Philosophy of Education

God is the source of all truth, not only as its provider but by definition. He created everything that is real and true, and therefore all that is true must come from Him. If any human knowledge is not derived from what He speaks into being, it cannot be true. There are two broad categories of what God has spoken into being and via which we can know truth from God: Natural creation and revealed utterance. The former is received through perception of the cosmos and the events within it that God’s Word spoke into being. The latter is received through perception of verbal utterances that God spoke into being, given ultimately and especially through His Son, the Word become flesh. Natural creation can teach us the processes of logic, matter, family, and other concepts of created life and language. God then speaks to us through His revealed utterances using the language of these concepts. God’s revealed utterances are recorded in the collections of the Old and New Testaments of Scripture. The autographs of the Scriptures were given to us with God’s authority and authorship and are completely infallible and inerrant, just as the Author of truth Himself is. The copies of the autographs we have today are faithful and reliable records of those autographs, far beyond any reasonable doubt. There is no other authoritative record today of God’s revealed utterances than the Scriptures we have inherited, and these are sufficient for knowledge of God and for life in His name. There is no higher authority for us than the Scriptures, and they must rule over how we perceive everything else in creation.

And the message of God’s Word is this: There are two kingdoms. There is the true Kingdom of God, under the rule of Christ our Lord, and there is the rebellious domain of darkness, under the rule of Satan. The fate of the domain of darkness is eternal death. Our first parents rejected faith in the truth of God’s revealed word and chose instead to listen to Satan, the author of lies. They thus joined themselves to his rebellion under the domain of darkness and earned his same fate for themselves and for us, their issue. But God, being rich in mercy, to the glory of His name and love, meted the death penalty for our rebellion upon Himself in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ, in our place. God then raised His Son from death and seated Him at His right hand with authority over all things, so that that all who repent of lawlessness and are rejoined to God in faith and fealty to Christ as their Lord are delivered from the final judgment of this dying world and will inherit eternal life in paradise in the Kingdom of God with Christ. This deliverance will be fulfilled when Christ returns to raise all the dead, to destroy the domain of darkness with its members once and for all time in the eternal fires of hell and to bring His faithful to eternal life with Him in a new heavens and a new earth. God has delayed this day of deliverance for the present, being patient toward humanity in love, so that many might repent and be saved. But Christ’s return could be at any time. He calls us as His servants to be watchful, to be patient, to grow and nurture His body of believers here, and to represent Him and His Kingdom here in our love toward God and toward one another in His image until He comes to take us home.

The goal of education is to grow the student into the maturity of the image of Christ our Lord as we build up His body and His house in love toward God and toward one another. While this has a purpose of equipping a student for service here in this world, our aim should always be to equip students for the eternal Kingdom that we await. A life of love in God’s kingdom involves building up the whole person God created each of us to be—one seamless mind and body informed and structured by God’s Word. The focus is not merely training individual trades or skills that will pass away, but as finite creatures we do ultimately need to focus our service within particular, God-given vocations as different, complementary members of Christ’s body. Each student might have a different God-given capacity for growth in different areas, but the goal is to fill up that capacity, whatever size and shape it may have, with the truth, goodness, and beauty of the image of Christ.

Given the stated goal of education, the teacher’s role is that of a gardener and a builder. A teacher is to tend and nurture the growth of God’s truth within the hearts of his students, though God must give the growth, while also curbing the growth of that which deviates from God’s truth in a firm but loving manner. A teacher is to supply his students with building blocks of knowledge and skill and with guidance in composing them together. All of this is done through instruction, example, and assigned exercise. A teacher should tailor his teaching to be appropriate for a student’s state of growth, using what the student has already learned as the elements through which to teach the next layer of growth. But a teacher can only pass along what he himself has received, drawing from the particular size and shape of his own capacity. Thus, students can benefit from a multiplicity of teachers who each have their own strengths, so long as those teachers all draw from and point to the same source truth of God’s Word. Christ is the Vine; we are the branches.

As a whole, I admire and pursue most of what classical education movement pursues. I add one caveat to my subscription to it, however. Classical education today emphasizes the Latin heritage of our Western culture and the “Great Books” from that heritage that equip the student to take part in the “Great Conversation” of human society across time. My own preference is to emphasize that we should derive our truth and philosophy and our rhetoric for the Great Conversation firstly from God’s Word rather than from the conversations of fallen man. The great teachers and authors of man’s history are only worth listening to to the extent that they point us to God’s truth, for anything else is not truth at all.

I perceive that our heritage for several hundred years has been one of trying to find answers to philosophical questions primarily from man’s conversations. This has led us to forget how to search the Scriptures for more than the elementary principles of Christ (Heb. 5:11-6:3). It is essential that students be trained and equipped to take part in the ongoing Great Conversation, but my own preference would be, in the spirit of ad fontes, to do that by emphasizing a study of the source of truth, which is God’s Word.

If one is to emphasize studying a classical language so that one can better ingest and grow from reading the root sources, I would firstly study Biblical Greek, so that one can be better fed from God’s Word, the source of all truth. I would then only study Latin and its derivative works more as context for applying Biblical thought to today’s questions and conversations and for catalyzing further searches into God’s Word for answers.

One must first first establish and then continually emphasize the firm foundation of how we must derive answers from the source of truth in order to equip our youth to stand tall through the storms that earthly life and its questions will throw their way.