ESSAY: Lost Ground

The temptation that faces every home schooling family is to find their own standard and their own level and pace. The great danger is that we will come to believe that this is enough. We trim our own rule and then measure ourselves by it. In this case, we are in need of an objective standard. But how is such a standard to be derived?

Another temptation will be to peg our standards to the declining standard of the educational establishment. As long as we can run faster than the incoming tide, we are far enough up the beach. Our feet are dry. But to do so is to peg ourselves to the same trajectory of decline and falling standards as the state schools, only with the the comfort that we will hit the bottom of the abyss ten minutes after others.

Fortunately, we are not the first people to walk the face of the earth, many paths have been marked out before us. This is the case for our pedagogy. In our reaction from the current state of things, we must not adjust ourselves to a permenant state of reaction. Godliness requires action, not merely reaction. When we react we are really letting the enemy set our own priorities. This will not do, as we are to seek first the Kingdom of God, our priorities are set elsewhere, and have been made very clear. In our zeal in rejecting the newest educational fantasies, and the latest side-shows of the new pedagogy, we must not turn our faces away from the main act. Prior to the recent mayhem, there was a more stable state: Christendom was, if nothing else, an educational programme. The church was an educative body.

Another way is to look at the ground we have lost and use this as a challenge to get us back to where we ought to be, and maybe beyond. In other words, we need a standard of education that is more objective and that transcends the current climate. Otherwise, we risk becoming educational relativists - i.e., there is no standard, each family must make it up as they go along, and so on.

What is the ground that has been lost? That is to ask: What was education formerly? How were our heroes and our heroines educated?

In a world where we regularly debate how many graduates are literate or not, we overlook these fact that a while back the literacy was measured against classical languages. English grammar was an assumption, and as much acquired in the mastery of Latin and Greek as directly. The grammar school was the classical school - the grammar was the grammar of Latin and Greek.
In the 17th Century, the Puritan, Cotton Mather, described the entry criteria to Harvard - this is Harvard when they met in a shed,

"When scholars had so far profited at the grammar schools, that they could read any classical author into English, and readily make and speak true Latin, and write it in verse as well as prose; and perfectly decline the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue, they were judged capable of admission in Harvard College." (1)

Similarly, for William and Mary College in 1727,

"Toward the cultivating the minds of men, and rectifying their manners, what a mighty influence the studies of good letters, and the liberal sciences have, appear from hence, that these studies not only flourished of old amongst those famous nations, the Hebrews, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans; but in the latter ages of the world likewise, after a great interruption and almost destruction of them, through the incursions of the barbarous nations, they are at last retrieved, and set up with honour in all considerable nations. Upon this there followed the reformation of many errors and abuses in the point of religion, [i.e. the Reformation], and the institution of youth to the duties of Christian virtues and civility; and a due preparation of fit persons for all offices in church and state." (2)

If we turn to the education and formation of our heroes of faith, we find the same pattern. Where did C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein learn their love of stories and story-telling? The answer is in their classical education. These men were educated from a period when Dickens and the like were considered novels for entertainment, not high culture and certainly not worthy of university study as "literature". For them, literature was the pre-modern epic, poetry of the ancients and the early period into the Middle Ages. Homer, Sophicles, Virgil, Dante and Milton were the standard.

Let's be clear: I am not arguing for an uncritical adoption of the classical method simply because it is ancient. The adoption of the classical method has often been idolatrous. With the recent revival of interest in classical education in non-Christian circles, the error has re-emerged that "virtue" can be learned from the Greeks. This is a grievous error. We do not turn to the Greeks and Romans for our morality and definition of virtue. Their world was immersed in the pagan view of Plato, Aristotle and the rest. But, we cannot understand our world without understanding that world. Also this approach was picked up in the Middle Ages, dusted down and placed in a more Christian and Biblical context, and then more thoroughly so with the Reformation. In the end every method has come from somewhere, so we may as well have one that has been tested and tried out over centuries. We must select a method that builds upon the history of Christendom, or at least have strong reaons for a change of direction.

God has placed us in a particular world - the world of Western Civilization. That is the backdrop to our lives; it's our context. Much of modernity has striven to embarrass us about our cultural legacy. This is where we must resist to join the chorus of jeers. Acknowledging the sins and failings of our forefathers, we must not allow the glories and achievements of the same to be obscured. Therefore, Christian Education for our particular children need to recognise that context, explore and understand it and build on it for the future. Subjecting all things to the critical gaze of the Word of God, we can confidently move forward. We do not live in an abstraction, we come into the great Story of the World at a particular moment. We don't sit in the audience, we walk onto the stage at a particular time, and we enter into a particular scene, with so much of the story already told.

What does this mean for us?

(1). It means that building a high standard of christian education is going to be a multi-generational programme. Too much Home Education runs on the basis of " what's good for my family". This may be how we started out, but it is not the way to end. Christian parents need to invest in the work that is required to spur their children to achieve a better education, one that is more Christian, more Biblically considered and whose standard and achievement is greater.

(2). We all have the ominous task of retrieving lost ground. Now let's be clear, what was lost over centuries cannot be retrieved in an afternoon. But there is much to be done now. Research, reading, curricula and materials, all need to be established for future generations to extend and build upon.

(3). We have to raise the bar. Literacy, whilst a struggle for State educators, must be more than a goal for us. Our children need to be thoroughly equipped and that is hard work. Fathers need to start reading, and not just their wives. Boys need to see in their fathers that learning and that books are not for wuses.

(4). Read these books: Dorothy L. Sayers' essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning," then, Douglas Wilson: Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning and Wilson, Callihan, Jones: Classical Education & The Homeschool.


Notes:

(1). Cited in, Wilson, Callihan, Jones: Classical Education & The Homeschool. From Richard Hofstadter, ed., American Higher Education Vol. 1 (Univ. of Chicago Press 1961), p. 17
(2). ibid.,. p. 39