As a teacher, I love that classical education attends to the why of education. While questions of methods, delivery, assessment, or any number of practical concerns are, of course, essential and significant, these details can easily overwhelm teachers so that they forget the foundation of our task.
Why require our students to wrestle with difficult subjects and texts? Why pour time and energy into lesson plans? Why labour at giving helpful and accurate feedback? The answer that usually comes to my mind is part of the answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism “to glorify God.” This is what I tell my children when the whining sets in over their own schoolwork, when they drag their feet and give less than a full effort. All things, I say, we must do all things to God’s glory. And God is not glorified by complaining and laziness.
Yet, the first answer of the catechism has two parts: to glorify God and to enjoy him. While glorifying God includes diligence and responsibility, diligence should not mean drudgery. Responsibility should not mean staleness. When it comes to teaching and learning, our work ought to be enlivened with joy, with delight. This is at the heart of a classical education: the conviction that the best learning, undertaken not simply for the sake of a career but for the sake of wisdom, is marked by a deep wonder at the beauty of the world.
A short essay from French philosopher Simone Weil offers wisdom that connects classical education’s goal of wisdom and humanity’s purpose to enjoy God in our learning. In her essay, Weil explores attention in school studies and its connection to prayer. She argues that the ability to attend lays a foundation for prayer, and that one cannot be a true student, either of school subjects or of God, without attention. We could say that enjoyment begins with attention.
The attentive student, Weil says, is not one who grits her teeth and exerts muscular effort in her geometry or Latin lessons. Instead, attention is a receptivity, an openness and expectancy that brings what is already known to the task at hand, waiting for the gift, or grace, of understanding to come.
In giving our attention to the studies at hand in this way, our relationship to the subject becomes one of humility and desire. Humility is nurtured by the posture of receptivity, rather than forcefulness. We are not Moses striking the rock at Meribah, but the Israelites receiving manna. Whatever comes is a gift. Desire is nurtured as well, as we wait, because endurance in waiting is only possible when we deeply desire that for which we wait.
In this way, Weil argues, school studies are a training ground for prayer, as the joy that we take in our studies imitates a spiritual desire for God. Every exercise, she says, is like a sacrifice, a “little fragment of particular truth...a pure image of the unique, eternal and living Truth.” This is the great treasure of education, attained by attentive waiting. This treasure does not simply consist of intellectual knowledge or the mastery of a skill. Instead, it is a treasure of personal transformation.
It is this kind of educational vision that classical education has in view. Classical education shifts the student’s question from “What career do I want to have?” and “How can I influence society?” to “What kind of person do I want to be?” In this sense, classical education is for all students, because it is not only the highest achieving students who can, or ought, to consider what it means to be human. Classical education is concerned for the transformation of the whole person, aiming for students who become persons of wisdom and virtue. All students, because of their bearing the image of God, are called to this kind of maturity. This is not an aim tacked onto the curriculum as an awkward appendage, but an aim integrated into the curriculum and the teaching methods.
This goal also enlivens the task of teaching, for teachers, too, are in the process of their own transformation. When the work of the classroom is simply a necessary stepping stone to a student’s career, the intellectual and moral life of a teacher has little room to grow. But when instead education works to ground a life ordered to what is true, good, and beautiful, teachers can be both guides and participants. The beauty of the classical classroom given to attentiveness and joy is that the task of teaching can have that same joy and desire. We learn along with students, waiting attentively for the grace that we know comes through patient, diligent study.
A renewal of classical education promises a renewal of a profound purpose for education, giving us an answer to the question of why that often goes unanswered, or whose answers are dominated by concerns of career readiness and technical proficiency. While being equipped to work in a particular field is an important part of education, a focus on the transformation of the whole person offers both teachers and students a rich depth to the work of the classroom—a feast for our whole selves.
