My education? Classic

A couple of months ago the Washington Post ran a story on a St. Jerome Classical School, a Roman Catholic school that had had falling enrollment and debt. The article, Embracing a classical education, told how the school decided to embrace what is called the "Classical" teaching method, a method that "divides childhood development into three stages known as the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric." Each stage begins at a certain age for a number of years before advancing to the next stage.

[The stat I found fascinating was that the roughly 230 other classical schools in the country are mostly run by "evangelical Protestants." Where you at, Rome?]

As I read through the article I was struck by what I had missed in much of my schooling.  I did not have a classical education, but a classic education. You know how the word is used--you hear about something absurd and say, "That is just classic." It means that there is no surprise in the absurd news. My education was the classic public education. Latin was not offered in middle school. I do not recall reading from Plato's Republic in 4th grade. But we did learn the state capitols and I still remember them all (Florida? Tallahassee! Kansas? Topeka! Vermont? Uhh...).

This is not to discount what I did learn in public school and some of what I missed was by not applying myself as well the last two years of high school and community college. I was also fortunate to be educated in smaller towns and have good, solid teachers. But in comparing what I read in the Post to what I went through, I can't help but think how much more I could have learned and processed if simply the public education system had introduced certain curricula sooner.  It has led me to embrace such outrageous beliefs as having Spanish offered beginning in 6th grade (or sooner) rather than 9th, with some Latin thrown in, and may be offering a course in Logic.  I never had a course in Logic.  No assigned summer reading lists either, unless I happened to sign up for advanced classes for college credit.

The funny thing is, I didn't start to get into the "classic" texts related to history, logic and philosophy and their affect on human thought until finishing up a Bible degree at a dinky Christian college and then going to a Reformed seminary that was waaaaay smaller than the college. The obvious reason is because I was actually interested in what I was learning, though the bad habits of not putting in the hours of study haunted me at times. I look over some of the papers I wrote and the comments posted on blogs or Facebook over the past few years and I think, "Well crap, I did learn something!" May be God has something for me to contribute to this human project of his.

The most important lesson I've taken away from my schooling is that the learning does not stop. The desire for knowledge and relating it to the different realms of life is exciting.  I feel like I'm just getting started!