Public education neither teaches nor believes in
the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty, the very pillars of the
education that built the western world and flow from Christianity itself.
Let’s get right to the point:
many Christians throughout history shared the idea that God is the fundamental
source of all truth, whether religious, academic, or otherwise. But what are we
to make of a student who has spent 15 to 20 years studying academics without
ever considering God’s relationship to these fields of knowledge? Does this
kind of education not actually imply that God is not the source of all knowledge and truth?
It should
really be no wonder that students so quickly abandon the faith after a year or
two of university schooling. God has been left out of every meaningful field of
knowledge by the end of high school, so it does not take much more prodding to
decide that God never really fits in the first place.
In the 1963 court case Abington School District vs. Schempp, the Supreme Court
eventually ruled, 8-1, in favor of a father who objected to his son being
required to read the Bible in a Pennsylvania public school. This marked the
beginning of numerous cases that created a clear precedent for removing
elements of religion from schools.
Yet the
majority opinion conceded “that one’s education is not complete without a study
of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the
advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy
of study for its literary and historic qualities” (374 U.S. 225).
In other
words, while arguing that it was unconstitutional for schools to require
student participation in religious exercises, the court decided was equally
erroneous to deny all discussions of religion in public education. This, as the
majority wrote, would constitute “hostility” toward religion and indirectly
prefer secular value-judgments. The one dissenting justice went further,
writing that to exclude religion from education is to give “preferential
treatment” to those opposed to religion and would help establish “a religion of
secularism” (374 U.S. 313).
Following this case, a
federal study was commissioned to investigate the relationship between religion
and education. They concluded that “A
curriculum which ignored religion…would appear to deny that religion has been
and is important in man’s history.” The point is clear: until recently, no one
though “value-neutral” education was even possible. Yet today we insist that it
is. Perhaps many of us have been equally convinced that the study of the material
world (science) has very little to do with the study of God (theology). Where
did we receive such ideas?
A Brief History Of Religion in Schools
In 362 the
Roman Emperor Julian issued an edict forbidding Christianity to be taught in
any schools while also instituting devotion to the pagan gods. Julian and
Christians agreed that whoever controlled education controlled culture.
So, while
Christians were barred from teaching in schools, students who were Christians
were openly accepted, with the hope that they might be converted to paganism.
Since these schools were the primary means by which an individual could achieve
elite status and become a part of the noble, political, and ruling class,
Julian assumed his edict would eventually end Christianity.
Julian
underestimated the role the Christian church and home played in religious and
educational training. Consider, for instance, the traditional Christian
educational requirements, called catechesis, for a new believer before baptism.
Often lasting three years, these catechumens would typically hear orations and
interpretations of the entirety of scripture, be taught all of Christian
doctrine and retain it through memorization of the early church creeds, while
also being held accountable for moral and spiritual formation. Much of this
process was overseen by the churches’ most educated bishops and priests,
Augustine being one notable leader who spent considerable time teaching these
courses.
Indeed,
immediately following Julian’s edict, Basil, the bishop of Caesarea, wrote an
“Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature.” It was heavily
circulated throughout the church and became the lasting foundation for
classical Christian education for centuries to come. In it, Basil argued that
the Greek education provided a very welcome instruction in language, logic, and
truth that prepares students for the much more difficult task of reading and
interpreting Scripture.
Yes, Basil
assumed that reading Homer was preliminary preparation for reading scripture.
Or, to put it more bluntly, he thought reading scripture was more difficult
than reading Homer. And why should it not be? Homer is only partial truth, and
finite. What comparison is that with the infinite truth of the eternal God?
One other
significant aid to being trained in the Greek academy was learning the careful
work of discerning what is true from what only has the initial appearance of
truth. Today, we might ask how one can sift through what Martin Luther King Jr.
called the “morass of propaganda” that targets us with every glimpse of the
screen.
It is for
this reason that Basil suggested that sifting through what is true and what is
false in Greek literature was “preliminary training for the eye of the soul.”
Of course, Basil would not have been confident that the students could sift
through such had he not been convinced that the church’s rigorous religious
instruction and formation would provide the necessary theological vision.
The question
today, then, is whether we are sending our kids out into the world without
properly equipping them with sufficient theological training? That is, do our
children have the tools to identify truth when so much of the American church
does so little theological training, especially in a society overwhelmed with
disinformation?
Indeed, one wonders whether
the American church could do any serious study when young Christians are being
mentally drained for two-thirds of their days by a secular institution. As the
dissenting Justice Stewart put it in Abington vs. Schempp: “a compulsory state educational system so structures a child’s
life that if religious exercises are held to be an impermissible activity in
schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state-created disadvantage”
(374 U.S. 313). The point is that the state has ensured that the church gets
the leftovers, or, perhaps more accurately, the crumbs.
The Transcendentals Ground a True
Education
As a late
professor of mine warned, “I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which
we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past,
perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons
of the past” (J. Rufus Fears, “Books That Have Made History: Books That Can
Change Your Life”). The point is that those with the greatest foresight are
equally skilled in the study of hindsight.
Today’s public education is not only increasingly
distancing itself from great literature but is also ambivalent if not hostile
toward virtue as the end goal of education.
Both
classical philosophy and Christianity agree that the purpose of education is to
prepare one to live the good life, but that such living requires robust
preparation. For this reason, the classically trained student is nurtured in
the habit of reading literary works that have passed the test of time, and so
offer a universal insight into the nature of mankind.
Contrast this
with today’s public education, which is not only increasingly distancing itself
from the humanities and great literature but is also ambivalent if not hostile
toward virtue as the end goal of education. Traditional morality is being
devoured by that one enlightened pseudo-virtue of tolerance, also known as
indifference.
Bertrand Russell’s
first encounter with math captures what so many children are missing: “At the
age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the
great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined that
there was anything so delicious in the world” (“Autobiography”).
It would not seem too
far-fetched to suggest that typical students today are rarely incited to such
delightful marvel in their own encounters with geometry, much less any other
discipline. Yet, for the classicist and the Christian, Russell’s sentiment
summarily defines the goal of education, which is, properly speaking, not an
increase of information but an increase
of imagination.
Does Your Child Wonder in the Glory of
Creation?
Instead,
today’s student (and presumably teacher) probably relates far better to the
detached and anesthetized paradigm of Charles Dickens’s “enlightened”
superintendent in “Hard Times,” Mr. Gradgrind: “Now, what I want is Facts.
Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.
Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds
of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to
them.”
This is, of
course, the necessary outcome of dividing the academic disciplines from their
transcendental parents of truth, goodness, and beauty. This leaves none other
than cold, passionless, uninteresting facts. And these facts supervene on
reality, but they have no ability to tell us anything beyond themselves.
To set our gaze on that which is ordered, harmonious, and
ultimately beautiful prepares us for that final beatific vision of the Triune
God.
It is for
this reason that C.S. Lewis, among others, has suggested that the pinnacle of
classical education is to set our gaze on that which is ordered, harmonious,
and ultimately beautiful, precisely because it prepares us for that final
beatific vision of the Triune God. Perhaps, then, one of the greatest litmus
tests for determining schooling’s effects on students is to see, by graduation,
whether they still retain that childlike capacity for wonder and awe.
This is where
public schools are desperately failing and Christian classical schools are
thriving. As G.K. Chesterton quipped in his “Tremendous Trifles,” “The world
will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” The loss
of wonder and beauty is one of the greatest tragedies in our modern climate of
education.
Perhaps the
most damning case against public education is that it neither teaches nor
believes in the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty, the very
pillars of the education that built the western world. The consequences of this
dichotomy are life-changing: classical schools are producing students who are
deeply attuned to these objective realities, while public schools are producing
students whose spiritual vision is dimmed to objectivity itself.
In his
treatise “The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition,”
Dr. E. Christian Kopff contends that, “A society without educated citizens will
collapse in times of crisis and will wither away in times of ease and
prosperity. Simply put, a civilization without educated citizens will cease to
be civilized.”
In times of cultural and
decadent decline, the church has risen to lead the way. Because classical
education does not merely differ in content of information, but especially in intent of formation, as its ultimate aim is to leisure in the infinite rather than
toil in the finite, it might just be our “last, best hope” to save Western
civilization. At the very least, it offers a robust Christian education,
whereby young Christians will be prepared, confident, and capable of bearing
witness to the gospel in the marketplace of idol gods.
Aaron Ames teaches rhetoric,
logic, speech, and literature at Trinity Christian Academy in Lexington,
Kentucky. He has published essays with The Imaginative Conservative and Circe
Institute.
