For All The Teachers Who Have Grown Cynical About Classical Christian Education

The growing popularity of classical education has lately prompted some soul-searching within the movement, which means more and more classical educators are rethinking what exactly is drawing so many people in. Is it the uniforms? The test scores? The lack of tampon machines in the boys’ bathroom? 

The popularity of classical education cannot be explained merely by pointing at the badness of public schools. For the family that is merely trying to escape the badness of public schools, any private option will do, and yet over the last ten years or so, it’s the classical option that has risen to the top. If you’re opening a Christian school next year, it better be classical or you won’t be able to compete. Christianity itself undertook just such an arc in the fourth century. In A.D. 300, becoming a Christian was a death sentence. In A.D. 380, becoming a Christian was a prerequisite to securing a good position in the government. Thus, Christians began wondering, “If we no longer have to suffer for the Gospel, are we for real? If the world doesn’t hate us, are we for real? If we’re not actually taking up our crosses, are we really following Christ?” Such anxieties drove the popularity of monasteries.  

In the last year or so, I’ve heard a growing number of people from within the classical industry begin seriously questioning the way classical education is pitched to outsiders. If the “About Classical Education” tab on our websites is any indication of what prospective parents are hearing while touring our schools, one of the most significant promises we’re making is to teach students “how to think, not what.”  

And yet, “how to think” has lately come up for debate, and as someone who has been whining about the claim since 2019, I’m tremendously encouraged. 

Dr. Nathan Gill lately published an article for The Beza Institute which offers a few cautions about classical education’s growing popularity, including a call to distinguish teaching “how to think” from teaching virtue. They are not the same. Students who have been trained “how to think” don’t necessarily know what to love, and the problem with “men without chests” isn’t that they don’t have brains. It’s that their hearts are dry and need “irrigation.” They need zeal, verve, and a desperate desire to properly adore the Good. 

Between a student who has been trained “how to think” and a student who has been trained what to love, my money is on the second kid to maintain his faith through college. Between the brain, the heart, and the stomach, the brain is the weakest. Merely knowing what’s right doesn’t lead to morality or piety. We must love what is right in order to do what is right.   

Of course, knowing how to think and actually thinking are two very different things. Knowing how to brush your teeth is a separate matter from actually brushing your teeth. Knowing how to lose weight is a far cry from going to the trouble of losing weight. I know how to lose weight. I’ve done it before. Diet and exercise, baby. And yet I’m fat because I’m lazy and undisciplined. Likewise, classical schools are graduating students who “know how to think” and love Drake and Taylor Swift. We may have been trained how to think, but that doesn’t mean we’re thinking. We’re not going to use our ability to think unless our hearts are trained, and training hearts means telling students what to love and what to hate.  

The thing is, “how to think, not what” has proven an amazingly effective pitch for prospective parents. When they tour classical schools, prospective parents love the uniforms and the high standardized test scores, but it’s the “how to think, not what” that makes them feel comfortable and validated. “How to think, not what” goes down so, so, so, so easy. Almost no one objects to it. Why would they? What would they say? “No, I want my child to be indoctrinated”?  

The average bourgeois consumer finds “how to think, not what” an incredibly sophisticated and urbane prospect. “How to think, not what” means you’ll teach my child to argue more efficiently for everything he hears at home, no matter how stupid. “How to think, not what” means teachers will never say anything that contradicts the teachings of my church, even if I worship at Sponge.TV Faith Cafe. It means nothing my children read in Augustine’s City of God or Plato’s Republic will be used to confound my kill-em-all-let-God-sort-em-out approach to foreign policy. It means that every claim about truth, goodness, and beauty in the classical canon will be presented as an option, a choice, a product on a shelf that I can buy if I like, but just as easily set aside if it seems unappealing, inconvenient, or just uncool. In practice, “how to think, not what” emasculates teachers. It keeps them from proclaiming dangerous truths. It prohibits them from intellectually and philosophically challenging students. It bans them from ever telling students, “Your beliefs are wrong.” It means the lowest common intellectual denominator is the ceiling, and so the more diverse our schools become, the more toothless our teachers must be. 

The alternative to teaching students “how to think” is teaching them “what to think,” which immediately sets prospective parents on guard. “What to think” strikes the modern ear as authoritarian, arrogant, and very undemocratic. Any institution which openly admits to teaching children “what to think” obviously thinks it has real access to the truth. “You teach them what to think, do you? You claim to know what all people should think? What makes you so confident? And when you teach children what to think, what exactly are you teaching them?” Sort of makes you want to know, doesn’t it? 

On the other hand, when someone hears you’re teaching children “how to think,” no further inquiry is needed. “How to think” is a morally neutral enterprise that can be filled by whatever children hear at home. Besides, the whole “how to think” thing corresponds neatly with teachers acting in loco parentis, another common feature of the “About Classical Education” tab. In classical circles, in loco parentis is a criminally misunderstood Latin phrase which supposedly means that any teacher who says something contrary to what the parentis thinks has—by definition—overstepped their bounds. Consequently, when a parent is upset at something a teacher has said in the classroom, nine out of ten administrators are going to have the teacher apologize. Even if what the teacher said was true, they’re at least going to do a little groveling for their tone. And if the tone was unobjectionable? Well, “there’s a difference between intent and impact” is now an acceptable line of argument in many classical schools, which means that my feelings determine what you’re guilty of.  This industry is now filled with people who claim truth is objective and yet also believe that manner of therapeutic schlock. 

To all this, some would reply that a school’s statement of faith is their index of “what to think,” their dogmatic backbone, and that the most important parts of the Christian faith are not up for debate. But this is a highly theoretical claim made by someone who hasn’t spent much time in the classroom and is willfully ignorant of what happens when teenagers genuinely grapple with big ideas for seven hours a day. The average Christian school’s statement of faith is a garden-variety synopsis of the most widely agreed upon tenets of Protestant doctrine: the dual nature of Christ; His death, burial, and resurrection; the inspiration of Scripture… While I absolutely acknowledge the centrality of such doctrines, they aren’t subjects that come up when teaching Hamlet, Jane Eyre, Pride & Prejudice, Frankenstein, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Johnny Tremain, and so forth. If teachers are supposed to remain neutral on all matters besides the articles of the statement of faith, it means they can’t speak with any kind of moral or philosophical authority when teaching Frankenstein. But if they’re “teaching Socratically,” this isn’t a problem. The leaders of a “Socratic discussion” are not supposed to speak authoritatively. All they need to do is ask interesting questions. 

Compounding these issues are two facts about classical education that are rather explosive when combined: first, parents are ten times more likely to bully young teachers than old teachers, and second, the average age of a classical educator is falling fast. The rapid growth of classical education has created a remarkable hiring crunch. CLT just announced a program that will place recent college grads at “top classical schools.” That’s right. Top schools are looking for 22 year-old teachers. That’s how badly classical schools need teachers. When hiring, not even “top schools” can afford to be choosy. As the average age of private school teachers is lowered, bullying all teachers becomes more of a norm. The entire profession is viewed with greater derision.  

Upon investigation, the commonly pitched classical trinity of Socratic discussion, “how to think,” and in loco parentis is just really, really squishy.  Squishy is marketable.  

The rapid growth of classical education either means that 1) many people have suddenly begun to care about virtue, or 2) that classical schools are no longer interested in virtue, or that 3) many people are turning to classical education for less-than-honest or less-than-noble reasons. If you believe the first explanation, I’m not content you actually understand what “virtue” is. One of the reasons virtue is celebrated is because it is rare. By its very nature, real virtue will never be popular. The second explanation is tempting for the cynic, but I know too many teachers who are virtuous, long-suffering human beings to agree. I think it’s the third.   

I can offer a partial solution: classical education has reached the point that it needs to be presented in a much less palatable manner. We need to stop leveraging our popularity for greater popularity. We need to start spending our popularity on dangerous truth telling. 

Here’s what I mean: Say some nobody blogger writes an article that goes viral and overnight, he goes from 200 Twitter followers to 8000. What does he do next? Does he flatter his new followers by making easy-to-agree-with claims that are apt to get shared by many, and thus push that 8000 up to 9000? Or does he say something true-but-unpopular, something risky that will shrink that 8000 to 5000, but help bring a few delusional people closer to the truth? Alas, there are too few people in classical education who want to spend our growing popularity. The classical industry is now rather full of people who want to leverage it. And when I say “people,” I don’t mean teachers. I mean administrators and consultants who are LinkedIn junkies hawking leadership jargon, Fortune 500 babble, fresh resume bullet points, franchise opportunities, and networking updates (that are posted from vacation spots no teacher could ever afford).  

But I’m encouraged by the fact that complaints about “how to think, not what” are now coming from headmasters. That’s where I’ve heard the complaints from, at any rate. While I think the insufficiency of “how to think, not what” is obvious to anyone who really thinks about it, I believe that headmasters who have turned against “how to think” are simply listening to their teachers, and this is because teachers have the best vantage point for seeing why “how to think” doesn’t work. The best teachers are the ones teaching students what to think. They’re the ones giving straight answers. That’s what paideia is.  

Going forward, one of the best ways to curb classical education’s rising popularity (to “correct” it, as market analysts say) is to get more teachers involved in the admissions process. The average tour of a classical school is designed to make a classical education seem as attractive as possible, which is why our schools are now filled with families that aren’t really mission-aligned. Teachers don’t stand to gain anything from growing enrollment which means they’re capable of presenting classical education with blunt honesty. We need more of that. A lot more. 

Try this: at your next faculty meeting, ask teachers what percentage of the families at your school are really mission-aligned. Give them the chance to answer anonymously, if they like: What percentage of the families at this school truly want what we’re offering? What percentage understand classical education well enough, and want a classical education for itself, not for some accidental, pleasant benefit of attendance at this school? 

When you crunch the numbers and find that the average response is somewhere around 25%, don’t despair. At this point, I’d wager that number is average. But don’t be content with that number. You’ve got to ask: 

What do we have to do over the next five years to have more mission-aligned families, not less? 

Are we willing to make any sacrifices in order to have a higher percentage of mission-aligned families, not less? 

Do administrators get defensive and protest they’re “not perfectionists” whenever the subject of mission-aligned families comes up, or do they acknowledge the problem and do something about it? 

Do administrators assume there are more mission-aligned families at the school than teachers do? Why? Who is in a better position to judge this accurately?  

Do admin and faculty have different ideas on what the mission of the school is? 

What problems emerge in a school where administrators assume there are more mission-aligned families than teachers do? 

Are these questions that can be openly discussed at your school, or are they treated as seditious and disrespectful as a matter of course? 

I think it’s fair to assume that many teachers will read these questions and scoff, “There’s no way we could openly discuss that at my school.” To those teachers, I should say that while classical education is obviously growing at an absurd pace, cynicism about the movement is not totally warranted. When I say that “nine out of ten administrators” will make teachers apologize for whatever parents are upset about, I mean it. I mean that a full ten percent are going to hold out for real justice and common sense. Ten percent! That’s pretty good! It’s decent! There are good classical schools out there, and they’re run by good men, good women, and boards that care about teachers and students equally. There are classical schools that have sane discipline policies, a strong resistance to fads, and robust faculty cultures. 

If you don’t work at such a school, you should find one.