Why Loudoun?

This is the third installment of a three-part series explaining the vision for Loudoun Classical School.

Why does Loudoun County need a classical Christian school? Well in part, the answer for that is easy—because children need classical Christian schools, and Loudoun County has plenty of children! Loudoun has been one of the fastest-growing counties in the country in the past 25 years, and as the classical Christian education movement has taken hold nationwide, Loudoun has not kept pace. Loudoun has over 400,000 residents, and till now, no classical schools! Christian homeschooling has flourished here, especially in Western Loudoun, home to Patrick Henry College and the Home School Legal Defense Association, but many homeschooling parents are eager to take their children’s education to the next level. That is perhaps reason enough to start something like Loudoun Classical School here in Purcellville.

But we think more can be said than just that. We believe there are reasons why a classical education is particularly important for a place like Loudoun County, and we plan to build our program at LCS to equip our students with what they need to serve this community—and through it, their nation, the church, and the world!

Steeped in History

Loudoun County is deeply steeped in history. Many of its towns were incorporated in the mid-18th century, and it became the most populous county in Virginia by the time of the American Revolution. It played a crucial role in the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and the countryside is dotted with historic markers, battlefields, and beautiful stone structures that attest the county’s rich heritage. Within less than an hour’s drive in any direction, you have sites of such epochal significance in American history as Mount Vernon, Harper’s Ferry, Manassas, and Antietam. When I moved here with my wife and three young children last year, I was excited at the opportunity for my kids to walk in the footsteps of the great men and women who shaped our nation’s story and gave their lives for its freedom.

But teaching children an appreciation of history requires a lot more than simply walking dusty paths to look at battlefield markers—indeed, you’re liable to find that while you’re intently studying the interpretive signs, your children have turned their interest to a nearby caterpillar instead! Instilling children with the love of history requires hands-on experiences, but it also requires creating an educational environment steeped in storytelling and a sense that history matters if we’re to intelligently navigate our present and plan for our future. One of the great strengths of classical education generally, and the curriculum at LCS in particular, is the deep awareness of history that it fosters. We seek to show our students that they are not the autonomous architects of their own lives, given a blank slate to reshape as they will, but that they have been plopped down in the middle of a great sweeping saga stretching back millenia, an epic tale that God is weaving with heroes, villains, statesmen and traitors, poets and prophets, and that they will not be able to play their part in this drama unless they know the rest of the story.

This appreciation for history is infectious. Once a student has learned to appreciate the drama of Alexander the Great’s campaigns, he will find a new enthusiasm for following in the footsteps of Robert E. Lee’s as well. Studying the foundations of freedom laid in the Magna Carta will give him a fuller appreciation for the great edifice of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Our children here in Loudoun County are surrounded by testimonies of great deeds that have shaped who we are today; at Loudoun Classical School, we aim to give them the tools to learn to love and make sense of these testimonies.

Training Future Leaders

Loudoun County is not only blessed with historical riches; it is also blessed with—let’s be honest—regular old riches. Since 2008, Loudoun County has boasted the highest median household income in the nation. Of course, let’s not pretend this is all roses; as any resident knows, this also means that it is cursed with some of the highest housing prices in the nation, and indeed steep education costs as well. We know that many families in Loudoun have to plan their budgets carefully to cover these high costs of living, and that’s one reason we’ve worked so hard to keep our tuition costs so low.

However, it won’t do to grumble ungratefully about the high cost of living here, and fail to praise God for the extraordinary blessings that a place like Loudoun County enjoys, and the remarkable opportunities that lie before our children. Loudoun County has a highly educated and skilled workforce, and is a national and even global leader in many advanced technology industries. Most significantly of all, of course, it lies an hour away from the most powerful city on earth, a metropolis whose magnetic pull will likely draw many of our children into careers in law, politics, defense, and data. Whether we want to be or not, as parents here in Loudoun County, we must recognize that we are raising future leaders; many of our children may find themselves occupying positions of significant economic and political influence.

How can we prepare them for this, and for the myriad temptations that such opportunities pose? How can we equip them with the virtue of wisdom, the virtue of kings and princes (Proverbs 1), the virtue that equips for discernment and judgment when the stakes are high?

This is the central task of classical education: the retrieval of and training in wisdom. We turn to the past and read the great books not out of mere antiquarian interest but so that we can glean the insights and imitate the habits that have been time-tested by centuries, that have proved their capacity to guide faithful men and women into how to effectively live out their human vocation. We study Aristotle and Augustine and Anselm to internalize their deep insight into human nature; we read the deeds of Caesar, Charlemagne, and Calvin to see how experienced leaders overcame seemingly insuperable challenges; we study Sophocles and Shakespeare to watch wise and foolish choices play out inexorably on the stage of human life, so that we can learn to act our own parts with justice and prudence. Every child, we are convinced, stands to benefit from a rich classical education, but it is indispensable for those preparing to be future leaders.

Preserving America

Speaking of leaders and history, we are surrounded here in northern Virginia with memorials to the leaders who built our nation and determined the course of its history. These leaders were not without flaws and blind spots—often grave ones—but they were nonetheless raised up and equipped by God to bequeath a great future to the nation they served. And one of God’s main instruments in equipping them was a classical education.

As one reads the writings of Adams or Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison, Washington, Witherspoon, or the dozens of other lesser luminaries that built a new nation out of the unpromising crucible of revolution, one cannot but be dazzled by their breadth of classical learning. They knew the great writers and political philosophers of their own century, but they were more likely to be quoting Cicero than Locke. Nearly all of these men were products of a rigorous classical education; they knew Latin and Greek, they memorized extensive selections of the great works of the Western tradition, and they read broadly in literature, science, and philosophy.

For the Founding Fathers, this classical education was not merely a way to fill their leisure time or to adorn their letters with impressive classical allusions. On the contrary, it was an indispensable aid in helping them to avoid the excesses of the French Revolution and counter the false secular humanism of the Enlightenment with the true humanism of the classical Christian heritage. They were presented with the daunting challenge of building the institutions of a new nation on a new continent, in a time of great intellectual upheaval, while remaining anchored to the institutions, legal and moral standards, and intellectual heritage of their past. Their success in seamlessly blending the wisdom of the old world with the opportunities of the new has made the US Constitution the longest-lasting written constitution in the world, and paved the way for the immense blessings that God would pour out on America and through America.

We live in a time when these blessings are being progressively scorned, forgotten, and abandoned. Even in conservative Christian circles, it has become increasingly common to encounter disillusionment with America and American ideals; many of our leading writers have cynically concluded that the moral decay and libertinism that surrounds us today is the inevitable result of the American experiment in liberty. Within the classical education movement itself, many educators have turned to “the Western tradition” as an alternative to the American tradition, a move that often coincides with an abandonment of the Protestant convictions that shaped our forebears and our freedoms.¹

Loudoun Classical School has been placed, by God’s grace, close to the epicenter of American public life, both past and present. Like it or not, we cannot hide from the achievements of our ancestors, whose memorials surround us on every side, nor can we hide from the responsibilities of our present and future, from the duty of taking up the legacy of American laws and institutions, with all their flaws and injustices, and making them into fit instruments for continuing to bless our communities, our churches, and the world. We know that Loudoun Classical School has been given a great opportunity to help shape young people who can take up these responsibilities equipped a rich grasp of their history, with the lost tools of wisdom, and with an appreciation of the unique vocation they have been given as American citizens. 

¹These trends pose important questions for the classical education movement more broadly, and we plan on addressing them in more depth in a future blog post.