As much as possible Christians must renew the cultural imagination of the Fathers of the Church. One way to do this is to soak in the cultural background that formed the basis for the New Testament, council, creeds, and the liturgy of those times. One should read a good deal of Greek philosophy and then review other forms of Hellenistic writing, especially theater and science. The central Jewish and Christian elements demand greater and more sustained attention.
Hopefully this total immersion will begin at an early age so that the mind of a child is formed by the dialectic between Athens and Jerusalem. Children reared on great books, great music, and great ideas will be able to enjoy the best of popular culture, but also have access to the higher things.
How can this be done? First, the battle is won if a parent is convinced to try. One should begin to read better books out loud to children. I read the Book of Virtues out loud to my children before they were old enough to understand most of it. I continued to read stories like those found in that collection until they were old enough to read themselves. Their mother still reads to them every night. This is a small thing, but it shapes the imagination. Capture the imagination of a child and the adult mind is not hard to win! Second, while living in our own time, and not avoiding popular culture altogether, one should carefully balance exposure to new ideas with the more lasting ones.
In her well known article The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy Sayers outlined the “how” of a traditional education. She suggested the benefits of schooling centered on the Trivium of the Middle Ages. Students would move through a grammar, dialectical, and rhetoric stage. They would learn how to learn. First, they would gain a mastery of grammar. Language, especially Latin and English, would become familiar. Second, the student would learn about argument. He would gain the skills necessary to make a valid argument himself and to recognize when others had or had not made one. Finally, he would learn to be persuasive. He would gain the ability to make true premises and a valid argument beautiful.
As my wife and I began to raise our own family, we wondered if we could capture what was best about the medieval experience and apply it to our own children in a modern context. The first stage of our children’s education was the language and vocabulary acquisition stage. My guess is that this roughly corresponds to most of what American education calls elementary and middle school ages. We pursued little of what would be called “schooling” in a modern sense, but tried to give the children the widest possible range of basic skills. These included basic literacy, being numerate, rudimentary musical and artistic skills, and as many cultural experiences as possible.
Our oldest children outgrew this stage by age eleven. In the grammar stage, our goal was to prepare our children to follow Christ spiritually and intellectually. We focused almost entirely on the proper use of the skills learned in earlier days. We good readers love to read and but also exercise discretion in their reading. Our children spent of most the school day reading and acquiring the discretion that would form the mental framework for the rest of their lives. Small children have seemingly limitless hard drives for even the most trivial data. So we tried to encourage them to learn all they could about sharks, ponies, or dinosaurs while our real goal was to teach them to be at home in their native tongue while learning the method used to master a topic.
We also scrapped the secular calendar in favor of following the Church year. Easter no longer catches the Reynolds’ family by surprise, coming as it does after Lent and Holy Week! In addition, we now celebrate many, many more Holy Days, holidays, than appear on the modern, secular, calendar. Changing the calendar helped shape all our imaginations. The liturgical calendar moves with nature and even the most urban of environments has not lost contact with nature. Since we live in a Brady Bunch tract house in Southern California, this is part of a needful reminder that milk is not a commodity produced by Starbucks for latte.
As soon as possible, children should be introduced to Latin. We hold off on this until our children show facility in English. The best thing that happened to both Hope and me in our Christian school was an English teacher who stressed grammar and sentence construction. Whatever my short comings as a writer, they are not her fault! She made both of us, but my wife in particular, at home with the structure of our language. I love English as English because of her. Children complain about grammar, as I did, but it benefits them. Our goal is not for our children to be able to read Virgil in Latin, though that would be nice. We hope to increase each child’s ability to understand what language is.
Of course, all of this is first made plain in Plato. In following the education he describes, both Hope and I became persuaded of the central importance of music. Music is a powerful language in itself. It ties together head, heart, and hands in a unique way. When Hope plays her trumpet or flute and I play with her on the recorder, we experience something as total in its own way as sex. All of our children are learning to play the piano to a rudimentary level. The practice of harmony in music is good practice for harmony in the soul.
Theater also occupies some of our children’s year. Aristotle and the Greeks understood the cathartic nature of some drama. I believe that the shaping of the imagination by acting in good theater is very helpful. Drama is a community project and also reminds our children that learning cannot take place in isolation, but must occur fundamentally in community.
In the end, my wife serves as a kitchen Socrates. Even a visit to Disneyland can be turned into an opportunity to ask good questions. Asking good questions at every turn is the most important element of our educational “plan.” Since the children were born, we have tried to ask each other questions in front of them and put appropriate questions to them. They learn to follow the logos, by living the life of free inquiry at an early age. If one does nothing but this, then one has given a child a priceless gift.
High School and Beyond
We are now in the dialectical and rhetorical stage with our two oldest children. Over the past decade, I have been involved in setting up a high school program for high school students that is both on-line and on site at Biola University. There we have worked on teaching the more advanced stages of argument and rhetoric. We try to get students not to write in an academic voice, but beautifully. Students are encouraged to write about topics which matter using precision and passion. Our students follow good models like C.S. Lewis in their writing and only then experiment in their own voice.
Successful students read. I cannot imagine anything more important than leaving a great deal of time for reading in the life of a high school student. Too often children, and in our culture these are children, are kept too busy in these years with too many activities. In my years of teaching college honor students, there has never yet been a good reader with good character who has done badly and yet too many high schools students are too busy to read.
All high school students should take a mathematical logic class. I do not mean the “informal reasoning” classes that cover informal fallacies. These are good, but should be done with elementary and junior high students. I am not good at it, but the logic I took in graduate school changed my thinking. Since leaving school, I have had the chance to teach it to high school and college students. The mental discipline required to see the framework for valid arguments aids in daily clarity of thought. As a romantic, learning the precision of logic was an important spiritual discipline.
Athletics are almost important. As Plato points out a sound body is necessary to pursue the dialectic with vigor. I played soccer in high school and continue to go to the gym with Hope as often as I can. My children have each experimented with different games. Our goal is to keep them games. Fierce competition is good, but the game should end on the field. We will pull our children out of a league where the players are not encouraged to conduct themselves as ladies and gentlemen. It is possible! Sports can become too much a part of a person’s life, but amateur athletics can be competitive and enjoyable.
Finally, it is the essence of the dialectic that no person learns alone. Find a group of like minded people and read together. Discuss everything as a family. Pick a family television show and discuss that as well. The more you question and allow yourself to be questioned, the more you will discover about the budding young adult in your house. My oldest son and I are beginning this process. It has frustrating moments when I provoke eye rolling, but it is mostly a joy for us both.
Love your children, give them to God, set them free to follow the Logos wherever it leads and all will be well!
