Education: October 2007 Archives
WORLD Magazine: Joel Belz: Confessing our weaknesses
"Here, I want to confess explicitly some of the embarrassing weaknesses of Christian education, all too apparent in both school and homeschool versions.... 2. In our support and development of textbooks and curriculum for our new programs, we have sometimes backed materials that were just as propagandistic on our side of issues as were the materials that so infuriated us from the secular side. 3. We have too often offered parents nothing more than a 'cleaned up' version of secularism. We've removed the ugly parts, but the product we've offered hasn't always been thoughtfully Christian--even though that's what we said we were offering and what we charged tuition for."
WORLD April 28, 2001: Susan Olasky: Dif'rent strokes
"Over the past 16 years our four sons have attended four different types of Christian schools. We've had children in a Lutheran school, a small school rooted in the Christian Reformed tradition, a large Southern Baptist school, and a classical Christian school. While some parents think there is one ideal type of Christian school, we've come to believe that no school has the corner on educational wisdom. Children differ and the types of schools that suit them will differ. But all good schools will share three important attributes: vision, leadership, and love.... We've seen four very different types of schools, but all of them--and Christian educators generally--face tough questions. How should they maintain academic excellence while realizing that not all children will be scholars? How can tuition be kept low enough to avoid economic segregation, and perhaps racial and ethnic segregation as well? How can we help children to love God in a society where they are propagandized to love just about everything else?"
The Old Schoolhouse Magazine: Homeschooling and Classical Christian Education
Gene Edward Veith on classical education: "If you go back to the Romans and the Greeks, there were basically two kinds of education. Slaves were taught to do their job and do it well and only know what to do to contribute to the economy. But the other education was for the free citizens of the Greek democracy or the Roman republic. For those free societies to work, the citizen had to take part in the decisions that were necessary, to weigh the facts and analyze problems, to plan a good course of action. One had to have a certain kind of education to be a citizen equipped in the running of the country. Citizens had to be able to use their minds, think clearly, have a knowledge bank, and persuade others of their ideas. To develop leaders and other cultural contributors, the objective was to cultivate every part of the human mind as much as possible.
"The liberal arts were put together into a system by Christians in the early church. There was the trivium, meaning the three ways... grammar, logic, and rhetoric. This was designed to train someone to think and use language well. Every subject has a 'grammar' -- basic rules and laws and facts that you just need to know. But it's not enough to just know a bunch of facts; you also need to be able to think. So after grammar comes logic, where you learn to understand what you've learned. That's not enough, either. Rhetoric is the ability to creatively express and apply what you've learned."
