Philosophy of Education
Classical education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty by means of the seven liberal arts. A Judeo-Christian worldview fulfills this view of education by recognizing its ultimate purpose: to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. We believe that since learning occurs over the span of a lifetime, that schools should provide a student with the tools necessary for the lifetime educative process. Thus, our school is designed to provide the two basic needs of starting a student on the path to a lifetime of learning: communicating and modeling wisdom and virtue.
We are constantly seeking to increase our students’ knowledge, actions, judgments, and thoughts by teaching them the habits and knowledge of the Western canon. Even though knowledge in and of itself is of great worth, we believe that education in addition to knowledge also encompasses moral behavior and virtuous character. Through the means of rational and critical thinking, knowledge is heightened into understanding. Understanding, when it is experienced in the classroom begins to form the habits of wise and virtuous living. The habits of thinking and judging are tempered by an appreciation of that which is beautiful. In all these content areas, a harmony is brought to the true, the good, and the beautiful through a focus on Christ and His revelation of God’s love.
Another way of setting forth this path of learning is to reference the seven liberal arts. Long a historical construct, the recent disappearance of the arts from education is something we are seeking to recover. The seven arts are skills that all learners use with greater or lesser felicity, to study any of the disciplines. The Trivium, or three grammatical arts, covers the inventing and combining of symbols (grammar), thinking (logic), and communicating (rhetoric); together these form the three verbal arts. The Quadrivium moves from words to
As our students pursue these disciplines and skills, their own behavior will naturally be impacted. The characteristics of a Christian scholar are preeminent in our school. Both the student and the teacher share in a love and pursuit of intellectual curiosity, intellectual justice (including honesty and fairness), a personal commitment to one’s moral duty, a passion for virtue and the goodness, a growing love of beauty, a commitment to giving reasons for what is believed, and a commitment to knowing God and His holiness.
We believe the teacher in our school must see his position as one of fellow learner alongside his students. He will seek to develop a relationship of tutorial love with them. The teacher must be an accomplished student of the specific content he is to teach. He is to model the characteristics of a Christian scholar mentioned above. Not only should his intellectual depth and breadth be continually growing, but his spiritual life should be characterized as constantly moving “further up and further in.” Inherent in this relationship is the notion that a teacher will pray for his students and pattern all his dealings with the students after the
The student must also be actively involved in
We recognize the
The first goal of a student then becomes that of striving to acquire specific content in order to grow in what he knows, how he acts, how he makes judgments, and how he thinks. Secondly, he will continually be developing behaviors and character traits that facilitate the lifelong enterprise of acquiring knowledge, becoming virtuous, acting morally, judging rightly, appreciating beauty, thinking rationally, and becoming holy. Thus our school is a place where truth, goodness, and beauty cultivate wisdom and virtue in the hearts and lives of its participants, both the teachers and students, by following after Christ.