This a continuation of an interviewed of me by Andrew Kern (a friend and founder of the Circe Institute ) for a revision of his book on Classical Christian Education. I wanted to share my answers to some of the questions with you. I will share them one or two at a time:

2. What obstacles does classical education confront now and will it confront in the future?

At present, I think that main obstacles are a lack of wisdom (for all parties involved—wisdom being earned by painful failure mainly), a lack of support particularly from the church, and a lack of patience which will seek to find final answers and methods too quickly.

First, there is the lack of wisdom. This is being corrected, but we are still very inexperienced and very naïve. We learn by suffering through budgets, clinging to core commitments, cutting away things that either do not matter or matter no longer, and continuing to learn about how to do this well. The main dangers are twofold. First, we can fail to recognize our lack of wisdom. This is a fairly straightforward sort of pride. Pride keeps you from learning. The antidote to this pride is difficulty and failure. We face these now, and they should be goad to us encouraging us to learn. Second, we can see our lack of wisdom and fall into despair. This despair can cause us to look for wisdom in the wrong places. I see this in the trend of schools recently hiring headmasters who know a lot about business or education, but (professedly) know little about classical education. I think that this sort of person will help the school become more financially stable, but what sort of school will it be in the end? I think that the real challenge is learning the real world truth (balancing a budget, etc.,) that we need to learn without giving into to drink from the trough of worldly wisdom while discarding the very truth that was important to us when we started this thing.

Second, we face a lack of support—especially from the church. This lack of support is causing (forcing? Tempting?) our schools to become what they should not be. The poor are being excluded from a classical education because the schools do not have the resources and the churches are politically hamstrung. The poor are forced into homeschooling (even if the parents are not gifted at it) or sending their kids to low cost and/or low quality schools. Schools seek to meet these needs, but quietly we are morphing into prep schools that serve—not the community that we had in mind at the beginning—but instead the needs of the wealthy who are tempted to look at this sort of education as a means to power (some poor are tempted by this as well).

Third, we have to face down the obstacle of patience. We want things not to be messy. We want to come to definite wisdom. We want a machine that runs at a steady, cool temperature where all the meaningful questions are answers. This, however, is not possible if we want to do it right. We are 30 years into a 1000 year project. If we are blessed, we are not even done with the beginning of the beginning of this. We have to be patient so that we can continue to learn about how to do this.

2A. What does classical education need now and in the near future?

It needs God’s grace (we need His blessing to sustain our work—in spite of the fact that it is imperfect, shortsighted work done by broken, sinful people). We need patience to let the work develop and to help us learn what we should. And we need love. We need to love our students and families. We need love to grow in our communities and churches. We need to continue to ask hard questions and to be content with whatever results accrue from following through on the callings God has laid on our lives.