“The hard, precipitous path of classical education ideally lead[s] not to knowledge alone, but to the cultivation of mind and spirit.”  Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus

We are all familiar with the normal morning routine, getting ready to rush out the door to school on a Monday morning.  There is the hassle of finding even just one clean white polo shirt and getting that lunch packed.  Plus, if your house is anything like mine, there is the hunt for the sixth grader’s belt and the twelfth grader’s car keys.  Maybe, however, you are much more organized and can leisurely drift out the door when it is time to leave.

Either way, I’m fairly certain you might have said something along the lines of “It’s time for school”.  Indeed, that is the location where you are headed, but is it really what we are doing?  

In fact, what is it that we are actually doing in a classical, Christian school?  The temptation is to believe that it is as simple as we are teaching and our students are learning.  

But, no, there is so much more to it than just the production and consumption of knowledge.  Our children aren’t “going to school”.  They are “going to be cultivated in mind and spirit.”  

The definition of cultivating is “to promote the development of” and “to refine” and that is exactly what we are doing in classical, Christian education.  We are promoting the development of our students, not just in knowledge, but in virtue.  Not in gaining information, but in fostering the growth of our students into whole individuals, with mind, body, and spirit trained to love Christ and all that is good, true, and beautiful.  

Through the grammar stage of learning, when we focus on the fundamentals and learn them well, we are cultivating discipline and a strong work ethic.  When we reach the dialectic stage of learning, and we begin wrestling with those fundamentals, we are cultivating virtue and discernment.  When we reach the beautiful level of the rhetoric stage of learning, we are cultivating the ability to speak and write winsomely, and the ability to reason accurately.  

This is no small thing.  Many places can teach multiplication tables and teach how to spot a red herring argument.  But where can you cultivate virtuous humans?  The best cultivation happens in three places –  your home, your church, and your classical, Christian school.   

So, tomorrow morning, when you are dashing out the door, remember, you are taking your children to the place where they are cultivated.  And that is worth every bit of morning hassle.  

Holly Kalton
Head of School, Libertas Academy