Christless Classical Curricula

If you dance to his tune, you have to pay the piper, but is it even a liberal arts education if it's shorn of its religious character? The idea is the child of the Ages of Faith.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Helen Freeh, PhD

If faith cannot be included within classical charter schools because of secularist State requirements, then what is the purpose of such education?

 Classical charter schools have surged in number over the past thirty years in response to the decreasing quality of education and the often-disordered learning environments of American public schools. Aided both by this decline and the abundance of state funding for education, classical charter schools are multiplying across the country. Such expansion has benefited many students and communities while also causing problems for others.

The growth of the classical curriculum model as seen, for instance, in the Great Hearts Academies, or Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School Initiative, has been a great boon for many. These schools are clearly helping improve public education by offering a solid, time-tested model. They have also highlighted the liberal arts approach to education that teaches students how rather than what to think.

But, while competing with their fellow public schools, charter schools are also causing many faith-based ones to close because parents see no essential difference between the secular and Christian approaches to liberal arts education. In my local community, a new classical charter school, part of the trademarked curriculum of the Barney School Initiative, has brought great good by offering another educational option to families. Yet, it also has caused the local Catholic school to suffer a loss of students. Parents see two similar educations, but one has “free” tuition and the other does not. The situation here repeats itself throughout the country whenever a state-supported charter classical school opens.

In this essay, I will focus on Catholic families who have elected to send their children to a classical charter school rather than a Catholic one, erroneously believing that the two types of education are equivalent. Although the two models appear similar, the charter school must remain subordinate to the State and beholden to its funding. By necessity, it must excise the central focus of a “classical liberal arts” curriculum, which is Christ. If a parent is lucky enough to have access to a faithful Catholic school with a liberal arts curriculum, such families need to consider enrolling their children in it for the sake of a more complete education in wisdom aimed at both earthly and eternal welfare.

The difference in tuition costs, though, is a significant hindrance for many families. Thus, the commitment to Catholic education must be taken on by the whole Christian community. The temporal and the existential good of a Catholic education, not simply for one family’s children but for the Church as a whole, must be understood by the community who commits financially to making such education possible for everyone.

To put it bluntly, to keep their funding and license, classical charter schools must remove Christ and Christian teleology from their curriculum. Such removal counters the very purpose of their curriculum – the pursuit of truth. This education, for all the good it achieves, lacks the freedom to acknowledge the ultimate origin of truth in God.

Like Dante’s Virgil and his inability to lead the character Dante beyond a certain point, a secular classical school can lead a student only so far along the path of truth, but then no farther. Some would argue this limited direction is sufficient to promote civic virtues. But such education will always remain stunted when compared to the freedom allowed in the faith-based model. A Catholic Liberal Arts curriculum has no such limitations, but educates the young in the fullness of Truth.

If faith cannot be included within classical charter schools because of secularist State requirements, then what is the purpose of such education?

Most classical charter schools would argue, and have as their mission statement, to teach students to love the “true, good, and the beautiful.” Further, their mission is to inculcate civic virtues and build moral character, educating students to become self-disciplined, honest, just, and patriotic. Such virtues are noble and important to the State, and yet such secular virtues divorced from Christ risk becoming tools the State uses to produce obedient and productive citizens.

Apart from a firm anchoring in the truth of Christianity, the “verum, bonum, pulchrum” of the secular classical school becomes relative. Without an education that clearly affirms an eternal Truth, a graduate of a secular classical school could easily join Pilate in asking, “what is truth?” Their purported goal of educating students in virtue can only be half achieved. Virtue or truth half-achieved is virtue or truth half-failed. As the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education states on its website, “although some private and charter schools have looked to the classical tradition, those efforts are incomplete without Christ, the Logos, at the center.”

I worked briefly for a classical charter school whose mission declared that its purpose was to instill virtues such as­ compassion, respect, courage, temperance, hard work, and honesty. Certainly, these are good goals and worthy ones, but they do not ultimately suffice apart from an eternal source. Natural virtue can achieve natural excellence and is an essential part of education, but a Christian understands the great limits to human nature because of original sin. Apart from an eternal framework of the Theological Virtues and belief in Divine Grace building upon fallen human nature, a life of natural virtue has an expiration date.

Why should one show respect to others? Because you want respect shown to you. But why are you or an other worthy of respect? What if you or others haven’t done anything that is worthy? Worth as a good in and of itself is only because of a transcendental understanding of each and every human being made in the image and likeness of God. Many non-Christian cultures do not remotely share this understanding of universal worthiness of humans.

Why should a person be compassionate? Because he or she would want also to be treated compassionately. Homer’s Achilles shows compassion to the supplicant, King Priam, begging for the body of the dead Hector because he suddenly sees the image of his own father in the grieving Priam. Yet, had he not shown empathy to him, Achilles would have been just as much the Greek hero. He did not show compassion to the defeated Hector. No transcendent good in mercy or compassion exists apart from the model of Jesus Christ. Many pagan cultures held, and still hold, that compassion is a weakness and a vice. Our country only holds such action to be a virtue precisely because of our Christian heritage!

I could continue examining the other listed virtues in this same manner. My point is that most of the virtues secular classical charter schools promote find their source of truth in the very religion the State will not permit to be encouraged or privileged – Christianity. In the promotion of these essentially Christian virtues in a non-Christian learning environment, the source of their value must be from the perspective of the person, or the ultimate good of the State. Such inculcation of virtue becomes narcissistic, self-referential, and utilitarian.

Without a transcendent source, the anchor of such secular virtues becomes the person himself or, as dangerous, the authority of the State. Virtue separated from a moral law rooted in an unchanging divine source quickly becomes relativism. If morality is severed from God, then as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov chillingly declares, “anything is possible.”

If education means a “leading out of,” then the question must be asked – out of what are secular classical schools leading their students? If they are leading them out of ignorance, then ignorance of what? Ignorance simply of the material world around us?

To lead out of something means also to lead into something else. Divorced from Christian truths, toward what truth exactly is the secular classical model leading its students? In the report for the establishment of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson puts forth the purpose of state-sponsored education: “to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, & instil into them the precepts of virtue & order. […] And generally to form them to habits of reflection, and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others & of happiness within themselves.” These are all adequate reasons for education and in no way wrong, but Jefferson, despite his own conflicted theology, assumes a Christian framework to society. However, as our country has moved far from the Founders’ initial assumptions of a transcendent god and established Christian rules for proper living, the State’s control of and purpose for education has changed dramatically.

Is the telos of contemporary classical charter schools simply to fulfill Thomas Jefferson’s proposal of making educated, informed citizens capable of continuing the democratic experiment? Such education remains utilitarian – for the service of employment and good citizenship.

Again, the question returns to educated from and to what? Are these Christless charter schools simply producing an articulate graduate who, like Saint Augustine before his conversion, is skilled in rhetoric and argument and who judges Christianity as a critic does a restaurant. Faith is one of many options to define world order if it suits your particular tastes.

Pope Benedict XVI in his address to Catholic educators notes the importance of Catholic education to the history of the United States. Calling it an “apostolate of hope,” Pope Benedict argues that the whole Catholic community should commit to helping parochial education by contributing “generously to the financial needs of our institutions.” He argues “everything possible must be done, in cooperation with the wider community, to ensure that they are accessible to people of all social and economic strata. No child should be denied his or her right to an education in faith, which in turn nurtures the soul of a nation.”

Public funds are a great temptation for a school and for individual families. The expense of salaries, benefits, buildings and properties are immense and lead to a yearly tuition necessary for such costs. Families struggle to pay additional monthly payments for private school tuition. They believe that they can teach and practice the faith at home and that will counter the secular influences their child receives outside it. Removing Christ from a school’s classical curriculum does not seem that great a problem if one believes that the classical model can be independent of and is equivalent to the Christian one. Many Christian educators even make the argument that the secular classical model can be an indirect way to teach Christian values to a worldly culture. Some may even argue that such circuitous education will lead to a greater evangelization of a non- or anti-Christian culture. Perhaps more time will prove this hope correct, but thus far, the education has not produced much fruit in this regard.

If a family has no other option, then such a choice for a classical charter school is a good. But, if the option exists for the complete classical curriculum as found in a solid faith-based school, then a Catholic parent must come to see it as a far greater good. And, as Pope Benedict urges, the whole Catholic community must cooperate to make such education accessible to every family.

Why should the financial burden fall on the shoulders of the whole community when only some of the community sends their children to the local parish school? Because such an education develops the young members of the parish family who, with the help of proper education and familial formation, will mature into the future leaders of the parish. The care of the young is a good in itself but also practically contributes to ongoing and future parish and diocesan strength. Not only must the individual Catholic parent recognize the value of a Catholic education over and against the tuition-free option of the state school, but the entire parish and whole diocese must also do so. All must work together as Pope Benedict urged to make such education affordable to every Catholic child. The diocesan models in Lincoln, NE, and Wichita, KS, show that such communal commitment is possible and makes possible the education-for-all model of which Benedict speaks.

In my own area of the country, Gallup, New Mexico, we are blessed to have Sacred Heart Catholic School. Founded in 1912, and despite good and bad fortune, it continues to operate today as a PK-8^th grade school (with great hopes of its expansion to add a high school again). This past year, the Dominican Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, founded their first teaching mission in Gallup and sent three sisters to help strengthen the school.

Using Sacred Heart as my example, let me indicate how a Catholic liberal arts education properly forms minds and souls. As an elementary school, its curriculum focuses on three basics of primary education – reading, writing, and arithmetic. Academically, the school is excellent in teaching these building blocks of knowledge. But these basics are united with the beauty and strength of faith. Learning is integrated with faith in every part of the school life.

While teaching the fundamentals of various subjects, the school equally nurtures a culture of faith within it by keeping the focus of all things always on God. No disparity exists between faith and reason. Religion class, while being its own subject, is not partitioned from the other subjects. So, too, math class, while focusing on the matter proper to itself, does not exclude the role or presence of God within the “hard sciences.”

Every school day begins with Mass so that Christ and His loving Sacrifice is the foundation of the day. The reality of God and His love continues beyond the Mass through images, signs, and symbols throughout the school. For instance, on each student’s desk is a sign they must personalize that reads: “God looks upon __________ and finds him/her very good.” During the day, as they learn their phonograms or advance in their times tables, students also see that statement of faith and remember God’s love for them personally.

Every month, the school focuses on one virtue for the students to learn, practice, and hopefully come to love – virtues such as docility and self-control, generosity and gratitude, affability and courtesy. Teachers surprise students by giving them gold slips announcing that they have been “caught practicing virtue.” The Catholic Faith is put into practice while also being taught.

The Catholic liberal arts curriculum integrates education such that the information one learns is part of the faith one believes and the life one practices. All the cohesive actions at a Catholic school like Sacred Heart show God is not a side thought or the faith a window-dressing; He is central to the whole education and life of each student.

The telos of such education is eternal life in heaven. And the practical daily result is a learning environment of joyful students who are excelling academically but also spiritually. The life of learning, the life of faith, the life of virtue – all these are one, complete life; not separate, conflicting, or contradicting categories.

Young men and women educated in this manner are becoming not merely good citizens – they are becoming great saints.

Who would not want to sacrifice for such a learning environment for their sons and daughters?