Most education is pointed at the next thing. The next test. The next grade level. The next line on a transcript. And eventually: the next college acceptance letter.

And there’s nothing wrong with any of those milestones! But if you’ve ever looked at the sum total of your child’s education and thought, “Is this really preparing them for life?”, you’re asking the right question.

Classical Christian education starts with a different end in mind. The goal isn’t to produce students who perform well on standardized metrics (though they do). The goal is to form people: young men and women who can think clearly, live with conviction, and engage the world with both wisdom and courage. People who know not just how to think, but also what is worth thinking about.

That’s a bold claim, and it deserves a thorough explanation.

Let’s start by looking at the term “classical Christian education” itself. The words “classical” and “Christian” show up together so often in homeschool circles that it’s easy to treat them as a single compound word. But they’re worth pulling apart for a moment, because understanding what each contributes reveals why the combination is so powerful.

Classical education provides a method: a time-tested approach to teaching children how to think, rooted in the liberal arts and the trivium.

Christian faith provides the foundation: a worldview that gives that thinking its ultimate purpose and direction.

We’ve been building classical Christian curriculum at Veritas Press for over 25 years, and we’ve watched this combination shape thousands of students into clear thinkers and faithful people.

This article will focus primarily on what makes this approach distinctively Christian. If you want a thorough treatment of the classical method itself, our guides on classical education and the trivium are worth exploring.

Christianity and Education Have Always Been Connected

Classical Christian education sometimes gets described as a modern trend, a reaction to declining public schools or a kind of boutique option for a certain kind of family. Its history is actually much older and richer than most people realize

The connection between Christian faith and rigorous education runs back centuries.

When Charlemagne set out to build something truly lasting for his kingdom in the 9th century, he understood that a civilization needs centers of learning to sustain itself. So this largely illiterate man established the foundations of what would become Christian universities and scholastic institutions. He planted oaks that he would never sit under.

The pattern repeated throughout the centuries that followed. The Reformation brought a renewed emphasis on schools and classical curricula. Every significant renewal in Christendom has been either preceded or accompanied by a fresh investment in education and discipleship.

The connection isn’t incidental. Christians have always understood that forming minds is part of forming souls.

The modern recovery of this tradition has its own story. In 1947, Dorothy Sayers, a contemporary of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien at Oxford, delivered a speech called The Lost Tools of Learning. In it, she observed that children naturally pass through stages of development, and that these stages correspond remarkably well to the three arts of the medieval trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Her insight was that we could teach in harmony with how children are actually wired to learn, rather than fighting against it.

That essay circulated quietly for decades until Douglas Wilson built on Sayers’ vision in Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning (1991), applying her framework to the practical work of starting Christian schools.

From there, the movement grew into what it is today: thousands of private schools and homeschool families across the country rediscovering an approach to education that had been largely forgotten.

So when someone asks, “Is classical Christian education new?”—the honest answer is it’s one of the oldest educational traditions in the Western world. What’s new is that we’re recovering it.

What Makes It “Classical”?

We’ll keep this brief, since we cover it thoroughly elsewhere.

Classical education is built on the trivium, a three-stage model that works with the grain of how children develop.

In the grammar stage, young students absorb facts, vocabulary, and foundational knowledge. They’re wired for memorization at this age, and classical education leans into that strength.

In the logic stage, students learn to analyze, question, and connect ideas. (This is also the age when they start arguing about everything, so we teach them to argue well.)

In the rhetoric stage, students learn to express their ideas persuasively and articulately.

The classical tradition also values primary sources, Great Books, and the liberal arts. The aim is to teach students how to think rather than simply loading them with information to recall on the next test.

What Makes It “Christian”?

This is the heart of the matter and the place where many families find themselves most drawn in or most curious.

In a classical Christian education, “Christian” is not a label, an elective, or a weekly chapel tacked on to an otherwise secular curriculum. It’s the foundation the whole structure rests on. Every subject, every discussion, every interaction grows out of the conviction that God has revealed Himself in Scripture and that this reality has implications for everything we study and everything we do.

A Worldview That Touches Every Subject

When history is taught as God’s story unfolding through time, something shifts.

Students don’t just memorize dates and battles. They learn to see a narrative that has a beginning, a direction, and a purpose. They wrestle with questions about why empires rise and fall, what justice looks like, and how God’s providence works through flawed human beings.

Or consider science. In a classical Christian framework, studying the natural world is an act of exploring God’s creation. The order, complexity, and beauty students encounter in biology, chemistry, and physics all point somewhere. Students learn to ask not just “how does this work?” but “what does this tell us about the God who made it?”

Literature becomes a place to grapple with the deepest questions of the human condition in light of Scripture. Mathematics reflects the rationality and order of a Creator who is Himself logical and consistent. Even subjects that seem spiritually neutral at first glance take on new depths when studied with the conviction that all truth is God’s truth.

Formation, Not Just Information

One of the most important distinctions in classical Christian education is the difference between educating and forming.

A purely academic approach often treats education as pure information transfer: input content, output test scores. Classical Christian education has a bigger ambition.

This doesn’t mean academics are secondary. The rigor of a classical Christian education is one of the first things families notice (and sometimes one of the things that stretches them), and at Veritas Scholars Academy, our students score well above average on national assessments.

Students read challenging texts, write extensively, learn Latin, study formal logic, and engage with primary sources most adults have never read.

But all of that rigor serves a deeper purpose. The goal goes beyond the transcript. We’re forming them into people who can think clearly, live wisely, and love what is true, good, and beautiful.

Philosopher George Grant, speaking about this kind of long-range vision, once put it memorably in a story about New College, Oxford.

When the 14th-century builders constructed the college’s magnificent dining hall with its soaring oak beams, they also planted oak trees on the edge of the grounds. Five hundred years later, when dry rot set in and the beams needed replacing, the college discovered the original plans, looked out the window, and saw the trees their predecessors had planted for exactly this purpose.

That’s the kind of generational thinking at work in classical Christian education. We’re not just solving today’s educational problems. We’re planting trees for a future we may never see.

The Christian Intellectual Tradition

Students in a classical Christian education don’t just study the Bible, though they study it deeply. They also enter a rich conversation with thinkers who have spent centuries wrestling with what it means to follow Christ with both heart and mind.

They read Augustine on the nature of time and memory. They encounter Aquinas on the relationship between faith and reason. They sit with Lewis’s arguments and Chesterton’s paradoxes. These aren’t museum pieces under glass. They’re living voices in an ongoing conversation about what is true, what matters, and how to live.

This produces something distinctive: students who can articulate what they believe and why they believe it.

They learn to engage the world with both conviction and charity, to defend their faith thoughtfully, and to approach unfamiliar ideas with curiosity.

Imagine what the world might look like if our children are raised to think Christianly about art, family, politics, literature, history, business, and science.

Discipleship Through Education

There’s one more dimension worth naming. In the classical Christian tradition, education is itself an act of discipleship.

Teachers aren’t just subject-matter experts delivering content. They’re mentors who care about their students as whole people, who model what it looks like to love learning and love God at the same time. The teacher-student relationship matters as much as the lesson plan.

Community matters, too. Families walking this path together share values, purpose, and mutual encouragement. Students learn alongside peers who are asking the same big questions. This is one of the things we hear most often from Veritas families: the sense that they’re not alone in this. Our live classes create real discussion and real relationships between students and teachers. The end-of-year gatherings bring families together from across the country. Online doesn’t have to mean isolated.

Why Both Words Matter

If you’re drawn to the classical method, you might wonder whether the Christian piece is essential. And if you’re coming from a Christian education background, you might wonder why the classical approach matters so much. Both are fair questions.

We believe the classical method is at its best when it’s grounded in something bigger than intellectual achievement alone. The trivium is a powerful framework for teaching students how to think. But how to think, without a foundation for understanding what is worth thinking about, can leave students brilliantly equipped and deeply uncertain about where to point all that capability.

On the other side, Christian education has always valued the formation of the heart. That’s a beautiful instinct. But hearts and minds aren’t separate things in Scripture, and students who hold deep convictions also need the intellectual tools to examine, articulate, and hold those convictions under pressure. Classical rigor gives them those tools.

Together, they produce students who think deeply and live faithfully. Students who can read a difficult text and a complex cultural moment. Students who have both the conviction to stand firm and the intellectual generosity to engage people who see the world differently.

Getting Started

If you’re reading this and thinking, “this sounds like what I want for my family,” here’s the good news: you have more options than you might expect.

Veritas Press offers multiple ways for families to pursue classical Christian education. Some parents want to be the primary teacher and use our materials as their backbone. Others want their students to work independently through a self-paced program. And others want their children in live, interactive classes led by experienced teachers. Same classical Christian foundation, different expressions for different families.

The best next step is simply to explore. Read more about our different curriculum options, or reach out with questions. This is a community that welcomes curious families.

Classical Christian education is, as many have observed, a “new old way.” It’s new because our generation is rediscovering it. And it’s old because Christians have been doing this, in one form or another, for as long as there have been Christians who cared about forming the next generation. That’s a tradition worth joining.