Where Most Classical Educators Miss the Boat

Rather than school, try schools.

Over the past couple of generations Christians have, with a growing conscientiousness, sought to uncouple the education of their children from the state, and to bring it back to where it has always belonged in Christian societies (and most human societies, for that matter). The home is the seat and center of education, whether or not the children go off to sit at the feet of a philosopher, or to apprentice under the master of a trade. The Christian home is where we learn to be human. Our mothers and fathers raise us to maturity, teaching us how to be in the Church and the City. Education, as I often emphasize, is above all else human formation.

The Christian home, in its life whose rhythm is set by the soil and the Church, is where we learn to be human.

The state has sought to infantilize us, in order to increase our docility and encourage us to think of its institutions in the same way as we think of family: we are dependent, we contribute to their welfare at our most fundamental level, we are defined by their rituals. The state has encouraged us to remain in a state of educational immaturity well into our twenties. Christians cannot accept this. Not too long ago, only a couple of centuries, it was normal to go to college or university at the age of fourteen or fifteen. If that were not your path, you would be apprenticed or simply begin working, hopefully with your family.

This essay is not an encouragement to work harder, to excel within the system more, to achieve more according to the world. It is, believe it or not, an encouragement to scholé. So read on.

This “accelerated” adulthood of teenagers in college frightens parents when we think of our children’s abilities at, say, age fifteen. I certainly think that we ought to hold ourselves, as Christian families, to a higher standard of social readiness and comportmental excellence, but we often make youthful readiness more of a bugbear than it need be. For example, in the English-speaking Americas of the 1600s, when young men worked and waged war at age fifteen and both young men and young women were considered marriageable as adolescents, the average age of first marriage for women was twenty. In the following century it was twenty-two. In England that age was slightly higher, and marriages of persons under the age of twenty-one (legal majority) required familial permission¹. Here is the point: children are often anxious to become adults. That does not mean that they or their parents need to be anxious to burden them with tasks and positions they aren’t capable of bearing yet. A young adult is a young adult.

This freedom to tailor and time responsibility can, perhaps ironically from a modern and statist perspective, help Christian parents educate their children for greater and more glorious (read heavier) things, with less pressure.

I challenge parents to use the following internal standard as a helpful pole star in the education of their children: children should be adults by age fifteen or so, ready to work, marry, and study independently. And in order to show that this is not some sort of apologia pro vita mea, in which I attempt to justify my kids’ flight from home and young marriages, I tell you of my three oldest children, aged twenty, nineteen, and seventeen. None are married, but each is independent in their own way. They receive no pressure from us to marry, but we do chivvy them on to greater achievement as we are able. When they were fifteen, they were given the same treatment as they are now. We have striven to treat them as men and women as early as practicable, and worked to make it practicable early. There’s plenty of adulthood ahead of them, which gives them running room. Running room is for running in, so they should never be still, but they are not under pressure. If it be now, 'tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

The best schools are not capable of human formation, only of supporting it. The best masters are indeed formative, but they cannot make the formation complete. This is especially true if we consider that the most effective work of masters is done during the ages in which our young humans should be considered young adults. The family and the church excel far more at what true children, les enfants, need: socialization, conversation, the word in the world and the world in the word. They need dad to tell them why the sky is blue far more than they need the 4th grade science teacher to do so, regardless of whose answer is the more technically correct. They need cosmovision more than anything. They need to be educated in the world of their parents.

This where most classical educators miss the boat: they infantilize by prolonging “grammar school” and fail to provide a structure in which students may be discipled.

Our common approach to classical Christian schools is a fruit of our dependence on expert opinion, which tends to push the orbital ellipses of our education toward the planets of information and certification, rather than toward the sun of human formation.

This essay is not a vindication of homeschooling, but a revindication of good Christian schooling. When children are children, education ought to look to the fireplace: the lar and the lore of the family. When children are adults, their education ought to be limenal², to look to the lintels of the door, out from which (and under the blood of which) they pass out into the world. Older students especially need school.

This is not a vindication of homeschooling, but a revindication of good Christian schooling. When children are children, education ought to look to the fireplace: the lar and the lore of the family. When children are adults, their education ought to be limenal, to look to the lintels of the door, out from which (and under the blood of which) they pass out into the world.

Education must be discipleship. If it is not, it is not human, much less is it gospel. One of the defining characteristics of a great master is his ability to disciple. Alas, schools as they are structured today radically restrict the ability of teachers to truly disciple. The ethos seems to settle into a sort of school-discipleship by committee. Any serious thought of what discipleship is and requires of master and student will show that by nature this cannot work. It doesn’t take a village. Rather, it takes a few masters, and even that plurality is usually to be managed in stages.

Schools that pile hour-long classes upon each other are not places of discipleship, except where a football coach or club leader may get their hands on some students for significant time. Nearly all classical schools fall into this mode. Such schools are not classical, nor are they family-friendly. They are, in fact, following the Prussian model so many of their leaders decry (if they are aware of it at all).

Families ought to seek masters for the education of their young adults, masters who are able to do what they want to do: disciple. This requires access, time, and most of all, scholé. A “pile-on” school will simply not be able to provide these.

The principal way in which this missing of the boat manifests itself is in a school’s attempt to be…well, to be a fast food university. A university is supposed to provide us with a world, a universe, of masters and their knowledge. But that university is divided into colleges for a reason. If a high school is large enough, it may have departments, but they are administrative. Schools, including those of the classical Christian variety, gather everything under their umbrella, then (to mix a metaphor) serve up insufficient portions of each of those everythings. Even at the “best” schools, excellent students are left to their own devices, or the special attention of a teacher, which comes at a cost to others. The structure works against fostering.

This shows itself most in the arts and in athletics, which devotees of classical education will recognize ought to be at the core of education. It should already strike us as odd that one institution should “offer” (read exigently require) biology alongside algebra and letters. It should strike us as bizarre that the same institution would then require music or sport. Or worse, not require them at all, but append them as neglected attachments called “electives”. The solution is for schools not to offer such fare at all, and yet for Christian families to highly value it. I will explain below.

If you are familiar with the conversations I had with Dr. Scott Postma in our many episodes of The Everlasting Education, you may be rubbing your ears right now. You thought Joffre loved omnivorous education. You thought he held, with Robert Heinlein, that specialization is for insects. I do indeed. And in fact, I can’t mention that quote without including it here, so enjoy, and meet me on the other side of this brief text:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Robert A. Heinlein

The problem we are running into with schools as they are currently organized is not breadth, but narrowness. We know what happens when one person attempts too much: everything tends to mediocrity. We should want mastery. We should want masters.

Many of the teachers at these schools are masters. Alas, they are not enabled to play the part.

When your children were children (enfants), they needed to be told what to study. I am no free-range educationist, no unschooler. I am, however, a lover of maturity. When your children are adults, which should be when they are in high school, they must be allowed (empowered, even) to find and pursue their loves. They need masters, and masters with time.

Center education around the home, and find masters abroad.

This is why I am such a fan of centering education around the home, and finding masters abroad: hither, thither, and yon. Encourage your son to go trawl fishing in Alaska, your daughter to work a year at the dude ranch. Push your son to join the editorial team of an online zine, your daughter to audit that writing course at a local Christian college. Find masters in their dedicated schools of mastery. Hire a teacher. If you choose to call this homeschooling, so be it. These things can usually work around a pile-on school, but I cannot deny that such schools interfere with this real education.

Let us briefly push aside financial considerations.

Why would you settle for a school’s music class when you could hire a master to teach trumpet, violin, voice, all the above? Why limit gymnasium to a pile-on school’s offerings, when your child could be at a club or school beginning to master dance or soccer or rugby or baseball as much as their love drives them?

Taking finance back into consideration, what can you achieve in the hiring of a master? If you value it, you may surprise yourself. Be a parent volunteer; offer your own mastery in trade; plan and save.

Families have handed education over to schools, because they misapprehend what a plenary education consists in. Schools have been no help, struggling to escape from the secret desires of parents: certification and social security.

Families must think of school and schooling differently. Earlier I said that this was not a vindication of homeschooling. I stand by that, even if I am endorsing a life that most school educators would identify as homeschooling.

Schooling must revolve around the home (as above, the fireplace and the doorway). There’s a reason your town has a school of dance, a school of music. There’s a reason many elite sports programs refer to themselves as academies. They are places of mastery. They are places masters are freer to disciple. Christians need to build more of these. In my town, the premier school of dance is Christian, as is the premier music school, as is the premier sports club.

Participate in such schools. Does your child wish to study Greek? Find him a dedicated Greek teacher, one-on-one or with a small group. Does your child wish to be a carpenter? a cook? an engineer? a writer? a pilot? an astronaut? You know what to do. Pursue the masters, wherever they be. Your young adult is just that, young. Juvenile. Often immature. He’s likely ready, regardless. This is that first step across the līmen, so any master you find, knowing his work, will start small: pilot school begins, and stays for a long while, with a little single-engine prop plane.

Do not consign your young adult to mediocrity, whether through lack of masters, lack of time, or lack of bandwidth. Allow him to pursue his loves, even if they change. Rather than school, try schools. Rather than teachers, try a master at his leisure.

1. These average ages may be slightly higher than actual practice, since these would have been registered marriages (i.e. a church or magistrate), and therefore more reflective of the middle and higher classes. Regardless, they serve to demythologize “child marriage” in the Protestant context.

2. I choose to write limenal rather than liminal in order to emphasize the Latin līmen, threshold. Liminal has lately taken on, not inappropriately, the meaning of between-space or no-space, communicating the ennui and unsettlement that comes from being stuck in threshold spaces, in places between places, i.e. bus stops and corridors. I prefer to use the 19th-century meaning, that of a beginning or initial stage.