Why School?

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

Christian parents have the God-given duty and privilege to direct the education and upbringing of their children. Scriptures such as Deuteronomy 6:6-7 and Genesis 18:19, Proverbs 22:6, and I Timothy 5:10 all speak directly to this imperative. Though the Bible offers some general guidance, and even gives a few specific practices, it does not lay out a one-size-fits-all approach to carry out this imperative. Throughout the ages of Christendom, Christian parents have successfully carried out this mandate in various ways, by teaching their own children at home, by employing private tutors, or by partnering together with other families to provide a classroom teacher. All of these arrangements have inherent merits and limitations.

For more than a quarter-century, the option that worked best for our own family was home education. I remain grateful for all the ways that the Lord has used our successes-and our failures-as home educating parents. As the youngest of our six children approached high school years, I began to feel the need for community and accountability in order to finish well. At that point, I had become very active in the Christian classical education recovery by way of authoring a language arts curriculum, and pursuing my own classical education alongside my children (and a few other children that joined or partnered with our family through the years). All of this led me to help found and direct our local homeschool co-op, Providence Prep, which continues to provide a first-rate program to assist parents in the task of educating their own children at home. At the same time, teaching high school courses in this setting opened my eyes to the fact that a great number of students and parents need the accountability and structure that a classroom setting and teachers apart from Mom or Dad can provide.

Other families have chosen to direct the education of their children by means of public school or private school education. The prevailing cultural winds have made public school a very challenging option for most Christian families to navigate; in the current wave of cultural transformation, Christian families are finding themselves increasingly marginalized in secular public and private education. Many are drawn to a more traditional Christian classical option for their children, but this does not exist in public education, and is often prohibitively expensive in private schools. Furthermore, though they do not wish to shoulder the full responsibility of directing their students’ day-to-day schooling, many parents do regret the long hours spent five days a week at school, usually followed by hours of solitary homework, which exhaust students physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and leave precious little time for family relationships.

Loudoun Classical School combines some of the best aspects of classroom education with some of the best aspects of home education. LCS offers a complete and integrated Christian classical Jr. High/High School curriculum, with a collegiate-style structure of three “campus days” and two “reading days” each week. Campus days provide the benefits of vocation and community. Reading days provide time for restful reflection.

Campus Days: Vocation and Community

Our campus days offer the gift of vocation to students and teachers alike. Dr. Gene Veith writes, “Vocation is the way God works through human beings to govern His creation and to bestow His gifts.” God specifically calls and equips His people for the benefit and blessing of the Christian community. Our model at LCS is to bring together those whom He has called to the vocation of teaching in order to serve to those in our local community whom He has called to the vocation of student. The LCS Board of Directors has a number of veteran classical educators and leaders in the classical recovery. Our Headmaster, Dean of Academics, Registrar, and several of our teachers have pursued classical higher education specifically in the Liberal Arts. All of our teachers have multiple years of teaching experience. But more than all of that, in the words of Dr. George Grant, our teachers “love what they love in front of their students.” The student who does not naturally love grammar or algebraic equations will often find it hard to resist the teacher who does. At the very least, such a teacher can inspire wonder and delight where none existed before. Our teachers also model the humbling work of education as repentance-a work that is sometimes even humiliating, as students often grasp and retain ideas more easily than we do!-intertwined with daily diligence. As teachers seek to love what they ought to love, and to know what they ought to know, even those students who love school the least may be inspired to the pursuit of life-long learning. It is not at all uncommon for the Lord to direct the vocational path of a particular student for years to come by the example of such teachers.

Our campus days offer the gift of community as well. Our common goal is to become people of rightly ordered affections who love what God loves. Though our teachers are specifically gifted for and called to the vocation of teaching, we understand from Scripture that everyone is called to the pursuit of wisdom and understanding: “Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not . . . Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee: love her, and she shall keep thee. Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.” (Proverbs 4:5-7) At LCS, our teachers take their place as the chief learner in the classroom, and thus lead the way in cultivating a thriving community of such lifelong learners, beginning with the fear of the Lord. A classroom full of like-minded students working side-by-side, week-by-week, gives both opportunity and inspiration to persevere in difficulty, to rejoice in the success of others, and to enjoy the shared delight of growing together in wisdom and understanding. At the same time, a classroom full of still-being-sanctified sinners also offers unique opportunities for growing in Christian charity and forgiveness.

Reading Days: Restful Reflection

Reading days at home allow students the opportunity for restful reflection in the context of family relationship. These are not “days off,” but purposeful time set apart for self-study. The course for LCS students is set by teachers in the classroom community, and reading days provide students with time and space to work out what has been worked in. On these days, students, under the direction of their parents, learn to organize their time in a way that will best suit them to achieve periods of focused attention interspersed with family interaction. We encourage families to develop a routine for reading days that includes both quiet times of study and corporate times of contemplation around a good book, a beautiful poem, a reading from Scripture, or a great hymn of the faith. The truism, “All education is self-education” has been a byword from educational philosophers such as Charlotte Mason and Robert Frost; our reading days give students the opportunity to develop habits of self-education that will set them on the course of true learning.

School As Scholé

Scholé is a concept that has recently surfaced-or I should say, resurfaced-in the Christian classical education recovery movement. Scholé merits its own blog post, which will be forthcoming in the next few weeks. Briefly, scholé, which actually gives us our word school, is the idea that education is inextricably linked with leisure. One cannot pursue education if one must work all day every day in order to provide the basic necessities of life. Thus, the education we offer at LCS is an immense and unprecedented privilege that we must never take for granted. But in a deeper sense, scholé is opposed to much of the frenetic, distracting, and disconnected endeavor that passes today for education. In the context of classical education, scholé requires an ordering of the curriculum, of the classroom, and of our lives in order to enjoy the thoughtful pursuit of knowledge both in community and in solitude. This is the aim of “school” at LCS, reflected in our structure, core curriculum, and our daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rhythms. We would love to have your family join us!