Third Benefit - the good Civic Life
This series continues with a look at the benefits of a Classical Christian education based on an original article by Arcadia Education that highlighted nine primary benefits as the classical education movement is gaining recognition and steam in the United States and beyond.
In this article, I hope to demonstrate a timely benefit to a Classical Christian education – that of the importance to live a Civic Life. My hope is that this is timely not only because we are (again) in a perpetual election cycle as I write this in April 2024, but because we continue to see the fabric of our nation seemingly move further and further away from that which was imagined by our Founding Fathers.
The root Arcadia article mentions that the civic life in one in which:
“Students of classical education learn the importance of civil life and community leadership – primarily in the classroom, then extending to recess, the athletic field and into the oratory, musical, and performing arts – always with an orientation towards living a life of integrity and service to others.”
How do classical schools do this? To put it simply, we start at the foundations – we read the great works of the West and focus on the great questions and conversations that have taken place since antiquity. We gear, guide, and mentor our students to seek after truth and find answers to many of these questions and to keep seeking over the others.
As our friends at the Circe Institute note:
“Classical education moves toward, prioritizes, and revolves around ideas. The great ideas are those that best help us understand the God, humankind, and the world we live in.”
We do this because the cannon of great books are those that embody the transcendental qualities so often spoken of in classical circles – truth, goodness, and beauty and exemplifies itself in the words of David Hicks in his treatise Norms and Nobility:
“Classical education eventually fills the young person’s head with the sound of voices: the impassioned debate of the great figures of myth and history concerning what is good, beautiful, and excellent in man. Through his imagination, the student participates in this dialectical confabulation, and his thoughts and actions become literally involved with the Ideal Type.”
What does this all have to do with living a good civic life? These are the same questions and the same conversations our Founders had and those who influenced them asked dating all the way back through antiquity. Thomas Jefferson was fond of quoting Cicero, who greatly influenced the work of not only Jefferson and the rest who gathered in Philadelphia that hot summer of 1776, but others who would play a role in the thoughts of that group, such as Algernon Sidney.
Our students grapple with the large questions of life and duty to one’s country because the mission of most classical schools has as one of their core attributes the service and responsibilities of a good citizen. We don’t do that out of coercion, but out of a genuine desire to impact the world and make it a better place for having served others.
Whether in reading Plato’s Republic, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, John Locke, Jefferson, or others, our students begin to unlock and understand the meaning of what a statesman is and what they are expected to do simply as a result of being a citizen.
Many today say our nation is at risk and is falling apart. They will paint a portrait of a country loosing its way and give speeches and write articles marked by a pessimistic viewpoint, especially of “the other side” wins an election.
I don’t share that pessimistic viewpoint. Because I have the blessing of working in, teaching, and leading a Classical and Christian school, I see the bright future of students who will have every opportunity to impact our nation based on the development of their ideas. I have hope for the future of our country because of a specific conversation I had with a group of high school sophomores recently where they were debating the roles and balance of power in our government and how the government needed to return to its roots in the Constitution.
One might wonder if that was simply the right thing to say. I submit rather that they said it not for that reason, but because they understood not only the need to fix the balance of power and reestablish a true system of checks and balances, but they shared all those thoughts because they read Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, Locke, Sidney, and Jefferson before they read the actual Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution.
With that background, they can fully appreciate the beauty of our Republic and live a life that is focused in part on their obligations as citizens, as part of “We the People”.