The Beauty of Classical Christian Education

A short article I wrote for the school where I work:

The Beauty of Classical Christian Education

Getting Easier Every Day

“Each day it becomes easier to know what we ought to despise: what modern man admires and journalism praises.”

- Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Laughter and Bad Literature

When things got a little boring at meetings of the Inklings they occasionally played a game to liven things up. They took turns reading aloud from the novels of Amanda McKittrick Ros to see how long each could read without bursting into a fit of laughter. I've been reading her novel Irene Iddesleigh out loud to the family for the last couple of days and I don't remember laughing so hard. And I can confirm that this novel is the worst I've ever read, but yet there is something compelling about Mrs. Ros's attempt at art.

I was introduced to the author through one of my favorite prose stylists, David Bentley Hart, in his article Brilliantly Bad Books. Read the article and then try a little of Irene Iddesleigh, especially if you have some literature lovers to share it with. Laughter is good medicine.

Consider This New Book on Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

I've been looking forward to reading this for a while... Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition. After reading part of the forward by David Hicks at Amazon, I'm really excited.

Also, check out the free study guide you can get right now.

The Awakening of Miss Prim

Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera turns out to be a kindred spirit to those who homeschool, love literature, believe that small is beautiful, and long for the simple life. Her first novel, The Awakening of Miss Prim, is a virtual apologetic for John Senior's Thousand Good Books approach to education, disguised as a Jane Austen romance, populated with characters who have imbibed the spirit of G.K. Chesterton. If this sounds too good to be true, give it a try - she actually pulls it off. 

A Peace to End All Peace

My understanding of the history of what we now refer to as the Middle East was almost non-existent before reading this engaging history of the region from shortly before the Great War up to the current time. The Ottoman Empire, Winston Churchill, The Great Game, The Russian Revolution, John Buchan, Lawrence of Arbia, Making the World Safe for Democracy, and the beginnings of Zionism all come to focus in this mysterious region of the globe. I highly recommended A Peace to End All Peace as a great work of history and relevant to the news of the hour.

What we learn from art, literature, history, and music

Knowledge includes three distinct kinds: knowledge that, knowledge how, and knowledge what. I know that uranium is radioactive; I know how to ride a bicycle; and I sometimes know what to do, what to say or what to feel. The first kind of knowledge is information (of which science is the systematic part); the second is skill; the third virtue. In reverse order these correspond to the three inputs into a rational life: the ends, the means and the facts. Knowing what to do, Aristotle suggested, is a matter of right judgement (orthos logos); but it also involves feeling rightly. The virtuous person ‘knows how to feel’, and this means feeling what the situation requires: the right emotion, towards the right object, on the right occasion and in the right degree. Moral education has just such knowledge as its goal: it is an education of the emotions. The virtue of the Greek hero is of a piece with his emotional certainty, and this certainty is the gift of culture, and of the higher vision which culture makes available. By setting the individual within the context of the group, by providing him with ritual expressions and the path to collective release, by uniting him in thought with the unborn and the dead, and by imbuing his thoughts with ideas of sanctity and sacrilege, the culture enables the hero to give safe and sincere expression to the feelings that social life requires. The common culture tells him how and what to feel, and in doing so raises his life to the ethical plane, where the thought of judgement inhabits whatever he does.” —from Roger Scruton’s Modern Culture (p. 15)

Greek Warrior Ethic in a Nutshell

From Alexander Pope's awesome translation of the Iliad:

Ye Greeks, be men! the charge of battle bear;
Your brave associates, and your selves revere!
Let glorious acts your glorious acts inspire,
And catch from breast to breast the noble fire!
On valour's side the odds of combate lie,
The brave live glorious, or lamented die;
The wretch who trembles in the field of fame,
Meets death, and worse than death, eternal shame.

One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows...

"One can argue over the merits of most books... one does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, he asks her to return his letters. The old man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. ... When you sit down to [read] it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy; I don't know. But it is you who are on trial." A.A. Milne

The Great Tradition

The Great Tradition will go on because the forces of nature are on its side; it has on its side an invincible ally, the self-preserving instinct of humanity. Men may forsake it, but they will come back to it because they must; their collective existence cannot permanently go on without it. Whole societies may disallow it and set it at nought, as ours has done; they may try to live by ways of their own, by bread alone, by bread and buncombe, by riches and power, by economic exploitation, by intensive industrialism, quantity-production, by what you please; but in the end they will find, as so many societies have already found, that they must return and seek the regenerative power of the Great Tradition, or lapse into decay and death. - Ablert Jay Nock , The Theory of Education in the United States

The Problem of the American University

Albert Jay Nock's diagnosis of the problems in American education delivered in 1931 were quite prescient and are still relevant. In the lectures he describes how a theory of education led to the destruction of classical education throughout all levels of the American school system. What led to the replacement of education in the Great Tradition with instruction and training? Nock identifies three aspects of the American theory of education: 1) A fantastic and impracticable idea of equality, 2) A fantastic and impracticable idea of democracy, and 3) A fantastically exaggerated idea of the importance of literacy in assuring the support of a sound and enlightened public order. This theory created a shift to training which vitiated the ideal of the educated person. Well written, precise, and at times very humorous, Nock's book is still worth reading today.

The Parable of the Sunfish

From Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading.

A post-graduate student equipped with honors and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.

Post-Graduate Student: "That's only a sunfish."

Agassiz: "I know that. Write a description of it."

After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.

The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.

Why Reading Matters: Great Books and the Life in Christ

I've enjoyed this talk by John Granger on how great fantasy stories help us in our Life in Christ many times. If you are interested in C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, imaginative literature, etc. you'll enjoy this.

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece

The three principle sayings of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece:

1. Know thyself.
2. Nothing to excess.
3. It is hard to be good.

From Constantine Cavarnos, The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece.

The Beauty of Classical Christian Education

An article I wrote for a classical Christian school where I work:

"Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, thousands can think for one who can see." - John Ruskin

Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale The Snow Queen begins with the story of a demon that creates a looking-glass with the power to make everything good or beautiful “shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looking increased in size and [became] worse than ever. The most lovely landscapes appeared like boiled spinach, and the people became hideous…” The demon kept a school to show mankind what the world was really like and he carried the looking-glass everywhere so that the people in every land could look through the distorting mirror. Eventually in his pride the demon even tried to fly the mirror up into heaven to see the angels, but it slips from his hand and breaks into tiny fragments which rain down on mankind. These tiny fragments can lodge in people’s eyes and even their hearts so that they can see nothing either rightly or justly. The rest of the fairy tale concerns the fate of one boy who has a mirror fragment lodged in his eye and heart.

It is a commonplace in our world that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, meaning that what is beautiful is completely relative and up to the individual to decide. This is not the understanding of the best of the ancients or the great teachers of Christ’s Church. The classical and Christian tradition has understood beauty as an objective reality that comes from God himself who is indeed the source of all beauty. But sin has entered in and distorted our sight and in some cases completely inverted the true order of the world. In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky has one of his characters say that we have fallen so far that “what to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting and the battlefield is the heart of man.” If beauty is objective and our vision is distorted preventing us from seeing, then what is needed to purify our eyes and restore our vision? As philosopher Mark Anderson says, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, rather “beauty is in the eye of the beautiful.” Or as the Apostle Paul puts it “be not conformed to this world. But be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” Our souls must be rightly ordered and renewed; they must become beautiful in order for us to see what is beautiful. Now to be sure, this is the work of the grace of God, yet we also need practice, or dare I say, classical Christian education to assist us in seeing aright.

The task of education according to David Hicks is to cultivate virtuous human beings: “Virtue is the life that knows and reveres, speculates and acts upon the Good, that loves and reproduces the Beautiful, and that pursues excellence and moderation in all things.”  That is why we read great children’s stories: to beautify our imaginations. That is why we study logic, mathematics, and science: to beautify our minds. That is why we read and discuss classic literature and history: to beautify our souls. That is why we study the scriptures and the theology of the Christian church: to beautify our hearts.  In the words of the great fourth century theologian Gregory of Nazianzus, we need to “polish our theological self to beauty like a statue” so that we can see what is truly beautiful.

What happened to the young boy with the distorted glass shards in Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen? You’ll have to read it yourself to see the great lengths that had to be pursued, but ultimately it was removed by the love of another who would not rest, who would suffer any hardship, who would sacrifice all for the restoration of the young boy’s true heart and sight. And ultimately that is what we have in Christ and what we must do and be as parents and teachers to teach ourselves, our children, and our students to be able to see what is good and true and beautiful. This is why we pursue classical Christian education.

The desperate need for a king...

I'm working my way through the the Odyssey and note that everyone in the first two books is either blamed or has the blame cast upon them for the problem of the suitors:

• Telemachus blames the gods for what comes to pass.
• The gods are vexed that humans blame them for the bad things that happen and in turn blame man with "heaping wantonness upon themselves."
• Telemachus blames the suitors for his troubles.
• Antinous, one of the suitors, blames Penelope for having "rapt away the wits of the Achaean men."
• Penelope's parents get blamed for not bringing her back home and choosing a husband for her.
• Telemachus blames the rest of the people who have "sat by mutely, without word of denunciation or restraint: though you are very many, and the suitors are but few" allowing injustice to go unpunished.

Homer seems to be telling us that a son needs a father, a wife needs a husband, and a people need a king.

Nature and the Knowledge of God

"Human beings have never before lived lives so remote from nature, or been more insensible to the enigma it embodies. For late modern peoples, God has become ever more a myth, but so in a sense has the world; and there probably is no way of living in real communion with one but not the other." (From The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart)

G.K.C. the Prophet

“The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilization. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralyzed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.”

~ G.K. Chesterton, speaking in Toronto in 1930.

A Book for the Wise: Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia

In 1759, Samuel Johnson published "a little story book" in order to defray the expense of his aged mother's funeral. The brief novel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, sought to answer the question of  the "choice of life" or what kind of occupation will lead to happiness in this life?

Rasselas, a young prince, is sequestered in the Happy Valley, where he is given all of his desires and kept from the vicissitudes of life. The prince, however, isn't satisfied, and with his sister and friend escape the Happy Valley and travel to Egypt in search of the answer to the choice of life.

While their fascinating search leads to a less than clear answer to the question, the book itself sets the reader on the path to wisdom. As Rasselas's sister says at the end of the book, "to me the choice of life is become less important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity." This is a wonderful book that will bear repeated reading over the course of a lifetime.