“A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried,’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.
-Thomas Sowell
Schools ought to be humble about their importance in society. It may surprise you that the head of your school would make this assertion. Let me explain why I would say so and what it means to us as parents, educators, and students. While it remains to be seen what will happen to the U.S. Department of Education, the bold statements about the disaster that would befall children across the nation if the department were to be dissolved illustrate a misunderstanding about the very short history of formal, systematized, public schooling and its outcomes, an ignorance or denial of the role of the family as a political unit, and a false understanding of human nature.
American compulsory education and the public school system as we know it were born in the 19th Century. In the scope of world history, they are brand new. Education, however, has been a part of the human experience from time immemorial. As a classical school, we study the writings of people from the present back to the dawn of time, and what we discover repeatedly is what Thomas Sowell referenced in the quote above: ancient unschooled people were not stupid, and modern people need to be taught by them. The best kinds of human flourishing were fostered through education first in the home, then in the religious community, and then by the local community through strong institutions but not through schools. Prior to the establishment of publicly funded schools (mostly in the 19th Century for us Americans), only the most privileged attended preparatory schools. Still, we find in the annals of not just American history but world history, brilliant, virtuous, and wise souls who never stepped foot in a classroom. Schools ought to look upon their relative newness and youth as a reason to be sober and humble in their sense of importance.
We ought also to compare our graduate outcomes to our unschooled predecessors. In our infancy, our formal schools have produced a population in which only 54% of adults can read at a 6th grade level. They have failed to provide consistent literacy—the prerequisite foundation for clear thinking and access to the world of ideas (National Center for Education Statistics). Neither have they succeeded in instilling virtue. Let’s use marriage and virtuous commitment to its corresponding vows as just one very significant indicator of a virtuous society. By 1979, the divorce rate was 17.5 times greater than it was in 1867. Estimates are that roughly 92% of the adult population was married in 1850, compared with 41% in 2025. Implementation of sex education in schools in the 1970s, the advent of no-fault divorce, and Roe v. Wade led to an individualistic, “liberated” population. Today, when we read about dropping numbers of divorces, we should note that a minority get married in the first place. In a society that questions the merits of marriage and even vilifies it and its offspring as stifling, The University of Chicago’s Linda Waite, in her book The Case for Marriage, explores the data on the pervasive benefits of marriage to society. While at Capstone we teach our students that reverence for and obedience to God are good enough reasons to honor marriage, Waite makes a strong case that marriage is a powerful creator and sustainer of human capital for adults as well as children and as important as education when it comes to promoting health, wealth, and well-being in our communities.
This does not surprise us because we know that marriage was established by God as the fundamental political unit for a flourishing society. In the family He ordains parents as the educators of their children. The home is the educational flagship—not schools. When God sets the educational standards, his focus is upon the formation of students’ minds, hearts, and souls in intact families (Deut. 6:4-9). He teaches parents to help them to develop rightly ordered affections—to love what ought to be loved and to hate what ought to be hated in morally prioritized order. For all of human history, we believed that this was the function of education and that education was the domain of the family. We believed the family was responsible for teaching children how to think, work, problem solve, resolve conflict, manage money and goods, and navigate civic duty. In the devaluing and erosion of family in favor of individualism, we’ve decided that schools must fill the family void, and over time, we’ve decided that schools are the primary educators of children and that parents must answer to schools. And yet, in proportion to human history, viewing grade schools as the primary educators of children is a recent fad.
Finally, our schools are often filled with self-importance because we have believed that humans are primarily thinking beings, and that if we give each human good information, he or she will love and do good things. The assumption is erroneous on two points. First, the human intellect is fallible and sinful. It is not a perfectly programmed computer. True input does not regularly lead to true or good output. Humans routinely choose to do irrational, foolish, and even evil things simply because we want to. We like the feeling of power and pleasure even at the expense of wisdom and virtue. St. Augustine describes human nature as having a “will of loves.” Our will is borne out of our desires—not our knowledge. So schools, to the extent that we only fill our students’ cognitive cups with information and skills, are at best creating what C.S. Lewis calls “clever devils.” It is a rare school (and never a public school) that teaches students through a comprehensive program of pursuit of objective goodness, truth, and beauty in both curriculum and habits of being within its classrooms. As a result, the most powerful determinant of a student’s future joy—namely rightly ordered loves—is utterly malnourished by most schools, leaving students with fragmented facts and no coherent worldview or incentive to virtuous living.
At Capstone, we understand that schools are not the unique design of God, and were not intended to replace family and church. While by God’s mercy, schools may provide a form of His common grace to their students, they were never intended to be in charge of shaping the hearts and minds of children. That role has always belonged to parents, and we do well to remember that—not just at Capstone but at every school. We serve at your good pleasure for as long as your conscience before God informs you to choose us as your partners. We want our school to be an extension of your home in such a way that your children find continuity between what you are teaching them, the habits of your family life, and what we are teaching them, and the habits of their school life. You do not answer to the institution that is Capstone. We answer to you. You may add us to your team or your tool belt, but we will never be more powerful or effective than you are in shaping wisdom and virtue in your children. It is our aim to be powerful and effective only as a complement to you. To this end, we pray and labor that in both your case and ours, your children will be able to follow us as we follow Christ. If we are successful, our boast will be, “Yet not us, but Christ living in us.” After all, schools aren’t all that important, but Christ living in them is. May Capstone live and move and have its being in Him.