With Jesus Christ came a complete paideia, a perfect education. It was a paideia that not only provided knowledge about the truth, but formed (morphosis) the student in godliness and, more broadly, in wisdom, the wisdom of Christ and the practical wisdom that the Bible teaches.

One of the strengths of Raising Sturdy Kids is that McCurdy begins with the transcendent (or absolute, or normative) instead of pragmatic techniques. Many parenting or classroom management books jump straight into techniques whereas McCurdy goes straight to the reality that good parenting flows out of right relationship with God and spouse.

The stories of The Iliad and The Odyssey are filled with aspects of the pagan life, but they are not just stories of “pagans doing pagan things,” as is often accused by Christians who read or teach the poems. If they were only that, there would be no value in reading them. They do, however, fall short of the ultimate answer.

Studying the classics is not an exercise in self-meditation or introspection, but rather an immersion in a world of human things from a different civilization. Nolan’s Odyssey flops because he wants to tell a story set in the Homeric world, but he imposes all his own 21st century moral and aesthetic values on the story. It’s not a Homeric masterpiece because he does not immerse the viewer in the moral values and imagination of Homer.

Education is more than the flimsy transfer of information from person to person. It is an enculturating process that invites the young to uphold an inheritance given to them as a gift by parents, teachers, mentors, and society. In short, education is the transmission of the unwritten constitution of a people from generation to generation.

Hugh encourages teachers, when teaching students any art, to teach it clearly, briefly, and simply in order to affect easy understanding and prevent distraction. Hugh writes that when “we treat of any art—and especially in teaching it, when everything must be reduced to outline and presented for easy understanding— we should be content to set forth the matter in hand as briefly and as clearly as possible, lest by excessively piling up extraneous considerations we distract the student more than we instruct him.”

Although the work of Christian education has a central role to play in resisting the progress of the Revolution, Van Prinsterer reminds us that we all have an anti-revolutionary role to play, and that “Resistance and Reformation” (to borrow George Grant’s phrase) begin and end with everyday faithfulness: “Let us be faithful, each in his station. If it be not given us to accomplish great things, let us remember that when the opportunity to witness to the truth is there, the greatest unfaithfulness can be committed in the smallest things.”

One of the hills Van Prinsterer chose to die on was the issue of Christian education. The Netherlands had been a Reformed Christian society for many years. The southern provinces split away to form the Catholic-majority country of Belgium. There was pressure to make the Dutch public schools more “inclusive” and downplay the Protestant faith in order to focus on a “neutral” morality that Protestants, Catholics, and Jews could all assent to. Van Prinsterer saw this as a betrayal of the country’s heritage. He rightly saw that the pursuit of neutrality would inevitably lead to the abandonment of any semblance of religion in the schools.

While works on revival may be most relevant for the church, there are also significant lessons on how schools can discern high enthusiasm within their communities. Because private schools are home to money, religion, and children, the need for discernment to reliably distinguish between true religious enthusiasm and misguided manufactured enthusiasm is not optional but essential. This article will share Finney’s and Edwards’ common ground, where they departed, and what that means for Classical Christian schools. 

There are doubtless many recommendations and practices that could be incorporated into a healthy anti-AI policy; my hope is that school administrators, faculty, and concerned parents will rally around this basic call to action. There is no diplomatic solution to the problem of AI; there is no easy compromise. We must be faithful to our mission, be faithful to our personal calling, be faithful to the trust our students place in us. We must stand for full humanity. We must stand against the machine.