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. 

John Piper’s book is to be commended on several scores. Just as his ministry is pervaded by an all-encompassing sense of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, so too this treatment of the ends of education is suffused with the beauty of God’s glory revealed through Jesus Christ. This rightly treats education not merely as a “neutral” or “secular” endeavor divorced from man’s chief end. That man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever means that education is “lifelong learning for the glory of Christ.”

A school is in many ways a microcosm of society and possesses the ability to train students to rightly love virtuous living and behavior not through the modern set of rewards, but simply through pointing them continually to Christ and to the things that are Good, True, and Beautiful.  Demonstrating for them in the order of a school day, the order of curriculum, play, adventure, and the freedom from chaos, students will appreciate and will take for natural that life is ordered when we set our lives in such a way that surrounds it around Christ and those who seek to follow after Him with their lives. Moral clarity is achieved even in physical education courses, science experiments, and studying great works of art just as much as it is in discussions on Aristotle and philosophy, on Luther and theological debates, on Jane Austen and literary dialogues.

Let boys be boys, but do not let them stay there. Boys want to climb higher, run faster, spit farther and get into random debates in class. There is a competitive jocularity to the male species. The boys need tactics suited to their tendencies as future men. Observe the boys but do not supervise them. Boys want to be seen but do not want someone looking over their shoulder all of the time. Boys need both expectations and a level of freedom that is suited to their age.

The greater argument about why Christian children should not go to public school isn’t about what they need to avoid, it’s about what they need to be given and can’t get there. A classical Christian education is not merely devoid of worldliness, it is filled with righteousness and virtue and the exaltation of Christ!

Being a Christian should make a man a better husband, a better father—and a better magistrate if that is one’s vocation. As Christians, we should want the salutary influence of Christianity to pervade every aspect of human life.

The idea of being a “peer” carries the notion of equality of station in life; being associated by common rank. Students are not the peers of teachers. Students are subordinate to teachers. The term “friend,” on the other hand, refers to two people who are not at odds with each other (friend is the opposite of foe), they do not wish harm to each other but, rather, they share a common interest or common interests.

As we look forward to another year at the Beza Institute for Reformed Classical Education, we are hopeful to provide more resources which serve as a blessing to the growing classical Christian education movement.

10 Recommendations from Dr. David Seibel

George’s public-spiritedness, combined with his piety, are his distinctive virtues. They are also the essence and end of classical education, particularly the Protestant branch of the tradition inaugurated by Luther, who so strongly urged the liberal arts as the essential way to form youth consecrated to the service of God and the state.