Chris Stovall: "Solving the Paradox: Education, Religion, and the New Classical Schooling"Solving the Paradox: Education, Religion, and the New Classical Schooling By Chris Stovall, Alliance Defense Fund Sr. Legal Counsel Recently the ADF Alliance Alert featured an abstract for an excellent new Columbia Law School working paper, The Constitutional Paradox of Religious Learning by Mark DeGirolami. In a nutshell, the Columbia Law School professor writes that a stridently secular public education purged of all religious content largely fails to accomplish a foundational purpose of public education, namely, forming adults with the requisite character and virtue to be excellent citizens capable of contributing to the strength of our constitutional republic. DeGirolami suggests that an expanded contemporary version of the classical liberal education best achieves that worthy purpose, because it includes robust discussion regarding (rather than indoctrination in) the religious beliefs and systems that give the context necessary for accurate understanding of many of the great ideas and works of literature, politics, philosophy, the arts, and more. Any intellectually honest person would recognize that this approach might be the closest thing possible to “neutrality” toward religion in our public schools, as opposed to the prevailing deafening silence on so central an influence in Western history, culture, and contemporary societal values, which is manifestly not neutral. Nevertheless, DeGirolami recognizes that the inconsistency of modern Establishment Clause jurisprudence makes it very difficult for us as a society to have the confidence to implement such an important educational paradigm in the public schools, and he analyzes the implications of this state of affairs. Readers interested in exploring the recent and growing resurgence of classical education will enjoy an excellent treatment of the subject recently included in the Intercollegiate Review, a journal of scholarship and opinion published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. In “The New Classical Schooling,” Dr. Peter J. Leithart, pastor of Trinity Reformed Church and a professor of theology and literature at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, contrasts the classical liberal education with the currently prevailing (and failing) model of public education predicated on the theories of John Dewey. He then discusses several examples of successful implementation of classical education in both Protestant and Catholic Christian school contexts, with a wealth of references to resources on classical schooling. On the public education side, the Charter School Growth Fund’s recently awarded a $2.7 million multi-year grant to an Arizona family of classical charter preparatory academies called Great Hearts in recognition of their educational innovation and excellence. This award demonstrates the promise of restoring classical education in the public school context, public education which is not hostile toward religion (either actively so or by a palpable ignoring of it), but instead fully educates students on the importance of religious ideas in the shaping of Western history and culture, through a rigorous course of study steeped in the great works of Western literature, history, philosophy and politics. As the Charter School Growth Fund describes the Great Hearts educational program:
As the Great Hearts website adds, almost quoting DeGirolami:
Can you imagine an America where these were the stated goals and motivating principles of all public schools?
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