The teacher must have a sufficiently winning personality that his students would want to be like him— not merely want to know what the teacher knows— and parents must not allow endless, irrefutable competition against the teacher to swindle the student’s heart away.
If we step outside of our current historical moment and listen to the wisdom of the past, we might find a healthier alternative. For thousands of years, figures like Plato, Cicero, Augustine, and C.S. Lewis have carried the torch for a different kind of education: the formation of the soul.
There are some who might view such questions as irrelevant, or an exercise in overthinking. Others may deem their children resilient enough to withstand whatever consequences may come about by not thinking about them. The problem here is that when we don’t make decisions based on convictions, we will likely make them based on convenience (the distance, cost, or size of a school). But what if the answers to such questions carried massive implications for your child’s future? What if an educational institution’s “soil” was the most critical factor to the detriment, or flourishing, of their students?
Repetition is well-established as a component of classical pedagogy. Repetition helps us memorize, helps us remember, helps us perfect and master. I have come to see another virtue in repetition: Repetition is restful. Repetition brings the shoulders down and reduces tension for both the student and the teacher.
We don’t want our kids to grow up and face adversity wondering, Do I have what it takes? We want them to know. We want them to have witnessed so many heroes living with integrity and fighting their weaknesses that they trust in the sureness of doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. We want them to stand up like warriors.
For classical educators striving to “integrate the disciplines,” music provides an invaluable instrument of integration. Music studies harmonize with every core discipline of he curriculum: the music of various periods vocalizes the movements of history, the formal structures of music correspond to the formal structures of poetry, the theory of music applies principles of mathematics, the physics of music makes audible the laws of science.
Christian education demands that we teach students what to love and how to love, for love is simply the greatest kind of knowledge. A classical education aims to train the affections and show a man how to “rightly order his loves” (ordo amoris), though a man cannot order his loves until he knows what they are.
