Addressing Critics of Classical Christian Education (Part III) | Michael Eatmon
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There have been many (often false) claims against classical Christian education:
- It is too outdated and impractical for life in the modern world.
- It puts too low an emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) skills.
- It is too Eurocentric and leaves no room for appreciating other cultures.
We respond to these criticisms and more today in our third episode with Michael Eatmon addressing Sherry Hayes’ (Mom Delights) podcast episode, “Why I Reject Classical Education as a Homeschooling Mom of 15”
Miss the first two episodes in this series?
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.
Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Welcome. Michael Eatmon, nice to have you here again.
Michael Eatmon:
Thank you. Good to be back.
Marlin Detweiler:
This is the third in a series of three episodes. Critics isms of classical Christian education. In our first episode, we addressed a particular blog post. And our second episode, we dealt with three different criticisms. And in this episode, we'll be dealing with three also. So, Michael, let me start with a question. One of the criticisms that we sometimes hear about classical Christian education is that it's irrelevant or impractical. What do you think about that?
Michael Eatmon:
First, I think I can say confidently that that's the criticism I hear more than any other.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's interesting.
Michael Eatmon:
I think so. That classical Christian education simply doesn't keep up with the times. Its content is passe, its teaching methods are passe. And what we want to do, what we need to do is, you know, it's interesting because the way the critic completes the sentence is also tell them what we need to do instead. Apostle Christian education is prepare these clones for 21st century living, 21st century jobs, 21st century experience.
And what I would say to that is that we don't believe in the first place that education is the means to the end of creating little cogs that fit into the socioeconomic machine that's controlled by the state or something else. Instead, what we would say is no. We believe that what education is fundamentally is the leading of others out of the darkness of ignorance and unbelief into the light of truth and faith.
And because that's our understanding of what an education is. It's far more than preparing students for tomorrow's workplace. And as I think about the question of irrelevance and impractical, the first place that I generally go is to say the basis of a classical Christian education in English and Latin grammar and language in logic, and teaching students how to think reasonably and rationally and to spot for thinking, and also to train students in how to communicate effectively, simply, persuasively to any given audience, at any given time, for any given purpose.
All of these skills, and they are just the skills that can be marshaled into an art that can improve with time practice. All of these are eminently transferable to any walk of life. And so when I think about the skills that are taught in classical Christian schools, which by the way, are not just arithmetic, but in many, many classical Christian schools are, for example, arithmetic, and several years worth of calculus, not just an introduction to English, but English to several years worth of advanced literature and composition in the
And so, without downplaying what the skills are in classical Christian education, it's also important to say we teach them in such a way that those skills are transferable from what the students learn, but what they haven't yet learned in the future. And more importantly, I think we introduce students to ideas and ideals. The core of the great conversation that's been going on for millennia, and we introduce them in such a way as to invite kids into a dialog, a dialog with the past so that they can have the wiser eyes, not just more knowledgeable eyes or more understanding eyes, even wiser eyes.
And now that's when they begin to interact with the dialogs of the present and the future.
Marlin Detweiler:
With Horace Mann. Beginning of the common school, now called the public school. And even more so then as Dewey becomes a force in education in America. But even from the very beginning, education tended to be thought of as doing this in order to get a job, doing this in order. So it doesn't surprise me for someone who's been swimming in salt water all his life, the saltwater education is for a job, to not understand that there's something else called fresh water, and out there something else that might be better for the person.
And provide freedom, liberty, and far more in the area of career options. One of the most eye opening things to me is that the irrelevant, impractical argument is, on its face, not valid or not true, because the answer to what a classically educated kid can do with his education is anything he wants to.
Michael Eatmon:
Absolutely. Yeah. Instead, it's interesting because I think sometimes the way I hear the question posed to me, it sounds as if the critic is saying, why don't you prepare these students to go 3,000 miles deep in a square inch of space? Because we think it's more important for students to go several feet deep in several hundreds of square miles of space across the arts.
The letters of math or science. Why? Because we believe that the end is to prepare these students to live life fully alive, fully alive in Christ, fully alive in themselves, fully alive with one another. And glad that you brought up this topic of freedom. Because for those who are listening, that may be an unfamiliar connection.
Classical Christian education, this notion of freedom. And I draw everyone's attention to the route of classical Christian education as it's expressed itself over much of the last 2000 years in what we refer to as a liberal arts and sciences education, but a liberal education. And here, of course, we don't mean liberal as in politically left leaning, but instead we mean liberal as it connects to its Latin root, and that is a free education.
So by free, we don't know really.
Marlin Detweiler:
Comes from that word.
Michael Eatmon:
It does, it does. So we don't mean free as in cost less. What we mean is an education that's designed for free men and women to help safeguard their freedom from tyrannies, both within and without. Yeah. Foreign and domestic.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's great. The next criticism that we're going to discuss is that classical Christian education minimizes STEM. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Michael Eatmon:
Yeah. By the way, before I answer that, some may be familiar with that acronym, some may be familiar with the acronym Steam. So S.t.e.a.m. Applied Mathematics but then concept knots and Sciences does classical Christian education okay.
Marlin Detweiler:
It stood for accounting.
Michael Eatmon:
So for those who would say classical Christian education seems to give short shrift to Stem or Steam disciplines, the short answer to that criticism is it does in many places. But that's not to say, again, as has been a drumbeat that we have beaten several times in the last few episodes, that's not an indictment of the model.
I would say that tends to be an indictment of its particular implementation or a particular focus or emphasis in some areas. So when we think about the classical model, the classical model is not reducible simplistically to grammar, logic and rhetoric not reducible to these things inclusive of it. Yes. Foundational to classical model. Yes. But in addition to that are the disciplines that later became the maths and sciences we referred to as the quadrivium.
So the entire liberal tradition, the entire trivium and quadrivium. The Western classical tradition is one that is solidly grounded in both the quality of our language arts and the quantity or the mathematical arts. It's just the case, though, that in classical education and so in our modern implementations of them, we start with the qualitative, we start with the language.
We start with the grammar, the logic and the rhetoric. Why? Because if we don't start with that foundation, we can't even talk about the other things. Yeah. So we begin somewhere. Now, one other word about Stem or Stem disciplines, and that is I have intimate familiarity with educational expressions over the last three plus decades that have really sought and have done a great job of investing a great deal of time, energy and effort in pushing an arts and sciences forward to fully integrating with the arts and letters.
Veritas is certainly an example of this but for some I would argue, hey, we don't seem to be concerned with staying true in some places. Not true of the model, not true.
Marlin Detweiler:
Ideally. Yeah. I would say for those educational classical education expressions that fail on this point, they tend to come from people who have misunderstood some of the things written or misapplied them and have not properly valued those things. The math and sciences are simply invaluable to a classical education, not a simple add on.
They are an integral part of it. And as you point out, there's nothing wrong with thinking in terms of building a foundation that may not include them as much at the time, any more than it's a problem building a house by building the foundation first. That's the way things are done in home building. And it's a good application for education, learning, mastering basic language.
Mastering language in general is important to anything that we have to speak about or write about or communicate in any form. And basic math is important to far more complex things in every one of the letters in Steam or Stem.
Michael Eatmon:
100% and I would add further when we talk about language, it's certainly the case. We're talking about a natural language, let's say like the one that we're using, we use it not only to hear and read and respond to ideas that are shared with us, but then also to incarnate them ourselves. So I have an idea in my head and I want to tell you in language. What's interesting is that on the qualitative side, that reduces to basic literacy, right?
So basic reading, writing, speaking on the math side, it reduces to numeracy and basic understanding of the abstractions about marriage, starting with young kids and counting 1234, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, that sort of thing. All of which are the basic building blocks of later mathematical and scientific thinking. And so equally important, even though, as you mentioned a moment ago, we're building something in a way that kind of looks pyramidal.
So there's a solid foundation and even a broader one early on in the language arts, before the maths and sciences. One other little bit I want to mention though, and that is I have known many a family over the years who have decided to step out of or avoid classical Christian education altogether because they feel as if it doesn't emphasize them enough.
And have headed off into, say, a Steam or Stem targeted IB or AP track in some other school somewhere else. And what I found most interesting about many of them, not all of them, but many of them, is that while they are learning a great deal of knowledge about this aspect of biology or that aspect of anatomy and history or whatever it happens to be, their understanding of how this aspect of chemistry relates to biology or physics, or how the sciences relate to the maths, or how the maths and sciences relate to the arts and letters of their understanding, and then their wisdom, and how to apply this knowledge of that that's lacking in many
Instances. So we had these students who come out who do masterfully well in this alternative environment, who might do masterfully well on a test that requires them to regurgitate information, but to think more deeply, to demonstrate understanding and wisdom not quite so much.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I'm not going to name the school because I'm going to speak a little critically of it. But there's a school that one of my sons went to an engineering program. He was invited into a very special engineering program for which he got it, went 100% scholarship, exceptional and bored for his entire time there, and was geared towards a bachelors the whole way through PhD over six years. It's a wonderful program.
I think there were 12 students in his class for that. He was the only one that was classically educated. The rest of them came out of Stem schools, magnet schools, and they were very capable scientists and learned very quickly. But his ability to communicate, his ability to relate to things raised him very quickly, even among his classmates, to be given privileges of representing the school trades at fairs and conferences and even as a young graduate assistant before he had graduated.
And he became, in a sense, a poster child with all the rest of them were still grinding on their calculators and doing the work quite well. The statistics from the school, too, are telling, and that is they had one of the highest, if not the highest placement salaries for their engineers and scientists into the marketplace when they started, but five years in, those numbers did not remain the highest in the system.
They were locked in and were not prepared to advance into more senior roles. I think is very telling.
Michael Eatmon:
It is very chilling and it's interesting. But you mentioned too, you know, they seem to get locked in and maybe they just weren't moving up into more senior roles in the way that school had expected. You might say, if you're if you're looking at a moving and shaking firm out there and they're looking for their sort of lower level talent to promote into a higher role of responsibility and oversight there, they're not simply generally speaking, going to be looking for those individuals who know a lot.
Yeah, but those who have an ability to understand the inner workings of the organization, how it relates to the outside world and communicate those ideas effectively and right. A classical education can prepare someone singularly for just such a position. And as I think about students who come up through classical Christian schools, whether we're talking about an online school like Veritas, we're talking about a brick and mortar school like there's so many in the country as we think through them.
It's certainly the case that there are students who by the time they get into high school, maybe they have a really good sense that what they want to pursue after high school is biomedicine, or they want to pursue quantum physics, which is near and dear to my heart, or whatever they say in the Stem disciplines, abstract algebra.
That's the direction that they want to head in. And what I would say is, and it's a great thing that they had the foundation in the ideas and ideals that came before them. In the language arts, in the grammar, in the dialectic, in the rhetoric, they were exposed to ideas because they were introduced to a great conversation that's been going on for millennia.
Right? Not by the way. And let me maybe sidebar here on a criticism that you alluded to in the last episode, and that is the sort of dead, white European male driven education. When we invite students today into the great lot more of my other referred to as the Great Conversation. We're not saying we want you to come into this conversation to get stuck.
What we're saying instead is we want you to kind of understand where you are in the history of the world, in your own personal history, and before you presume to speak out of your abundant knowledge and experience as a 15 year old, it might be important to listen to what the greatest minds and greatest fathers have had to say for the last two, two and a half millennia before you begin to speak.
So it's not don't speak, it's listen first reflect and then speak.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, this is related to our last topic, and that's the idea, the criticism that classical Christian education is Eurocentric. That is, it focuses on Western civilization. What do you say to that criticism?
Michael Eatmon:
Yeah. Again, this is one of those criticisms where I would say if what we are talking about is classical Christian education, especially as it manifests in the US or in the Western world, the answer to it is yes. That is true. We do tend to lean toward and into Western civilization. And as I mentioned in our last episode, I'll underscore here there are two principal reasons for this.
One of them is, and the most obvious one, the lower hanging fruit, is that's our culture. That's our civilization. We are the grandchildren of the Greco-Roman Christian synthesis. Whether we like it or not, it's simply a fact.
Marlin Detweiler:
And let me just say something parenthetically. Maybe you were going to say it, but I said before I lose the thought. Yeah, there was I picture Stanford and the protests against Western civilization saying that it's got to go implying things that are hard for me to make sense of. The real issue here with regard to appreciating eastern culture or Indian culture or whatever it might be.
The principle here is we don't learn to appreciate their cultures and understand their world by hating ours. We learn best by learning that which is most familiar to us in order to learn something that is less familiar. And so that's just a little bit of an insert, so to speak, that says you got to be careful of your logic here, too.
Michael Eatmon:
100%. And that really does build on one of the classical dicta of education. And that is we as teachers help move our students from the known to the unknown. Yeah. And this is true when it comes to cultural appreciation as well. I can best appreciate and learn from other cultures and other civilizations to the extent that I want to learn from them only when or insofar as I have learned from depreciating my own.
Yeah. Past absorbed. And so I think that is super valuable. Super important. And then the second is to say, so not only is it that we are the grandchildren of the Greco-Roman Christian synthesis, but it's also the case that that Greco-Roman Christian synthesis is not just an historical accident. And that is that Western civilization is a confluence.
And so people can think of the two tributaries come together into a much larger river. Western civilization is the confluence of the Greco-Roman world. And, footnoting our first episode, the best that the Greco-Roman world had to offer. Not the worst it had to offer, but it's a confluence of the best ideas and ideals from the Greco-Roman world blowing together with Christian faith and practice, solidly grounded in the scriptures and not only solidly grounded in the scriptures, but one which serves as an interpretive framework of that classical tradition.
So it's not just the two are running side by side, it's that we take a look at the Greco-Roman, the classical tradition, and we say, what's being said and is it true? And if we embrace it, if we adapt it, if we use it, what's the best way to use it for God's glory and the good of others?
Michael Eatmon:
Yeah. So for us, we would say we believe there's a great deal of truth, goodness and beauty that are traveling on the waters of both of these streams that have come together in Western civilization, different kinds of truths. When Greeks in the Romans are not going to teach us how to be saved. On the other hand, there's a great deal about that tradition that teaches us about think how to organize things, how to deliver a great public address.
And it would be I think foolish for us to say to be raised in a culture where we're surrounded by such an inheritance and say, I want nothing to do with the goodness, the truth, the beauty that I see.
Marlin Detweiler:
It truly is suicidal. Intellectually. It it's important. And you said it. But I want to underscore it, and that is we have to recognize that it is an objective fact. It's very hard to argue with that. The development of Christianity happened in the river that you described of Western civilization. It didn't happen in other cultures.
So that doesn't make Western civilization in and of itself superior or exclusive in its value. It simply means that if we're going to understand the history of Christianity, we have to recognize the water in which it traveled for millennia.
Michael Eatmon:
Amen to that. And I will add that doesn't mean. And here I'll take that to another criticism that I sometimes hear. It doesn't mean that we give free passes to all of the abuses or exploitations or missteps or, and certainly there are plenty who could point to some aspect of Western civilizational history and say, is that the example that you're setting up for me and we could say, no, but it's a great clear example.
Yeah. So we are non dogmatic with respect as a Western Christian civilization is the model that all other cultures should strive to say, no, that's not what we're saying. We want to go in with open eyes, open ears, open hearts and be honest. Embrace truth, goodness and beauty where we found it but then also say, and that was an evil step and a profound step.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, a great place to end this series. Michael, thanks for joining us. And this has been a lot of fun.
Michael Eatmon:
Thank you. Good to be.
Marlin Detweiler:
Back. And folks, thanks again for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of Classical Christian Education. We look forward to seeing you next time.
