For two months now we have been unpacking our definition of classical Christian education to help all of us understand and appreciate what makes a Capstone education distinct not just in its ends but in its means. Not just in its goals but in the ways we accomplish those goals. Last time we explored the school habits of the Christian West as they are conceived of and practiced in our school and how those habits of our classrooms, teams, and Houses work to shape our students’ values and vision of the kinds of lives they want to pursue for the glory of God and benefit of one another.
By way of review, here’s our definition of classical education from the beginning up to today’s topic, which is a rich and ordered curriculum grounded in the liberal arts:
Classical education is the pursuit of wisdom through a cultivation of intellectual virtue and an encouragement of moral virtue by means of habits rooted in the historic scholastic practices of the Church and the West and by a rich and ordered course of study, grounded in the liberal arts. . .
We’ve discussed the treasures of wisdom and intellectual and moral virtue which we are pursuing and their tremendous worth in our students’ experience of abundant life in Christ. We’ve seen that the cultural and learning habits of our school shape our students’ imagination or ability to conceive of and to desire the wise and moral life available in Christ. These ingredients in the classical school are best thought of as the way we do life together on our campus. They heavily influence and shape the minds and hearts of our students, but they are not the core curriculum. By themselves, they would still be powerful forces for good in our children, but they produce the kinds of wisdom and virtue that are caught more than taught.
As for what is directly taught, it is the rich and ordered course of study grounded in the liberal arts that develops the tools of learning and habits of the mind necessary to not just the scholastic or school-based studies with which most of our students will engage through college and even graduate school, but the tools of learning and habits of mind necessary to be wise, fruitfully creative, articulate, visionary individuals who have learned and internalized storehouses of rich knowledge and have acquired and refined the skills to put that knowledge to use in their communities. In short, today’s conversation is about the curriculum of a classical school.
So we’ve described the curriculum as both rich and ordered. But what do we mean by rich? Rich content is wide, yes, but it also goes deep, hits home, prompts questions and reflection, presents complexity, and nourishes the whole person. It isn’t trivial. It is time-tested and has proven its value to human flourishing. Rich curriculum grounds students in what is real and what matters most. It promotes the good. It is not speculative or the latest fad but has been proven true or comes from the pen of authorities have have passed the test of time. It is beautifully crafted—exposing school subjects—which are better understood as life subjects—in their beautiful simplicity and complexity. It is rich in vocabulary, story, challenge, and imagery, whether through words or art. Rich content is content that matters. While the uninitiated student might not initially see the relevance of rich content, with the help of the teacher and the grace of God, rich content presents itself to students as something worth learning for its own sake and not because there will be a test.
So the classical curriculum is intentionally rich and has been curated over centuries to create a collection that is the best of the best. Yes, it is rich, but it is also carefully ordered. At Capstone, our curriculum has been vetted over centuries and in the highest performing schools in our high performing classical school renewal movement. The scope and sequence of it has been crafted, tested, and evaluated for results. From our Literacy Essentials curriculum to Singapore Math to Well-Ordered Language to the primary texts for literature, logic, theology, and rhetoric, our books may have recent copyright dates, but their content and methods are not new. They have been proven highly effective in schools for generations. The order in which courses are taught here considers both the logical sequence of prerequisite knowledge and skills within a subject but also the nature of human development, honoring the ordered content and methods that will best suit young people at their respective stages of development. Fortunately for us, we have tall, strong shoulders upon which to stand and have implemented the liberal arts tradition abandoned by American schools since the late 19th Century.
The progressive schools, which are virtually all schools that are not classical and Christian, gave up this rich and ordered content rooted in the liberal arts in exchange for a factory model for schools. Our rich curriculum was viewed as old-fashioned, time-consuming, and unnecessary for graduating workers shaped in the newest liberal ideologies of the progressive colleges. They were less interested in the flourishing of each student and the moral character of our youth than they were in socially engineering humans useful to the industries of their day and their progressive social and political agendas.
For the last 100 years, the education industry has had a vested interest in selling the next big thing that will necessitate the production and purchase of new curriculum, the teaching of new classes in colleges of education, the ongoing revision of teacher licensure requirements, and the proliferation of consultants to help everyone to master the cutting edge content that has yet to prove itself in the arena of real life. Those who try to keep up with these so-called innovations will always be chasing the next quick fix—never considering that the answer may have been with us all along. The education industry runs on constant innovation without positive results despite the fact that the foundational tools of learning and human growth in wisdom and virtue have remained unchanged and available to us since the birth of formal education in the West.
So what exactly are the liberal arts in which all of our curriculum is rooted? What are these tools of learning that the other schools have abandoned but that classical schools have revived? The liberal arts are called liberal because they enable men to live free, self-governed lives. The liberal arts are both the bedrock and fountain of the art of learning, enabling students to grow into adults who can think critically and adapt to an ever-changing social and technological landscape. Rather than being irrelevant due to their old age, they have proven themselves timeless and of increasing value the more that times change. They have remained not just relevant but necessary because of the rapid change we experience in our age. Dorothy Sayers, in her essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” which served as a rallying cry and point of inspiration for the renewal of classical education in America in the last 20th Century, asserted, “To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.” Thus, the goal of the liberal arts and the rich and ordered curriculum in a classical school is to make learning new and novel subjects not yet even imagined, manageable to our students as they apply universal tools to new challenges brought on by technological, social, and economic change. Indeed, the liberal arts have no expiration date.
Most of today’s adults who graduated from college will assume that they received a liberal arts education. This is because the term is thrown around in most institutions of higher education and even in college preparatory high schools. However, most school and colleges abandoned the liberal arts generations back, and we can see the dire consequences in Americans’ inability to think logically or to articulate a coherent argument. We see it in low reading levels and our fellow citizens’ inability to write. Very few of us received a true liberal arts education like the one our student are receiving at Capstone and in the other roughly 1,500 classical schools in America. The seven classical liberal arts are grammar, logic, rhetoric (called the Trivium or “three ways”) and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (called the Quadrivium or “four ways”). In the next few First Things episodes, we will explore the content, skills, and value of these arts, but from a 30,000 foot view, we can think of the Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric as the arts of language and thought. They make for logical, articulate, persuasive human beings. The Quadrivium arts of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy are the mathematical arts that provide students with a deep understanding of numbers and their relationships, the relationships between various forms of matter and space, and the interplay of the natural philosophies with each other—physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy. While these subjects may sound like standard fare in all schools, it is the way they are taught as an interconnected whole that makes the Quadrivium different than a progressive approach to the sciences.
We will dig in to the Trivium and Quadrivium in the next two episodes, but the distinguishing strength of the classical liberal arts at Capstone versus the progressive approach to distinct school subjects in neighboring schools is the rich, ordered, and integrated way in which the subjects are explored in the classical classroom, leading to intellectual virtues and the ability to think for oneself, to read insightfully, to think rigorously, to write beautifully, and to speak articulately. The classical classroom curriculum prepares students to think and live according to a unified vision of reality. Because our curriculum is carefully ordered so that they see the connectedness of all subjects and the world as a coherent whole, they retain not just knowledge but also understanding and can solve problems across several domains.
Hence, we eliminate the defect of modern education as identified by Dorothy Sayers, “that although we often succeed in teaching our students ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning” itself. Next time we will seek to understand the Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and how they are taught and applied in a Capstone education.
Until then, keep on pursuing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful to the glory of God and for the good of your neighbor.