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. 

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.