Classical Wonder for Contemporary Minds

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Classical Wonder for Contemporary Minds

For the last century, education has been allied to the ends of the market, and the consequent means of instruction have largely left our children to be treated as the products that emerge at the end of a bureaucratic assembly line. Of course, there have been and are many faithful people in these systems who have deployed their agency to truly inspire wonder in the hearts of children, but the system itself is not intended for this, and it progressively evaporates the opportunities for those who are teachers to connect with their students at that level.

It is not surprising, therefore, that we have witnessed a range of alternative education models over the last half-century. However, Christians should be cautious about the temptations of our times. The temptation to construct an “alternative system” in the contemporary vacuum easily risks allowing the ghost of progressivist education to negatively “in-form” the ends of our own calling. Whereas they did “public” school, we do “private” school. Whereas they did “vocational” training, we do “intellectual” training. Where they are “contemporary,” we are “classical,” “secular” becomes “religious,” and the disciplines themselves (history, biology, economics, etc) become objects of counter-politicization. They have their “secular” history and we our “religious” one.

But this is not to escape the Leviathan of modern education, but to internalize its very chief error—that education is some means to an end other than itself—but now only billed as in the service of our team. Urgently needed today, in a day that consumes the imagination and wonder from which the entirety of the classical tradition can be truly internalized, grasped, and (most importantly) lived in a renewed and contemporary way. What is required is not chiefly a new program of education, but a new imagination for what education even is in the first place.

And yet, it is fitting that we also seek to “organize” education in such a manner as to bring our young ones into a life of wonder in the engagement of God’s creation and the human response to it. In this conference, we ask what it might look like to reimagine contemporary classical education not along the vectors of fighting any battle or recovering any particular thing, but rather what it might mean to educate here and now, simply for the sake of enlarging the soul with the glory of God that is displayed in every thing and texture of the cosmos.