A School for Perilous Times
The news over the last year and a half has leapt from one crisis to the next. From the pandemic to the riots to the assault on the Capitol to the disaster in Afghanistan – a sense of unsettled turmoil has pervaded the public consciousness for quite some time now. Everyone has their opinions about the nature and causes of these crises; I have my own. But I suspect most people would agree in acknowledging the disquieting circumstances we find ourselves in as a nation, and the foreboding cast those circumstances have thrown over the future for all of us.
To be a parent in these times is to feel that apprehension many times over. All parents pray for a peaceful era in which to raise their children, and those of us who grew up in this country in the eighties and nineties enjoyed that privilege. It is becoming less clear whether we will be able to pass our children that same privilege. It is hard for a father to bear the thought that his children are likely to grow up in a world more violent, less prosperous, and less stable than the one in which he grew up. To be candid, there are times I feel almost overwhelmed by the sadness and dread of that thought.
But of course, sadness and dread rarely point us towards any fruitful course of action, and certainly do nothing to prepare our children for the future they face. In good times and bad, we still must do all that we can for our children. If it lies outside our powers to provide them with a stable world in which to grow and develop, it is certainly within our power to cultivate in them the character that will allow them to live courageously amid the throes of an unstable world. If we cannot hold off the storm, we can definitely build up the foundations, to stand strong against whatever winds may blow.
And so I find myself quite often telling my daughter about what life was like in worlds long past, and listening to the music or showing her pictures of the monuments those peoples left behind, so that she can begin to understand that her own world can look much, much different than the way she will find it. And we often read stories together about heroes and heroines, and talk about the virtues they display in the course of overcoming the witch’s evil spell or rescuing their beloved friend, until she begins to realize that however fabulous the stories, the beauty of those virtues is quite real. And we read stories from her Children’s Bible, and go to Church, and discuss what we hear there, so that she slowly comes to inhabit the one story that makes sense of all the others. Through such practices, I strive to bequeath her that wisdom which alone can stand as the bedrock of sanity and humaneness.
Not coincidentally, I find myself doing much the same thing in the classroom these days, since becoming a classical educator. These are the very practices at the heart of classical education, and the intellectual and spiritual preparation classical educators offer to our students are allied to the efforts a mindful parent makes to prepare their own children for the future. We draw upon an ancient approach to education, an approach that has proven itself through centuries to provide exactly the kind of formation that leads to wisdom and virtue. After all, the far greater portion of historical epochs have been marked by disruption, division, suffering, and upheaval, yet through them all our forbears continued to form their children according to that very same plan that classical educators have inherited, in the clear conviction that this plan would call forth all the human potencies they would need to flourish and to lead in even the most perilous of ages.
So we pray with our students, and attend church, and invite them to know intimately a Lord who remained steadfast towards God’s will in the throes of the most bitter trial and suffering. We share with them other stories as well, the story about the Trojan prince who fought dutifully for his family and his country in the certain knowledge that his efforts would prove futile in the end, or the story about the dissolute saint who went astray amid a crumbling empire, and who only found salvation from the evils of the city of man when his soul submitted at last to its desire for the city of God. And we marvel daily by their sides at the monuments and the masterpieces and the cities and the poems that come down to us from past times, in order to impress upon them that dictum of Chesterton, “what man has done man may do,” and to remember that no matter how ugly, how uncivil, how stupid and degrading the world around them becomes, it does not need to be that way, not even now. In this way, we strive to supply each of our students with the intellectual and moral virtues that will serve them in the days to come, let those days unfold how they will. It is not everything we would do for them, but it is not little either; it is not negligible; and it will bear fruit for them in their lives, I am sure.
At the outset of our school year, the pastor of our parish addressed our faculty in order to prepare our minds and hearts for the work of the year ahead. He referenced the story of Jairus, as told in the Gospel of Mark, about how he implored Christ to come and heal his ailing daughter, and how, as they walked together back to his house, he received the news that in fact, his daughter had died. It was at that moment – so fraught with the most intense anguish imaginable – that Christ admonished Jairus: “Fear is useless. What is needed now is faith.” In these words, the whole impetus behind the classical schooling movement is distilled. Classical Christian education is the faithful response to the fearful uncertainty of our times. It is the means by which we pass along to our children those priceless gifts over which fortune has no power. As classical educators, we walk the same road as that old master of the synagogue, who grieved for the bitter fortune that had overtaken his child, but who, in the face of that grief, trusted in the strange promise of the Lord, and through the power of that promise, found his child vibrant and joyful when he came home again.