Characteristic 1

The first characteristic of a Classical Christian Education is the development and cultivation of Paideia , a word whose etymology can be recognized in words like pediatrics or pedagogy. In his letter to the saints at Ephesus, St. Paul writes,

“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4, ESV).

The word translated discipline here is the Greek word, paideia , and is defined as the act of providing guidance for responsible living . . . upbringing, training, instruction . . . chiefly as it is attained by discipline, correction . 1 It is a word that is related to the word translated discipline in this verse, nouthesia , meaning counsel about avoidance or cessation of an improper course of conduct, admonition. 2

Definitions are noted here to draw attention to not only the denotation of paideia but also its connotation. It reveals the fundamental nature of education, the rearing of a young person in a proper view of the world; that is, a worldview that guides the way he should go (Proverbs 22:6). While the word worldview brings its own set of baggage to the conversation, it is used here to mean thinking Christianly about the world in which we live and move and have our being. A young person with a Christian worldview possesses a comprehensive vision of the cosmos as having been created and (still) being redeemed by God. He or she also possesses a moral imagination informed first by the truth of Scripture, but also by the noble traditions of the Church. This idea of Christian worldview falls into the stage of education that will later be addressed as piety.

1 William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 748.

2 Ibid., 679.

Characteristic 2

The second characteristic of a Classical Christian Education is its focus on a liberal or humane education. In opposition to the modern and slavish approach to training mere workers for an institutionalized and crony-capitalist society, Classical Christian Education seeks to educate the whole person, human qua human. This is to what liberal (libere) in the liberal arts refers; a Classical Christian Education is the education of a liberated man (homo versus vir), or the education that makes for a full and free human being. Regarding education oriented to job training in a world where vocations ebb and flow like the tide, John W. Gardner, author of Excellence, noted, “We don’t even know what skills may be needed in the years ahead. That is why we must train our young people in the fundamental fields of knowledge, and equip them to understand and cope with change. That is why we must give them the critical qualities of mind and durable qualities of character that will serve them in circumstances we cannot now even predict.”3

The ability to rightly cope with change can only be accomplished by receiving a liberal arts education. John of Salisbury, the secretary and counselor to Thomas Becket, the renowned Archbishop of Canterbury, published an influential treatise on education in 1159 titled Metalogicon. John of Salisbury stated, “The liberal arts are said to have become so efficacious among our ancestors, who studied them diligently, that they enabled them to comprehend everything they read, elevated their understanding to all things, and empowered them to cut through the knots of all problems possible of solution.”4

And to the point of educating the whole person, Robert Maynard Hutchins notably said, “Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining.”5

3 John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1961), https://archive.org/details/excellencecanweb00ingard/page/34/mode/2up, 35.

4 John and Daniel D. McGarry, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2009), 36-37.

5 Robert M Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education , vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 5.