Let me begin this lesson with a confession. When I first started working in Christian education—more than thirty years ago now—I made all three of the mistakes I’m about to describe.
It wasn’t because I was a bad parent or a careless educator. I made these mistakes because I had not yet been taught to think differently. I hadn’t yet discovered, at least in any meaningful way, the older Christian intellectual tradition. I actually didn’t have the furniture I needed to cultivate a robust life of the mind. As a result, I did what many sincere Christian parents and educators do: I tried to build a better version of the same thing I had inherited.
So, we adopted better standards and expected better behavior. We purchased better textbooks and added Bible classes and chapel services. But, to change metaphors, the differences we produced were often more in the wallpaper than in the foundation.
I suspect that if you are honest with yourself you’ll likely recognize at least one of these mistakes in your own home.
Mistake Number One: Confusing Information with Formation
Here is the assumption many of us absorbed from our own schooling without ever examining it: education is primarily about filling the mind with content.
Education is accumulating as many facts, skills, and knowledge as we can. And, success is measured in completing assignments, getting good test scores, and how focused we are on college readiness and career preparation. The more a child knows, the better educated he is!
But the classical Christian tradition would say this gets things almost precisely backwards. Education is not the accumulation of lots of information. Education is “the passing down of wisdom and knowledge from one generation to the next.” It is where “every culture tells the truth about what it believes and what it loves.”
See, education is never neutral. It is always forming loves. It is always shaping the student’s attention. And, it’s always cultivating some vision of what a human being is for. The ancients called this paideia: the rearing of a young person in a proper view of the world.
Paideia is synonymous with “upbringing, training, instruction,” but not in the sense of just data transfer. Paideia is the formation of the whole person—intellect, will, imagination, affections, appetites, and desires.
Classical Christian Education “seeks to educate the whole person, human qua human. It is not finally about training workers for an institutionalized society. It is the education that makes for “a full and free human being.”
So the child who has memorized a thousand facts but has not learned to love what is good, recognize what is true, and be moved by what is beautiful has been trained, perhaps even efficiently trained, but he has not yet been educated.
The practical consequence of this mistake is that we begin to measure our children’s education almost entirely by what they can produce: good grades, better test scores, assignments completed, facts recalled, and credits earned. But those are not the deepest or most meaningful measurements.
The question can’t simply be, “What did my child learn today?” The better question is, “Who is my child becoming?”
Mistake Number Two: Outsourcing Formation Entirely to the School
This mistake is subtle because it feels responsible. You have chosen a good school. Perhaps a classical Christian school. Perhaps an online academy. Perhaps a rigorous homeschool curriculum. You trust the teachers. You care about the books. You are involved enough to know your child is receiving something better than the public schools or mainstream approach to education.
And so, without intending to, you begin to assume that the formation happening during school hours is sufficient. It’s enough to do what you expect it will do. But formation is never outsourced. It is either intentional or accidental.
The school can cultivate, the teacher can guide, and the curriculum can even order the mind toward truth. But the home remains the first and most powerful culture your child inhabits. The books on your shelves, the conversations at your dinner table, the jokes you laugh at, the stories you tell and return to, the things you admire, the things you dismiss, even the way you spend your leisure; all of it teaches. Your home has a liturgy, whether you have written it down or not.
Classical Christian education can give a child tools of freedom. It can introduce him to the liberal arts and the great conversation. It can teach him that “humane learning is ultimately a discipline of attention toward that which is worthy.” But the home either strengthens that discipline or dissolves it.
If the school teaches attention but the home practices distraction, the child will learn distraction. If the school teaches reverence but the home practices cynicism, the child will learn cynicism. If the school teaches that wisdom is more precious than utility but the home speaks as if education is mainly about college, earning a good income, and building one’s résumé, the child will likely believe the home.
This doesn’t mean parents have to become professional educators, but it does mean they have to recover confidence in their own vocation. Even though the school may assist you, it can never replace you.
Mistake Number Three: Assuming the Tradition Is for Children, Not for You
This may be the most common mistake among parents who have chosen classical Christian education for their children but did not receive it themselves.
You believe in it. You have seen what it does. You can see your children flourishing in ways you did not flourish. They are reading books you never read. They are learning Latin words you never learned. They are discussing Homer, Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, and Lewis while you’re just trying to remember what you read in high school.
And somewhere in the background, you feel the gap, the gap between what they are receiving and what you were given. The gap between the education you now admire and the education you never had is real; and parents tell me this all the time.
Here is what I want to say to you directly: the Great Conversation is not age-restricted.
Plato didn’t write the Republic for twelve-year-olds. Augustine didn’t write the Confessions for people who had grown up in classical schools. And, C. S. Lewis certainly did not write The Abolition of Man only for professional philosophers.
The great tradition is for any person, at any stage of life, who is willing to sit down with a serious book and give it the attention it deserves. In fact, there is a particular gift that comes to the adult who encounters these texts with the accumulated experience of a life already lived. You bring questions a child cannot bring. You bring sorrows a child has not yet carried. You bring all kinds of things—loves, losses, regrets, hopes, and longings—that make the old books speak with a startling intimacy.
Augustine’s restless heart is not a metaphor to a forty-five-year-old who has spent twenty years building a life that doesn’t quite satisfy. It is a diagnosis, an analysis of lived experience that’s recognized from the inside. And this is one of the great recoveries of classical Christian education for parents: you are not simply choosing an education for your children. You are being invited into the life of the mind yourself.
You do not need to return to school to begin. You don’t have to pursue a degree to get this kind of education. You just need a book, a chair, and a pencil; perhaps a little courage and a few friends with whom to read in community might even be helpful. But this kind of education is for adults too, and it’s accessible.
Bonus Mistake: Failing to Fully Entrust Teachers Who Are Truly Your Allies
There is one more mistake worth naming, especially in our present moment. Some parents choose teachers who share their deepest convictions—at least broadly speaking—and then fail to entrust them fully.
They scrutinize every assignment. They suspect every difference. They talk down the teacher at the dinner table. They assume that if a teacher doesn’t agree with the family on every detail, then that teacher must not be safe, faithful, or trustworthy.
Of course, parents need to be discerning. Teachers are not substitutes for parents. And no parent should blindly entrust a child to a teacher who is hostile to the family’s faith, values, or vision of the good life. That would be stupid. But there is a difference between discernment and suspicion. There’s also a difference between alignment and total agreement, unity and uniformity.
A teacher may not share every preference, every emphasis, every denominational nuance, or even every household practice, and still be a true ally. Indeed, a good teacher often serves the family precisely by bringing gifts the family doesn’t possess in the same measure. Maybe it’s the mastery of a particular subject; maybe it’s pedagogical wisdom; maybe it’s patience born of practice and a love for students ordered toward their intellectual and moral good.
A good teacher knows the telos of education. They know education is not job training and that it’s not only civic formation. They also know it’s not helping students become whatever they want to be. “The purpose of educating children is to prepare them to be virtuous and wise, free men and women in the kingdom of God.”
When a teacher is genuinely laboring toward that end, parents should be careful not to undermine that labor with careless words or a bad attitude. Children learn how to regard authority by watching how their parents speak of those to whom they have delegated a portion of authority.
If a parent constantly corrects, belittles, mocks, suspects, or second-guesses the teacher, especially in front of the child, the child may end up learning more than the parent intended. The child may inadvertently learn that teachers are service providers and not authorities. He may learn that education is a consumer transaction rather than a shared vocation. He may even learn that every disagreement is a betrayal.
That’s not classical. And it is certainly not Christian.
The better way is covenantal, not consumerism. Parents and teachers are not competitors. They are not rival claimants over the child’s mind and soul. At their best, they are allies in the same work: both helping the child apprehend wisdom, appropriate noble judgment, and become the kind of person capable of bringing ordered judgment to the disorders of the age.
So, by all means, choose teachers carefully. Choose teachers whose loves are rightly ordered. Choose teachers who understand that humane learning is a discipline of attention toward that which is worthy. Choose teachers who know that education is ordered toward wisdom and virtue. But once you have chosen them, entrust them and speak well of them.
Ask honest questions, sure. But assume good will where good will has been demonstrated. And when disagreement comes, as it surely will, treat it as an occasion for conversation, not as an occasion for contempt.
So there they are, the three mistakes parents make without even knowing it—and one bonus mistake that may be more common than we care to admit.
We confuse information with formation.
We outsource formation entirely to the school.
We assume the tradition is for our children but not for us.
And sometimes, having chosen teachers who are truly our allies, we fail to entrust them with the work we asked them to do.
The good news is that none of these mistakes is fatal. They are all correctable. And the correction begins with a simple shift from asking what your child is learning to asking who your child—and you—are becoming. I think that’s a question worth sitting with. Because in a confused and fragmented world, recovering such an education for our children is now more essential than ever.
