Having a foundation to draw from is critical for a leader at any level and to draw from the wellspring of life in our Savior not only refreshes the soul but provides the spiritual nourishment in good times and bad that all leaders face.

Recently I had a student ask me a very good question, one which faces Classical Christian science teachers: how do I take seriously the knowledge of stars and atoms arising from scientific investigation while at the same time retain the kind of deep enchanted understanding of the cosmos evident in C.S. Lewis and medieval thought? This is a key question for the Classical Christian movement and students within the Classical Christian stream are asking it. On my reading, modern science is both ripe for such a re-enchantment and already has a degree of enchantment which is obfuscated in the STEM context.

The Bible has lots of interesting things to say about spiritual creatures (angels, seraphim, cherubim, demons, etc.) being territorial entities (consider the fascinating episode in Daniel 10:10-14). That the Greek gods, the Egyptian gods, the Norse gods, the Babylonian gods, etc., are demons makes a lot of sense in light of the consistent teaching of the canon of Scripture. If the above thesis is true, what business do we have as Christian educators taking young hearts and souls to the words of Homer, Herodotus, Aeschylus, etc.? Shouldn’t we just read the Bible, theology books consistent with the Bible, and benign stories with nothing dangerous in them?

True humanities teachers will agree to submit to the text they teach. That doesn’t mean we agree to present all the ideas in the text as true and the author as inerrant. Rather, it means that we agree the text is a great book—it has endured and therefore it is valuable. We agree that it has something to teach us about what it means to be human, and we agree to guide our students through the text with reverence and careful attention, but the books we read with our students are dangerous.

If the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy was the biggest issue for early 20th century Christianity, philosophical anthropology looks to be the defining question of the 21st. In recent months, major questions that center around human nature have made headlines: a transgender activist funeral held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City; Alabama declaring that embryos are fully human and merit legal protections; a fifty year old male swimmer identifying as a teenage girl on a high school swim team. We’ve lost consensus on what we are as human beings, and chaos follows.

Why, then, should we have students memorize prayers? There are many reasons, but at a foundational level we have students memorize prayers for the same reason that we have them memorize Scripture (after all, the best prayers are those that weave together various pieces of Scripture), not to mention classical hymnody, poetry, or anything else worth committing to memory.

Having students define their terms and defend assertions is critically important to their education. Students need to learn to make critical distinctions, how to inquire into the nature of a thing, and how to define terms in accordance with reality.

If you have never read Narnia, never been brought into its world and characters, you really should start with the conversional experience of entering the wardrobe with the Pevensies.

Jesus himself told us that discipline will be unpleasant at the time, even painful. He also told us he comes after our souls with sharp shears. When we choose classical education for our children, it will require change from us as parents and as a family. There will be discipline that yields a harvest.

Teaching teenagers is not for the faint-hearted. These students are becoming adults, and they need to understand how adult relationships work, how to submit to authority, and how to treat those in authority with respect. They need to know how to do hard things even when they don’t want to or be prepared to face the consequences. These are the life lessons we are able to offer in a classical school because here we are unashamedly about creating virtue.