Your Classical School's Biggest Problem
My brother attended for a time one of the most prestigious private boarding schools in the St. Louis area. It was a pivotal experience for him, opening to him new vistas of intellectual endeavor hitherto unimagined. As a teacher myself, I am keen to discover what it was about this school that proved such a combustible tinder for the life of his mind, and so have been prompting him to reflect on his time there.
One could point to many interesting aspects of this school’s program. It put forth a demanding curriculum—including an ambitious reading list, featuring The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Oedipus Rex, Beowulf and Gardner’s Grendel, and that was only for the freshmen—with mandatory Latin and Greek, a rigorous sequence of mathematics, and the usual sciences and social studies. It structured its day in short thirty minute periods with classes wrapping up by noon. After classes it broke the day into segments of athletic activity, tutorial-like advisory meetings with a faculty member, and structured study.
But I think what struck me most forcibly about the school was its single-mindedness. The athletic program was modest. It made no apologies for a curriculum that made it impossible for it to serve all and sundry. Its one goal was to produce literate, well-educated students who could go on to productive intellectual endeavors.
The greatest problem for classical schools is their impractical drive to be every kind of school for every kind of student. There are probably exceptions, but most classical schools I have known have tried to be perhaps a dozen different schools simultaneously—the rigorous school for those who care about academics, the religious school for parents who just want a safe environment for their average or below average pupil, the reform school for the tough nuts from rough backgrounds, the athletic school for the jocks, the choir school or the art school for the creative and talented, the special ed school to remediate students with pronounced disabilities, and so on—with the result that nothing gets done particularly well, and everyone feels constantly pulled in different directions.
It would be wise to just pick one of these and decide to do it very, very well. Do you want to be the religious school for the average (sometimes very average) student? Fine and well. Have daily chapel, with preaching from people who know how. Do plenty of Bible reading. Jettison standardized testing, and either remove or make optional more challenging academic subjects (do not retain them and then require them to be done poorly, which is blasphemy). Focus on preparing students for a practical vocation. Be selective of families that already have a strong practice of religious observance, because bad company in your classes will spoil your efforts. Be demanding in school rules about enforcing separation from the world—unusually plain and modest dress, prohibitions on dating, and restrictions on media should all be on the table. Such a school should be at the most K-8; education beyond that level will be superfluous for your purposes. Students can spend the remaining years of their minority apprenticing to some godly and competent mentor in some productive line of work. The question people should ask about your school is this: are you people Amish, or something? You won’t fear the question, because you know what you are and what you’re trying to accomplish.
Or perhaps you are the sports school. Fine and well. Hire good coaches, bring in recruiters for college athletic programs, shorten the school day by cutting out the more challenging academic subjects (do not simply pull kids out of classes and expect teachers to make up the difference). Make the religious life of the school centered around good sportsmanship and the other incidental virtues cultivated by athletics. Voilà, you will have your sports school.
You get the idea: an honest and sincere pursuit of any of these goals (and why should we be interested in any pursuit which is less than honest and sincere?) requires us to joyfully make trade-offs. If you want everything from your school, you want nothing from your school.
“Ah, but we are a classical school. Therefore we pursue academic excellence in godliness; we will ‘repair the ruins’ while simultaneously inculcating virtue in students from rough families, nourishing the faith of ordinary kids from ordinary Christian families, and graduate students who speak Latin and know symbolic logic and have read the Great Books and sing in four-part harmony and excel on standardized tests and have read the Bible cover to cover and…”
Trim your sails, O man. I am by no means saying that the pursuit of godliness and intellectual excellence are at cross purposes. But academic excellence is by no means a necessary condition for a godly education. Plenty of holy men and women and have lived and died ignorant of Latin, the syllogism, and the quadratic equation, and still been perfectly useful to their church and their neighbors. Do you really want to exclude from this godly environment you’re creating the students who can’t hack it with their conjugations or their polynomials?
“Well, no, we won’t exclude them…”
Then what are you going to do when they aren’t up for the effort of learning all these things you’ve loaded them down with?
If you are like many schools, you will require these things with a big wink. The student must be there in body: where he is mentally is no concern of ours. You will simply require teachers to do their job badly and pass along students who aren’t learning. Or else you will tether each class to the glacial progress of the dunces and duffers. If we can’t honestly give them a passing grade, we will just eliminate the grades. No goal posts will mean no losses.
I say again that to defend this in the name of providing a “godly” education is simply blasphemous. If such a term is to have any meaning, it must imply priorities and trade-offs that we will gladly make for the sake of our goals. What those trade-offs would look like in candor I have outlined above. If we aren’t willing to make them, if in some sense we want to say academics are the raison d’être of our school, then we are committed to making another set of trade-offs, no less honorable in themselves as long as we are frank about them to all concerned parties.
What we shouldn’t abide is the muddled juggling and confusion of trying to be all things to all people. A servant cannot serve two masters: something has got to give.
The underlying logic here is not difficult to see. Most schools would presumably admit that they can’t be all things to all people. Why, then, do they so often try? Some, perhaps, feel pressured by the idea that a classical school is simply “supposed” to be all these things, that other people are pulling it off successfully, and that what is mainly required is a little more tinkering and calibration before it all comes off the way it should. This impression is no doubt strengthened by the pervasive imposter syndrome in the classical world: the fear that everyone but you has it figured out, that everyone belongs here except someone with your background. Better to grin and fake it until everything gets straightened out. This reenactment of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” makes for ripe pickings for quackery, cant, and nostrums.
Only in moments of dreadful lucidity would such a bullied and intimidated person begin to ask himself questions like, “Why, in a rural midwestern area where a collared shirt is tantamount to formal wear, where education beyond the immediately practical is not valued, where families are coming to us primarily because they find the public schools increasingly zany, why are we here dressing kids up in blazers and rep ties, trying to teach them Plato and categorical logic, and forcing them to study dead languages?”
Now, lest I sounds overly pessimistic, I am by no means denying that schools can be transformative. I started out by affirming the transformative role a school had for my brother. We grew up (I did entirely, he did substantially) in a rural community where the nearest commercial enterprise was a cow farm. Nobody was wearing a tuxedo to the local burger stand or reading Plato at the local public school. Now he has a Ph.D. from Cambridge and I’m gaga about teaching a dead language. Certainly something got ahold of us.
That magic something has to subsist in a very carefully preserved environment, however. It is quickly disrupted by a class where some people don’t want to learn, just as it would be in a religious school that admitted militant atheists. To become transformative, a climate has to be almost undifferentiated, almost all-encompassing, almost without horizon. As soon as there’s a sense of a intermingling between those who are in and those who are out, the magic is broken: a nursery becomes a battlefield.
Suppose you actually wish to have a classical school that is transformative for the intellectual lives of your students. How should you go about it? First, unless you are on the coasts, reconcile yourself to being small and staying small. Find a financial model that allows your school to be small and still be sustainable (something that must be secured without reducing teachers to penury). Second, be selective. Since you wish to have a religious classical school, you must be selective on two criteria: you must find families that already have an intellectual life as well as a strong religious ethos. Lastly, you must implement a curriculum that is rigorous and academic standards that have teeth: at least one purpose of your standards must be the identification of families that don’t make the cut, so that you can encourage them to move on.
If you can build something like this, you will save yourself a lot of time on other tasks, such as hiring, retaining, and training good teachers. Good teachers will be naturally attracted to an environment like this, and will fight to stay there. They will require far less direction and far less supervision than their equivalent functionaries in a school with a chaotic and ambiguous culture. I would also venture to say that, if you can sustain yourself past the first generation of students, you will also not have to spend much time raising money or justifying your project: people will see the transformation in your students, your students will fondly remember your school, and you will build a community that will want you to survive and flourish.1
In this sense, one wonders whether it is really prudent to build a classical school in the customary way, i.e. beginning with kindergarten and adding on grades after that. The procedure was adopted out of a certain logic dictated by pedagogy and child development, and seeing little tykes recite poetry and sing songs must be admitted to have a certain marketability factor. The downside is that it prolongs for the better part of a generation any proof that the school has produced distinctive citizens, and the school’s energies tend to dissipate by then into a vague miasma of internal politics and hackneyed catch phrases. Better, perhaps, to pour the start-up enthusiasm of the school into a solid four years that can sow the seeds for the school’s continued community and support. It tends to be easier to sell secondary teachers on classical education in any case, and one is not working against the grain of the impoverished preparation of teachers’ colleges and education majors.