Feeding our souls...

In the Spring issue of the Intercollegiate Review, Peter Leithart offers an interesting historical perspective on the "new" classical schooling movement in America. On beginning the article, I was afraid Dr. leithart might be overly colored in his assessment by his close proximity and work with Rev. Doug Wilson and the Logos School folks in Moscow, ID, but found the article to be very well balanced, and at least mention many of the strains coloring the Christian classical schooling movement that I have encountered.

He says many significant things in the article, including some history of the current movement, the desire to return to some sense of tradition as well as to rediscover true humanism, and the success of CCE (Christian Classical Education) to produce outstanding students. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

... Liberal education is "above all else, and education in imagination, an initiation into the art of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the different modes of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this conversational relationship, and thus to make our...distinguishing mark of a human being"...True education is an intiation into our full humanity...

...In the end, however, classical education is more radical than reactionary-- radical, that is, in its original sense, describing something that goes to the roots. Classical educators advocate not a reversion to the imagined certainties and calm of the 1950s but a root-and-branch reform of American education that finds inspiration in medieval, Renaissance, and early American education...

...In a recent essay on "Eating Books", Callihan talks about the virtues of slow reading, reading for more than the "gist": "We in the modern world have too little time, and the same pressure that drives us to to gobble fast-food meals on the run causes us also to read veerything, even our Bibles, mush too fast." Callihan captures the vision of classical education in his Oakeshottian conclusion: "We starve our souls and our minds and wonder why there is so little wisdom in the world."

You can read the whole article here.

And if you are unfamiliar with the Intercollegiate Review, let me give you a little plug. The thought-provoking articles this issue cover classical Christian education, the new Agrarian movement, what makes a great composer of music and can such a genius exist in the contemporary world, and the meaning of the classical movement in architecture. It provides a great return on it's modest subscription price!