Here in lesson three, I want to make an argument that might make some of you slightly uncomfortable. I’m going to make it anyway, because it’s true; and, because if we’re being thoughtful, we’ll recognize that the discomfort that comes with wrestling with this argument is itself instructive.
Here is my argument: choosing not to pursue a classical Christian education for your children is not a benign or neutral decision. It is a choice that comes with a price tag. And the cost of not educating classically and in the Christian intellectual tradition is much higher than you might realize—perhaps higher than you’ve ever been asked to calculate.
Let me be careful about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that every child who attends a modern public school is doomed. I’m not saying that classical Christian education is the only path to wisdom and virtue. What I am saying is that the alternative—the modern progressive educational model that the majority of American children inhabit—has a specific shape, a specific set of assumptions, and, therefore, a specific set of outcomes. And those outcomes are not accidental.
Modern education is, at its core, utilitarian. It is designed to produce workers and buyers—or, as I prefer to say, consumers and cogs. I’ll grant that some of its earlier, more ambitious forms did attempt to cultivate informed citizens. But that, I would argue, is no longer an accurate description of our contemporary situation.
In any case, I cannot honestly say that a utilitarian approach to education is wicked, exactly. But there is something deeply impoverished about it. And that poverty doesn’t always show up in academic failure. It shows up in something harder to measure and far more important, but it does show up.
It shows up in young adults who are technologically competent and spiritually adrift—adults who may hold degrees but possess no framework for asking what kind of life is worth living; adults who were never taught to love what is objectively beautiful, to recognize what is actually true, or to order their desires toward what is genuinely good; adults who arrive at the great questions of human existence—Who am I? What am I for? How should I live?—with no resources to answer them, because their education never considered those questions worth asking.
Modern education also measures success by standardized metrics: test scores, graduation rates, college acceptance, and potential employment outcomes. It treats knowledge as a commodity and learning as a transaction. If you pay in the currency of time and tuition, modern education will ensure you receive credentials and some level of earning potential within the system it cultivates. It is rather like the old Fingerhut catalog, which would help you “build up your credit”—but you could only use that credit to shop their catalog. It is useful only in the limited ways that serve their interests. And because secularism always creates a vacuum, it opens the door for something far worse than mere utility to take up residence.
Dorothy Sayers, writing her landmark essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” in 1947, put the matter rather sharply. She argued that modern education had produced a generation easily manipulated by propaganda, because students had never been taught to recognize it, let alone argue against it or see through it. We give children words, she observed, but not the tools to discern truth from fiction, nor the ability to identify and refute the fallacies embedded in those words. That was 1947. I leave it to you to assess how much has improved since then.
Now, what does a classical Christian education offer instead?
It offers, first, a different answer to the question of what education is for. Not credentials. Not employment. Not even knowledge, strictly speaking. Education is paideia — the formation of the whole person toward wisdom and virtue. Classical Christian education is the cultivation of a soul capable of recognizing the true, loving the good, and being moved by the beautiful.
It offers, second, access to the Great Conversation, nearly three thousand years of the best minds of the Western world wrestling with the questions that matter most. Your child, formed in this tradition, will sit with Homer and Virgil, with Plato and Aristotle, with Augustine and Aquinas, with Shakespeare and Milton, with C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton. Students don’t merely come to know about these thinkers; they come to know them as conversation partners, as intellectual friends, as voices from the past that illumine the human condition.
And it offers, third, a language. Not Latin alone—though Latin is part of it—but a shared vocabulary for talking about what matters most. A student who has read the Republic can speak meaningfully about justice. A student who has read Augustine’s Confessions can speak with equal depth about desire. A child who has read The Abolition of Man can recognize, and resist, precisely the manipulation of language that Sayers warned about.
The price of not educating your children in the classical Christian tradition is the forfeiture of their intellectual and spiritual inheritance. And as we all know, once forfeited, inheritances are exceedingly difficult to recover.
In lesson four, I am going to talk about something that costs almost nothing and takes almost no time, but that begins—for those willing to take it up—the work of recovery.
