My friend suddenly found herself a single mother, with young children to raise alone. She went into teaching and found a job at the best of all possible private schools. Pay was low, but her kids would attend the school.
They would have a world-class education — the best of all possible curricula and challenging of teachers. Cultural opportunities abounded. The school’s alumni list was a Who’s Who, What’s What, and Who Went Where. She was thrilled that despite her small paycheck, she could give her children a world of opportunities.
It went well for a couple of years. Slowly, she saw an arrogance in her students. The worst incident happened one day when one of her students lied to her. She told him, “You can’t lie.”
He looked her straight in the face and answered, “My dad’s a professional. He lies on the job every day, and he makes more money in a week than you’ll make in a year. What’s your point?”
The scales fell from my friend’s eyes. The school where she taught excelled in academics but lacked values at its core. The next year, she started teaching at a smaller school with Christian values, where her children’s education would be well grounded in not only academics but also morals.
What can we learn from her experience?
Parents are their children’s first teachers. Parents who lie, disrespect authority, and don’t believe they need to work in the system raise children who lie, disrespect authority, and don’t believe they need to work in the system. Arrogance begets arrogance. We teach by example, both good and bad.
Values matter. Integrity shows. Manners are important. We can give our children the best world-class education money can buy, and their education can still be worthless.
Imagine buying a libretto for Handel’s Messiah and reading every word of it. You can spend a month staring at the notes, analyzing the parts, and memorizing the lyrics without ever having a clue of what the Messiah really is. It’s not until it is performed — or listened to with full orchestration — that we can marvel at Handel’s genius.
The same is true of a world-class education. A world-class education is more than memorization, completion of the right books, and study of the “right” foreign language. It’s about teaching the whole child and building up a child’s heart.
Dorothy Sayers’ essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” is at times venerated as the holy grail of classical education. She urged vigorous mental exercise, a strong understanding of history, and early study of Latin. It is easy to blindly follow those few guidelines and assume that if we do so, our children receive a world-class education.
If we follow those suggestions of Dorothy Sayers without reading her other works, we risk missing an integral part of her vision of a “world-class education.” It would be like trying to take the Ten Commandments and saying if we memorize that list, we get the gist of the entire Bible.
This is what the Dickens character Gradgrind does in Hard Times. Gradgrind is obsessed with his children learning facts. He forces them to learn facts — and then more facts — and more facts. His purpose for education is as utilitarian as the book’s setting in an industrial British town. Everything in his school is in its place, and everything is done with its purpose — to pour more facts into the poor children’s heads. His school left no time for the circus or anything smacking of frivolity.
Sayers did not advocate this. She encouraged the building up of the Whole Man and urged us to rediscover our creativity so we could build up that which has been lost in our world. When we build our intellectual agility and combine it with our creativity, we unleash the real power of freedom. Children develop their creativity when they are given the freedom to play and experiment and when they are raised in a world of positive encouragement.
We teach our children the real meaning of freedom — and give them a real world-class education — when we first give them values. Those who worship the values of greed, arrogance, and deceit lay their lives before false idols with clay feet. They build the schoolhouse of their children’s education upon sand.
Paul reminds us that love is most important:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. (1 Cor 13:1-3)
A world-class education begins with a rock of values and is taught with words of love. A lot of love and a strong foundation of basics go a long way. We must teach our children to love — not just those like us, but the lost, the forgotten, those below us, and those in authority over us. Our children must know how to obey rules without bending them. When the character is well-formed, our children can build their knowledge of facts, figures, and more. Then they can use those facts and figures to do great things.
When we forget love and values in the classroom, we've more than failed to give our children a world-class education. If we give our children a school without values and love, they grow up with a worldview that destines them to failure and hopelessness, and spells misery for us, for them, and for the generations to come.
This doesn’t have to happen. Gradgrind learned this lesson at the end of Hard Times. At the conclusion of Dickens’s novel, Gradgrind left his facts behind and instead taught “Faith, hope, and charity.”
We must infuse our teaching of facts with virtues — faith, hope, and charity. When we do so, greater things can happen than we can imagine.
It begins with a real world-class education.
Copyright 2006 by Mary Biever. All rights reserved.
Mary Biever is a homeschooling mother of two who publishes encouragement articles and runs Encouragement Workshops For Today's Families.
This article was adapted from one of her columns.
