“In the classical Christian school, every moment is indeed holy, so we aim for our most ordinary moments to be intentionally spent in habits that form us and our students toward holiness.”
In our ongoing explanation of the distinctive elements of classical Christian education, we have meditated upon the essence and value of moral and intellectual virtue, which are the first two ends explicitly stated in Capstone’s missions statement: wisdom and virtue defined as having thoughts and desires of heart, soul, and mind that are for Christ and his Kingdom. This telos or end—we might say purpose—of classical education is what differentiates it from virtually all other educational models, but in addition to a different telos, classical education tends to use different means or methods. In our school’s definition of classical education, we name two primary means: habits rooted in the historic scholastic practices of the Church and the West, and a rich and ordered course of study grounded in the liberal arts, ascending through humane letters, mathematics, natural sciences, philosophy, and theology.
Today we focus on the habits of a classical education. Next time we’ll talk about the distinctive classical curriculum. Habits. That doesn’t sound very interesting, does it? Perhaps when we think of habits we think of the boring versions of new year’s resolutions. However, habits are powerful forces for either good or evil. As writer and educator Blake Hart writes, habits are “grooves our souls settle into.” Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, once wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Ms. Dillard was, of course, stating an obvious truth that still somehow manages to be strikingly sobering. However, what we do in the small things or habits is not just about what we spend but also about how we are formed by how we spend our time. In Story of Philosophy, Will Durant writes, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
You see, habits form our minds, bodies, and souls in a particular way that is determined by the story told in the habit and also by the way that our habits shape our instincts and longings. Perhaps you or someone you know has a habit of spending Thanksgiving morning or afternoon looking at ads for Black Friday deals. The ads themselves tell a story of supreme or at least elevated satisfaction with life the more deals can be had. This is certainly a story at odds with Jesus’ words, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.”
But the habit doesn’t just stop with the story it tells our hearts. Such a prolonged focus on what can be acquired cheaply tomorrow moves the mind from contemplation of and gratitude for blessings today. It distracts us from pondering the utter unlikelihood and abundance of our blessings and from our unworthiness of them and therefore also moves our hearts from gratitude and instead toward an enhanced desire for more. What seemed like a harmless habit of perusing the newspaper or retailer websites—done year after year not because we invented it as a good way to foster gratitude on Thanksgiving but because retailers intentionally planted a habit—became a tradition that shapes the heart’s desire for how to spend a day once dedicated to gratitude.
Habits are like that—most often unintentional yet powerfully formational. Before we opened the school for classes in 2022, the faculty and staff gathered in the commons of the North Campus to discuss what heart-shaping habits might be intentionally fostered in the school. Our intention was to start with a few and grow them as each new habit became thoughtless—habituated, as it were. Greeting one another by name, using manners, using titles of respect, speaking purpose and blessing when we address students by calling them learners, scholars, or philosophers, practicing reconciliation with intentional words such as, “I am sorry,” and “I forgive you,” being obedient the first time, and gentlemen holding the door for the ladies. These did not and do not happen by accident, but rather each one was selected and then taught and practiced by teachers and students alike in order that a disposition of respect, love, kindness, humility, and reverence might become second nature within teachers and students. What starts for the student as simply following the leader eventually forms the identity, will, and instincts of the student.
Other habits have been established over our first three years together. In the upper school, starting each morning in the chapel for lauds (worship) frames all that happens within the day as belonging to God and dedicated to his purposes. It reminds us who we are and whose we are before we begin doing anything social or academic. It teaches us Who has the preeminent seat of authority in our school more by habit than by word or rule.
Gryphon Gathering in the grammar school classrooms involves recitation of various and rotating wisdom and authoritative words such as the school honor code or mission statement, question and answer about the Gryphon’s Weapons (school virtues), scripture reading, and prayer. This habit forms student and teacher identity as a community of individuals that has responsibilities to the whole and tells the whole what it is for. When repeated daily for months and years, the heart and mind align themselves with the calling and vision that these habits articulate.
In truth, the entire school day and school year are punctuated with habits that were intentionally authored and implemented because of their formative power toward the telos of our school—the cultivation of wisdom and virtue in our students. A love for order and dignity—both attributes of God and his unspoiled creation—is formed in simple habits of keeping lockers, desks, and classrooms organized and neat or by the decorum practiced by passing respectfully and orderly through the hallways between classes. A desire to truly understand others before being understood ourselves is fostered by habits of active listening and questioning taught and rehearsed at the Harkness table in upper school classes. To be sure, the habit can be difficult to learn and may feel restrictive at first, but it forms a humble, charitable heart toward others and their ideas.
Likewise, we could fill a day unpacking some of the classroom catechisms that frame learning at the start of so many of our classes. In these habits, students stand and answer by rote (once they’ve read the responses for several weeks) questions of the nature and purpose of the studies within a particular subject studied. Over time, this habit provides the students with lenses through which to view and to receive and interpret their school subjects, ultimately cultivating in them a greater reason for knowing and wrestling with the academic content and so often a growing appreciation and curiosity for it.
We could write a book about Capstone habits that at the surface level seem mundane but that form the desires, thoughts, and imaginations of our students. These have been a few good examples of habits that were intentionally created in our school as they are in all truly classical schools, because we know that habits shape desires and ways of thinking and being. As Aristotle rightly observed, we become what we practice. Every school forms students through habits. The only question is whether those habits are intentional and whether they have considered which competing stories they tell and what loves and ways of being they form in their students.
In classical Christian schools, we borrow most of our habits from those habits practiced by the Church over the millennia. Each of the school habits in a classical school must consider which story or version of “the good life” is being told to the heart, mind, and soul of the student and which desire or disposition will most likely be cultivated by practicing it. This is the fundamental question behind even habits such as the way we generate grades, what awards we give students, how we select uniform clothing, how we complete team warmups in athletics, how we go through the lunch line, how we read a text in class, and how we greet adults and guests when they walk into our classrooms. The classical school takes its cues from what we already see as time-tested or authoritative habits of the Church from biblical times to the great academies and universities started by the Church over the centuries. We look to great men and women and institutions of Western Civilization and ask ourselves what habits shaped their most excellent, wise, and virtuous institutions, ideas, and movements. Rather than rushing headlong into the newest fads of our day, we first sit humbly at the feet of those great men and women upon whose shoulders we stand today and learn to imitate their way of life—so long as they are congruent with Christ and his Kingdom.
In classical schools, we believe there are no small, meaningless acts, so everything we do can be exciting and purposeful. We believe that every moment is sacred—every act holy in a world created and governed by God.
Writer Wendell Berry (whom I highly recommend) writes, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” In that spirit, Author, singer, and songwriter Andrew Peterson writes in his foreword to Every Moment Holy, Volume I, “There are no unsacred moments; there are only sacred moments and moments we have forgotten are sacred. If that’s true, then it is our duty to reclaim the sacredness of our lives, of life itself.” He also quotes an unnamed wise man who taught him that “Christianity ought to be as normal in your home as dirty laundry and Corn Flakes.” In the classical Christian school, every moment is indeed holy, so we aim for our most ordinary moments to be intentionally spent in habits that form us and our students toward holiness.