Characteristic 3

The third characteristic of Classical Christian Education is a pedagogical method that follows the order of the medieval seven liberal arts, mainly as it relates to a child’s development but also as an approach to teaching all subject matter. The seven liberal arts are described by the medieval divines as the trivium (three ways) and the quadrivium (four ways).

First, following the trivium, students learn grammar (language), then dialectic (logical thinking), and finally rhetoric (expressing oneself accurately and persuasively) before moving on to studying the quadrivium. The quadrivium treats four universal truths: number, geometry, harmony, and astronomy.

Early in the modern renewal of Classical Christian Education, those seeking to recover the classical model of education relied on an essay by Dorothy Sayers, titled, “The Lost Tools of Learning.” It was an extremely helpful essay and many schools adopted her pedagogical model. But the recovery didn’t stop there. In the midst of “repairing the ruins,” more about classical pedagogy was uncovered. Sayers’ pedagogical insights were just the tip of the iceberg, to lean on a worn-out metaphor. Recovery of classical pedagogy also revealed just how important poetic knowledge was to the formation of the whole person. 6

6 James S. Taylor, Poetic Knowledge (University of New York Press, 1998).

Today, most recognize a much fuller expression of Classical Christian Education that was first laid out by Ms. Sayers. Referred to by Clark and Jain as the PGMAPT paradigm (i.e., piety, gymnasium, music, liberal arts, philosophy, and theology), where the A stands for the liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium), and the seven liberal arts are bookended by poetic knowledge on one end and modern consummate studies on the other.

Characteristic 4

The fourth characteristic recognizes the pedagogical approach must be applied to something. In other words, Classical Christian Education is more than a pedagogy, it is a pedagogy applied to a specific pool of knowledge, the best of what has been thought and written in the last twoand-a-half millennia of the Western tradition. Sometimes this pool or “Western canon” of knowledge is referred to as the great books. When referring to great books, some may immediately recall Mortimer J. Adler’s 60-volume set published by the University of Chicago and Encyclopedia Britannica. His are merely a collection of the kinds of works to which the great books refer. While it is a good collection, it is also an incomplete collection. The president of Harvard College, Charles Eliot, suggested his own list of similar books which affectionately came to be called his “five-foot shelf” and published as The Harvard Classics.

Classical Christian Education makes a point of exposing students to these primary sources in an integrated fash- ion, finding in both the classical and Christian traditions that all truth (i.e., reality) is part of the whole. In other words, knowledge of any subject is only a partial knowledge of the one truth.

Instead of studying textbooks of disintegrated subjects like social studies, history, or English, in a Classical Christian Education, students study the humanities in an integrated manner. This means they read and discuss in Socratic fashion the best primary literature, philosophy, theology, and history, often within a given historical period.

Characteristic 5

The fifth characteristic of Classical Christian Education is the study of classical languages, including Greek, and especially Latin. While a few have made a somewhat meritorious argument of substituting Latin with modern languages, there are many stronger arguments for the continued inclusion of classical languages in a Classical Christian Education. A few of those arguments are:

• Learning Latin gives students the ability to read many important primary sources in Latin, the language in which they were written; it also affords opportunity to read texts that have not yet been translated into English.

• Learning Latin provides students with a fuller understanding of the English language since about 40% of English is derived from Latin.

• Many of the professional vocations still do and probably always will rely heavily on Latin languages (e.g., law, science, medicine, theology).

• And one ancillary and pragmatic reason is that students who study Latin overwhelmingly score higher on standardized tests than students who have not studied Latin.

In any case, Classical Christian Education emphasizes the learning of not only modern languages but the classical languages as a fundamental staple of a person’s education.

Characteristic 6

The sixth element is teaching students with the goal of fostering virtue and wisdom instead of helping them merely accumulate disconnected facts or skills for the job market. While modern education takes what it claims to be a secular approach, wrongly believing education can only consist of the is and not the ought, Classical Christian Education emphasizes what a student ought to be, virtuous, by highlighting what David Hicks, in Norms and Nobility, calls the “Tyranny of the Ideal Image.” This Ideal Image is exemplified by the seven Christian virtues (i.e., prudence, fortitude, wisdom, justice, faith, hope, and love) and also as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ (Ephesians 4:11-16).