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Me & Mr. Jones
www.MemoriaPress.com
Several years ago,
a prominent homeschool personality, let’s call him “Mr. Jones” (The names have been changed to protect the mistaken), wrote a broadside in a popular magazine against classical education, leveling a number of charges against it. These arguments were representative of the criticisms you sometimes hear from those who have a misapprehension of what classical education is and how it is practiced. So I wrote a response. The following article is an abridged version of that response. As classical education has become more popular among Christian educators, it has acquired not only friends, but a few enemies. Mr. Jones is one of these latter individuals, and he articulates a number of arguments against classical education. Let’s take each one of these arguments in turn.
Is classical education pagan? Jones’ first argument is that classical education has pagan origins. It “traces its roots to the pagan Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle around 500-400 B.C.” This charge is absolutely correct. Classical education was the original invention of the Greeks and Romans. Only later was it taken by Christians and fashioned into the system of classical education that has lasted, in a few places, even to today. The problem with this argument, however, is that these same charges could be leveled individually against mathematics, geography, music, astronomy, and history as a separate and distinct method of
study. In fact, education as we know it—education itself—was an invention of the Greeks. There are many things that originated with the pagans that we should reject. But we should not reject them because they are pagan: We should reject them because they are false. There are many truths the pagans discovered. Should we reject them just because a pagan discovered them?
Is classical education only for the upper class? Jones says, “It promised to make members of the upper class witty and interesting among their peers in any setting.” Maybe there are some people who educate classically because they are interested in becoming witty and interesting. I’m not sure I wouldn’t like to be witty and interesting myself (and there have been a few occasions when I would have liked to have been upper class as well).