Three years ago, as a high school student finishing my sophomore year, I started this blog. My first three posts were all an attempt to explain what classical education looks like as a homeschooler.
Now, I’m a college student about to start my sophomore year. In those three and a half years, classical education has only become a bigger part of my life.
At first, I wanted this post to be something like a summer recap or where I’m at now before I start school again. But as I debated that idea, I didn’t feel like that was enough. I don’t post much now, so when I do, I want it to be substantial. So instead of just laying out some of what I’ve done lately, I want to share my experiences and how classical education has shaped that. And hopefully along the way I’ll provide a better definition of classical education than I did before.
Classical Education is Human
This has been at the forefront of my mind for a while. I made a post about this on Instagram a little while ago. Essentially, I said that being fully human (one of the goals of classical education) is embracing how God created us to be. We so often strive to be different; in our modern world, a common striving is to be a machine. We want to be like our technology.
But that technology is destroying our health. One of the things I’ve learned a lot about this summer is EMFs (electromagnetic fields/frequencies/forces). These are emitted by so many of the technologies we use. But they’re also harming us, throwing our bodies off the normal rhythm that God created us to have.
God knew what He was doing when He created us. When we try to be like our machines, we not only push Him off, but we also move closer to worshipping human-made idols. The thing you strive to become like often demonstrates what you worship most. And EMFs provide us a wonderful, tangible example of how worshipping things other than God alone lead to destruction.
But if we strive to be like Christ, we are by nature striving to be more human (for Christ was fully God and fully man). And being more human is the goal of classical education.
I got a chance to see this play out this summer when I interned for the Classic Learning Test. The core values of CLT are passionate, humane, and anchored. Of course, the employees all embody all these very well, but the one that stood out to me is humane. They demonstrated so much love, kindness, and humility in all they do. Unlike many similar companies, they form real relationships with people and stay grounded in the traditions of the past.
So many of the people I got to work with truly embodied what it means to be fully human. They love what they do, they care for others, and they seek truth, goodness, and beauty in everything they do. It was such a wonderful experience that I am so thankful for. Tenth grade me would be bouncing off the walls to know I got this position (and college-freshman me was too when I got the email).
Classical Education Seeks Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
This brings me to my next point of classical education revolving around the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. These three transcendentals drive most of classical education. But they also tend to be classical buzzwords that people may not even fully understand.
Truth
Of course, the point of any education should be to seek the truth. But classical learning does this in a different way than most other education forms. Classical education doesn’t seek to impose any ideas on students. Rather it lays facts, narratives, and ideas before students. It seeks to guide them, but it doesn’t indoctrinate.
A common method that schools use is the Socratic method. This revolves around a lot of discussion and questions and answers to show students what literature says, what past thinkers have said, and, most importantly, what the Bible says about the issues the students are studying.
I have been working for Compass Classroom for the past 9 months. They are a company that is committed to bringing truth to students. Most things are self-paced and don’t have much room for discussion (although they do encourage discussion with parents or within homeschool groups). But they always seek to bring a Christian worldview to their courses so that students are able to see the truth behind the way the world works.
Goodness
This is the one of the three transcendentals that I haven’t put as much thought into, admittedly. As of now, I feel that it’s pretty straightforward. It reminds me most of the goal to be fully human; God wants what is good for us and so He designed us to seek goodness. Not goodness as the world defines us, but actual, true goodness.
Classical education wants to feed students that goodness. It wants them to learn to love it, to seek it, to grasp it. Part of being human is dwelling in the creation. God created the world to be good. Yes, it is fallen. But if you look, as classical education teaches you to, you will find so much goodness.
Beauty
I read a Flannery O’Connor story with CLT this summer. O’Connor has an interesting recurring theme in her works about the tug between the physical and the spiritual, the tangible and the transcendental.
Beauty pulls us into that tug. It gives us something physical, something we can see and smell and touch and hear, to remind us of the ultimate beauty that we cannot directly sense.
Classical education can seem so heady, as though it only cares about the intellectual and the imaginary. But it’s really not. Of course, it does value what the mind can dream up. At its core, however, it loves the tangible because that is what sparks the imagination and inspires one to think about the truth.
If we never had a beautiful representation of the intangible, we’d have no way to grasp it. Real things also help us to embrace our humanity and hold our attention. Most of us feel this even when reading the Bible: we often feel something more sacred in reading a physical copy of God’s word than when we read it on our phones or computers.
It’s also the reason we have sacraments. They are beautiful actions that remind us of the greater beauty of Christ and His love.
Classical Education is Rhythmic
I’m going to touch on these next two aspects more briefly. One reason is because I haven’t had as much time to think on them deeply. Another is because once I have had that time, I want to write a whole post about each of them because there is so much there.
First, is the rhythms of classical education. God created us to be rhythmic creatures, which you see in aspects of humanity like our circadian rhythm or of eating. He meant for us to have rhythms of feasting and fasting, light and dark.
Because it focuses more on forming a person than on career readiness and worldly goals, classical education has these rhythms built much more naturally into it. In fact, when done well, classical education should encourage students to celebrate, rest, and reflect in regular patterns.
Classical Education Forms the Imagination and Memory
I’ve never quite understood the whole idea of imagination and memory in classical education. Until I went to the undergraduate seminars at the Memoria National Conference this summer. I don’t even quite remember which sessions it was where it finally started to click. But somewhere during that day of seminars, discussion, and being around other classical education lovers, I started to understand it better.
First, we are memory-driven creatures. Our personalities are formed by our memories, whether they are of experiences we’ve had, books we’ve read, or things we’ve learned (this is part of the reason classical education focuses so heavily on good literature).
These memories also drive our imaginations. Imagination is more than being able to paint free hand or tell a detailed story. Imagination is making connections between ideas, narratives, and other topics. Imagination is dwelling on these connections and considering how they influence us and our culture. And beyond that, imagination is one of the only ways we can access an understanding of Christ and His love for us.
Almost everything in the world can point to God if we are looking for it (the idea of plundering the Egyptians). Imagination helps us to make these connections. Memory is the means by which we have ideas to imagine. Hopefully, I’ll have some more thoughts on this after this semester, as I’ll be taking a college seminar all about imagination!
Classical education has definitely been on my mind lately. I’ve learned so much this summer and had so many amazing experiences. I could never have imagined I’d be able to work the jobs, attend the conference, and deepen the relationships with people in the ways that I did this summer. I cannot wait to keep getting deeper and deeper into the world of education.
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