The philosophical difference between classical Christian education and public education.

At the classical Christian school where I work, we are constantly looking for new ways to increase enrollment in healthy ways.  We do this by maintaining those students who currently attend, and bringing in new families.  Over the past 2 or 3 years we've improved our retention of families, but one of the challenges we face is getting new families to see the surpassing worth of an education that is not utilitarian and that also costs money.  The current market that my school struggles to reach is the public school families.  There are a few classical schools in the greater western suburbs of Chicago, but our primary "competition" is not these other schools but the public schools. There are hordes of great Christian families who do not think that private education is worth the money or is better than the public schools.  (Caveat: my wife teaches in the public school, I attended public school, I have friends who teach in public schools, ergo, I'm not anti-public schools!)  These aren't irrelevant things to discuss when it comes to talking about public vs. private, but the reason why so many great Christian families don't send their kids to schools like mine is because there is a deeper philosophical shift that has happened that needs to be recognized and exposed.  Don't let words like "philosophical" stop you from reading the rest of this short post.  Let me explain.

Think of the word Truth.  It is a concept that encompasses all of what we accept as being right or correct about anything.  We believe that Truth includes the facts about all things.  Imagine a school that decided to take out Calculus, literature, physical education, or any other subject that belongs to a good education.  Some students might be happy, but many parents and teachers would (or at least should) object to paring down education in this way because it removes a branch of knowledge from a child's education.  Secularization in the West has been going on for hundreds of years (the belief that religion should be avoided because of its divisive effects came about not too long after the Reformation and the wars of religion that followed), and one of the effects of this is that religion has been relegated to the private sphere not the public sphere.  (I've used the term "private" school, and perhaps we should stop using that phrase because it seems to affirm the public and private divide.  Shouldn't all schools be "public" insofar as they exist for the common good of those in the community?)  This has been disastrous for education because it has hindered not only our ability to address morality (see David Hicks, Norms and Nobility for a slightly outdated but not insignificant account of the necessity of moral formation within education) but it has also eliminated the importance of religious knowledge within the broad scope of what we can know.

In the late 1850s, John Henry Newman wrote a book called Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education, a book which now goes by the title The Idea of a University and includes some later material.  In this marvelous book, Newman, who was asked to found a Catholic University in Ireland, set out to explain the very purpose of a university.  He explains how theology is a branch of knowledge, and if you take it out then it's similar to taking out Calculus, literature, physical education, or any other subject that belongs to a good education.  Newman believes that theology, which is the study of God's revelation to humankind, ought to be placed in the context of a university in order to balance out the other disciplines.  It belongs in a university because it is here where what he calls the "rivalry of the other studies" occurs.  The liberal arts are a checks and balance among the subjects so that the student learns the "scope and nature" of things that can be known.  Public school education eliminates religion from its curriculum (I'm not saying it needs a class on Christianity, Buddhism, etc., but it would easy to ask a student what her religious community would say on any number of topics that come up in class discussion or literature class), and in doing so offers students a less than full course of knowledge.  I think that this truncated curriculum is lamentable, and it ultimately leads to another serious problem.

What happens to even some of the best Christian students when you hinder clear moral formation and religious knowledge from their education?  To put it simply, some make it through public education with their faith intact and some don't.  We've all seen great Christian families raise kids in the fear and knowledge of God only to have a child resist the faith.  None of us know how our kids will turn out.  But what if our country's public education with its removal of morality and religious knowledge contributes to the secularization of our Christian students and families?  Wouldn't paying for an education that took Christianity and learning seriously be a risk worth taking when it comes to the well-being of your child?  This sounds like a guilt trip, and I don't mean it to be one.  But education is so important, and the cost of not thinking it through could be detrimental.  I bless the families that don't continue at our school.  I love some of them dearly and mourn their departure.  I don't think less of them.  But I've seen some of these dear people leave for the public school for reasons that hurt them in the future.  In the past year I've had two former students email me with serious concerns about their faith.  I was able to talk to one student in person, but the other was out of state and email had to suffice.  If only we could have struggled together for the faith.

I don't have any stats to demonstrate that Christians who attend public school lose their faith more frequently but I do know that the pressure against being a Christian is intense, and many parents and students aren't ready or able to withstand it.  My sisters and I made it through with our faith intact.  My parents and my church were crucial in this process.  And I'm sure that there are students who attended classical Christian schools who have since lost their faith.  I'm not putting forth classical Christian education as a panacea.  But I wish that more parents realized the way that public education participates in secularization and seriously considered a school like mine where my team of teachers live out everyday that fantastic medieval mantra of faith seeking understanding.

Barzun on the lecture

This quote leads me to compare this type of education where students and teachers inhabit the same space and online "education" where "students" read and write away from their "classmates" and "teachers."  The differences between these two approaches expose the reality that what is actually being argued about (or should be argued about) is the very definition of education.  According to Barzun, it is people who convey truth to other people through their very eloquence and personality.  Taken from Barzun's Teacher in America, pp 51-2:

"Now what makes a lecture legitimate and good?  The answer is - a combinations of eloquence and personality.... The lecture room is the place where drama may properly become theater.  This usually means a fluent speaker, no notes, and no shyness about "effects."... The speaker projects himself and the subject.   The "effects" are not laid on, they are the meaningful stress which constitutes, most literally, the truth of the matter.  This meaning - as against fact - is the one thing to be indelibly stamped on the mind, and it is this that the printed book cannot give.  That is why hearers never forgot Huxley lecturing, nor Michelet, nor William James.  Plenty of facts can be conveyed, too - the more highly organized the better, but in the hands of a great lecturer it is feelings and principles that illuminate the soul as does a perfect play or concert."

Origen on Christians in the military and religious freedom

This is taken from George Kalantzis's Caesar and the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Service.  It is an excerpt from Origen of Alexandria's Contra Celsum, of which the best translation is Henry Chadwick's (Cambridge, 1953).  The excerpt is from book 8, section 73, and Origen is responding to Celsus's criticism that Christians take all the benefits of living in Roman society without constructively making it better, specifically by refusing to fight in Rome's wars.

"We would also say this to those who are alien to our faith and ask us to fight for the community and to kill men: that is is also your opinion that the priests of certain images and wardens of the temples of the gods, as you think them to be, should keep their right hand undefiled for the sake of sacrifices, that they may offer the customary sacrifices to those who you say are gods with hands unstained by blood and pure from murders.  And in fact when war comes you do not enlist the priests. If, then, this is reasonable, how much more reasonable is it that, while others fight, Christians also should be fighting as priests and worshippers of God, keeping their right hands pure and by their prayers to God striving for those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously, in order that everything which is opposed  and hostile to those who act rightly may be destroyed?  Moreover, we who by our prayers destroy all demons which stir up wars, violate oaths, and disturb the peace are of more help to the emperors than those who seem to be doing the fighting.  We who offer prayers with righteousness, together with ascetic practices and exercises which teach us to despise pleasures and not to be led by them, are cooperating in the tasks of the community.  Even more do we fight on behalf of the emperor.  And though we do not become fellow-soldiers with him, even if he presses for this, yet we are fighting for him and are composing a special army of piety through our intercessions to God."

This is a remarkable argument for tolerance towards Christians, but it is one that requires a government that believes in prayer and a god who answer prayers.  Rome honored the gods and had civil religion with priests who offered sacrifices and prayers on behalf of the emperor and his people.  It is interesting to think about how our civil religion in America functions: who are our priests? what do we sacrifice? where are our temples?  But this is not the direction I want to take.  Origen's argument is profound, even if our secular age does not have the ability within itself to acknowledge the power of his argument since it requires the belief in prayer that works.  If you want the help of the Christian God, and if the help of the Christian God comes through prayer and piety, then you must have Christians who are pure and holy in order for their prayers to be heard.  The Romans believed that the gods answer the prayers of the righteous.  Asking Christians to violate their laws by requiring them to fight Rome's wars and then expecting them to also pray for divine favor is like asking a good Roman to offer a sacrifice in the wrong way.  Roman sacrifices required that the supplicant perform the proper rituals in their necessary form and order more than that the supplicant maintain personal sincerity.  In other words, the sincerity and righteousness of a person was measured more by their respect of the rituals that honored the gods than that they approach the gods with "a humble and contrite heart."  Christians must be enabled to be Christians, which Origen assumed included nonviolence based on the teachings of Jesus,  in order for them to be "useful" to the government.  

This is not an argument in favor of just war theory, but it does affirm the Christian's responsibility to pray that the government take up a "righteous cause."  We pray for "those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously."  Origen's wording is subtle because he knows that we don't blindly pray for our governments and their success, for it was true then as it is now that not every cause is righteous and neither is every emperor.  We pray that when our governments act, they would do so justly, knowing full well that so often they do not.  Origen's point is that Christians qua Christians do not fight wars, regardless if they are just or not.  As he said before the excerpt above, Christians arm themselves with the armor of God, and "the more pious a man is, the more effective he is in helping the emperors - more so  than the soldiers who go out into the lines and kill all the enemy troops they can."  Can we even imagine what would happen if all the Christians in the world refused to fight in wars and gathered to pray?  Not being able to do so is, in my opinion, a lack of eschatological imagination that the NT and much (not all) of the Christian tradition requires.