Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
Welcome!
Who can benefit from this Session?
• Christian school educators
• Christian parents who home-school
• Christian parents who are interested
in learning more about the benefits of a
classical, Christian education for their
children
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
What is Classical Education?
•The older traditional education in America’s
history of education
•The purpose is to raise up an educated
person
•The ability to carry out successful inquiries
into what is significantly true, good and
beautiful
•The ability to deal with the most significant
issues of human existence - life, death, and
how can we secure the future.
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
Classical vs Contemporary Progressive Education
What’s the Difference?
• Education vs schooling
• the difference between learning tasks
and skills vs learning how to learn . . .
• and what to learn that is significant for
a life of civil liberty and spiritual faith
• The belief that education is for all
children regardless of intelligence level
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
What is needed to carry out
significant inquiries concerning truth?
• The ability to use language well
• The ability to analyze and distinguish
sense from nonsense
• The ability to evaluate, judge and apply in
word and in action
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
What is needed to deal with
the great issues of human existence?
• An understanding of the Christian Faith
and why it is true
• An ability to process meaning,
purpose,and value from a Christian Worldview
• An informed understanding of how these
issues have been addressed from the best
minds and works of Western Civilization
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
An Educational Philosophy for Christian Education
Some Key Priorities and Assumptions
• Christian education should not simply be
designed to prepare students to make a living. It
should prepare them to make a life.
• If a person can successfully address the
temporal and spiritual challenges of making a life both now and in eternity . . . making a living is
easy.
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
An Educational Philosophy for Christian Education
Some Key Priorities and Assumptions
• There needs always to be a vital link between
knowing and doing.
• Only as students learn what is good can they
place it above themselves and do it.
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
An Educational Philosophy for Christian Education
Some Key Priorities and Assumptions
•Students need to hone the fundamental language
skills (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) so that they can
successfully carry out their own inquiries into what is
significantly true, good and beautiful.
• Students need to become educated persons. This
means, in part, to receive an education that enables
them not to have to depend on what others tell
them in order to comprehend the meaning of
important events that swirl around them in life.
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
An Educational Philosophy for Christian Education
Some Key Priorities and Assumptions
•Since Christian men and women inhabit both the
world and the Kingdom of God, our children need an
education that will equip them simultaneously to
engage the world’s fight and trust in the soul’s
salvation.
•For this you need to impart good knowledge, form
good character, and nurture good faith. There is no
other way.
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
An Educational Philosophy for Christian Education
Some Key Priorities and Assumptions
•Students become voracious learners when they
become hooked on learning. This is effectively
done by relating knowledge to the major questions
of human existence, such as: What is life? What is
death? How can I secure the future?
•Every child is passionately interested in finding real
answers here. The interest is forced by human
existence itself.
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
An Educational Philosophy for Christian Education
Some Key Priorities and Assumptions
•Christian parents often fear when their children go
off to a secular university that they might “graduate”
from the Church’s confession before they graduate
from Secular U. These fears are well founded . . .
many do.
•It is vital that Christian education provide the
means whereby a Christian’s faith-life may grow in
knowledge that is shaped by the Christian worldview.
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
An Educational Philosophy for Christian Education
Some Key Priorities and Assumptions
•Christian young people need to know not only what
the faith is, but also why it is true. If they do not
know why, in terms of faith, then they cannot
answer why not to the challenges of unbelief.
•They must learn the whys of faith as well as the
whats to calm honest and serious doubts and to give
a defense for the hope that is in them.
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
An Educational Philosophy for Christian Education
Some Key Priorities and Assumptions
•Excellent Christian schools are not just the
educational answer for Christian families over
against poor or mediocre secular schools. They are
especially the answer over against the really good
secular ones.
•No education is innocent of an attitude toward man
and his purposes.
•All government schools are required to teach all
subjects where meaning, purpose, and value are
formed by the absence of God and His revelation.
Seminar on Classical, Christian Education
An Educational Philosophy for Christian Education
Some Key Priorities and Assumptions
•Government schools also teach students how to be
socialized devoid of the moral absolutes of the
Creator.
•It is in the really effective and competent public
schools that students effectively learn to understand
the world and how to live in it without God.