On Order and Education

At the beginning of Augustine’s theodicy, “On Order,” he writes to Zenobius, the friend to which he addressed to the work:

There is an order to be found, within things and between them, which binds and directs this world. To attain and retain that order, Zenobius, to open one’s eyes and other people’s to it, it is difficult and very uncommon. Even one who has the ability for it will not necessarily succeed. One needs to find worthy listeners with an ordered lifestyle and an ordered mind to grasp such divine but obscure realities. Neither is it sufficient to be eager to listen and learn.

Though Augustine subsequently moves into the main topic of his work – that is, reconciling God’s goodness with the existence of evil – the meaning of his opening words resounds beyond the fields of theology and philosophy. The truth that Augustine opens with – that “there is an order to be found” – pertains to every realm of thought and life in this world, including education. For Augustine is, after all, addressing that order which holds all things together. Augustine sees such order as a binding reality to be discovered, not created or asserted – and he maintains that such discovery of reality requires much of the discoverer. Discovery of reality requires more than ability or eagerness, according to Augustine. Discovery of the ordered reality about us itself requires an ordered path of education.

I have been dwelling on the requirements for discovery in my first few weeks as a full-time teacher at a classical Christian school. After growing up as a beneficiary of the classical tradition, I now am tasked with caring for lower-school children and directing them in a path of discovery like that which I received. Throughout teacher training and the early days of the school year, I have been struck by the manifold ways that order abounds across a classical school. Order abounds at multiple levels in such an institution, both in our approach to learning and curriculum as a whole and in our everyday operations as an educational ecosystem.

First, we follow an ordered way of learning at large. Classical Christian education, despite its diversity of definition and variety in practice, is not a loose term, applicable to any sort of private education. Rather, it prompts a particular path. Dr. Christopher Perrin, a leader in the Classical Christian movement, offers this definition:

Classical Christian education is a traditional approach to education that blends Christian theology with the historic curriculum and pedagogy of the seven medieval liberal arts in order to cultivate societal leaders characterized by wisdom, virtue, and eloquence.

As Perrin’s understanding implies, classical Christian education builds from the age-old wisdom of the liberal arts to bring students along a path whose end is the formation of heart and mind into a rich understanding and love of God and his world. This formation is the specific end to which our curriculum is ordered – for order always requires a specific end. Our path – which follows the particularities of the arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, while interweaving the arts of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music, all of which together comprise the seven liberal arts that Perrin speaks of – is not only time-tested, but arranged and girded up by time.

At our school, we regularly discuss the “PCS Way.” The PCS Way addresses how it is that our school embodies and lives out this path of classical learning, how it is that we practice discipline and create culture in line with Scripture and Christian wisdom. As I sat in teacher training at the beginning of the year, the Head of School’s continued use of the words “PCS Way” impressed me. For the PCS Way not only refers to our school’s particular set of practices but our understanding of the path of education.

By the simple fact that our school – like all classical Christian schools – holds that there is a singular “way” for education to occur, we set ourselves apart from the educational ideology of the past several hundred years. We set ourselves apart from the world. Contra our world’s general opinion that there are many roads to truth and, consequently, many paths that children may take to be properly educated, we believe that there is a way, one constellated around the Way, Truth, and Life – Christ, God incarnate. Just as faith in the singular Way, Truth, and Life is radical amidst our world, persistence in the classical Christian way is radical.

Educators in the classical Christian way structure their curriculum around the stages of natural human development, as Dorothy Sayers lays out in her famous essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning.” In the “grammar” stage, young children use their propensities for song, chants, and memory work, along with their adaptability to structure, to learn the basic structures of our world. Grammar-age children learn the basic stories that make up our history, the facts of science, and the rules of the English language, etc. In the “logic” stage, teenagers may employ their budding bent toward argument in learning the rules of logic and practicing proper argumentation through writing and discussion. Finally, in the “rhetoric” stage, young adults bring the facts and practices they have learned in the grammar and logic stages to discover the nuances and joys of the art of persuasion. Rhetoric allows students to implement their “tools of learning” to speak truthfully and beautifully, to integrate all they have learned and finally lay it out, as if covering a broad canvas with a long-studied landscape.

These stages of the classical Christian curriculum do not arbitrarily impose order on either the children who follow them or the material which is learned within them. Rather, the sequence of the classical curriculum weaves together things which have an internal order. Martin Luther famously wrote that “the love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to it.” Fittingly, human education is not on par with God’s powerful love but works in an opposite manner: we do not create what is proper but find it. We discover truth. Truth is not of our own making. We have no power to rival the generative, order-making power of God’s love.

As education recognizes our sublimation under God’s created order, our everyday actions and motions in the realm of education ought to flow from our understanding of authority. In other words, the way that classical Christian school teachers seek to manage their classrooms reflects whether they adhere to the truth. We believe in a good God who created certain natural hierarchies in creation – the sun to govern the day, and the moon to govern the night, for example. He created men and women, his image bearers, to govern and tend the world that he made, each working alongside the other in their own way. Governance and hierarchy are fundamental to the world in which we live; as such, our places of education should reflect the reality of God’s hierarchy.

In addition to the “PCS Way,” our head of school also repeatedly emphasized this idea of “hierarchy” during the initial days of teacher training. Her emphasis struck me: even in conservative Christian circles, using the language of “hierarchy” is often frowned upon. But our reigning spirit of egalitarianism dissipates in the classroom: for in the classroom, young, still-forming souls gather together with their unbridled emotions. Such souls need the gentle guidance of authority. They need guidance as regards both their behavior and the content of their lessons. When faced with the obvious dependence and distinct needs of young children, how can one be faithful to our society’s spirit and the “child-centered instruction” that proceeds from it?

The principles of order and authority, as opposed to the principle of equality, can gird up a classroom such that students do indeed learn. Under a properly authoritative teacher, children are not in control or at the “center” of their education but can be subjected to the great story that they are learning: the “great conversation” of the centuries.

In our school, this properly authoritative framework brings students into a schedule that is itself structured. The school lives liturgically. The lower grades sing a verse of a hymn between each class period as a transition. The whole school memorizes and repeats an ancient prayer each year. And in our classrooms, teachers begin and end each day with further prayer. Younger students repeat jingles and memory passages – from the Bible and from the classical tradition – as a rhythm throughout the day.

What does all this structure produce? Order in learning does not necessitate a heart and life that is properly ordered, despite the best efforts of Christian teachers. As Augustine hints, achieving true order is “very difficult and very uncommon.” Yet we believe that living within order accomplishes something as regards true, proper order: all this order on all levels of learning leads students not to achieve proper order but prepares them to receive order. We prepare our students by our structured education to accept the order of life designed by their Creator, articulated by Scripture, and exemplified in the Church. We prepare them to set out upon a journey seeking after God’s order in every aspect of their lives. After they have left our halls, our students must ultimately continue this journey without their teachers’ guidance. We may rest in the knowledge that we have striven to give them an ordered education by which to pursue the Order of their God.

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