Notes on Classical Christian Education: What the School Cannot Do and What Parents Must Do for their Children

Two things can be true at once:

1. Formal Christian education (k-12) should aim at the formation of the whole person into a virtuous and mature disciple of Jesus. This means transmitting a body of knowledge, developing critical reasoning skills and rhetorical excellence, cultivating wisdom attuned to what is good, true, and beautiful, and ultimately passing on a culture or way of life fitting for the kingdom of God. This is “paideia” in the full sense. Thus, true education (like the church’s liturgy) must be at least somewhat insulated from market forces. It must be anchored in moral conviction, not mere pragmatism. It is not job prep or standardized test prep or college prep but “life in the kingdom” prep. It is laying the groundwork so the student can obey the lordship of Jesus in whatever square inches of creation he occupies (to cite Kuyper). Even after formal schooling is complete, the student should be equipped to be a life-long learner. 
2. In addition to this formal education, children must develop skills needed for being productive and economically viable members of society. These skills may directly overlap with and flow out of formal education, but not always, at least not in an obvious way. These skills will be different for boys and girls since men and women are generally called to occupy different domains – men as household providers, women as homemakers. The acquisition of these skills is quite pragmatic and market driven because the goal is to be economically productive in the workplace (most men) or to be at the heart of a productive household (most women). 

Formal education answers the question, “What kind of person do you want to be?” Vocational training answers the question, “What do you want to do with your life?,” or perhaps even, “How do you want to provide for yourself and your family?” Educational training is about who we are. Vocational training is about what we will do. They are related, obviously, but not the same. We want our children to be grounded in wisdom, to know and understand the culture in which they live and its heritage, and to be virtuous – even if none of these things equip them for a job as such. But we also want them to have the skills they need to do a job. Education without additional marketable skills creates financial hardship that no parent should wish upon their child. Education totally subjected to market forces leaves our children largely ignorant and immature, to be tossed to and fro by the waves of the worldly culture. We need both character and competence, wisdom and skills, fully developed paideia and productivity in the marketplace. 

How does this work out? Education is not merely a credential so one can “get a good job” or even “get into a good college in order to get a good job.” We cannot instrumentalize education in this way. We cannot reduce education to a system of credentialing. No matter what vocation a person goes on to enter into, the formation of the person as an image bearer and disciple, called to apply Scripture and wisdom to all of life, is crucial. Education aims to help us understand ourselves and our world in light of God’s Word. It aims at maturity. 

But men in particular have to make a living. And most people will need skills that will not be given in primary or secondary k-12 education in order to get a job. A future engineer will most likely need a college degree with specialized training. A future doctor will need to go to college, then medical school, then residency. A future plumber will need to go to trade school or an apprenticeship. A future entrepreneur will need to learn about starting a business either in a classroom or from a mentor or both. A future wife and mother will need to learn domestic arts and home management skills. A future mechanic will have to get under the hood with a master mechanic and learn the trade. And so on. College, graduate school, and vocational schools are often very focused on developing marketable skills and that is not necessarily a bad thing, provided the groundwork of paideia has been laid. 

In the modern world, secular primary and secondary education has been reduced to credentialing and job prep or college prep (at best). It does not teach students how to think. It does not form them into virtuous persons. Indeed, it’s more likely to turn them into corrupt and mindless drones who obey the dictates of the state and pop culture. Education has become completely pragmatic so that, at best at, it readies someone for the job market. At worst, it trains them into becoming nothing more than little statists, ready to do Caesar’s will, working a job, paying taxes, and amusing themselves to death.

So parents need to give their kids paideia — enculturation into a holistic, obedient, faithful way of life, familiar with the great works and great events that have shaped our civilization. We want our kids to be educated in the truest and fullest sense of that term. But parents have to prepare their children for the economic realities of life as well. The job market does matter. People need to be able to get jobs. To be clear, the form and content of education (at least k-12) should not be dictated by the job market, it should be driven by our vision of what a person is and what it means to live in God’s kingdom. But good parents will run on both of these tracks. This two-track parenting will develop the child as a person and as a worker. Parents should desire to form their children in virtue and wisdom through the educational process AND prepare them for a vocation that comes afterwards and which may require a set of skills that were not cultivated during k-12th grade formal education. 

Once upon a time, real education was only for the elites — the nobility and clergy were the only ones who got a real education. That education could ignore the market because those being educated already had jobs that would be underwritten in some other way. Everyone else outside of the elites learned the skills needed to make a living (usually their father’s trade in the case of sons) but didn’t really get an education. With the Protestant Reformation arose the impulse to universalize literacy so that everyone could read and study the Bible (since all believers belong to the royal priesthood). But since then there has been a tension between the desire to educate the masses and the desire to prepare them for the kind of work they will do after they graduation — which was often quite unrelated to their classroom learning. At various points attempts were made to bring the two strands together, e.g., including shop class and domestic arts classes in high school. But as education got more secular and its content thinner and thinner, eventually the true core of paideia was lost. The classical Christian school movement is an attempt to recover paideia. Parents who provide a Christian paideia for their children should be commended. But paideia is not going to be enough for most of our children to do what they will need to do in life and to do what God calls them to do. Some kind of vocational training (whether in college or vocational school or an apprenticeship) is going to be needed as well. Parents should plan accordingly.

I’ve seen many parents prepare their children poorly, either because they gave them paideia without marketable skills, or they focused on marketable skills at the expense of paideia. A k-12 Christian school should certainly be focused on paideia, not the market. But parents should raise children on both tracks so they are not only educated but also ready for the task of making a living and forming a household in a world full of challenges.