Today I want to talk about classical education. My thesis is that classical education and Catholic education are the same thing. It’s an interesting thesis, since, of course, classical education existed before the Catholic Church. Aristotle, who was a pagan living 300 some years before Christ, is largely the source of classical education as it is understood today. Not alone, of course, but classical education is considered to consist of the ‘classics’, those works from antiquity which have shaped Western Civilization. The information and formation received from those classical texts have informed Catholic philosophical and theological thought from the beginning of the Church, but especially in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, who is the universal doctor of the Church.

Teaching Our Children the Art of Learning

Though information and formation are closely related, they differ in an important way. Intellectual Formation is primarily about developing the habits of thought that make it possible to use information rightly. An intellectually well-formed man is able to think about any subject he chooses, for he can acquire the information necessary when he desires it, and his habit of thought will make it possible for him to follow an argument, as well as make reasonable deductions and right judgments about it. It is for this reason our school curricula should be directed toward developing this formation. If we do, our children will be equipped for life. Whether or not they learn and retain everything that is presented in school, they will be able to learn any subject when it becomes necessary or desirable, because they will know how to learn. Until they know how to do this, most (though not all) of the subjects studied are less essential than that formation itself. The fact is that though all men think, thinking can be done well or badly and one can be taught to do it well.

One large goal of education, then, is to teach children how to think, to develop the right habits of thought. We want them to accumulate important facts or information. Facts are necessary in education; some, like the truths of the faith, are essential. But even with respect to those truths that need to be known, knowing alone is not enough. One also needs to acquire a method whereby deeper penetration of the truth becomes possible. Classical education is by intention ordered to teaching people the art of learning.

There was a time when classical education was the education every educated person in Western Civilization received, sometimes known as a liberal arts education. In such an education the idea is to educate the man as man, whatever vocation he may pursue. All of his faculties are used. He develops all the powers of his soul. This is the education of a man as a man. He is not trained in a vocation, one field of inquiry, but he is trained in the truth of all reality, and he is prepared to live a good life.

In the classical curriculum the liberal arts are studied. These are the Trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric, and the Quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. These are presupposed to and ordered to philosophy and theology.

It is important to understand the order in the classical program. The arts of the Trivium and Quadrivium prepare the student’s mind to study the philosophic sciences, such as the Study of Nature (Aristotle’s Physics), the Study of the Soul (Aristotle’s De Anima), the Study of Ethics (Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics) and the Study of the Politics (Aristotle’s Politics). All of these are ordered to the Metaphysics, or Natural Theology. And all of this is ordered to understanding Sacred Theology. Aristotle, of course, didn’t know that Sacred Theology was even possible, but he did know that to know the first cause was the only thing that would satisfy the intellect. This schema for education, starting in the liberal arts and realizing its end in Sacred Theology, is laid out by St. Thomas in his Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate. So we see that all education is ordered in itself to understanding, in so far as we can in this life, God, Who is the noblest and most perfect object of our intellect and will.

This leads to a further reflection. We are made in God’s image and likeness, St. Thomas says, because we have the power to know and to love, as He does. Now, we are more perfectly in His image when we are using those powers, as opposed to merely having them, and when we are using them to know and love Him, we are using them most perfectly. We become more perfect and thus more like God insofar as we know and love Him. That is the goal of our life, and it is also the goal of classical education. That is why classical education is the education of a man as a man.

I’ve heard it said that classical education is not Catholic education. That would, as I indicated, be news to St. Thomas Aquinas, who understands education in precisely the terms I’ve just used. In that commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate, where St. Thomas is talking about education, he takes for granted that education involves the seven liberal arts, that they are for the sake of the philosophic disciplines, which have an order among themselves, and that the whole of this education is intended to bring one to an understanding of theology. He sees this as the right way to perfect the intellect, and for many years Catholic schools followed this understanding of education.

They have abandoned this understanding in recent years, either because they have abandoned the faith itself, or because they have moved to the practical view of education, where education is seen as a job ticket, not as an opportunity to develop the soul. In the past, for example, when my father was a student, even those who had business majors, as he did, followed the order of liberal education. My father had many of the same courses, even some of the same texts in his undergraduate education, as I did at Thomas Aquinas College.

I have further heard it said that classical education is about pagan people, ideas, and cultures. This is simply false. Classical education is about truth. It is outside of time, and doesn’t consider culture. It is about the perfection of the intellect, both by developing the power of the soul and by studying the right subjects in the right order.

Now, as a matter of fact, some of the people who thought best about these subjects were alive in ancient Greece, notably Aristotle. But it is not as pagan ideas, or as ideas thought by ancient Greeks, that we consider what they said. It is as thinkers and those who pursue the truth. St. Thomas refers to Aristotle as “The Philosopher”, just as he refers to St. Paul as “The Apostle”, throughout the Summa. He doesn’t do this because he is considering Aristotle as an interesting Greek product of the time he lived in. He refers to Aristotle with such deference because of Aristotle’s great knowledge and power of reasoning, the value of which transcends the peculiarities of any particular culture.

Aristotle reasoned to the existence of God, the unmoved mover. Aristotle came to know that man is a substantial unity, body and soul, and that his soul is everlasting. He saw that the separation of body and soul was against nature, and he saw that somehow, something had gone wrong with the order of nature. Even though he had not the benefit of revelation, he had some sense of the Fall, for, he observed, “in many ways, human nature is in bondage.” Aristotle was a remarkable thinker, and it is as such that his works are studied in a liberal education.

Remember what we were saying about the order of the sciences? That they were ordered in such a way that the end of the order was knowledge of the highest things? Theology, the end or goal of education, is sometimes called the queen of the sciences and the other sciences are called her handmaidens. The other sciences support theology. One way that is accomplished is when the arguments from a lower science are used in a higher science. For example, St. Thomas uses the arguments of Aristotle from the Physics in his proofs for the existence of God. All of you who have used the Mother of Divine Grace 10^th grade religion course have an acquaintance with those arguments, for it is those arguments that Fr. Laux uses in his proofs for God’s existence. Also, St. Thomas uses propositions from Euclid’s geometry as illustrations in his discussion of the nature of the Trinity. In each of these cases, the material reasoned to is pressed into the service of the faith, and one’s understanding of the faith is strengthened by it.

You might think of it like this. We listen to Mozart, Hayden, Handel, and Bach, not because of the time they lived in, but because of the music they composed. As a matter of fact, they did all live around the same time, and I’m sure that has to do with God’s providence. Maybe they each needed the other in order to achieve the level of perfection they could achieve. Be that as it may, however, we don’t listen to them as 18^th century musicians. We listen to them as great composers who composed beautiful music.

Similarly, in God’s providence, some of the great thinkers in western civilization lived in ancient Greece. They helped each other achieve the fullness of the intellectual perfection of which they were capable. But we don’t read them as ancient Greeks - we read them as men who have reasoned to the truth using their natural powers. And we use the conclusions they came to in the service of revealed truth.

Truth: The Key to Understanding the Relationship between Classical and Catholic

We say things like, “Yes, what you say is true”, or “I am speaking the truth”. We say, “This position is true.” We even say “that building is true”, as in it is a true representation of the architect’s plan. Notice that though different, there is a common element in all these senses of truth. What is common is that in every case there is a conformity between a mind and a thing. “What you say is true” means that the words coming out of your mouth match the thought that is in your mind. Something sensible (your words) is conformed to something intellectual. If you lie, that conformity is lacking. Similarly, when I say, “I am speaking the truth” I am affirming to you that the words you hear are conformed to the thought in my mind.

(As an aside, I just want to point out from this one very important reason why lying is so bad. I can’t see your thoughts, I can’t see your soul. I can’t know you directly. I rely on what you say to reveal your thoughts and your soul. I rely on your speech to reveal you to me. If you lie, then I don’t know you, I don’t know what you are thinking, and once I realize you are lying, I realize we can’t have a relationship of one person to another person, because relationship relies on knowledge of the other, and I can’t have that knowledge. Lying destroys personal relationships.)

Back to the conformity of spoken words to the thought in the mind. It is that conformity that I am referring to when I say, “I am speaking the truth.” But that conformity depends on another conformity. When I say, “This position is true,” I mean that there is a conformity between the thing in reality, and the thought in my mind, which is, in the scholastic tradition, referred to as the word of the mind, or the internal word. The truth of my thought (or internal word) depends on its correspondence to the reality outside. If they match, then what I think is true. This means, of course, that my true speech (the external word), also, ultimately, depends on the conformity of what I say to the reality of which I am speaking. (So someone can be speaking truthfully, but be wrong. That is if he is saying what he thinks is true, and what conforms to his thought, then he isn’t lying. Nonetheless, though he is speaking the truth, what he says is not true because it doesn’t conform to reality. Does that make sense?)

There is that third sense of true I mentioned: the true building. Again, there is a conformity of intellect to thing. The thought in the architect’s mind (his internal word) is the measure of the ‘truth’ of the building, which is, in this case, the external expression of the internal word or concept. We ask, “It is true to his design?”

So you see that in all three of these senses of true there is a conformity of mind to thing: The spoken word (a thing) to the internal word of the mind, the internal word to the reality (thing) of which it is an expression, and the external expression of the building (thing) to the internal concept or word of the architect. There is one more sense of truth that we want to consider now. That is the truth found in the Word of God. The Word of God is God’s concept of Himself (that is why we use the term Word) and It is also the second Person of the Blessed Trinity.

In the light of all this, we can understand St. Thomas’ remarks in the Commentary on the Gospel of St. John. St. Thomas says:

Truth belongs properly (per se) to Him (Christ) because He is the Word. For truth is nothing other than the conformity of a thing to the intellect, and this comes about when the intellect conceives a thing as it is. Therefore, the truth of our intellect belongs to our word, which is its conception. But although our word is true, it is not truth itself, since it is not through itself, but it is conformed to the thing conceived. Now the truth of the divine intellect belongs to the Word of God. But because the Word of God is true of itself, since it is not measured by things, but things are true insofar as they come near to a likeness of Him, and so it is that the Word of God is truth itself. And because no one can know the truth unless he adheres to the truth, it is necessary that everyone who desires to know the truth adhere to this Word. (In John, L. 14, lec.2)

The word in our mind is measured by its conformity to the thing it knows. But God’s Word is the cause of everything that is. He is Truth itself. In that way, He is more like the architect. We, and all of reality, are true because we are conformed to His thought, His internal Word. To know anything at all is to know God in some way.

Think about the implication here. My brother-in-law, Paul O’Reilly, in a lecture at Thomas Aquinas College, put it this way: “God contains all truth because things conform to Him. So how are we to reach the fullness of truth? By knowing God.” Everything we learn, every lesser truth, that is, less than God Himself, is something that will direct the mind to God who is the fullness of truth. And this also means that we can’t know anything fully unless we see it in the light of that ultimate Truth.

So classical education, which is the education of a free man, a man who can direct himself and the community of which he is a part, depends on and is directed to knowing truth, and knowing truth depends on knowing God, and His Word. Jesus, the Word, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Who established a Church, which is His Mystical Body, to guide all men to Himself. He established that Church to guide men to knowledge of Him, Who is Truth itself. There is no true education, no truth, outside of Him Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. So all true education has to be Catholic education.

To quote Paul O’Reilly again, “Knowing the truth, which is found in God essentially, and the Word personally, is what makes us free. And since the end of a liberal education is to know the truth, which enables one to live the life of a free man, it follows that the fullness of liberal education is found in a program of studies under the inspiration of the church Christ established while He was on earth to guard His truth.” So classical education, which is education simply, is Catholic education.

Now, in college the doctrine of the liberal arts, and the philosophic sciences, or, one might say, the teaching of the truth about these various areas of reality, will be undertaken formally. The student is then ready to make the more difficult universal considerations that are necessary. He will study the principles of grammar, the parts of the syllogism, genus, species, and difference, and the science of using words effectively.

Before the student gets to that point, however, there is a preparation for such an education, which can be seen to be the beginning and foundation of classical education. (It is this kind of education that I propose in my book, Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum. And I just want to mention, in case you are interested, that on our school's website there are some additional resources about Classical Education. See the article " Classical Education - Beginning in Wonder, Ending in Wisdom ".)

Children, and even adults newly pursuing classical education, do not have the tools or the experience to make the judgments necessary for philosophy and theology. They have to work on acquiring foundational areas of understanding. In doing so their intellects are strengthened and formed, enabling them to make good judgments. That is what we are doing as we educate our children.

What we all want, ultimately, is wisdom. We are interested in having true knowledge, which means knowing the cause of a thing, that it is the cause, and that it can't be otherwise. We want to know the Cause of the causes. That is what we are directed to, and that fits with our nature. (If you are interested in more information about the fullness of classical education I suggest that you look at the founding document of Thomas Aquinas College.)

Mother of Divine Grace School's Classical Curriculum

When I began developing curricula for children, more than 40 years ago, I knew that I wanted to teach children how to think, as well as give them the most important content I could. Dorothy Sayers' essay on the "Lost Tools of Learning", helped me understand and articulate the position that education should be directed toward both acquiring the art of learning, and to learning subjects.

With regard to the content of education, note that all learning is cyclical. We learn first on an introductory level and then we come back to the same objects at a deeper level. This is easiest to see, I think, in mathematics. When one first masters counting, the very next step is to learn the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) with respect to whole numbers. The rest of one’s mathematical career is spent learning the power of those operations. One adds, subtracts, multiples and divides fractions, then decimals and percents, then algebraic expressions, then trigonometric functions and then he uses them in calculus. This process is clearly a deepening of one’s understanding of what is first learned on a very simple level.

We follow the same process in every field, including the liberal arts and the sciences to which they are ordered. What young children do, if those who direct them are knowledgeable of the ends of education, are exercises that prepare their minds and hearts for the deepest level of natural, and, finally, supernatural, knowledge.

This involves both how and what we study. In the earliest years one helps the student strengthen and make docile his imagination by exercises in observation, memorization and sequential ordering. One does this with a matter that also prepares the mind and heart for those later deep truths. At this level children make their acquaintance with salvation history, something they will study all their lives. They also are introduced to the good and the beautiful in many areas, as a preparation for the true, as such, later on. They learn the basis of all arithmetic, develop an acquaintance with the geometric figures, are exposed to great music, and study God’s effects in nature, including in the heavens. These are the beginnings of the arts of the Quadrivium. They learn the basis of all language arts, reading and writing, which constitutes the beginning of the Trivium.

As the student matures, he continues to perfect these methods and subjects; he keeps coming back to them at a deeper level, developing his habits of thought. For example, in language arts preparation one is clearly preparing for the Trivium done in its fullness. The Trivium, as we have noted, consists of the arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric. It is worth also noting that all of these have to do with speech in some way or another. Grammar is concerned with the construction of the sentence, and its principles are the ways of signifying that determine the parts of speech. Logic concerns the common method of procedure in all the sciences, and principally considers definition and reasoning, both of which are carried on through speech. Rhetoric is the art of speaking persuasively. In all of these there is a sort of making: one makes a statement, one makes an argument, and one makes a speech. In our school, we work on perfecting these first connections with the arts that will lead to the sciences that will lead to natural and sacred theology.

Further, young students work on argumentation, so that they can eventually use rhetoric in the service of the truly noble. We teach our students to summarize, which is to order items according to importance instead of chronology, and we teach them to identify an argument and then construct their own arguments. We teach them to develop their thoughts in paragraphs, so that they can develop them later in essays and papers using the rhetorical modes: exposition, argumentation, description and narration.

We explicitly, with our older children, introduce the ends of rhetoric into their regular assignments. Rhetoric is of three kinds: the political, the forensic and the ceremonial. The political aims at establishing whether a proposed course of action is expedient or inexpedient; the forensic, whether an action done was just or unjust; and the ceremonial, whether someone deserves praise or blame. In our high school programs we discuss and write about all three types of actions and characters. In my experience, the student in the rhetorical stage is interested in the high and noble; he cares about what is good and bad, and about what is blameworthy and praiseworthy. So the ends of rhetoric are by nature of interest to the high school student. This is a very real preparation for, and participation in, the Art of Rhetoric. I want to mention that in my experience if you are having trouble getting a conversation going with a group of high school students, reframe your questions around the ends of rhetoric and they will respond.

We prepare for the sciences, too. We introduce our children to great literature. Through these works the student gains a sort of experience. The great works of literature appeal to the imagination and move the affections rightly. They present or imply profoundly important views of human life and reality as a whole. Similarly, the great works of history provide vicarious moral experience, a conception of human society, and an awareness of the greatest issues mankind faces. All of this prepares the student well to read the more difficult things, such as Plato’s Dialogues, and then the Ethics and the Politics of Aristotle, at the right time. We introduce our children to the arguments our Founding Fathers had regarding the nature of the republic, and the particular “incarnation” of the form of mixed government that was appropriate to us, in this new land. This is the beginning of the study of the Politics. We have the children study natural science, particularly animal behavior, as a beginning to the study of the soul. For those of us who are consciously aware of the fullness of the classical curriculum, there is an intentional ordering of the parts of our curricula to that curriculum, so that the fullness of the classical curriculum can be achieved as excellently as possible when the time is right.

As regards the highest object of the classical curriculum, God Himself, the end of natural and supernatural theology, we are preparing our children for that knowledge from the moment they are born. We do that by the way we live, by the example we give them of Fatherhood, and of sacrificial love, and by the doctrine we teach them as soon as they are able to reason. All of this is their first introduction to the greatest truths, and to the object they will, with God’s grace, contemplate in eternity.

Understanding How Thinking Takes Place and What It Means for Education

As I have been saying, however, it’s not only what you learn, but how you approach it, that makes a difference. I want to explain why. To do that, however, one must be familiar with how thinking takes place in the human person. The exposition I am about to give as to how one thinks comes from the De Anima of Aristotle, and it comes from a remarkably complex series of considerations. I am summarizing the conclusions of that involved argument, and therefore, necessarily, won't do justice to the whole. Nonetheless, as I think every teacher should have at least a general understanding of this process, I am going to give the summary, defective as it may be.

First, one receives the form of external objects by means of his five senses. He sees, hears, smells, tastes or touches the objects around him. That information is received by one or more of the five proper senses and passed on to what Aristotle calls the common sense. He reasons to the existence of this faculty because he sees that though the eyes can tell, for example, that the object on the table is white, and the tongue can tell that it is sweet, the eyes can't tell that it is sweet, and the tongue can't tell that it is white. Yet the person knows that it is the same object that is both white and sweet. Therefore, there must be some place in one where this information is integrated, and Aristotle calls that place the common sense.

Then, just as the proper senses receive from the external objects, and the common sense receive from the proper senses, the imagination receives the integrated form from the common sense. But this power (the imagination) retains what it has received, unlike the proper senses, so that we can produce at will images of the objects we have sensed.

The power of imagination may be compared to a slate. The forms which come from the senses are like seals, pressed into the wax. Sometimes the wax is too hard and the seal has to be pressed over and over in order to make the image. Sometimes the wax is too soft and the seal makes an impression the first time, but the wax mushes and the image is gone. Sometimes the wax is just the right consistency and then the image is nice and clear, sharp around the edges, a faithful image of the original.

Then, this integrated object is passed on (via nerves, I suppose) to what Aristotle calls the 'vis cogitativa', or 'thinking power'. The function of this power is to sort the objects into like kinds. It doesn't require universal knowledge, but only deals with the particulars in front of it, simply sorting them. An analogy that occurs to me is the way the baby uses that sorting toy that has holes on the top in the shape of a triangle, a rectangle, and a circle. He picks up the block in the shape of a triangle and sees that it fits with the triangle-shaped hole, so he puts the block in there. Similarly, he sees that the circle-shaped cylinder fits in the circle-shaped hole, and puts it in. He doesn't need to make some general consideration of 'triangularity' or 'circleness' to do that, he just sees a likeness in two particular things.

The 'vis cogitativa' works something like that. (By the way, I was once on a plane and in the flight magazine there was a fascinating article about how the electrical impulses originating in the proper senses moved along to the brain and were sorted in that process so that when the impulses actually went to the brain they didn't all go to the same place. Some went to the front right lobe of the brain, some to the left, and so on. That physical description of what happens seems to fit very well with Aristotle's philosophic judgment regarding the vis cogitativa.)

Now, there is more to the process of thinking. These images, retained in the imagination, and sorted into like kinds, are used by what Aristotle calls "the agent intellect", the active power of the mind, which, so to speak, shines a light on the images in the imagination. In virtue of this light, the universal form of the object is received into "the possible intellect". In that reception, understanding takes place. Given this process, clearly, the condition of the image is of great importance in the effectiveness of the understanding. Even concepts concerning immaterial objects like truth and beauty require an image. (De Anima, Bk III, Ch 7, 15). When you consider the highest objects, which are immaterial, you use a sense image.

So, as educators we must be concerned about perfecting whatever we can of every part of the process of thinking. There is not much one can do about the way the common sense works, or how the form is initially received, (though it is those things that the special education teacher largely concerns himself with), but the formation of the imagination is something that one can and should address. This is what guides us in the way we approach the content of the subjects the children learn.

Now the interesting and not too surprising thing is that when you intentionally think about perfecting the process of thinking, you find that you are following the natural development of the intellect. Education should always capitalize on the natural capabilities of the child. When children want to memorize, direct their memorization. When they want to argue, teach them to argue carefully. And when they want to express themselves, let them practice doing so.

In this method of education one pays attention to the particular intellectual strengths of each child at each stage of his development, and uses those strengths in every subject. If the student does what he is ready to do at that point of his intellectual development, he will profit from his work, and if he is not ready he won’t. That is why the order of the education is so important both in regard to how one approaches the subjects and how the content is arranged.

A Preparation for the Divine Life

Further, it is just a fact that all education is ordered to truth, and all lesser truth is ordered to the greatest Truth. Further, classical education is the education of man precisely as a man. It fits his nature. It makes him more perfectly what God intends him to be. It forms his mind and heart so that he is able to know and love the highest things in the way that is possible in this life. It prepares him not only for a job; it prepares him to live his life here in such a way that he is ready for his ultimate goal: life with God. Remember, that is the end of classical education, and it the end of our life as Catholics.

Education should prepare one to be happy in this life by teaching him what is truly most important, and helping him order his life to that, but this life is short, and eternity is very, very long. True education should put in front of us the ultimate goal of our lives, which is found in the life to come. If one is prepared for this life, but not the life to come, then he is missing what is most important. Bl. Cardinal Newman said, “If our hearts are by nature set on the world for its own sake, and the world is one day to pass away, what are they to be set on, what to delight in, then?” True education will help us rightly order our lives, both here and in eternal life. To lead the student to rightly judge the true ends of life is most of all to educate him. That is what classical education does, and it does that because it is ordered to truth, which means to the Truth, God Himself. And finally, that means it is Catholic education. The Church was instituted to guide us to the Truth, and that is what the fullness of classical education, done as articulated by St. Thomas, under the guidance and inspiration of the Church, does.

This end is perfect supernatural fulfillment and true happiness, infinitely superior to what we could hope for naturally. I want to mention something, though, that I find very moving. Aristotle, speaking of merely natural fulfillment and human happiness, writes in the Ethics of the life of reason:

…such a life [seems] too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; …. [For] If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve [do everything], to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.

This, of natural happiness.

I frequently wonder, what would Aristotle say about the end promised to us? Looking at this partial happiness, this limited participation in the divine life, Aristotle can already see that it surpasses everything else in life. And it already makes its demands: do everything in accordance with this end. Order all your life to this noble activity.

As we contemplate our accessibility to truly Catholic formation, we should ask ourselves, is everything in our lives ordered to the Vision of God? When we die and go to judgement, let us not be found to have cared less and striven more weakly for our perfect and infinite participation in Godhood than Aristotle did in search of limited and imperfect participation. Not only should our children get the very best, ongoing Catholic formation possible, but so should we. I do not think we should stop learning, ever. Real education, the kind of education I am proposing here, is lifelong and, in fact, eternal. Let us commit ourselves to learning here and now, as much as we can, for ourselves and our children, so as to prepare for the divine life in which we hope to participate.