Each day it's more apparent that our society is in moral and intellectual chaos—unmoored from any transcendent understanding of what's good and true and beautiful.  

This disorder makes crystal clear why classical Christian education is so needed in our tumultuous time, and I was struck by this article spotlighting one Christian public intellectual's call 40 years ago for Christians to reintroduce "ancient wisdom and 'right reason'" to education.

In particular, Charles Malik—a scholar, educator, and diplomat to Lebanon—called for Christians to focus on the humanities, the disciplines that introduce students to the most important questions about our mortal lives.  Surrendering these fields to secular society, Malik warned, would leave areas of profound cultural influence to Christianity's adversaries.  

Our hope and prayer is that students at Knox Classical School would never experience the "dearth of grace and beauty" plaguing our culture but instead learn from their earliest days that the God who is good, true, and beautiful holds all things together—and be ready to share with a lost and dying world that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.  

"Let your reasonableness be known to everyone.  The Lord is at hand."  

— Philippians 4:5

How will choosing classical Christian education affect what your child is doing in the classroom and at home on a day-to-day basis? Here’s a quick summary. 

At the grammar level (approximately grades K-6), the most apparent differences are in orientation and emphasis. From the very beginning of their education, classical Christian students learn that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” not “self discovery” or even (just) the material world around us. Grammar-stage classes also emphasize extensive memorization and strive to cultivate a love of learning through vivid books, hands-on projects, and wide exposure to what’s good, true, and beautiful.  

A kindergartener at Knox Classical, for example, will memorize 160 history-timeline events and a catechism with proof verses, and observe God’s sovereignty over and fingerprints on all human history, six different areas of science, mathematics, the English language, and more!  Students in older grades will build on this knowledge each year, diving deeper into every subject to recognize God’s greatness.

At the logic and rhetoric stages (approximately grades 7-9 and 10-12, respectively), the uniqueness of the classical method is clear from the subjects studied—especially logic, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology—and the goal pursued: Not just knowledge for knowledge’s sake (or for the sake of a standardized test) but developing students who can discern the truth and communicate it with love and prudence.

Read more about this trivium-based approach to learning and why it’s so successful.  

One of the distinctive strengths of classical education is that it focuses on methods and content with proven track records.  Today we’ll focus on the "Great Conversation," an ongoing discourse connecting thinkers, philosophers, writers, and scholars across various cultures and eras as they search for truth, order, freedom, goodness, beauty, virtue—and much more.  It's a way of understanding how ideas have developed and evolved over time through the exchange of thoughts, arguments, and insights.

The Great Conversation plays out in a set of pivotal literary and philosophical works known as the "Great Books."  Simply put, the Great Books are the sort of works that generations of people have considered worthy of passing on to their children.  These are the writings of renowned authors like Virgil, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Jane Austen, and they offer profound insight and intellectual rigor that have shaped human intellect and society.  However, this doesn’t imply that classical students completely disregard modern literature—students track the Great Conversation through modern works, as well. 

By immersing students in this Great Conversation, we can help them understand that careful—and influential—thinkers don't emerge in isolation.  (“Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.”  Prov. 11:14).  And we train them to desire and value ideas that are good, true, and beautiful and that have stood the test of time.

As we engage students with the Great Books and partake in the great conversation at Knox Classical School, we guide them in communal thinking alongside the most eminent figures from our cultural heritage.  And we approach these texts not from a presumed neutral stance, but rather within the framework of the biblical worldview.  The overarching objective is that as students develop an affection for the virtues of goodness, truth, and beauty evident in the Great Books, their adoration for both God and fellow beings will flourish.