Seminar on Classical, Christian Education Who can benefit from this Session? Christian school educators Christian parents who home-school Christian parents

Seminar on Classical, Christian Education

Who can benefit from this Session?

• Christian school educators• Christian parents who home-school• Christian parents who are interested in learning more about the benefits of a classical, Christian education for their children

Welcome!


What is Classical Education?•The older traditional education in America’s history of education•The purpose is to raise up an educated person•The ability to carry out successful inquiries into what is significantly true, good and beautiful•The ability to deal with the most significant issues of human existence - life, death, and how can we secure the future.


Classical vs Contemporary Progressive Education

What’s the Difference?• Education vs schooling • the difference between learning tasks and skills vs learning how to learn . . .• and what to learn that is significant for a life of civil liberty and spiritual faith• The belief that education is for all children regardless of intelligence level


What is needed to carry out significant inquiries concerning truth?

• The ability to use language well• The ability to analyze and distinguish sense from nonsense• The ability to evaluate, judge and apply in word and in action


What is needed to deal with the great issues of human existence?

• An understanding of the Christian Faith and why it is true• An ability to process meaning, purpose,and value from a Christian World-view• An informed understanding of how these issues have been addressed from the best minds and works of Western Civilization


An Educational Philosophy for Christian Education

Some Key Priorities and Assumptions• Christian education should not simply be designed to prepare students to make a living. It should prepare them to make a life. • If a person can successfully address the temporal and spiritual challenges of making a life - both now and in eternity . . . making a living is easy.


An Educational Philosophy for Christian EducationSome Key Priorities and Assumptions

• There needs always to be a vital link between knowing and doing. • Only as students learn what is good can they place it above themselves and do it.



Some Key Priorities and Assumptions•Students need to hone the fundamental language skills (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) so that they can successfully carry out their own inquiries into what is significantly true, good and beautiful. • Students need to become educated persons. This means, in part, to receive an education that enables them not to have to depend on what others tell them in order to comprehend the meaning of important events that swirl around them in life.



Some Key Priorities and Assumptions•Since Christian men and women inhabit both the world and the Kingdom of God, our children need an education that will equip them simultaneously to engage the world’s fight and trust in the soul’s salvation. •For this you need to impart good knowledge, form good character, and nurture good faith. There is no other way.



Some Key Priorities and Assumptions•Students become voracious learners when they become hooked on learning. This is effectively done by relating knowledge to the major questions of human existence, such as: What is life? What is death? How can I secure the future? •Every child is passionately interested in finding real answers here. The interest is forced by human existence itself.



Some Key Priorities and Assumptions•Christian parents often fear when their children go off to a secular university that they might “graduate” from the Church’s confession before they graduate from Secular U. These fears are well founded . . . many do. •It is vital that Christian education provide the means whereby a Christian’s faith-life may grow in knowledge that is shaped by the Christian world-view.



Some Key Priorities and Assumptions•Christian young people need to know not only what the faith is, but also why it is true. If they do not know why, in terms of faith, then they cannot answer why not to the challenges of unbelief. •They must learn the whys of faith as well as the whats to calm honest and serious doubts and to give a defense for the hope that is in them.



Some Key Priorities and Assumptions•Excellent Christian schools are not just the educational answer for Christian families over against poor or mediocre secular schools. They are especially the answer over against the really good secular ones. •No education is innocent of an attitude toward man and his purposes. •All government schools are required to teach all subjects where meaning, purpose, and value are formed by the absence of God and His revelation.



Some Key Priorities and Assumptions

•Government schools also teach students how to be socialized devoid of the moral absolutes of the Creator. •It is in the really effective and competent public schools that students effectively learn to understand the world and how to live in it without God.

Documents

Seminar on Classical, Christian Education Who can benefit from this Session? Christian school educators Christian parents who home-school Christian parents