My Philosophy of Education

THE GOAL OF EDUCATION

Isocrates, perhaps the father of the trivium, asserts that our ability to persuade others and communicate our desires sets us apart from the animals.  Our ability to come together and devise cultural norms is distinctly human and uniquely a result of the power of speech. 

For this it is which has laid down laws concerning things just and unjust, and things honorable and base; and if it were not for these ordinances we should not be able to live with one another.  It is by this also that we confute the bad and extol the good.  Through this we educate the ignorant and appraise the wise; for the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul.

In Antidosis, Isocrates views his educational goal as patriotic.  While he labored to touch the souls of his students in order to make them good citizens of Rome, we must strive today to make strong citizens for the kingdom of God. 

Mature and active citizens of God’s kingdom love wisdom and seek the honorable and lovely throughout the entirety of their lives.  Kingdom citizens submit to the reign of Christ in every aspect of their lives.  We recognize the importance of allowing the gospel to activate and empower our knowledge to change our own lives and the culture in which we live.   

THE FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF EDUCATION

The fundamental elements of Christian education are summed up beautifully by John Milton Gregory as “the Seven Laws of Teaching”:

(1) a teacher who knows the lesson to be taught; (2) a learner who attends with interest to the lesson; (3) a common language used, a medium between the teacher and learner; (4) a lesson to be mastered that uses the known to explain the unknown; (5) teaching that arouses the learner to use his mind to grasp a new idea or truth; (6) learning that is the process of a pupil thinking a new idea or truth into his own understanding; and (7) review and application of the ideas and truths communicated.

 

THE AUTHORITY IN EDUCATION

Authority is the right and power to command, instruct, and direct.  As citizens of the kingdom of God, all authority is His.  God has instituted the church and family to cultivate children to become godly citizens.  A family can not raise a fully developed child, ignoring religion.  Each family tacitly proclaims their religious beliefs through their lives.  Deuteronomy 6 gives families the responsibility to diligently teach their children.  However, the context seems less like transferring knowledge and more like sharing the legacy of the Christian culture.  Parents are commanded to teach the moral law and Christian principles when they sit in the living room, when they walk around the neighborhood, when they lie down to sleep, when they rise to greet a new day, and all the opportunities to find Christ in between. 

 

Professional educators partner with parents in order to educate and cultivate a culture of Christ, always acknowledging the parents’ God-given responsibility to raise children in the nurture and counsel of God. 

 

THE METHODS OF EDUCATION

From the ancient days of Isocrates, students were educated in what would later be codified as the trivium.  Throughout history, children have learned according to the method of classical education until John Dewey asserted his new antics in the beginning of the twentieth century.  As a tried and successful method, the trivium has produced the great minds of Aristotle, Pythagoras, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, John Locke, C. S. Lewis, and virtually every other person involved in the great conversation before 1950. 

 

The trivium includes three stages:  grammar, logic, and rhetoric.  The grammar stage is the first and most basic.  During this stage, a student learns the basic language of a subject and all its vocabulary.  Students learn the very basic methods of memorizing while young:  singing, chanting, and repetition, repetition, repetition.  While accumulating the facts of a subject, the student provides a foundation for the next stage, logic. 

 

The dialectic, or logic, stage takes the stored knowledge of various subjects and begins to organize it in a meaningful way.  This necessitates formal logic training but also accompanies the stage of development in which children begin to demand logical explanations for knowledge rather than a simple fact.  Organizing knowledge and beginning to learn how to define something through logic adds strength to the child’s knowledge and confidence in truth. 

 

Finding truth is not the ultimate end of education though.  Rhetoric is the culmination of the stages of learning.  Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, requires students to find ways to make their arguments for the truth attractive.  This includes poetry and higher sciences and wisdom in addition to the artful construct of logical arguments.  Rhetoric also forces students to recognize that their lives are the most potent of the persuasive powers.  Isocrates, along with countless other rhetoricians, acknowledge the power of ethos, or personal character, in the attempt to persuade others:  “…[A]n honorable reputation not only lends greater persuasiveness to the words of the man who possesses it, but adds greater luster to his deeds, and is, therefore more zealously to be sought after by men of intelligence than anything else in the world.”  Because people believe people, not disembodied ideas, rhetoric demands that we be the kind of people worth believing—people filled with the power and wisdom of the gospel. 

 

THE PERSONALIZED APPROACH TO EDUCATION IN LIGHT OF THE ABOVE

As a believer of the gospel and the ideas asserted above, I have no small task in showing the next generation the wonder and grace and knowledge of God in all creation.  In the classroom, I must lovingly show the power of the gospel to students who do not believe they can master themselves or the subject at hand.  I see the classroom as a training ground for life in which discipleship is the counterpart of academics.