"An education is an ultimate possession," explains Donald Verene, Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University.
We don't often think of education this way because we've been trained to think of possessions in terms of material goods. We possess cars and homes and electronic devices. But some of our greatest possessions are not material goods. For example, this very moment in time belongs to us right now; and it's quite possibly our most valuable possession.
Next to that is our education.
Yet, most of us don't think of education as a possession because modern society has conditioned us to think of education as job training: learning the information and skills necessary to get a good job in the world—to make ourselves marketable to employers. But to reduce education to mere job training is to reduce our self to a mere commodity; that is, when we think of education in this way, we become the possession of the market.
Verene explains, "Education depends upon the metamorphosis of the self toward wisdom..."
It's not the metamorphosis of the self toward labor. That would be slavish. Education is the metamorphosis of the self toward wisdom because wisdom is the ability to know, to discern, to judge all situations well, to have the proper insight about the nature of the world in all its facets (i.e., its Creator, its inhabitants, its functions, it societies, its cultures, its markets, etc.). Consider the exhortation of Solomon to his own son:
“Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from the words of my mouth. Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee: love her, and she shall keep thee. Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: she shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her. She shall give to thine head an ornament of grace: a crown of glory shall she deliver to thee. Hear, O my son, and receive my sayings; and the years of thy life shall be many. I have taught thee in the way of wisdom; I have led thee in right paths. When thou goest, thy steps shall not be hampered; and when thou runnest, thou shalt not stumble.” -Proverbs 4:5–12
Imagine the doors such Wisdom would open for a person. We see then that Wisdom is the principal thing. And we get Wisdom by being educated (properly). One who possesses this Wisdom orders their loves rightly and then the whole world seems to open up for them and to them.
Verene says further, "The purpose of teaching is to produce a self that can think," and then "information and skills will fall into line behind this." In other words, pursue skilled training and you’ll get a job (maybe), but pursue Wisdom and you get information and skill too. That’s why Verene calls it "an ultimate possession."
Classical Education Should Make No Room for Racism
Dr. Christopher Perrin has written an excellent short article about Classical Christian Education and the issue of racism. It was sparked by some recent hubbub surrounding a former Classical Christian Headmaster who had allegedly concealed some white nationalist beliefs to his board and, under a social media pseudonym, had been writing racist and anti-semitic posts.
I usually stay away from these sorts of controversies because they tend to distract from the conversations I believe move us forward, toward human flourishing; but, I’ve decided to mention it here because the race conversation within Classical Christian Education has only heightened in light of this new revelation.
Now that that the conversation has moved closer in proximity to my own projects, I feel I need to make it clear for the record that I denounce racism and abhor any mistreatment of any human being, especially on the grounds of their race or ethnicity. I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Perrin: “Classical education should make no room for racism!” and “Done right, classical education is not only incompatible with racism, it actively works against it.”
I believe anyone who knows me already knows where I stand, and probably finds my statement unnecessary, but in our pathos-driven culture, it’s easy for people to make assumptions when clear statements are not made.
Racism and Flannery O’Connor
For example, when I started publishing this newsletter about a year ago now, I received an email expressing deep concern about my Flannery O’Connor angle and the use of O’Connor’s quote from her short story, “Revelation,” that includes the word “nigger.”
I am aware that some have pointed to O’Connor’s use of such nefarious racial slurs to characterize her as a racist; and, I was (and am still) well aware of how offensive the word is when I chose to publish her quote using it.
What needs to be made clear here is O’Connor’s point in using such dysphemisms is not to promote racist views but to scandalize her readers into seeing their own sins.
My own O’Connor angle in this newsletter is anything but racist; like her own use of such language, my O’Connor angle serves quite the opposite. I have taken up her Christian humanist mantle believing, as she did that,
The novelist (or writer) with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.1
Identity and Classical Christian Education: An Introduction to The Consortium (Volume 1: Issue 2)
Now, to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak, I would love to introduce our latest Issue (Vol. 1: Issue 2) of the Consortium Journal focused on Identity and Classical Christian Education. After you check out the Table of Contents, you can read my full introduction below, gratis.
During the mid-twentieth century, the Western world entered a crisis about the identity of man. After two surprising World Wars, the unalienable rights of man could no longer be taken for granted in Europe, as “man” was being alienated and eradicated, altered and undone.
The question, “What is man?” is of course a perennial question and has been being asked for at least as long as man has been writing letters, but during the mid-twentieth century there was something unique and unsettling about this question at a time when Nazis, Soviets, and lesser fascists each had their own vision for a “new man” while simultaneously erasing “man” by the millions with gunbarrels and gas chambers. The nature of the crisis being as prevalent as it was, a remarkable number of books appeared addressing this question. To illustrate just how prevalent the concern was, consider the sample of notable works that were produced during this span of years that attempted to address the question anew:
The Nature and Destiny of Man (Reinhold Neibuhr), The Condition of Man (Lewis Mumford), “The Root is Man” (Dwight Macdonald), Existentialism is a Humanism (Jean-Paul Satre), The Human Condition (Hannah Arndt), Man the Measure (Erich Kahler), Modern Man is Obsolete (Norman Cousins), The Science of Man in the World Crisis (Ralph Linton), Education for Modern Man (Sidney Hook), Human Nature and the Human Condition (Joseph Wood Crutch), Who is Man? (Abraham Joshua Heschel), and New Leviathan: Or, Man, Society, Civilization, and Barbarism (R. G. Collingwood).
The implications of this crisis about the nature of man—is he miracle or monster?—“would echo for nearly three decades” transforming the tone and content of intellectual, political, and literary enterprises in ways that—because they are so intertwined with panic, piety, and the permanent philosophical questions of human nature—have still not been given an adequate accounting.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and like a SARS-2 virus, the crisis has mutated and taken on a new form. Identity and self are among the most imperative and polarizing contemporary issues of our postmodern times. In the prevailing worldview, clarifying, establishing, and signaling to which racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious group one belongs is paramount to achieving a proper understanding and acceptance of one’s self.
If the question of the twentieth century was “What is man?,” then the question of the twenty-first century is “Who am I?” It just so happens that the very clinical definition of identity, according to the Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology and Counseling, refers to one’s answer to that very question. Additionally, drawing from the works of cultural philosophers, Phillip Reif, Robert Bellah, and Charles Taylor, Carl Trueman asserts that in our postmodern times, the popular culture’s answer to that question is only and emphatically attained by way of expressive individualism. “Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.” Said another way, “the modern self is one where authenticity is achieved by acting outwardly in accordance with one’s inward feelings.”
It is common knowledge that human beings have an inner life and are frequently introspective about their identity, purpose, and feelings. The Apostle Paul is a premiere example of this when he explains some of his own inner conflict in his letter to the church at Rome. He writes,
I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.
St. Augustine penned his Confessions as a prayer to God reflecting on his inner self:
My soul’s house is too strait for thee to come into: let it be enlarged by thee: ’tis ruinous, but do thou repair it. There be many things in it, I both confess and know, which may offend thine eyes; but who can cleanse it? or to whom but thee shall I cry, Cleanse me, O Lord, from my secret sins, and from strange sins deliver thy servant; I believe, and therefore do I speak. Thou knowest, O Lord, that I have confessed my sins against mine own self, O my God; and thou forgavest me the iniquity of my heart.
While it is certainly the case that all human beings have an inner life, what is remarkable about the modern identity crisis contra classical inner reflection, is that it has become normative to assume that society must not only recognize but also affirm what are considered to be outward expressions of every individual’s authentic inner self. If one identifies as belonging to an alternative race, ethnicity, or gender, it is society’s responsibility to conform to every form of “authentic” expressive individualism, and not the other way around. This existentialist ideology is the only means of establishing one’s authentic identity in popular culture.
In times past, however, a gospel-animated liberal education was a palliative for and restraint to one’s malordered loves and inordinate desires to the end that one might be wise and virtuous instead of “authentic” and foolish. In other words, one of the tasks of education was to prepare the individual for sharing in and contributing to the life of the shared community. Churches, schools, and other mutual civic institutions shared in the ennobling task. As literary and social critic, Marion Montgomery rightly noted in Liberal Arts and Community: The Feeding of the Larger Body, “Education is the preparing of the mind for the presence of our common inheritance, the accumulated and accumulating knowledge of the truth of things.”
Modern classical Christian education is the recovery of such an education, an education that while useless in terms of its market value, is not worthless in its humane value–an education that attempts to educate the whole person in the life of the community’s accumulated and accumulating knowledge of the truth of things.
Those of us committed to conserving the best of the Western tradition recognize a person is more than his inner feelings. Each one, regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity, is created imago dei, and it is outside ourselves—in Christ alone—that we find our true self, our authentic identity. And it is the classically educated person who knows that individuals, as much as societies at large, have a responsibility to submit and conform to the truth of things, to the Norms as it were—and not the other way around.
But we also recognize that neither the gospel nor education erase the individual self from its relationship with the community. Said another way, in its task of preparing the student to flourish within the culture’s common inheritance, he or she does not become just another insignificant bead in the cosmic bean bag of existence.
The articles in this issue of The Consortium journal take into account the various ways in which classical Christian education transcends any single group identity because it is a human education that seeks to apprehend and appreciate what is good, true, and beautiful and then to help each individual with his or her endowments and attainments approximate one’s self to that revealed or discovered truth.
In the first paper, long-time African missionary, Karen J. Elliott, addresses concerns regarding the value of the liberal arts for church education systems in the African continent. She contends that a liberal arts education is “not only appropriate for Africa but essential for its future development.” Elliot makes the case that while vocational training is important for the survival of the people, it is a liberal education that is “the best education for cultivating human beings, developing free societies, and unifying and strengthening the continent through the church. Plus it cultivates great carpenters, engineers, farmers, artists, as well as theologians.”
The second paper addresses the cultural relevance of a classical liberal arts education for the Chinese in much the same way the West did with classical Western Pagans—by “spoiling the Egyptians” as St. Augustine advised early Western Christian educators—by redeeming the six arts of the ancient Chinese Pagans. Chinese missionary and classical educator, Brent Pinkall, explains,
In Christ, all that the wise men of old longed for is fulfilled. All of their frayed philosophies are mended. The ancients could intuit much truth about God and His creation. "He did not leave himself without witness" (Acts 14:17). They could hear the song that He was composing, but they could only hear the rhythm. When we read their writings, we can sense the steady pulse of divine order and meaning echoing through the cosmos, but only in the crucified and risen Christ do we hear the melody.
In the third paper, Albert Cheng and Carrie Eben, discuss their findings from an empirical research study at a classical Christian school in Northwest Arkansas on the merits of poetry and its effects on intuitive knowledge (i.e., poetic knowledge). Although James Taylor warns educators that knowledge of poetry and poetic knowledge are distinct and not the same thing, the research presented in this paper suggests the implementation of poetry cultivates intellectual space or categories of thought which prepare learners for developing poetic knowledge. Cheng writes,
We recently set out to address these questions by conducting an empirical study at a classical Christian school in Northwest Arkansas and found that engagement with poetry affects poetic (intuitive) knowledge of the natural world. Although empiricism is not the only way to know something, it is a way. Consistent with Taylor’s philosophical assertions about poetic knowledge, the findings of our study suggest that poetry, as an experience, integrated with a science curriculum, introduces students to other dimensions of knowledge that are beyond scientific.
The fourth paper in this issue looks at the role of the liberal arts in the educational philosophy of Protestants, particularly as held by Protestant Reformer, John Calvin. Here Lucas Vieira discusses the role of non-Scripture based studies in Protestant Christian education and suggests “Calvin’s doxological approach to Christian education offers insightful guidance to the classical Christian education movement today.”
Wrapping up this issue are four important book reviews written by each of our editorial board members. The Autumn of the Middle Ages is an appreciative review of three separate translations of one masterpiece written by Johan Huizanga. In this review, Robert Woods analyzes these works and their “inherent value as intellectual artifacts approximating a modern masterpiece of cultural history.”
In the review of The Battle for the American Mind, a journalist treatment of the broken American education system written by Pete Hegseth with David Goodwin, Christy Vaughan offers a critical review of the book she says is “at once pedagogical, historical, and yet accessible to all readers in a kind of Joe The Plumber sort of way.”
Next, Gregory Soderberg reviews The Black Intellectual Tradition written by Angel Adams Parham and Anika Prather, who through their reading of authors like Frederick Douglas and W.E.B. Du Bois, “discovered their indebtedness to the classical tradition…[and] realized that many African American heroes were also shaped and formed by classical education, and that this was an important, if neglected, part of Black history.”
Finally, we include in this issue of The Consortium a review of Abraham Kuyper’s On Education. I first published this review in Ad Fontes, the journal of The Davenant Institute, and it is reprinted here with the full permission of Ad Fontes because I believe Kuyper’s “unique gifts, experiences, and writings” on Christianity and education during his long struggle for educational reform in the 19th and early 20th-century Netherlands is a uniquely prescient guide for everyone concerned with the education crisis plaguing twenty-first century North America.
It is my hope, as well as the hope of our board, that readers will be edified by what is presented in this issue and discover the unique gift that is classical Christian education, and see that it is good not just for a White European West, but for the flourishing of all human beings regardless of ethnicity, race, or geographic boundaries.
On behalf of the editorial board and the entire Consortium of Classical Educators,
it is by God’s Grace and for his Glory that I present to you Volume 1, Issue 2 of The Consortium: A Journal of Classical Christian Education.
Scott Postma
General Editor
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 34.