A Pamphlet for Prospective Students

“So Your Parents are Thinking of Sending You to a Classical Christian School” is approximately 7400 words long. After an introduction, the pamphlet is divided into four main sections. Portions of each section are reprinted below.

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Excerpt from How To Read This Pamphlet

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Right now, there’s a good chance that you’re not all that excited to read this pamphlet. It’s certainly not the sort of thing you would choose to read. Your parents may have asked you to read it, or the school where you’re applying may even be requiring you to read it. You have already sized up the length of this pamphlet, determined it’s going to take about half an hour to read, and are considering skimming or even skipping the boring parts. 

I’m not going to tell you that this pamphlet is actually exciting. It’s not. If you read it all the way to the end, you may find it interesting, strange, stupid, or profound, but it won’t be exciting. In this pamphlet, I am going to talk about why old books matter more than new books. I’m going to talk about beauty, truth, emotions, religion, history, and duty. There are no characters in this pamphlet. There is no plot. It’s just a description of how things are and how things should be. 

Let me be honest with you, though: the sorts of things I am going to talk about in this pamphlet are the same sorts of things students at this school talk about every day in their literature classes, civics classes, theology classes, and so forth. In other words, this pamphlet is a bit like this school, which means that if you’re going to make it as a student at this school, you have to be able to make it through this pamphlet. If you hate this pamphlet and find it so boring that you can’t finish it without skimming and skipping, this school isn’t for you. 

This pamphlet contains descriptions of classical Christian education, which is the kind of education this school offers, but it also contains a few arguments about why this school does the things it does. Some parts of this pamphlet will be easy to understand, but some parts will require you to pay very close attention and read slowly. If you do not have the sort of attention span that can handle the length and depth of the arguments in this little pamphlet, this school is probably not for you. I hope you’re not offended, but the fact of the matter is that many teenagers have so completely ruined their attention spans on video games and social media, they find it difficult to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes, especially things that aren’t exciting. There are many schools out there which have noted just how short the average teenager’s attention span is and responded by changing their curriculum and their teaching methods to accommodate shorter attention spans. This school hasn’t done that. This school doesn’t change with the times. That’s part of what it means that this is a classical school. 

Excerpt from The “Christian” Part of Classical Christian Education

There are many different kinds of Christians. There are Lutherans, Baptists, Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and hundreds of other denominations. Most classical Christian schools are open to people of just about any denomination. For the moment, though, I would like to speak about just two kinds of Christians: Christians who go to church every Sunday and Christians who don’t. 

When I refer to Christians who go to church every Sunday, I mean every Sunday. They might very occasionally miss church because of illness, but that’s pretty much the only reason they think legitimate for not being in church on Sunday morning. Week after week, month after month, year after year, they can be found in a church on Sunday morning. Let’s call these sorts of people Every-Sunday Christians. 

When I say there are also Christians who don’t go to church every Sunday, I mean they go to church every so often. They might go once or twice a month, but they might also let six or seven weeks go by without making it to church. Let’s call these sorts of people Every-So-Often Christians. 

Regardless of what sort of church you go to, this school takes an approach to Christianity which is really only going to make sense to Every-Sunday Christians. Every-So-Often Christians will find themselves frustrated and confused by the sort of claims the teachers at this school make about Christianity. My intention in this pamphlet is not to argue that you should be an Every-Sunday Christian. I’m simply saying that at this school, Christianity is practiced and preached as an Every-Sunday sort of thing.  

Let me explain. 

Every-Sunday Christians don’t go to church every Sunday because they feel like it. They wake up on Sunday morning tired, wanting to go back to bed. And when they get up on Sunday morning, they have plenty of little projects around the house they would like to start on, and they have hobbies they’d like to fuss with, and unfinished work that needs to be ready by Monday. They do not feel like going to church, but they go anyway because they believe it is their duty. 

Because they believe going to church is a duty, they do not have to decide on Saturday night or Sunday morning whether they are going to church or not. They already know they’re going. They have made a decision (years ago) to always go to church on Sunday. 

Every-So-Often Christians do not regard church attendance as a duty or an obligation, which is to say church attendance is not a priority. Instead, going to church is a thing they do when they feel like it, and they do not often feel like going to church. For this reason, Every-So-Often Christian families are less likely than Every-Sunday Christian families to pray together in the evening or read the Bible together on a daily basis. All of this makes Every-So-Often Christians much less inclined to talk about God on a regular basis, or to discuss the commands and precepts of God when thinking through important matters. If a certain person only attends church when he feels like it, he does not want his religion to inconvenience him, which means that when the teachings of Scripture become difficult to follow (because they are unpopular or thought “outdated”), the Every-So-Often Christian is more likely than the Every-Sunday Christian to simply do what is easy and popular.     

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Excerpt from Uniforms

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I’m not saying that a private school uniform is the most beautiful sort of clothing imaginable, or that a student magically becomes good just by wearing it. However, I am saying that uniforms help train students to care about beauty and goodness. How? A uniform asks a student to care about something other than himself and his own comfort. Over the years, I have heard students make many different kinds of arguments against uniforms, but almost all of them come down to “what I would like,” not what other people would like. 

Christian high school students often borrow their values and priorities from popular culture, and popular culture places a high value on “expressing yourself,” “finding yourself,” and “being yourself.” A uniform doesn’t stop a student from expressing himself, it simply narrows the aspects of himself that he expresses. Every student is a unique individual, of course, but every student is also a student, and wearing a uniform reminds students of this fact. 

When you’re at a classical school, it is more important for you to act like a student than it is for you to act “like yourself.” This school is not a place where you go to express yourself, it is a place where you go to learn wisdom. Neither is this school a stage where you go to “be yourself” and win the approval and praise of others. That’s what social media is for, and a classical Christian school is not a platform set up for students to perform upon. Instead, a school is a place where you go to listen, to mature, to absorb wisdom and knowledge, and to be formed for virtue and good works. Wearing a uniform confirms your shared purpose with other students. You’re a unique individual, true, but that’s not why you go to a classical Christian school. At a classical Christian school, you will be treated like a teenager, like a Christian, like a boy or a girl, and like a student, all of which are identities you have in common with others. Consequently, at this school you are more likely to be told to “act like a Christian,” “act like a gentleman,” or “act like a lady,” than you are to be told to “just be yourself.” You attend a classical Christian school to learn what it means to be a Christian, a lady, or a gentleman. These are not terms we are free to define however we want, and at the age of sixteen or seventeen, no one really cares what being a Christian means to you. They care that you learn what “being a Christian” means to the wise men and women whom history has vindicated. In speaking of Christ, St. John the Baptist said, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30), and a classical Christian school is interested in helping you do this. Wearing a uniform is a small but significant way in which you can decrease, learn to be silent, and make room in your heart for the wisdom of Christ and His friends.  

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Excerpt from Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Grades

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The writer Walker Percy once said, “You can get all A’s and flunk life.” This truth sits close to the hearts of classical Christian teachers. For instance, a certain student might perform well on tests, get into a great college, and enter a lucrative career, and yet be wildly unhappy and treat his family poorly. In other words, plenty of high school students graduate with great GPAs but go on to be lousy fathers and terrible husbands, in which case all their study and diligence in school was really for nothing. A high GPA won’t keep anyone from being miserable or making others miserable. 

Now, teachers at a classical Christian school do care about students “doing well” in the worldly sense of the term. If you want to get married and have kids, you want something good and God-ordained, and in order to have such a life, you need a job, a home, a car, and so forth. Simply put, you need money, and there is no point denying the fact that good grades turn into scholarships, scholarships turn into good colleges, good colleges turn into good jobs, and good jobs turn into good money. At the same time, I have been in plenty of arguments with parents who tried to convince me that their child’s entire future was going to fall apart because of a low grade I gave on an essay. 

The thing is, getting a C in a high school class isn’t going to keep anybody from going to college. It may keep an ambitious student from going to the prestigious college of his dreams, but a classical Christian school doesn’t exist to help ambitious students get into the highest realms of earthly success. There are some private schools that exist for that very reason, but not this one. While I care about my students landing jobs in the future, I am far more concerned that they don’t “flunk life,” as Walker Percy put it. 

You don’t have to spend much time in a classical Christian school before you hear someone mention “truth, goodness, and beauty.” This is because classical Christian teachers believe that pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty is how you keep from flunking life. Obviously, classical Christian educators are not alone in their interest in truth, goodness, and beauty. Everybody talks about these concepts; however, classical Christian teachers mean something very particular when they use these words.

Many people these days say that truth is entirely relative, or that everybody has “their own truth.” Similarly, modern people often say beauty is relative and that everyone is entitled to take pleasure from whatever art or music they like. In conversations about music, you have probably heard people say things like, “You like rock music, I like country, my dad likes jazz, but we don’t need to sort out which music is good or bad because it’s all a matter of opinion. Everybody likes different things. Beauty is in the eye of beholder.” While modern people are less squishy about goodness than beauty, they also tend to believe that what is right or wrong can change over time, and that behaviors which were thought evil in the past can—because of scientific discoveries or cultural change—suddenly be revealed as good and acceptable. 

I should point out that the sort of people who believe that truth, goodness, and beauty are relative tend to bristle at the expression “flunk life.” Why? Because one person’s idea of flunking life might be another person’s vision of perfect contentment and happiness. What gives one person the right to force his vision of “acing life” on someone else? 

However, classical Christian schools do not hold that truth, goodness, and beauty are relative. Instead, classical Christians believe that God Himself is truth, and that God Himself is goodness, and that God Himself is beauty. We believe that wherever we see truth, goodness, and beauty, God is revealing Himself to us. The greatest, fullest, and final revelation of God is Jesus Christ, and yet God reveals Himself in many other ways, as well. 

Because a classical Christian school does not believe that truth, goodness, and beauty are relative, neither do they believe that “flunking life” is relative and that everyone is free to pursue whatever path in life they like. The fact that a grown man enjoys living in his parents’ basement and playing video games for three hours every day doesn’t mean his life is good. If he quits going to church because he has decided God is “too big to fit into one religion,” he isn’t “discovering his truth,” he is abandoning God. If a woman deserts her family to have an affair with her boss, she isn’t “figuring out who she is and what she needs,” she is flunking life. If she spends several hours every day posting photos and videos of herself on social media, she is not “being true to herself,” she’s just shallow and vain.   

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