy Ken, because he gets paid to read books and interview authors. He is certainly one the most well-read cultural critics in the country, and always offers insightful commentary on the large issues facing the church and the nation—issues like the function and impact of media and technology on church and society, or the significance and role of art, literature and music in human society and worship, to name a few. Every two months Ken releases a 90-minute CD (or mp3 file) that features Ken’s interviews (conversations really) with about six contemporary authors. To date, Mars Hill Audio has released 104 such CDs.
Ken is also a student of education, and while insisting he is not an educational theorist, his wide reading and ongoing reflection have made him an advocate of classical Christian education. Over the last several years, he has spoken at several conferences for classical Christian educators and even visited some classical schools. My interview with Ken was fascinating. He was able to connect the renewal of classical Christian education to a number of other cultural trends from the shaping of a human soul to embodied learning to the disorder of modern education. I have broken down the interview into several segments by topic, which average about 10 minutes in length. Classical educators and leaders will particularly enjoy his comments on the forming of the soul, embodied learning and community. Click on any of the links below to listen to various sections of the interview.
Ken Myers Cultural Assimilation
Ken Myers Engaging Creation
Ken Myers Forming the Soul
Ken Myers Embodied Learning
Ken Myers Community
Ken Myers Human Flourishing
Ken Myers Books for Educators
Ken Myers Seeing a Classical School
Ken Myers Concerns for CC Leaders
Ken Myers A Disordered Education
Ken Myers Are the Lib Arts Useless
Ken Myers History of Mars Hill Audio
Ken Myers His Education
by Christopher Perrin, PhD | Nov 24, 2010 | Articles, Book Reviews
Leisure is not the cessation of work, but work of another kind, work restored to its human meaning, as a celebration and a festival.
–Roger Scruton
We Americans have no trouble being busy. American educators are about the busiest people I know. Classical school administrators are usually frenetic. Teachers work so hard for nine months that they truly do need a summer’s rest. How do classical students fare? Well, they need those three months of summer too.
I was interviewing Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio recently, and asked him what he would hope to see if he observed a classical Christian school. I was braced by one of his responses: he would hope to see a rhythm of fasting and feasting. Fasting and feasting sounds strange to 21st century American ears, though it ought not sound so strange to American Christians trying to learn from the classical tradition. The church has practiced fasting and feasting for centuries. For various reasons, many, perhaps most, American Christians have forgotten these practices—and so we are not likely to quickly bring them to our schools.
Ken’s comments got me thinking again about our need to re-examine and understand leisure, contemplation and rest as vital aspects of a classical education. Contemplation, after all, is a key component of the classical tradition of education. Do our students have appropriate time to reflect on what they read and to contemplate the great ideas of the Great Conversation? Or do they fly from book to book, class to class and grade to grade? Ah, we are Americans and we are busy seeking ways to keep the cake and eat it too. We want depth and breadth. We want music, sports, art, drama, debate, trips, labs, language, science, literature, logic, rhetoric, theology, history and a dozen electives. It is not unusual for a student to be tracking 7-8 classes plus several extra-curricular activities. Parents need sophisticated planning software just to manage transportation of students from one place to another. Parents too are often frenetic.
The things we are busy about deserve scrutiny. Our history is one of sustained, hard work, forging a country out of wilderness, building cities, moving west and building more cities. We are widely known for our “can do” spirit and seemingly endless entrepreneurial energy. Classical leaders and educators possess this strength. What we don’t do well is rest.
In 1948 the German philosopher Josef Pieper wrote a small book (about 130 pages) entitled Leisure the Basis for Culture. Classical educators need this book. Pieper does more than tell us we need to slow down and take a breather. Rather, he helps recover the long-lost meaning of the word leisure. In a society that greatly values “work for the sake of work” leisure has come to mean time free from the obligations of work, time that most Americans often fill with amusements and play. This is not the leisure of long ago.
Pieper points out that the Greeks and Romans did not even have specific words for “work” as a positive concept. The Greeks referred to “work” as ascholia which means “not at leisure.” The Greek word for leisure is schole, from which we derive our word “school.” Astonishingly, the Greek word for institutions of learning means “leisure.” The Romans’ word for leisure is otium and their word for work is neg-otium (not at leisure), from which we get our word “negotiate.” Aristotle writes “we are not at leisure (ascholia) in order to be at leisure (schole). Pieper also notes that engaging in the reflection of truth and virtue (the vita contemplavita) is the “highest fulfillment or what it means to be human” and thus of profound importance.
Now this is worth some…reflection. The classical tradition of education regarded a “school” as a place of schole. The Romans imported schole into Latin as schola, from which we get our word “school.” Just what about our schools is schole? Would our students describe our schools, among other things, as a place of leisure? This would not mean of course, that our schools would be places of mere relaxation, but places of reflection, conversation, celebration and feasting. Sound like your school?
What the Greeks and the Romans discerned as fitting for man is also confirmed by biblical teaching. When God rested after six days of creation, he was not tired. He celebrated and blessed his creation (Gen. 2:3). The Sabbath rest and the regular feasts were not given so that God’s people would do nothing, though it did mean ceasing from typical daily labor. Rather it was meant as a time for a particular kind of robust activity—feasting, celebration and blessing. The Sabbath rest is not the mere cessation of labor, but the orientation of the human to his highest end—the “work” of leisure, the “work” of praising, serving, feasting and blessing.
When C. S. Lewis studied as an adolescent with the retired Scottish schoolmaster (whom Lewis called “the Great Knock” in Surprised by Joy) he studied two subjects for three years—Latin and Greek. But wait–through his study of Latin and Greek he studied history, literature, philosophy, poetry, grammar. And he learned dialectic, because the Great Knock argued with him about everything. Lewis goes on to criticize modern education for denying students in secondary schools the hope of ever mastering anything—we cover too many subjects all at the same time to ever hope of mastering a single one. Lewis regards this as costly sacrifice, because he thinks that mastery of one subject creates a kind of confidence that leads students to go to master the next subject, now believing (and knowing) that mastery is possible.
This all flies in the face of our typical understanding of a broad-based liberal education—or does it? Dorothy Sayers suggests that at the age of 16 a classically-educated student should be ready to specialize in a subject he or she has grown to love and prefer. I think we may be caught in a false dilemma of thinking we must choose between two extremes of either a highly specialized education (study only Latin and Greek!) or studying eight subjects every semester for about ten years. As we re-imagine what form classical education should take in 21st century America, I think we would do well to ask ourselves in what ways we may have simply taken some aspects of the contemporary progressive model (eight subjects every semester plus extra-curriculars) into our schools without sufficient scrutiny. The medieval maxim of non multa, sed multum (not many but much) should be reconsidered for modern application to our schools. If we do this while also recovering leisure, perhaps we will create schools of schole that offer 21st century America something it sorely needs.
In what ways does your school pursue leisure? I would love to hear. Here are some preliminary ideas:
- Have students read fewer books in literature courses to include in-depth discussion and reflection upon them.
- Consider block scheduling: This enables classes to meet longer and facilitates discussion
- Consider a trimester schedule with only four courses: This allows students to study fewer courses at a time, more intensively, but over three semesters instead of two.
- Incorporate conversation about ideas into the school at large: Socratic circles for student discussion worked into classes; Socratic circles in which staff discuss ideas in front of students; Socratic circles involving parents, students and staff at various times and events in or out of school.
- Feasts and celebrations that integrate with the church calendar and incorporate skills and themes from student learning.
by Christopher Perrin, PhD | Sep 29, 2010 | Book Reviews
A review of Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, by James K. A. Smith.
By Christopher A. Perrin, PhD
We all have ideals—ideals for a wonderful marriage, the best job, a superb vacation. Our ideals, however, are often fuzzy. What does the ideal church really look like? An ideal government? What about an ideal school?
Well to outline an ideal marriage involving the intersection of two inscrutable human beings is a difficult challenge, to actually live out an ideal marriage is beyond difficult. What might an ideal school look like—with the intersection of two to three hundred human beings—parents, teachers, administrators, board members and….students? And that would be a small school.
If James K. A. Smith is right, we simply cannot help imagining an ideal future, an ideal of human flourishing. According to Smith in his book Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation, imagining ideals is a large part of what it means to be human. We all are seeking some version of the good life, we all desire a kingdom. What is more, we are all being shaped and formed in various ways to love and desire one sort of kingdom or another.
Smith contends that before we humans are cognitive, rational beings we are creatures of desires, passions and loves. He further contends that the way we change is not primarily a matter of the mind, but primarily the result of the heart-shaping forces of the “cultural liturgies” we encounter in the world. He writes, “Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate, it is the rituals and practices of the mall—the liturgies of the mall and market—that shape our imaginations and how we orient ourselves to the world. Embedded in them is a common set of assumptions about the shape of human flourishing, which becomes an implicit telos or goal of our own desires and actions. That is, the visions of the good life embedded in these practices become surreptitiously embedded in us through our participation in the rituals and rhythms of these institutions. “
Smith takes time to examine the ways that various institutions do in fact act as cultural liturgies. He begins with the mall, imagining what it might be like for a Martian anthropologist to study its culture. Smith is convinced that such an anthropologist would see the mall as a thoroughly religious institution. The mall has a daily visitation of pilgrims who enter a large and dazzling cathedral of glass, concrete, light and ornamentation. There are banners and flags in displayed in a large atrium; there are familiar texts and symbols placed on walls to help us easily identify what is inside the various chapels that are contained in this labyrinthine cathedral. Rich iconography lines the wall of each chapel, and there are many three-dimensional statues adorned with the garb that we too can acquire in imitation of these ideals. These same icons, statues and exemplars can be found in similar temples across the country and around the world. In fact the wide distribution of these colors and icons are found in many places in the outside world and have drawn us as pilgrims in the first place. The power of the gospel message of these temple is the power of beauty, “which speaks to our deepest desires and compels us to come not with dire moralisms but rather with a winsome invitation to share in the envisioned good life.”
At this point, Smith is just getting started with his analysis of the “religion of the mall.” He goes on to describe the purchasing experience as a kind of secular Eucharist. Understandably, he does not like or praise the religion of the mall. He does acknowledge, however, that the mall understands something profound about human beings. It embodies its view of its kingdom, rather than merely talking about it. He writes, “Indeed, the genius of mall religion is that actually it operates with a more holistic, affective, embodied anthropology (or theory of the human person) than the Christian church tends to assume. Because worldview-thinking still tends to focus on ideas and beliefs, the formative cultural impact of sites like the mall tends to not show up on our radar.”
As you might guess, the point of Smith’s book is to help us turn on our radar to the formative impact that various cultural liturgies have on us all. Of interest to classical educators will be his liturgical analysis of university education and of Christian college education. Using Tom Wolfe’s book I am Charlotte Simmons, Smith points out that the college experience is far more than the 15 hours a week a student spends in a classroom. Secular university experience exerts a dynamic and intentional shaping influence on college students in dozens of ways. Dorm life, frat house life, football games, drinking, bar and club escapades, hooking up and an exhausting, frenetic rhythm of classes, study, exams shape and form students for the “real world” of “corporate ladder climbing and white-collar overtime needed in order to secure the cottage, the boat, and the private education for the kids.” Smith concludes that while the classroom, laboratory, lecture hall and library have performed some role in shaping a student, it does not compare to these other ways students are shaped. The information provided in the academic areas is “not nearly as potent as the formation we’ve received in the dorm and frat house, or the stadium and dance club.”
His look at Christian colleges is not much more encouraging. Too many Christian colleges in his opinion simply take the basic secular approach to education and add the integration of a Christian worldview or Christian perspective. Smith suggests that the dominant paradigm of Christian education asserts that “goal of a Christian education is to produce professionals who do pretty much the same sorts of things that graduates of Ivy League and state universities do, but who do them ‘from a Christian perspective,’ and perhaps with the goal of transforming and redeeming society.” For Smith this is a regrettable reduction as it “unhooks Christianity from the practices that constitute Christian discipleship.” For Smith, the worship practices of the church must be vitally bound up with the rhythms and practices of a Christian college (and school). When the Christian college is unhooked from the liturgies of the church we end up with an intellectualization of Christianity, leading students to think that “being a Christian doesn’t radically reconfigure our desires and wants, our practices and habits.” This happens because for far too long Christian education has “been concerned with information rather than formation; thus Christian colleges have thought it sufficient to provide a Christian perspective, an intellectual framework, because they see themselves as fostering individual ‘minds in the making.’ Hand in hand with that, such an approach reduces Christianity to a denuded intellectual framework that has diminished bite because such an intellectualized rendition of the faith doesn’t touch our core passions.”
I think by now you sense Smith’s thesis beginning to sink in. Christian worldview instruction is not enough. Appealing to the mind and intellect is not enough. Not that instruction in Christian worldview and ideas should not be done—such instruction is vital. But it is not sufficient, not enough. We must address the core passions of our students, and we do this by means of creating community, atmosphere, rhythms, practices, traditions that shape the hearts of students by engaging them as affective, passionate lovers, not mere minds. The church, rightly worshiping, seeks to do this. Welcoming, greeting, singing, hearing, tasting, standing, kneeling, we worship with all of our person—mind and body. Embodied worship is formative and shapes our love for the kingdom of God and acts a powerful counter-formation over against the formative influence of a dozen secular liturgies we witness and experience. In fact the liturgy of worship helps subvert the power of these secular liturgies, wising us up to their power and methods.
This is where things get interesting. Could it be that our children are being shaped to love a version of the good life that is primarily determined by the “liturgies” of the mall, football stadium, TV sitcoms and the iPod? Could it be that our schools privilege direct engagement with the mind, and the presentation of ideas and a Christian worldview but are nonetheless failing to thwart the power of these other shaping influences? Any teacher with experience can tell you about scores of students whose minds and hearts are seldom truly present in the classroom. They are instead occupied with the shopping for the next fashionable item, the next soccer game, the latest movie, Monday Night Football, the coming rock concert. These things shape them and engage them as lovers, and the teacher often feel powerless standing before her whiteboard with a black marker in her hand. She wonders if would not be better to show then an educational movie—something they can relate to.
Consider the atmosphere and community of your school. What is its liturgy? That is, what are its rhythms, rituals, practices and traditions? We carefully plan our curriculum and lessons. Do we carefully plan and create rhythms, rituals, practices and traditions? Do our teachers carefully plan rhythms, rituals, practices and traditions for each class of students? If Smith is right, then it is these things that will most profoundly shape what our students will love. Every teacher knows that students will forget 75% of the content you “teach” them in a classroom. Might it be wise then to pay attention to more than just content think about form with the same rigor? How can we shape, form and engage hearts, minds and yes, even bodies? Is there vibrant worship in you school? Does music echo through the halls and the great art adorn the walls? Are their dinner parties and great conversation with students and adults alike? Is your facility attractive and conducive to worship and learning? Are poems read and recited, stories written and told? Is Scripture read at lunch for a time? Are there traditions of hospitality when existing students welcome new students into the school, when upper school students warmly welcome new 7th graders or 9th graders? Do teachers and parents gather socially to read books, cook, dine and pray? Do high school students babysit for the young children of teachers (maybe at no charge?). Do you older students help teach the younger students and join them for games on the playground from time to time? Do teachers and students go hiking together or bike-riding or running? Are pastors visiting your school counseling students and speaking in your classrooms or chapel services, or teaching a Bible class? Do you pray for the churches represented by your school and for each pastor by name? Does your school fast occasionally and give money or food to the needy?
These and dozens of other questions might enable us to think more deeply about embodying classical Christian education, such that students absorb it with all five senses and with their hearts as well as their minds. By considering such questions (and generating more) we might clarify our vision of an ideal classical school, and remove much of the fuzziness and confusion that impedes enthusiasm and momentum. Classical education has historically been communal and ecclesial and Smith poignantly reminds us of this. He also helps us to see more clearly that a classical Christian education involves the collaboration of family, church and school as we seek nothing less than the kingdom of God. Classical educators and leaders would do well to learn from the insights of this valuable and timely book.
