Why Classical Christian Education Is for Everyone
During my time in high school at PCA, I had the same conversation several times with various adults in my life. It went something like this.
Them: “What school do you go to?”
Me: “Pinnacle Classical Academy. It’s over there off of Chenal, you know?”
Them: “Oh…isn’t that just a school for smart kids?”
Since I had this conversation more than once, I came to understand that this was a common conception of Classical Christian Education. People tend to hear the word “classical” and think things like “elite” or even “elitist.” (Images of men in powdered wigs and coattails come to mind.) For many people, our model is associated with academic rigor that only students with the most extraordinary academic gifts can ever hope to achieve. Yet this is neither the goal nor the reality at Pinnacle. On the contrary, Classical Christian Education is for everyone.
The classical liberal arts consisted of a set of disciplines which included mathematics, music, and the practices of thinking and speaking well. In the classical world, these were the disciplines a student must have mastered in order to be considered an educated person, fit for leadership. Of course, certain disciplines have been developed in more recent centuries that the ancients would no doubt have considered equally valuable. But for a chemist not to learn poetry because “poetry is boring,” or for a painter not to learn geometry because he “isn’t a math person,” would have been a foreign concept. The key here is that the full educational curriculum was designed to make every student a more complete person, better equipped to live a life of virtue and of freedom–hence “liberal arts,” from the Latin liber, meaning free.
The idea that an education can shape a person is at the heart of our mission here at PCA. Our vision is “to graduate students instilled with a lifelong love of learning, equipped for service in love to God and man.” This vision is deeply classical in that it reflects an ancient philosophy of education that has largely been lost to our society. This idea has been treated extensively elsewhere, even on this blog, so I will not belabor it here. Suffice it to say that modern education’s purpose is to train students to work, while classical education’s purpose is to train students to live–to live lives that are defined by love of what is good and characterized by service. The claim that we can teach students to love the right things is altogether foreign to modern education, but we believe it is our primary responsibility as educators. And that goal–to learn to love what is good and true and beautiful–is not for an arbitrarily defined “elite,” but for everyone.
The structure and methods of Classical Christian Education are also designed to be effective for all students. In the Classical Christian Education resurgence of recent decades, the trivium (which includes grammar, logic, and rhetoric) has often been used as a pedagogical framework that coincides with natural child development. Young children are instinctive memorizers and excel at taking in and retaining new information, and so in the younger grades we use tools like catechisms, songs, and chants to help them memorize key ideas across subjects (the “grammar”). Kids with all kinds of giftings thrive with the use of these tools. At the pre-teen and early teen age, children begin wanting to form arguments and reason from one point to another, and so we start training them in formal logic. And as our students mature into young men and women, we teach them to communicate well through studying rhetoric.
This is not to say that only young children can absorb and memorize raw factual information or that only older students can learn to express themselves well. But these demarcations in their growth as learners are consistent with their natural development, and students find more joy in learning when their instruction is appropriately focused on the way that they naturally learn at that age. This is true for students of all ages and backgrounds. In fact, it especially helps students who may otherwise tend to struggle with a particular subject like reading or math.
The charge that Classical Christian Education is “only for smart kids” ought to give us pause and to lead us to examine ourselves. What a shame it would be if, with all the many gifts we have been given, we produced more pride than wisdom. But our model is not reserved for the “exceptionally gifted,” nor should it put down any student. Rather, it lifts students up by challenging them and pushing them beyond what they believe their limits to be. We do hold our students to high standards, and for good reason: most of us are prone to be too easily satisfied. But we also give our students the tools that we know can help them succeed, because they have helped others like them succeed for centuries. It is an encouraging thought to know that you are following an ancient and time-proven tradition, or as some have said, “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Laurel McLaughlin
Upper School Teacher
