Why a Classical and Christian Education?

In 1947, Dorothy Sayers (1893-1967), author and scholar, addressed Oxford University in a lecture entitled “The Lost Tools of Learning.” She asked a rather simple, yet profoundly important question: “Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has every been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined?” If this were true in mid-20th century England, how much more is it true of us today? As Christians we cannot allow this to continue. We are commanded to love God with “heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Today, our educational goals and expectations, in public and private, secular and Christian sectors, are astonishingly low. In the worst cases, children pass through a dozen years of mandated government education and remain functionally illiterate. In the best schools, our children have digested vast amounts of unrelated data, yet remain unable to distinguish truth from falsehood in nearly every sphere of life. And most concerning is that fact that many children are taught that God, if he exists at all, is positively irrelevant to everything they study. Finally, many parents are asking, “What can be done?”

Let it be said at the outset that classical education is no panacea to cure the myriad of infirmities that assail Western intellectual life. It has, however, helped to train and nurture a glorious Christian heritage for nearly two millennia and for that reason alone deserves Christians’ attention. More importantly, God demands that his children be clear thinkers. A quick survey of the book of Romans or Hebrews will tell us as much. To understand God’s Word and His world, we simply must love to learn.

John Buchan (1875-1940), author and politician, articulated his thoughts on classical education with these words:
Our greatest inheritance, the very foundation of our civilization, is a marvel to behold and consider. If I tried to describe its rich legacy with utmost brevity I should take the Latin word “humanitas.” It represents in the widest sense the accumulated harvest of the ages, the fine flower of a long discipline of Christian thought. It is the Western mind of which we ought to turn ourselves to careful study. The now frivolously disregarded trivium, emphasizing the basic classical scholastic categories of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, once equipped untold generations of young pupils with the essential tack and apparatus for a life time of learning. These are the very notions that once set a course the great flowering of Christendom over the past thousand years. Indeed, this sort of educational philosophy and methodology is that which steadfastly affirms that every student, every family, every community, and every nation need to be grounded in the good things, the great things, the true things, in order to do the right things.