Inside a building that looks like a roller rink because it used to be one, students at the Logos School in the small northern Idaho town of Moscow are being initiated into an inheritance that the school describes as "classical and Christ-centered." Unsurprisingly, students learn the Bible and take classes in Christian doctrine.
To these subjects, however, Logos adds liberal arts and classical studies. Second-graders chant Latin paradigms and learn important names and dates from classical and American history. Middle school students study formal logic and engage in debates. Older students read Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Dante. Every high school student takes two years of rhetoric, using Aristotle as a text, and the hardy have the chance to learn Greek.
Logos is a flagship school for Classical Christian Education, a movement of educational renewal taking place mostly among American Protestants. Many of the leaders are evangelicals who, over the years, have become more attuned to the role of tradition both in theology and in educational philosophy. CCE is a vigorous expression of this evangelical ressourcement – a return to the "sources."
Douglas Wilson, one of the founders of Logos, observes that outside CCE circles "most conservative private schools have a sense of church history that goes back [only] to 1776." Leaders of CCE reach more deeply into the past. At bottom, Mr. Wilson believes, the classical turn in Christian education arises from a "hunger for historical rootedness."
A similar analysis comes from Andrew Kern, director of the CiRCE Institute, which promotes classical education. In a book on classical education, Mr. Kern and his co-author insist that classical education is not nostalgic or traditionalist. Yet he thinks CCE is especially attractive in an "age of disintegration and homelessness" when parents and teachers "are looking for ancient roots."
Ken Myers, host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, characterizes the movement as a search for true humanism: "While some Christians thought that America's ills were because of too much humanism, some Christians realized that our problem was not having enough humanism." Evangelicals "by and large don't have a strong ecclesiastically centered cultural heritage," so they look outside their own world for educational models. Similar educational programs are found in some Catholic schools and among Catholic homeschoolers.
CCE schools see education not as vocational training but as initiation into a cultural heritage, induction into the ongoing conversation of Western civilization. Classical educators also aim to recover the moral dimensions of education, immersing students in a quest for wisdom and virtue, for truth, goodness and beauty.
The search for historical roots has taken many back to the Middle Ages – at least to the Middle Ages as related by Dorothy Sayers.
In her 1947 essay "The Lost Tools of Learning," Ms. Sayers, a British literary figure, lamented the state of education in England. Once, Ms. Sayers argued, things were different. A medieval student acquired the tools for learning, especially the tools of language. Once our culture had these tools as a common possession, but no more.
Ms. Sayers was not content to lament. She outlined a modern curriculum based on the medieval Trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, which she conceived as learning strategies applied to all subjects. Grammar involves mastery of foundational facts; dialectic makes use of reason and examines the connections between facts; rhetorical training teaches the student to express facts and logical connections with persuasive elegance.
The Trivium trains students to think. No matter what subject matter he encounters, he will be capable of mastering it. Over the past 25 years, the refurbished Trivium has provided the skeletal structure for hundreds of new classical schools throughout the United States and elsewhere.
Faced with the need to provide a Christian education for his oldest daughter, Douglas Wilson started a school. He didn't want either "a fundamentalist reactionary academy" or "a compromised prep school." In 1980, guided by Ms. Sayers' essay, Mr. Wilson helped start the Logos School, which opened its doors to 19 students.
Mr. Wilson's subsequent book about CCE struck a chord with Christian schools and parents, and he began receiving requests for help in starting schools. This led to the 1994 formation of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which provides start-up advice, accreditation and training for CCE teachers. Affiliated schools now enroll more than 25,000 students, an increase of 10,000 over the last five years.
CCE has been a notable academic success. But more than anything else, says Andrew Kern, "what draws people to classical Christian schools is the children they see who are different – more articulate, more respectful and more intelligent."
Inspired by medieval, Renaissance and early American educational practices, classical educators are attempting to repudiate not only mid-20th-century pedagogical corruptions but also a long-standing American prejudice in favor of pragmatism. It is too early to tell whether CCE can successfully swim against so broad and deep a cultural current. Ken Myers worries that CCE could degenerate into Christianized pragmatism, merely training students to man the battlements of the culture war.
I would argue, however, that classical schools have built-in protections against becoming an arm of the Christian Right. At its best, CCE combines fervently evangelical Christianity with an appreciation of what English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, speaking of university education, described as the "gift of the interval," the opportunity to find a "moment in which to taste the mystery without the necessity of at once seeking a solution."