AN EVENING TO REMEMBER

Annual Scholarship Dinner & Silent Auction

March 7, 2023 | MeadowView Marriott | Kingsport, TN | 5:00 p.m.

What a great evening our community had celebrating together and raising funds for our Annual Need-Based Scholarship Fund. Whitney Belt, parent and coach at Providence Academy, shares insight on our speaker, Pete Hegseth, and the book he co-authored with David Goodwin. (Due to emergency heart surgery, David Goodwin was unable to join us. He sent VP of Association of Classical Christian Schools, Timothy Dernlan, in his stead.)

I learned so much about classical Christian education (CCE) from reading, Battle for the American Mind. I had heard Pete Hegseth interviewed about his book on a podcast and wanted to read it. However, upon learning that he was to be one of the PA Auction speakers, I knew I wanted to read it in advance of hearing him and Mr. Goodwin speak.

Admittedly, I have described PA to friends and relatives as a “small Christian school,” with little emphasis on the “classical” portion of PA's curriculum. Other than as a rebuttal for why we have to learn Latin, I was ignorant as to the classical components of the classical Christian model and how they integrate subject matter. I love the description of classical Christian education being “more like a web than a chest of drawers” in contrast to government education and common core methodology that offers “narrow silos of knowledge (that) are not interrelated.”

The descriptions of “virtue” and of classical Christian education’s emphasis on its cultivation as opposed to indoctrination into progressive “values” were thoughtprovoking. I had never heard these ideas contrasted and could not have previously defined virtue as “rooted in the affections of a person as they align to God’s affections.” I also enjoyed learning how virtue shaped our nation’s founding fathers via classical Christian education, and how these virtues have been purposely eroded and are now eliminated from government education.

These virtues produced the founding of our great nation and inspired brilliant literature and art - which CCE unapologetically defines as such. We can be hopeful about the greatly increasing numbers of families choosing CCE for their children and prayerfully optimistic about their future impact.

Thank you for recommending the book and for the chance to hear the authors speak. I’m thankful that the education my kids receive at PA through the CCE model is even more purposeful and all-encompassing than I had known. I will continue to encourage people to learn more about it as I did, and I will pray that our school stays strictly faithful to the classical Christian model. - Whitney Belt

PETE HEGSETH was the main speaker at the Annual Scholarship Dinner this March. He shared with us how the progressives began to tear down the fabric of our society from the beginning of the early 1900's by getting rid of a classical Christian education. His and David Goodwin's research is presented in the book, Battle for the American Mind and in the Fox Nation docuseries, The MisEducation of America. We encourage you to check these resources out. They are worth your time!

The Capstone

by Ruth Stevenson & Andrea Loy