Classical Education in the Theoretical Weeds
With more and more parents turning to classical education, the questions multiply: what is classical education, and what is it for?
By Collin Slowey
It’s official: K-12 classical education is booming. This year, the consulting group Arcadia Education reported that more than 670,000 students were enrolled in classical schools, while the annual rate of new classical schools opening has reached almost five percent. Per Arcadia, much of this growth is being driven by Christians, who see the classical model as more morally edifying and amenable to their faith than mainstream public schools.
Some Christian commentators celebrate this boom as an unqualified good. “The students of a classical education,” writes the Bible scholar Stephen Turley, “are rediscovering what it means to be truly human…. [T]hey are rediscovering the distinctly Christian conception of the educated person.” But this enthusiasm, regardless of its merit, may obscure an underlying disagreement within the classical movement about what that conception entails. What is the nature and purpose of education, really? Beyond the labels of “classical,” “Christian,” and “liberal arts” lie two, apparently competing, answers.
The Anglican novelist Dorothy Sayers offers the first answer in her 1947 lecture, “The Lost Tools of Learning.” This influential text presents the medieval trivium, an ancient regimen of grammar, logic, and rhetoric courses, as a superior alternative to the modern educational system. In it, Sayers argues that whereas the modern system fills children with “facts” that are soon forgotten, the trivium’s intellectual drilling teaches children to think clearly, critically, and soundly. This is preferable because “the true sole end of education” is not to expound upon “subjects,” but “to teach men [and women] to learn for themselves.” In other words, grade schooling is fundamentally about cultivating the next generation’s intelligence: creating what the influential teacher Susan Wise Bauer calls “well-trained minds.”
Countless classical schools and educational institutions, both Christian and non-Christian, hearken to “The Lost Tools of Learning” as a guiding light. Some cite it in their official documents; others provide links to it on their websites. And yet, Sayers’s lecture seems to run counter to another, similarly popular “classical” understanding of education, which prioritizes liberal learning as defined by Oxford Reference: “the acquisition of knowledge… valued for its own sake.”
For Sayers, what children learn is mostly beside the point; it is unlikely to be remembered, so it should generally be thought of as “mere grist for the mental mill.” By contrast, for Christian educators like Classical Commons’ Robert L. Jackson, what children learn is essential. In Jackson’s own words: “The use of good and great works distinguish[es] a classical education from a nonclassical one.” This perspective is comparable to that of the 19th-century Anglican teacher Charlotte Mason, who insists in her Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education that feeding children intrinsically valuable ideas, not training their minds, is “the sole concern of education.” It also explains the frequent recurrence of terms like “Great Books” and “Good, True, and Beautiful” within the classical movement.
On the ground and in the weeds, only the virtue of prudence can ensure this tension works to students’ benefit.
So, which of these threads of thought is more correct? Should Christians view education as mental training or liberal learning? Most private, charter, or home schools that claim the classical mantle decline to decide. They borrow Sayers’s emphasis on the trivium and speak highly of their students’ intelligence. Simultaneously, they follow Mason in prioritizing the exposition of children to the “best which has been thought and said in the world,” to borrow Matthew Arnold’s turn of phrase. This synthesis is only to be expected from institutions more interested, by necessity or choice, in attracting and retaining students than in resolving the niceties of philosophical debates. But does it represent a merely provisional compromise between two ultimately incompatible visions? Or is it theoretically grounded? If the former, then schools must prepare to eventually alter their pedagogies, as no such compromises can last forever. If the latter, then they require a better theory of education than either thread alone appears to offer.
The work of St. John Henry Newman, probably the greatest modern theorist of higher education, sheds some light here. In the Idea of a University, Newman’s predominant book on schooling, the saint defines authentic education as that which “strengthens, refines, and enriches [students’] intellectual powers.” But he also teaches that “philosophy presupposes knowledge,” and that effective mental training “requires a great deal of reading,” presumably of worthwhile books. This suggests that both Sayers and Mason have partially correct, but incomplete pictures of the truth.
What is the full truth? Newman struggles to articulate it, because he believes the final end of education is neither intelligence nor knowledge per se, but something that “English, [un]like the [ancient] Greek language, [has no] definite word to express.” He goes so far, however, as to say it is analogous to “‘health,’ as used with reference to the animal frame.”
Applied to the education of children, this analogy is very illuminating. Consider how a child attains physical health: he consumes food, by which he gains raw material for growth, and then he exercises, by which he turns that material into growth. If the child were just to eat, he would stunt his development. If he were just to exercise, by contrast, he would exhaust himself. Therefore, he continuously alternates between both activities. Now, would not the same child best attain intellectual “health” by continuously alternating between “consuming” good, true, and beautiful ideas and “exercising” his mind with grammar, logic, and rhetoric? Newman’s thought indicates as much. At the very least, this interpretation aligns with the saint’s defining liberal education as the “expansion of the mind” while conceding that knowledge “is the indispensable condition of expansion of mind, and the instrument of attaining it.”
Mason, to her credit, says much the same in her Essay. “The body lives by air,” she writes, “grows on food, demands rest, flourishes on a diet wisely various. So, of course, the mind… calls for both activity and rest and flourishes on a wisely varied diet [of knowledge].” Mason does depart from the classical tradition by downplaying the value of mental training. She asserts, overoptimistically, that children need not be schooled to exercise either their minds or their bodies, because they reliably do so of their own accord. But if Sayers seems vindicated for retaining the concept of the trivium, Mason seems vindicated for insisting that what people learn matters. After all, the body cannot reach healthy adulthood on an empty stomach. Why should the mind work any differently?
Most Christian classical schools, whether they realize it or not, have followed this line of thought to its common-sense conclusion. As President Chip Denton of the Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill writes, when adjudicating between Sayers-esque classicism and core elements of Mason’s philosophy, “We all know that the answer is ‘both.’” Some may consider this an unjustifiable evasion. But if education’s final end really is intellectual “health,” it is more likely just the truth.
This should bring a sigh of relief to any readers who are also classical educators. And yet, if the mind-body analogy holds, we should expect the tension between mental training and liberal learning to persist in the Christian classical movement, just as the tension between exercise and diet persists in the physical life. On the ground and in the weeds, only the virtue of prudence can ensure this tension works to students’ benefit. Nonetheless, prudence must be informed by theory; and so, there is still more thinking to be done.
Collin Slowey is a writer living and working in Washington, DC. He hails from Bryan, TX and is a graduate of Baylor University and the John Jay Institute Fellowship. Collin’s work can also be found in Evangelization and Culture Online, Mere Orthodoxy, and Public Discourse, among other outlets.
