Editors' Letter

Currently, the public square is an ideological battleground. The good news for those of us with classical sensibilities is that the classics exist for such a time as this. In fact, current cultural contentions mirror the complexities of classical antiquity far more accurately than our former (and now likely defunct) Pax Americana. As poet Robert Hass quipped, “All the new thinking is about loss. In this, it resembles all the old thinking.” At FORMA, we dwell in the fraught intersection of old and new, and we believe that classical thought can illuminate a divided contemporary culture. Of course, such an endeavor requires free discourse—which was a classical virtue long before it was a contemporary one. For this issue, we invited our contributors to address the concerns that are perplexing America—education, family, race, academia, censorship, and more. By providing a platform for classical practitioners to address complex questions through the lens of ancient thought, we continue the pursuit of wisdom and virtue that characterizes the Christian classical tradition. We welcome the thoughtful conversations that will ensue.

In this issue, Dr. Anika Prather defends the classics for all people, Samantha Jones addresses “woke” academia, Dr. Eric Wearne proposes options for hybrid homeschooling, Paul Twiss invites the church to a deeper engagement with human flourishing, and more. Along the way, you will find the thoughtful reviews and original poetry that you have come to expect from each issue of FORMA.

In this embattled cultural moment, FORMA is honored to provide a platform for Christian classical thinkers to advance goodness in the public square through robust scholarship, insightful commentary, beautiful poetry, and civil dialogue.

Cheers,

The Editors

The Editorial Team

Publisher: Andrew Kern, President of The CiRCE Institute

Editor-in-Chief: David Kern

Managing Editor: Heidi White

Art Director: Graeme Pitman

Poetry Editor: Christine Perrin

Associate Editors: Emily Andrews, Sean Johnson

Senior Editors: Jamie Cain, Matt Bianco

Contributing Editors: Ian Andrews, Noah Perrin

Copy Editor: Emily Callihan

Cultural Currency

WHAT’S IT GOING TO TAKE?

Neither the astronomical cost of tuition, nor the high incidence of sexual assault on American campuses, nor the omnipresent assault on Christianity and conservatism which is now standard at secular universities can keep graduates of classical Christian schools from wanting to go. It seems a secular university could rename itself The Anti-Christian Apostasy Factory and a good number of classically educated Christians would still want to go simply because it had an “amazing mechanical engineering program.” I suspect there are two reasons for this, both of them rather embarrassing.

First, classical Christian education has become too big, too diffuse, and there are simply too many people attending classical Christian schools that don’t belong. Mark Twain once said, “A classic is something everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read,” which means I will not be convinced human nature has changed in the last twenty-five years, that classics have somehow become easy to like, and that good taste is more common now than in the past. Classic literature is neither more nor less popular now than it was back in the

1970s, which means that whatever it is about classical Christian schools which is now popular, it isn’t Milton, Homer, or teaching virtue.

Second, classical Christian schools are reluctant to admit just how many graduates fall away from the faith when attending secular colleges. Cliches about “cultural engagement” and “plundering the Egyptians” mean a secular university can be hostile to the faith and yet still do remarkable work in bioengineering or computer science. A Christian trained in presuppositional apologetics, history, Scripture, and logic must be prepared to have his faith challenged in college. It is widely thought, then, that a classical Christian school could not claim to offer a robust religious education if graduates were not prepared to leave home, enjoy profound freedom and autonomy, and have their Christian convictions continuously assaulted for the next four years.

And yet, I know many classical Christian educators who would contend this is simply not an accurate depiction of what normally happens. A Christian teenager whose life revolves around sports, video games, and memes is not prepared to have his faith assaulted in college simply because he got a 72 percent on a test over Greg Bahnsen’s Always Ready, especially given how many questions on the test were probably multiple choice. As a strategy for cultural engagement, “plundering the Egyptians” tends to assume human beings are far more rational, intellectual, and guided by abstract considerations than they actually are. In fact, arguments prevail very little over the powerful embodiments of self-direction, self-discovery, and cultural rebellion which proliferate on the modern campus.

Having discussed this matter in class many times, I know that many students at classical schools bristle at the comparison between public schools and secular colleges. “At fourteen or fifteen, a Christian can’t handle everything which comes with public school. You don’t know enough. You can’t handle the temptations. By eighteen, though, you’re ready.” Ah, yes. Eighteen. When intellectual maturity and spiritual competence have finally settled in. But their reasoning seems a little too convenient, a little too predetermined by their own plans to attend the sort of university which brazenly, tirelessly assaults Christianity. How many children born and raised in the faith abandon it at sixteen? Personally, I know of none. How many children born and raised in the faith abandon it in college? I have lost count, and so I have far more confidence that a Christian attending a public school will remain faithful to God through graduation than that a Christian attending a secular university will do so.

That confidence has quite a lot to do with life outside of class, not just intellectual acumen. Unfortunately, too many of the exhortations we give to graduates going off to secular universities revolve around “making good Christian friends” and “finding the right church,” even though the former typically determines the latter. Our idolatrous devotion to community blinds us to rather obvious facts about friendship—namely, that our friends are far less likely to keep us from sin than our families are. When my students tell me about the ultimate importance of making good Christian friends in college, I ask them how much of their sinning is done in the presence of friends. After thinking on this a moment, they reply, “Quite a bit of it.”

Nonetheless, the typical classical Christian school is simply not willing to present itself as an option that requires any real renunciation or sacrifice apart from finances. Rather, classical education is simply a recherche, indirect route to success—of course, “success” in the conventional, entirely worldly sense of the word. “Latin, logic, and Paradise Lost are capable of producing graduates every bit as attractive to secular universities as the other expensive private schools in town,” and so no one enrolling their child in a classical Christian school should expect to give up anything.

But what if enrolling your child in a classical Christian school entailed existential sacrifice, not just financial sacrifice? What if it meant giving up on much of what the world has determined “success” to mean? What if enrolling your child at a classical Christian school actually meant consigning them— economically speaking—to a rather average future, a future comparable to that of a classical Christian educator, in fact? Suppose prospective parents were told what the average classical Christian educator made per year and that enrolling your child in a classical Christian school meant agreeing your child might not make a whole lot more. I was probably three or four years into my career as a classical educator before I realized there were a handful of parents that I cordially chatted with throughout the year who uncritically assumed any career which only produced a salary comparable to mine must constitute failure. What is more, they often assumed I must believe this, as well, and that it was the responsibility of any teacher to secure the “greatest advantages” for his students so they would not have to suffer the indignity of lower-middle-class life.

As a great admirer of Edmund Burke, I neither despise the rich nor envy them; nonetheless, as a private school teacher of many years, I have spoken with parents whose ambition for their children slyly implied, whenever grades and transcripts and colleges came up, “Oh, you have to want your students to turn out better than yourself—otherwise, who will be around in twenty years to send their children to this school? You can’t afford the tuition, can you? That’s just the way some industries work, old chap. The employees at a Gucci boutique can’t afford the handbags they sell, but they hope somebody can, or else the boutique will have to close. Don’t you see? By giving my son lower grades, you’re hurting yourself. Lower grades mean he won’t have the greatest advantages possible, which will hurt his chances of someday sending his children to this school.” Granted, conversations with these sorts of implications are rare; however, parents of goodwill, generosity, and virtue who enroll their children at private schools should know that many of their children’s teachers have been subtly informed of all this a few times in the past.

We are not hesitant to send our children off to Babylon U. We are not gritting our teeth as they head off to get reeducated. Rather, we will do whatever it takes to get them to Babylon U. There was a time when classical Christian education was a small, scrappy movement for people who rejected the false promises of the zeitgeist and were willing to suffer accusations of being Luddites, dorks, snobs, and recluses—in other words, to live with a great many disadvantages so far as advancement goes. Today, classical Christian schools are no longer densely populated with such people, just sparsely populated.

At this point, one has to wonder what exactly a secular college would have to do in order for classical Christian schools to quit sending them graduates. Conversely, to what degree is a secular university’s willingness to consider my letters of recommendation born of their ignorance of my beliefs or the beliefs of most teachers at classical Christian schools? Do graduates from classical schools want college admissions offices to know what their high school teachers raised them to think, or would that hurt their chances at getting in? Should I not want former students to attend colleges where I could lecture and write freely without fear of getting canceled? It is one thing for a classical school to claim their graduates are apologetically savvy and ready for the world, and yet, a casual observer might be forgiven for wondering when self-respect would take a hand and classical teachers would tell students, “Don’t go there. They can’t stand our kind.”

If a classical school took a more skeptical approach toward apostasy factories—or an outright hostile one, for that matter—as opposed to merely saying there are things in life more important than grades and scholarships, could it survive? In our vir- tue-signaling society, “There are things in life more important than grades” could easily become the classical Christian equivalent of the snack food company which claims to be “More than a snack food company,” and yet must make this claim because every modern boutique product needs a noble credo which describes its raison d’être. If the modern man is going to pay a steep price, then, he demands to hear he is doing good, but the only real way to avoid the temptations of virtue-signaling is to willingly suffer.

In order to break the vice grip secular colleges have on the Christian imagination, Christian high schools need to reimagine graduation as the beginning of a relationship and not the end. Were I an administrator, one of the first questions I would ask a high school teaching candidate—an experienced candidate, at least—is, “With how many of your former students are you still in regular contact?” If a high school teacher of ten or more years does not regularly talk to any former students, he is not likely a mentor to any of his students now. Reimagining graduation also means schools would do well to regularly conduct this thought experiment: if a tuition refund had to be given to parents of graduates who quit going to church in college, how would this affect the way we send students to college, or which colleges we were willing to send them to? How would this affect the way we conduct classes, or even what classes we teach?

What I am suggesting might very well throw the rapid expansion of classical Christian schools in this country to a grinding halt, but people within this movement talk entirely too much about growth and numbers. Pious people need chaste, peaceful, sober refuges from the madness of public schools, but a classical Christian school must be something greater. It must be a refuge for all those “nobodies” who actually want to read classics, as Twain might have put it.

Joshua Gibbs is author of the books How to Be Unlucky: Reflections on the Pursuit of Virtue and Something They Will Not Forget: A Handbook for Classical Teachers, and host of the podcast Proverbial, which you can subscribe to now wherever you listen to podcasts.