I hope the few of you who follow this blog will indulge me a brief moment of moral indignation and the opportunity to stand atop my soap box, which has sat in the corner collecting dust for a lengthy period of time.
I do not often publicly criticize or ridicule any particular ideology or thought or belief, even though I do it often enough at home. But today is different because I’m going to begin to tackle an issue which unfortunately has been one of the single most molding and destructive in my life: Christian education. I attended a private Christian school in Eastern Washington from the second grade through graduation in the 12th grade, so virtually the entirety of my primary education. This school was classified as a Classical Christian school, and if you’re unfamiliar with that particular strain of education I will try to condense it down.
Essentially, there are stages in this style which roughly correspond to typical elementary, middle, and high school curriculum’s. The Grammar or elementary stage is focused on accumulating a ton of raw knowledge, the subject material is fairly standard ranging from history to spelling to math to science. The Logic stage is the shortest and arguably the most useful as well. Here we see teachers trying to teach their students the building blocks of classical logic, how to form arguments and write persuasively and eloquently frame their thoughts. The final stage is called the rhetoric stage, where all the resources of the first two stages are brought together with an emphasis on public speaking (as the Greeks and Romans were wont to do) to form the ideal classical student. Now imagine what I’ve just described combined with church and biblical teaching infused into every lesson (including Statistics bizarrely enough) and you’ve got my school. It was a reformed denomination, very ensconced in Calvinist theology.
Such an intense (and frankly, unhealthy) focus is placed on the importance of grades, that plenty of students are forced to spend up to 7 hours on homework, in the elementary ages. This is to say nothing of how it scales upwards once you reach the high school stage. I can very vividly remember one instance my senior year returning home at 4 Pm, doing homework, eating dinner at 6:30, and continuing with homework until just before three in the morning. And this was the norm.
Now as to some context as to why I’m bringing this up now, a mere five years after I’ve left that institution. The man responsible for beating this dead horse and making it live again resides just south of Spokane in Moscow Idaho and in the past few years and months he has been involved, indirectly, in several fairly sinister events at his church. For the most part, these involve appearing in support of or on behalf of accused (and now convicted) sex offenders. You can find an article with more detailed information here.
One of the seminal works for this movement is a book called Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, a re-appropriation of the Dorothy Sayers’ work The Lost Tools of Learning, in which he lays out his view as to why education has declined and why we must revert back to more classical methods for properly educating our children. Now I give credit where credit was due, when the book was published (circa 1991), education did need reform. But, much like Ask-Jeeves and MySpace the book and the ideas it espouses are very outdated and in some cases, completely wrong. Even if you haven’t read the book, you can glean much of its focus by simply reading its synopsis on Amazon:
“Public education in America has run into hard times. Even many within the system admit that it is failing. While many factors contribute, Douglas Wilson lays much blame on the idea that education can take place in a moral vacuum. It is not possible for education to be nonreligious, deliberately excluding the basic questions about life. All education builds on the foundation of someone’s worldview. Education deals with fundamental questions that require religious answers. Learning to read and write is simply the process of acquiring the tools to ask and answer such questions.
A second reason for the failure of public schools, Wilson feels, is modern teaching methods. He argues for a return to a classical education, firm discipline, and the requirement of hard work.
Often educational reforms create new problems that must be solved down the road. This book presents alternatives that have proved workable in experience.”
Wilson is also the author of Repairing the Ruins: The Classical and Christian Challenge to Modern Education and The Case for Classical Christian Education.
My goal over the next series of blog posts is to detail my experiences at the school, outline its key problems, both the school individually and classical Christian education in general. I spent the better part of two years in therapy in large part because of the dysfunctional environment there and I’ve been silent about its problems for long enough.
The Many Faces of Henry 