by Fritz Hinrichs
Originally posted on Escondido Tutorial Service
Statement on offsite articles

This talk will attempt to answer two questions; what is Classical Education and why is it necessary in our day. 

The word "classical" or "classic" is used in many contexts and often without specific meaning; Classic Coke, classical music, classic rock; however, classical usually means something that through time for various reasons has been proven worthy of our respect and interest. In music, the work of certain composers has been recognized as worth saving and while that of others, even though perhaps popular in its own time, has been tossed aside to the dust-bin of history. The same is true of books, some books are more worthy of study than others because of the profundity and clarity with which they express the ideas that they contain. 

The study of the great books has been the backbone of good education for centuries. If you look at the books that the intellectual giants have read who have arisen in our culture, you find that there are particular books that come up again and again. These books were required of most schoolboys until the rise of Dewey and the democratization of education through the public school system. The public school system saw these books as elitist and not easily comprehensible by the masses and therefor not appropriate for public education. 

Another influence contributing to the demise of the great books was the demoralization of the Christian intellectual community. Most of the institutions of learning in this country were founded by Christians who saw it as their duty to conquer the intellectual arena for Christ. However, since the rise of secularism and especially since the humiliating defeat that biblical Christians saw at the Scopes Trial, the evangelical community has been in full retreat from the intellectual arena. Before the turn of the century, most institutions of learning were dominated by those who thought from a Biblical worldview; however, this consensus quickly began to crumble and in 1925 at the Scope's Trial, through the public humiliation of William Jennings Bryan's creationism, academia as well as the general culture came to hold biblical Christianity as unworthy of intellectual regard. Even though the trial was in no way a rigorous debate of the creation issue, its effect on the Christian intellectual community was nothing short of disastrous. From that point on Christians felt as though the intellectual community had humiliated them and, to return the favor, they abandoned the intellectual community in droves. The intellectual pursuit came to be seen as not only of little value for Christians but also as simply antagonistic to the faith. At this point in history the church saw an unraveling of the Christian intellectual tradition. No longer would Christians apply themselves to the study of the great thinkers; that would be a task left entirely to those with a non-Christian world view. 

Christian education has become something of a lost science. Not only have Christians done very little to prepare their children to become godly intellects, but intellectual incompetence has been seen as the true helpmate of vital spirituality. A soft mind has been seen as a vital tool in the pursuit of a soft heart. In our day, mental rigor and a vigorous intellectual pursuit have became equated with doctrinal rigidity and cold spirituality. 

However, by God's grace, with the increasing interest in classical education, we are seeing a revival of the Christian intellectual tradition. Classical education differs from most educational philosophies in that it attempts to step back from the parade of educational theories that seem to keep us in a state of continual bewilderment and asks "what was education like in the past?" "What books were used?" "What goals were thought important?" 

Dorothy Sayers in her well-known essay "The Lost Tools of Learning" attempted to answer these questions and in so doing gave us some very sage advice for education in our own day. She began by investigating the medieval model of education and found that it was composed of two parts; the first was called the Trivium and the second, the Quadrivium . 

The Trivium contained three areas; Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. Each of these three areas were specifically suited to the stages in a child's mental development. During his early years a child studies the Grammar portion of the Trivium. The Grammar period (ages 9-11) includes a great deal of language, preferably an ancient language, such as Latin or Greek, that will require the child to spend a great deal of time learning and memorizing its' grammatical structure. During their younger years children possess a great natural ability to memorize large amounts of material even though they may not understand its significance. This is the time to fill them full of facts, such as the multiplication table, geography, dates, events, plant and animal classifications; anything that lends itself to easy repetition and assimilation by the mind. 

During the second period, the Dialectic period (ages 12-14), the child begins to understand that which he has learned and begins to use his reason to ask questions based on the information that he has gathered in the grammar stage. It is during this stage that the child no longer sees the facts that he learned as merely separate pieces of information but he starts to put them together into logical relationships by asking questions. No longer can the american revolution merely be a fact in history but it must be understood in the light of the rest of what the child has learned. For example, how do we understand the actions of the american revolutionaries in light of what we know about our responsibility to obey the governing authorities? How can the fact that Washington and Jefferson are both held up as great men must be reconciled with the fact that they were slave-holders? 

When a child comes to the age when he has the ability to reason, he usually puts his reason to use by making a nuisance of himself back-talking to his parents or trying catch them in some error or fallacy, but during this time the young mind's new abilities should be directed towards profitable mental exercises. Formal logic can be a great aid during this time, so that the student learns the rules that guide sound thinking. There are many areas that can be used to provide good material for the young mind to practice on. History supplies many events that involve questions of morality which require a good deal of discussion and careful reasoning to work through. Theology also gives many opportunities for debate; even though our discussion must be seasoned with reverence for the subject matter as well as our opponents, fundamentally we can see theological debate as a very healthy and beneficial activity. A less controversial area is that of Mathematics; for thousands of years the geometry text written by the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid has provided a beautifully constructed series of Geometrical proofs that, with guidance, any perceptive child can work through with great benefit to their thinking skills. 

The third period Sayer mentions is that of Rhetoric (ages 14-16). During this period the child moves from merely grasping the logical sequence of arguments to learning how to present them in an persuasive, aesthetically pleasing form. Dorothy Sayers also calls this period the Poetic age, because during this period the student is to develop the skill of organizing the information he has learned into a well reasoned format that will be both pleasing as well as logical. During this period the student can begin to specialize in particular areas of interest and is equipped to move on to the Quadrivium, which involves specialization in particular areas of study. At this time, students that are more inclined towards either mathematics and science or literature and the humanities can pursue the area of their natural abilities. The pursuit of particular subjects is appropriate at this point because they have been given the tools of learning that are necessary for the study of any subject. By this stage, a student who had been given a classical education would have the thinking skills and mental discipline that are necessary to tackle the difficulties associated with most any area of study. 

In modern education, we have put the proverbial cart before the horse by expecting students to master a great number of subjects before they have mastered the tools of learning. Even though the study of language and logic may seem dull in themselves, they are the tools that one needs to develop to be able to approach the task of mastering any particular subject whether it be scottish political history or carburetor maintenance. Sayers ends her essay with this line, "The sole true end of education is simply this; to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain." 

"Learning to learn for oneself" certainly well summarizes the pedagogical goal of classical education; however, once one can learn for themselves, where to go from there? Another educational truism is helpful, "Education is merely selling someone on books". To be able to learn for oneself does not mean that you no longer need a teacher, but rather, you are capable of making books your teachers without the aid of an instructor to explain the books to you. In our day and age we seem to be quite impressed by the number of years one has spent in the academic institutions obtaining degrees. However, the ancients would probably have thougth that our institutions must be quite poor being that after so many years they had not produced students who were able to learn indepedently. That a student still needs an instructor to explain the works he is reading shows a sad level of intellectual dependency. We seem to think that intellectual adolescence must be indefinitely prolonged before granting a young scholar the right to stand on his own two feet. The fact that you leave the academic institution should not be a sign that your education has come to an end, rather it should show that you are ready for it to begin. 

To this end we must ask, "Which books are worthy teachers?" The answer to this question usually lies in what we are attempting to learn, however if we are merely to ask in general "Which are the truly great books?" we find there is actually a fairly broad agreement on the answer to this question. There are books that through history have shown enduring value. With the Bible we have a canon which compromises those books that God has directed the Church through His Spirit to acknowledge as authoritative; so also with the great books there is a canon of sorts. Through time certain books have generally come to be viewed as central to the development of western culture and have had an unusually large impact due to the profundity and eloquence with which they have expressed their ideas. These books form the core of the western intellectual tradition; it is the ideas contained in them that has formed the saga that we know as western history.  Anyone who has grown up in the West who desires to understand the cultural milieu in which they have been raised should read these books. In order to come to a self-conscious understanding of the ideas that have shaped the culture around us, we need to face the ideas at the source from which they came. Francis Schaeffer had an excellent sense for the top-down flow of ideas. He was fond of explaining how ideas began with the philosophers, worked down through the universities, into the popular media and finally into the general culture. Because ideas progress in this manner, it behooves us to become acquainted with ideas at their fount so that we may understand their manifestations in our present culture. Thus, the reading of the great books serves an important apologetical function for Christians; the books allow us to grapple with the ideas that have shaped the thinking of those around us who we are called to minister to as evangelists. 

Often when I describe the study of the great books as a tool in apologetics, people often visualize their study as something of a brutal secular gauntlet the Christian must run in order to gain intellectual credibility. This is a mistaken understanding. Certainly there is much in the western intellectual tradition that must be consciously rejected and put under biblical criticism; however, it is the non-believer and not the Christian who must fear the reading of the great books. Those who through the promotion of political correctness would return us to polytheistic paganism have come to realize that they must entirely throw out the study of western culture if they are going to reshape the thinking of our students. Western thought has been permeated with Christian monotheism and thus a persistent concept of objective and universal truth so it will always be dangerous territory for the mental slugs that political correctness would raise up on its diet of insipid relativism. 

Certainly the study of the great books should not be taken lightly. There are serious hazards to one's faith that lurk; however, studying through the great books often is like the trouble filled journey of Christian in Pilgrim's Progress; just about the time that you think all is lost and that the darkness is certainly coming in around and you feel that you will surely be done in, an author who is a friend of the Faith comes to your side and helps guide you back to the path of truth. For every Aristotle, there is an Augustine; when you are in the throws of a sceptical Descartes, the brilliant faith of Pascal comes to your aid; when under attack by Hume, you have a friend in Calvin; when besieged by Kant, you fight back with Lewis. God in his providential care has given us a bountiful number of voices who have stood in the gap at crucial periods of our history and spoken for His truth. The men God has raised up to speak His truth to our culture are a testimony to the tremendous care with which He has guided the West.

  We live in the continuum of western history. In order to evaluate this stream that we are part of we must step back from it and discern the ideas that have shaped it. To attempt to ignore the ideas that have shaped our cultural history is to guarantee ourselves not only cultural irrelevance but also entrenchment in the Christian ghetto. This position not only will lead to our own intellectual poverty but also will disgrace the Sovereign God who needs not be mocked by the cowardice of His children. The King's children do not hide in the alleys but walk confidently knowing that the sun that shines belongs to their Father.