Dennis Tuuri

spend a little bit of time on the method but the first thing is the method itself and this method uses three tools of learning and so Dorothy Sayers’ article in 1947 was called the lost tools of learning classical education tries to get in educating the child tools of learning in place rather than teaching to a subject content of a subject okay rather it’s the idea of teaching a basic way of learning or education so that later on individual subjects can be layered in if this these tools of learning are in place.

The tools of learning are called the trivium and these refer to grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Now grammar we think of that as English grammar. The root of the grammar in terms of the method of instruction in the trivium is really Latin grammar and from that it is it is demonstrated or the basis for the education is that every subject has a particular grammar. So in the early ages of a classical Christian education, maybe let’s say ages 8 to 10, the child would be primarily focused on learning grammar, but grammar of different subjects.

Okay? So Latin grammar being the primary one, English grammar, the portions of speech and the multiplication tables in terms of mathematics. So grammar, the second element of the trivium is dialectic or logic. And so the first section of the education is kind of putting stuff together, getting a whole bunch of not putting, excuse me, is is a bunch of memorization of basically brute facts, stuffing them into the heads of these kids for 2 or 3 years.

In the Middle Ages, the dialectic or logic section of the trivium. So Latin is kind of the root thing in the first few years and from it the grammar of mathematics, the grammar of science, the grammar of English, etc., all memorized. In the middle years, logic forms kind of the focal point of the dialectic section of their education in which they collect together these pieces of facts and begin to form cohesive logical components out of them.

Okay? So, we would move on to algebra or geometry. Having learned all these multiplication tables, subtraction, addition, all the brutalities of math in the middle section, those things we put together to form algebraic equations. And then in the third area, the third level of instruction say at ages 14 to 16, you would move into that section known as rhetoric in which the presentation of an argument is made.

So you take and you basically collect stuff the first few years, you organize stuff in the middle years, and you learn how to present that stuff in the best possible way in the last years. And I’ll talk more about that in a couple of minutes. So first of all, there is this method known as the trivium. What Dorothy Sayers referred to as the lost tools of learning and that’s a component of classical education.

But secondly, Doug Wilson says and he’s kind of the expert that the second aspect of classical learning refers to the content of the studies themselves. So it’s not just this method of instruction that I’ve just laid out for you. It is secondarily a content of subjects. Classical education is distinguished by the presence of subjects like Latin, logic, theology and rhetoric in the curriculum. So it’s different subject matter in the context of this education of the child between the ages of eight and 16.

Third and this is most significant for the latter portion of my talk. The third aspect recognizes the importance of the historical and cultural position of the teacher and student. Okay. Christian and classical education is indigenous to western culture. It is the result of Christ being born during the reign of Caesar Augustus and of the earliest missionaries heading west more than they did east or south.

In the providence of God, our children have been born into western culture. So there’s an emphasis in classical Christian education to teach western culture and specifically the sort of western culture developed out of Greek and Roman thought. So classical education is three things according to Doug Wilson. First, it’s this method of the trivium. Second, it’s a different sort of subjects being taught than in your typical school.

And third, it’s a emphasis upon western civilization, western culture. If you go to Logos’ web page under their purpose or mission statement, you will see as well this basic same statement as was said here that Jesus Christ was born in the reign of Augustus Caesar and that has implications they believe for education. So I want to talk about that as the second part of my talk. I want to talk first explain a little bit more about this trivium and what it was and what it is and then the latter of the talk I want to talk about whether or not it’s a good thing to have so much focus on Western civilization and Greek and Roman culture.

Okay. Okay. So, first the trivium. There’s a book called on Christian doctrine by Augustine written obviously when he was alive that was the basic book for Christian pedagogy for education and teaching youth for many centuries. But in the sixth and seventh century a further development of Augustine’s work on Christian doctrine was put forth by a fellow named Cassiodorus and that was the seven liberal arts.

Okay, the seven liberal arts developed in the context and Cassiodorus sort of took Augustine’s work and sort of layered it together with Greek and Roman philosophy and came up with this idea the seven liberal arts. The seven liberal arts are first of all the trivium which I’ve just mentioned the trivium is grammar, dialectic or logic and rhetoric. And the rest of the seven, the last four is the quadrivium and those are subject matter and specifically it’s the subject matter of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy.

The quadrivium. So classical education really emphasizes when we talk about classical education, we’re really talking about pre-university studies and the quadrivium place in terms of the system taught by Cassiodorus in the sixth century known as the seven liberal arts. So that’s where this comes from. Dorothy Sayers in 1947 looked back at a method of education that had been largely that was largely very much in place in the medieval period used somewhat in the reformation period but then fell into disuse after the Renaissance.

And she said we need to bring back that system of the seven liberal arts, the trivium and then the quadrivium for advanced education and use that as a method of training children not in terms of the trivium not specific subject areas as much as how to learn how to think how to analyze arguments and presentations and how to make effective presentations of what you understand is truth. Okay. And she said that and as far as I know nothing much happened.

There were some small works that began but in our day and age in the providence of God uh the Chalcedon reprinted Dorothy Sayers article in the 1977 Journal of Christian Reconstruction, and since that time, Doug Wilson has also reprinted Dorothy Sayers’ essay on the lost tools of learning in his book on classical Christian education. And if you go to most any of the websites for classical Christian schools, Dorothy Sayers’ article is seen as a seminal work, as a work that from which everything else sort of sprang up in terms of classical Christian education.

And as I said, she articulates these three phases of the trivium in terms of method and I want to quote again from uh actually this is from a different article than Dorothy Sayers. This is from a man named William Blake who lives up in Washington state that probably a number of us know. He said this to begin with the goal of developing skills academic or otherwise is to believe that the teacher’s duty is to develop in the student the ability to learn for himself.

In one case The student is by and large passive. That’s the kind of education we have now. In the other, the one he’s advocating for, the trivium, the student is active for he is gaining self-sufficiency in the learning process. In one case, the teacher is the prime interpreter of life. In the other, the student is learning the principles of interpretation so that he can arrive at his own views intelligently.

Attention to proper method opens the way to teach men how to learn for themselves. So, I again that’s by way of repetition that the idea in these classical schools is really to get the children to learn for themselves. It’s teaching a method of learning and a pedagogy of learning rather than subject matter. Now you do teach some subject matter. I mean in the grammar stage you do have the multiplication tables and you teach Latin conjugation of verbs etc.

But the idea is that what you’re doing with this bunch of facts being memorized adding on logic or organizational skills and then persuasive skills in the rhetoric section. What you’re doing is getting them to be able to evaluate and discern arguments that people make with words and how to make effective presentations based upon a set of data that is true. Okay, so that’s kind of the idea. Now in terms of this as I mentioned uh the idea then is through the trivium to produce tools of learning to the child so the child then can begin to apply them to subjects in later coursework in the university.

So that’s kind of the idea. Okay. So the method is then to begin in the first few years of the child’s instruction and Dorothy Sayers I think says ages 8 to 10 basically it’d be the first section of this three-fold process that this the tool of learning that they would you they would learn in that particular in the opening section would essentially be memorization. Okay. Let’s see in the grammar stage then the idea is that there is a memorization of a large body of data whether it’s geographic historical dates king’s names president names etc.

In Latin it would include case endings verb endings basic vocabulary a bunch of stuff is memorized in those first 3 years or so of instruction. And it is in that section then that all these facts are kind of poured into these empty skulls, these skulls full of mush and all this data is then memorized. Now they don’t understand any of it practically but the idea simply is they’re memorizing it.

And then in the middle stages of that process of education when you get to the dialectic phase then logic takes precedence. And so all the subject areas, mathematics, science, English, history, etc. Now, all of it is gone over again and all the facts they’ve learned are kind of culled up again, but put into an organized and logical sequence. In addition, they’re learning the tools of logic. Is a statement valid?

Just because a statement’s valid, it may not be true. It may be a valid statement, but it may not be a true statement. And how do you analyze logical consistencies and logical errors? What sort of fallacies do people make in logic. So they’re learning the elements of logic so that they can know how to go about taking all these facts and put them into a logical organized sequence of instruction. Okay?

And that’s why you’d move from the multiplication tables for instance in math to algebra. That’s why instead of now simply memorizing the Latin case endings, you would begin to construct Latin sentences and understand what those case endings actually mean in the context of a particular sentence or presentation. Okay. So you organize the data in the first few years or rather you collect the data in the first few years, you organize it in the middle years and the latter years is entirely geared at presenting the data in a good and defensible way.

So that’s really the basic model of the trivium. Let’s see now this middle section I mentioned that 8 to 10 is the roughly the age groups that are given. now Doug Wilson lowers it to 5 to 10, but Dorothy Sayers in her original essay said this, the grammar phase of memorization is 8 to 10. Wilson says 5 to 10. And then 11 to 13 is the basic those three years of the years in which logic is stressed and the organization of these facts goes on.

And then in ages 14 to 16, you would have the summing up of their primary education with rhetoric or how to present things effectively. I’m not going to take the time to go through rhetoric, but there is a whole series in the rhetoric section of how you go about putting together an argument, deciding which part of the argument to stress in a particular way, how to go about using illustrations, making that argument effective in its presentation, etc.

As I was reading for this, really the process of rhetoric that a child learns those last three years, it’s sort of like what I was doing with House Bill 3080. It’s sort of saying, “Okay, we have a truth we to present to legislators. We want to motivate them to action. And so I have to decide what particular tools I’m going to use out of my bag of facts and data back here that I’ve organized logically.

How I’m going to put those together in a succinct and presentable way to convince the legislator to vote for this bill. And really, that’s a lot of what rhetoric is. It’s the ability to defend one’s position and also present it in a logical sequence. Now, so I’m going to I’m not going to talk anymore about the method. I hope that’s that’s clear. I do want to talk a little bit though about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Dorothy Sayers in her article the lost tools of learning said that there are two reasons to do this. One, this is what the classical schools did and they seem to produce people that could really think well. Two, she said that as I look around the children in our nation, she was writing in England at the time. It seems that child psychology seems to fit these three sections of the trivium pretty well.

In other words, she said children 8 to 10 memorize really easily, you know, and they’re doing all these nursery well maybe a little younger than that, but they do all these nursery rhymes. They’re memorizing silly stuff. So, they’re particularly suited for memorization. And as they get to be 11 to 13, they like to start arguing and you know, kind of asking questions as to why, etc. And so the idea of logic then teaching them how to go about asking the questions correctly, how to bug their parents in a logical way instead of an illogical way, she said sort of makes sense.

And as they get older, the older kids, they’re real interested in appearance and they want to look good and they want to sound good to their peers and to their parents. And so rhetoric, which stresses presentation of that data organized correctly and logically, the presentation of it seems to match up well with the psychology of children in their older ages. Now, we can look at that and say, “Yeah, I guess that’s okay.”, but I would like to suggest that maybe a better way for using the presentation of the trivium and what it does, forcing the children to submit to a body of data that they haven’t decided or analyzed in their youngest years.

Maybe a better biblical reason to do it that way is submission and humility of the child. In other words, the scripture have a lot to say about foolishness and wisdom. And I think that our children are moved from a position of foolishness when they’re born, not no acknowledgement of God, no fear of God in their eyes, and they’re brought to an understanding and an acknowledgement of God. And they’re brought to wisdom as they mature.

So, it makes sense if that’s the case, and the scriptures say it is, that the younger they are, the more they’re going to memorize and just learn what you tell them they’ve got to learn. And then you’re going to build into them an ability to organize things in an effective way and to critique them from a logical perspective. So I’m a little concerned that in Doug Wilson’s treatment and Dorothy Sayers’ treatment that there is this psychological evaluation of children that becomes part of the reason why we’re doing these things.

I mean there’s some common sense observations, but I would much rather see a pedagogy if it’s going to say that children are in three particular groups to see those three particular groupings of children and ages in biblical terminology. Okay. and I think you could do that if one took the time to look at the progression of a child from foolishness to wisdom as they mature. That would make me a little more comfortable with the with the idea of the trivium as a model.

The second concern I have, so first of all, I’m I’m saying it’s it’s a good thing. It’s a real good thing that’ll teach kids logic particularly and this base of to be able to organize data that’s given to them and then make effective presentations. That’s a great idea. Another concern though I have is as well this third element of Doug Wilson’s emphasis on what classical Christian education is and that is that we teach them western civilization because they were born in the context of western civilization and Jesus came in the context of that as well.

What I mean by that is this what you will find and people that are kind of sloshing through the issues of this whole idea of classical Christian education is that what we’re doing is picking up a methodology that was basically the result of syncretism between Greek and Roman philosophy and thought by Cassiodorus and also Christian thought by drawing on the works of Augustine on Christian doctrine.

And so classical education tends to emphasize a lot of readings in Greek and Roman culture which is the basis for western civilization and in Greek and Roman philosophers. The idea is that Rome gave us our system of law today. So if you want to understand law, you got to understand Roman law. And Greek philosophy was the basis of Western civilization and our culture. So if you’re going to understand the culture in which you live, you got to understand something about Greek culture.

Okay. The danger is that what we’re trying to do as Christians is to self-consciously root out alien thought systems from our lives and our culture. We’re not interested in perpetuating Greek culture or Roman law. What we’re interested in doing is developing and refining biblical culture and biblical law. So another potential danger of classical education is that it represents again this kind of conservative mindset.

They want to go back to something as opposed to the minds we want to move on to something. Now you know I’m not talking here about you know Doug Wilson specifically. I mean he obviously wants to progress. I think he has some very optimistic eschatology. But I’m saying that in general in terms of this resurgence of classical Christian education, a lot of it seems to be going back to something. There’s a lot of debate about how much of Greek culture we should have our children learn or understand in the context of all this.

In fact, Doug Wilson in this little pamphlet on relating uh classical education to home schools goes out of his way to say, “Hey, we’re not saying that the neopagan culture of Greece and Rome was good. That’s not why we’re teaching this stuff. And we’re also not saying that the Roman Catholic method of scholarship, which was built largely, Thomas Aquinas based largely his material on Aristotle and Greek philosophy.

We’re also not saying that is good either. So he goes out of his way to say to distance himself from those two approaches that just wants to revive Greek culture or that somehow falls into the Roman Catholic idea of taking Greek culture and sort of Christianizing it all. So he tries to distance themselves. But I think that it is important if we’re going to develop if we’re going to individually in our households in terms of our home school if there are thoughts of in perhaps coming together and forming a school that involves classical education.

I think this whole idea of how much Greek how much Greek and Roman culture to teach is one that we’re going to have to work through. So I want to talk about that a little bit. Let me let me read some stuff here for you as an example of this kind of mindset that says this stuff is good and this is what we want to teach our children. there was a book by Cochran called Christianity and classical culture.

And here’s here’s a quote from a fellow named Ruben Alvarado in terms of advocating classical Christian education and a return to teaching a good deal of Roman and Greek culture. He says when I read this book it’s perfectly clear that the classical world was a very intricate lock and Christianity had a had the very exact key for that lock. The problems are perfectly formulated. The answer is perfectly crafted.

The questions in the framework continue to be perennially important. Greek philosophy essentially asks all the right questions. Remember the line, the Bible is the answer. Now, what was the question? That’s perhaps the single most important service Greek philosophy provides. It asks the right questions. Okay? and as a result of this, then teaching children Greek philosophy. Okay, in the context of Christian education, this would get the children to think, asking the questions, seeing the importance of the higher things quote unquote that Greek culture talks about.

Some will of course also accept some of the screw ball answers the philosophers pose to their own questions, but at least then they do it with their eyes open. So the idea is let’s teach our children classical culture because it asks the right questions to which Christianity is the answer. Now some would go further than this. would call upon the fact that Tertullian, one of the early church fathers, brought in Roman legal concepts, which he did as the basis for western Roman law.

Western law, the basis being Roman law. they would say that Christianity plus classical culture is what has developed the western tradition of science and law etc. Now there’s a fellow named Arthur Custance who wrote a series of books on the three sons of Noah. And of course, all civilization comes from the three sons of Noah after the flood. But this particular idea is that the three sons of Noah, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, produced three sets of cultures that the Shemites or Semites were the one that had the emphasis upon religion.

And the Japheth lineage had an emphasis upon intellectual attainment. And that they would say is the Greek In Roman culture, the Indo-European races were from Japheth, it is said, and the Semitic races were from Shem. And so you have the priestly kind of group and then the scholarly kind of group. And the Hamites were the non-white races. So the oriental races and the Negro races etc. the Mongolian races. And they were their particular value was technological advancement.

And so what happens is that these three groups have to work together in terms of religion, philosophy and technology to produce a godly culture. And so some look at this and say it was the providence of God in which God developed Greek and Roman culture. Rome is basically you know Greek culture taken over by the Romans. So this Greek Roman culture that was produced in the context for the entrance of our savior was in the providence of God deliberate so that the intellectual development of the Japhites of that group of men would come into contact with Christianity and it’s through a synthesis of those you could say the Shemites and the Japhites that would then also then take over the Hamite cultures and bring Greek philosophy and the Christian view of religion to technological cultures and that’s what produces the following of civilization.

Well, in classical education we want to be very careful to say we don’t believe that. We want to say that instead perhaps another model. We would say first of all that God is sovereign and that he did indeed produce a Greek and Roman culture as the component in which Christianity first took root. But another idea is that this was the culture that God used as the foil for Christian culture. In other words, Augustus Caesar, it’s very easy to see that Augustus Caesar is kind of like a false Christ.

You know, salvation was proclaimed in his name literally. you know, hills were leveled down and valleys were built up when he would go to a city as the conqueror. See, it’s kind of a counterfeit Christianity. It’s not a component a a good thing to syncretize with Christianity, but it’s the way the church learned the implications of who Jesus was in distinction from the savior for instance of Augustus Caesar.

You see, Greek culture is a foil. So, Greek culture comes up with Roman law, but Roman law is there to show us not that Roman law is good and we just take it over but rather that Roman law should be replaced by biblical law. It asks the right questions but Christianity has to provide the answers. Okay. Now involved in this whole process is the idea that in the providence of God is we see the ungodly line in the old testament build the first cities develop musical instruments etc.

Those city the idea of the city and musical instruments are taken over by the godly race when the ungodly race is conquered so to speak. So what God seems to do is that we mentioned patience this afternoon to young people. People who are not godly and rebellion against God, they grab after technology and achievements before really God has matured them to the point of being able to use it correctly. And they develop musical instruments as an example or they develop Euclidean geometry as another example.

Okay. But what God is doing is He’s saving up those treasures of the wicked for the righteous. And when we take over those, we appropriate those, we bring geometry, we bring cities, we bring musical instruments into a Christian worldview and you know essentially sanctify them for their proper purposes. Okay. So the idea is that there may have been good things developed by Greek philosophy and Roman law and western culture, but what we want to do is recognize that it’s not good in and of themselves apart from the knowledge of God.

If we’re going to use them at all, we want to bring them into a self-consciously biblical perspective. That’s the idea. Now, when you bring in a musical instrument into temple worship or music, that’s one thing. But if you bring in a philosophy from a Greek philosopher into your Christian house and try to use it for the glory of God, that’s quite another much more difficult, much more prone to error. I remember years ago asking George Scipione about this, you know, in terms of this development of the ungodly, things for the godly to possess.

And he said, well, you know, the when you get to raw scientific data at this end of the spectrum, okay, the ungodly man goes out and he discovers gold and we can take the gold and use it for God’s purposes. That’s over here. But the closer you move to humanity and a philosophy of what mankind is, the more the sin nature, the Adamic nature perverts the knowledge of that. Why? Because man’s the highest image bearer of God.

And pagan man is trying to suppress the truth of God and unrighteousness. So when he builds a philosophy of humankind as opposed to a metallurgy, he’s going to be prone to more error because he’s more actively working to suppress the truth of God and unrighteousness. And man is the primary image bearer of God. Now the application of that is that when you have a Greek culture and Roman culture that became homosexual, which it did clearly relating that culture to Romans 1 and the active suppression of the truth of God in an advanced degree.

Then how much of that philosophy do we want to bring over into the education of our children? And I would suggest precious little. I would suggest that what happened in the Reformation is what should happen today. When the reformation began, the Renaissance was going back to the classics. The Renaissance people were going back to Greek and Roman philosophy and culture and law. But the Christians, Luther and Calvin, they weren’t going back to that stuff primarily.

They wrote in the context of the Renaissance and they would address classical writings of course and philosophers, but primarily what Calvin and Luther and the early reformers did was to go back to the Old Testament. That’s our lineage. That’s our classics, you know. And so what happened in the followers of Calvin and Luther was that the reformation tended to pick up the stream of the Renaissance. And so when the book against tyrants is written, it’s given a Latin title and the author instead of referring to himself as a Hebrew or a conqueror of ungodly men in the Old Testament takes a Roman Greek name to himself the name of a Roman conqueror who defeated the enemies of Greek and Rome.

You see what I’m saying? Why do that? Why take a Greek name Brutus or whatever it was that really conjures up images of how the Greeks fought against their enemies as opposed to an Old Testament name? It’s a picture. It’s a model that as the Reformation continued the heavy emphasis on the Old Testament upon case law to development of jurisprudential principles of jurisprudence and the culture of the Old Testament for building a Christian culture that to understand the New Testament all that got washed away fairly early.

and it got mixed up with Greek philosophy. So, what I’m saying is if we’re going to have if we’re going to return to a system of pedagogy or education that learns from the classics, that’s okay. We can do that and we can sort of see if it works with our kids to go through these stages of grammar and logic and rhetoric. But I’m very uncomfortable if what that produces is a return to Christian philosophers who are primarily influenced by Greek thought.

Jim Jordan believes, and I think that he’s on a good track with this, that for 2,000 years, Christianity has gone through this cycle of a tribal development, a minor, a kingdom development, and an empire development. But it all has been with an admixture of Greek and Roman thought. And with Cornelius Van Til and the work of Reformation and reconstruction and transformation, what we want to do is purge out Greek thought from our worldview.

We don’t want to go back and build it back in. That’s why I read the quote to beginning a family camp. What’s more holy to do? To go off by yourself for a week, to pray, fast, and meditate or is it better to get together for a week with the saints of God, to sing songs, to have fun, to rejoice, to eat good food, and to think through the implications of the faith relative to world missions, education, or courtship.

Well, you know, in the Bible, you were called to do the latter. That’s Old Testament. You get to the New Testament, and you don’t got a lot of direction if you try to read it in isolation from the Old Testament. This is another thing that happened. in the New Testament, the language that was used wasn’t pure Greek. It was a Hebrewized version of Greek. And when the LA when the when for instance the word baptism in its original Greek usage, the word baptizo meant to immerse.

But by the time but by but in the Hebrewized Greek version of baptizo, it had gone through a transformation of what it meant. And now it meant to put somebody in connection with something else to dye a piece of material and transfer the qualities of what the thing is being dipped in to the thing. And then it became to mean union or identification with what you were being baptized into. So by the time the New Testament writers use baptizo, it doesn’t mean immersed anymore.

It doesn’t mean immersed in the context of their culture. You see, in the providence of God, God’s people took the Greek language like they took the musical instruments and brought them into a Christian worldview and changed the very meanings of the terms themselves. When we get to reading in the scriptures about dangers of the body and flesh, we don’t want to read Greek thought into that. Greek thought said the body is bad, the spirit is good.

And so you had the Stoics on one hand who were trying to transcend the body and the Epicureans on the other who wanted to just get into all kinds of sinful actions. but an attempt to really get away from the passions of the body. In Greek thought, all passion is bad. In biblical thought, ungodly passions are bad, but godly passions are quite important. The idea isn’t that you don’t want to lust after a woman.

You want to lust after your wife. It’s good to have passion. Okay? And the constraints of God’s word. And the idea is that you’re supposed to enjoy the physical creation that God has given to us as we see it redeemed and used according to the purposes of the Lord Jesus Christ. Anger is another one. And the Greek thought, anger is always bad. But biblically, there’s a place for proper anger and righteousness.

You’re supposed to be jealous husbands. If a man makes advances to your wife, you’re your nostrils are supposed to flare the way God’s nostrils flared and you’re supposed to bring judgment forth. If a guy attacks your wife, that’s a good thing. So, all I’m saying by this is that in analyzing classical Christian education, I think we have to be very careful to say that what we would like to see in our homes, home schools, if we develop a school in the context of Reformation Covenant or some of the other churches represented this last week, it seems to me we may want to use that kind of methodology of the trivium.

But it seems like instead of a lot of emphasis upon Western civilization or Greek culture, we would want our children to have first and foremost a knowledge of the Old Testament of our classical culture. We who are the Israel of God and the culture that God ordained and revealed distinctively to his people the kind of culture that Jesus came to usher us into biblical culture. One other thought on all of this and then we’ll open it up for questions and discussion.

Greek thought also as I’ve mentioned is the primacy of the intellect, the primacy of the mind. Biblical culture that isn’t the case. Chris W. you know gave us a real good talk the other day in the great commission. But how do you disciple the nations? You go and you baptize is the first in the order of words that’s used there and then you instruct. You see, we have liturgical actions, covenantal actions, baptism.

We come together to worship. And the basic idea of worship is not a Greek lecture where our minds are built up. The basic idea of worship is certainly to receive instruction from God’s word, but to engage in a series of liturgical actions and of song and praise to God that forms the model for how we live our lives. So if in our home schools as we bring in some ideas from classical Christian education, I would suggest being very careful with the sodomite philosophers of Greece and of Roman law which really we need to get out of the legal system.

We need to turn to biblical law. And secondly, I’d say you have to be very careful not to fall into the Greek mindset of the primacy of the mind. Education should be in the context of what the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and thanksgiving is the beginning of the liturgy that God gives us, giving thanks for the bread and wine. So it seems like our instruction of our children should be in the context of the fear of God, the knowledge of his immanence and of his judgments in the earth, a sense of thanksgiving for every subject area, and the context of worship and song in our schools with a heavy emphasis upon Old Testament culture as we seek to understand how to apply all 66 books of the Bible to our culture.

So classical education, yes, but the classics primarily are the Old Testament or the scriptures. So those are some thoughts. Okay, questions about either that or courtship. Okay, first questions about classical education. Any questions or comments?

I appreciate very much what you had to say. I hope you don’t mind if I have a lengthy response.

Well, it’s 5 minutes to 8 and we do want to give you give me a couple of minutes.

Sure. I I tend to recoil against this idea of classical education, not be cause it doesn’t produce smart kids, but because I don’t think it’s necessarily biblical. Number one, I think there’s a there’s a fallacy in saying that Western civilization is primarily Greek and Roman. I think that Western civilization is primarily Christian and that Christian culture inherited the ruins or whatever the Greeks and Romans left just as the Israelites inherited the Amorites land.

And what God had given the Amorites and the blessings of the Amorites, the once the Amorite culture was destroyed by the Israelites, they were able to move in and inherit that. And I think that’s that’s the way I view the last 2,000 years of world history. And I think that uh the pedagogy that this uh that classical education works in the context of is not, I don’t see it in the scriptures. It seems to me that if we’re going to have a biblical pedagogy, we would want to a covenantal model seems to me very a lot more biblical where you start with God’s transcendence.

You know, I don’t see any child psychology that says, well, you stuff kids full of data up until they’re 10 years old, then you use then you teach them how to use it, then you teach them how to express it. What I as I see and what I’ve tried to teach my own case. I haven’t self-consciously done this, but you start with who God is. You know, you say this God’s transcendence, you know, is is it this is this is where we got to start.

Then you move toward hierarchy. I’m I’m your parent. I’m the one who’s going to be teaching you. And God has officers in his church to teach you as well. you move from there to ethics. You’ve got there are certain things God says are right and wrong. Then you’ve got sanctions. Then you go to continuity. And I think that those are things that you can work through within a child’s life from birth to 20 years of age or when they’re out of the home.

And you know, continuity is the last step in that covenantal model where they’re out on they’re out of the home, you know. So, I So, and as far as Greek culture asking the right questions, I don’t think that’s the case. Humanist man never asks the right questions. The questions that he asks, he wants to suppress the truth with. rather than find the truth. So, thank you. Those are good comments. Those are, you know, some of the same I’ve probably not come to quite the definite positions you have, but those are certainly the same questions I have relative to some of the study of this stuff.

Anyone else? I When John said he wasn’t against the the lost tools because they don’t necessarily turn out stupid kids, you know, I guess you got to look at that and agree. But on the other hand, I’m really interested, you know, and maybe all of us John hearing some more of Jordan to find out, you know, what is that biblical method? I mean, we do believe in a form of catechizing. I think the points that John just made in terms of the covenant are helpful, but boy, I sure like to see some more of that sort of thing flushed out.

You know, I really appreciate Doug Wilson and you know, he seems to be taking a lot of ways self-conscious approach to trying to understand these things, but yet some of the things you’ve said seem to I mean, I’m all for understanding that our heritage, our who we are is an extension of Israel. I mean, we have been we’re sons of Abraham in Christ. And to have that context and content, I think, is just very important.

So, I don’t know. I’d sure like to see that flushed out more, you know, as the years go on. Maybe Jordan’s done more thought on that. I know there’s a list of articles in the common practice on that I never got around to reading. So, I don’t know how much of that was, but I mean, just, you know, in terms of how is the the learning going on? Is it just question answer, you know, catechizing thing? Is it just straight lecture?

I mean, how, you know, how does it work or what would be the biblical model for that? And I think it’s You know, I tend to think that it’s not just a brute classroom situation. It’s more like we see in Deuteronomy 6, but you know, I surely certainly don’t have the answer. I’m just really curious. Richard was referring to a thread on an email list we’re both on common practice that which basically Ruben Alvarado and Jim Jordan dialogued back and forth beginning the discussion with classical Christian education.

Then it got into a whole discussion of Greek versus biblical culture. And I have saved all of those and actually I read the entire thread in preparation for this talk. and much of what Jordan writes as the talk as the thread went on got clearer and clearer what he believes. And so you know maybe I could get that on some kind of form and put it uh give you the file if you’re interested or put it on our web page at church or something and begin to develop some of this.

I might mention too that in terms of what Wilson is doing And there is this association of classical schools. There’s about I don’t know 30 40 50 groups that are either have schools started or starting schools. There’s a school that’s starting in Newberg this fall with about 40 or 45 students. I talked to that man who’s starting that school. Some of you know there’s a group that are meeting in Hillsboro.

This fellow from Newberg was actually there three or four weeks ago to meet with a group in Hillsboro who are thinking about starting a classical school. He also mentioned to me that Lake Oswego there was an advertisement in World Magazine for a headmaster of what they plan to have as a really big classical school in Lake Oswego in 1998. This is going to be a deal. This is going to be, you know, a big deal in Christian education, private schools and now with Ferris getting on board in home schools, too.

That’s why I kind of just wanted to raise it this year, get you thinking about it a little bit, try to draw out some of the parameters of the discussion and then maybe we can follow up this next year by reading Jordan’s stuff, etc. He had some great stuff in that thread. The further it went on, the more articulate he became in terms of his concerns. So well, I won’t read them now, but I will certainly send you that disc or the file of his stuff particularly if you’d like to read more about that.

Any other questions or comments? Yeah, I wanted to say I was real glad you brought the subject up because we have some friends who are very much interested in the classical methodology. And I’ve always wondered about the Greek and Roman influence and how good that would be. I heard from Jordan on a series of tapes he just had a side comment about philosophy and how he felt that led to homosexuality because philosophy is a you know you detach yourself from everything.

You just stand back and observe and watch things and you’re not engaged at all. And he said that’s a characteristic of homosexuals. They are not engaged. They do not commit to anything. They just stand back and let it happen. I guess uh