Paideia: The Purpose of Classical Christian Education
In the world of Christian education, there is much talk about the concept of worldview. Our worldview consists of a set of beliefs and assumptions about the world around us—its origins, its purpose, how it works, and what our responsibility is to it. As we prepared for the upcoming school year, the staff here at PCA reviewed our school’s purpose and goals. We talked about how important it is for us to uphold a biblical worldview in our teaching and in our lives, but our headmaster Dr. Collins pointed out that we can’t just stop at transferring a biblical worldview. What we want to bestow on our students is more fully expressed by the Greek term paideia, which encompasses not just the glasses through which we look at the world around us but also the way of life that follows.
I recently watched a TED Talk in which atheist philosopher Alain de Botton argued that secular culture has much to learn from religion. He had observed certain holes in the way society functions, and he set out to find a few ideological and methodological plugs. One of the cultural advantages of religion that he proposed secular society borrow is “sermonizing” in our educational endeavors. He astutely observed that the point of a lecture is to impart information, while the point of a sermon is to change your life. What society needs in education, he said, is the latter. I think he was onto something.
Being “preachy” gets a bad rap, and for good reason—it’s associated with being self-righteous and looking down your nose at others. But in the view of classical Christian education, every new bit of knowledge we gain does have moral implications because we view every subject as being a revelation of God's character in His world. Everything we learn about creation then obligates us to worship. This obligation should color our approach to every subject, every lesson, and every homework assignment.
Let me add a qualification. You may have read in a recent post about the temptation for Christian schools to view themselves as churches. Allow me to reiterate: Pinnacle is not primarily a place of worship; it is primarily a place of learning. But all our learning is pointing us to a grander goal than being able to recite the third declension endings in Latin from memory or explain why Roland’s view of honor was self-serving. Our school’s vision statement says,
Pinnacle Classical Academy seeks to graduate students instilled with a lifelong
love of learning, equipped for service in love to God and man.
Our purpose is to teach, but our vision is to prepare your students for whatever calling God has for them and to equip them to pursue this calling rightly. We want our students to graduate fully prepared to live a life of love, of growth, and of service to God and man. This truth may not be explicit in every conversation we have about modifiers or the Pythagorean theorem, but it is the foundational assumption that gives meaning to everything we teach.
And this should lead us to be anything but stuck up! In fact, it should lead us toward humility as we bow in reverence to God. At Pinnacle, we believe the best learning happens when we not only acknowledge but actively seek out the eternal implications of the things we're learning.
In the course of a recent leadership study, I was asked to answer the following question: Do you think a person who values religious faith will tend to be more of a person-oriented leader or more of a task-oriented leader? As soon as I read this question, I was struck by how much it applies to us here at PCA. As Christian educators, should we be more focused on results or on people? I got the impression that the “correct” answer to the question was that the leader of faith would be more person-oriented than task-oriented. After all, tasks are temporary and people are eternal. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this just didn’t quite capture the full picture.
Scripture is brimming with calls to care for those around us, especially those who are under our authority. Under no circumstances should we devalue or dismiss this duty. But the Bible also calls us to value doing the task and doing it well, working heartily, as to the Lord and not to men (Col. 3:23). This is our first call to value results: because God values results. “Let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart” (Gal. 6:9). This call leads us to hold ourselves and our students to a high standard, not so we can boast about how intelligent or elitist we are—may we never be so!—but because we believe that God is most honored when we do our best work for Him.
But we also want to graduate students who not only do the task of learning but are instilled with a lifelong love of learning. The writer of Ecclesiastes writes the following: “What do workers gain from their toil? … I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God” (Eccl. 3:9, 12-13).
Enjoying our work is a gift from God, Scripture tells us. Often we think of “toil” as a negative—tedious, burdensome, difficult, sweaty. But enjoying the fruit of our work is God’s gift to us. So what is the fruit of our work? The fruit of learning well is that we grow to love learning. And at Pinnacle, we believe that the fruit of a lifelong love of learning is becoming progressively better equipped for service in love to God and man. In short…people.
We are not choosing the task over the person or the person over the task. In classical Christian education, the person—the whole person—is the task. Our goal is not test scores or grades or college acceptance—all of those things are good, and we find that they are frequently the benefits of the classical model—but to shape the whole person into someone who is not only knowledgeable but wise, not only capable but virtuous.
In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis famously wrote,
“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. … There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit— immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
It is for our neighbor’s glory that we educate. In light of this truth, we may be tempted to think that our omnibus readings and science experiments really aren’t so important after all, in the grand scheme of things. But it is precisely through doing the task of education that we instill the love of learning and build the kind of personal character that equips students to live a godly life.
Ultimately, your student’s literature assignment will pass away. But the child who is being shaped by it will not, and because we believe it does have the power to shape her, it nevertheless has eternal significance. It is with great humility and by the grace of Christ, then, that we must embark on the task of educating your child, of giving them a paideia—training his mind and shaping his heart.
Laurel McLaughlin
Upper School Teacher
