Classical Christian Education

Thanks, Jeff. I also have some handouts if you want to send those around afraid of the Bible. We can spend a few minutes talking about some issues that I think are are more directly related to the Old Testament. And if you have a Bible and you wish to you wish to turn, there are several passages that I will flash for you. You may wish to find the context. We could entitle this film Jerusalem versus Athens. In fact, there was a third century church father named Tertullian who asked the question, what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? And when he asked that, he was really asking the questions, what does Christianity have to do with paganism? How do we view paganism? How do we look at the great achievements of the Greeks and the Romans and even the empires before that? And what profit, if any, is there in the intellectual pursuits and achievements and accomplishments of those that were outside of the pale of Israel in the Old Covenant and the Church in the New, as symbolized by the two great cities of the ancient world, Athens and Jerusalem? Cthulhu's answer was that they have very little to do with one another. Augustine's answer was quite different. They actually have much to do with one another, and those of us that are involved in classical Christian education think that they do have something involved, but that the relationship is sometimes one of tension, and that we have to be careful in what we mean by classical and what we mean by Christian. We always have to be clear in those terms. St. Paul said in Colossians 2, verses 2 and 3, see that no one beguile you through philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, and contrary to the wisdom of the Holy Ghost. We are warned to be careful about philosophy, and when St. Paul wrote in the first century, of course he lived and breathed in a world of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas. Modern philosophy, for 20 centuries, is largely a footnote to Plato. Regardless of whether he was right or wrong, that's the way the world is. Outside of Solomon, he got there first. And dealing with philosophical questions requires us to deal with Plato and with Aristotle, to some degree Socrates, if we can discern what it is he wrote as it comes to us, through both of those men. Tertullian said that the same subject matter is discussed over and over again by what he calls the heretics. Now he means by this people who may have been in the church or people outside of the church, probably people within the church but who were not orthodox, and the philosophers. The same arguments are involved. Whence comes evil and why is it permitted? What is the origin of man and in what way does he come? Besides the question which Valentinus has very lately proposed, whence comes God? Those questions are not difficult to ask, they're difficult to answer, but you can see in Tertullian's time that the philosophical questions of what is man and what is God, how do we know, these are global questions, and it doesn't matter whether you're a Christian or a non-Christian, those questions have to be answered, and they have to be answered satisfactorily. Tertullian is complaining here that the heretics are raising these questions with unsuitable answers. When he talks about the same subject matter, he's talking about first things, the things that are at the bedrock of what forms what we might call a worldview. It doesn't really matter if you're a Christian or a non-Christian, you still have a view and an opinion about whether God exists. And depending on the answer to that question, that tends to inform everything that you do thereafter. It doesn't matter whether you're a Christian or a non-Christian, your code of ethics informs the kind of world that you pursue, the kind of world that you create. There are traditionally five or six categories of worldview kinds of questions. We could ask questions in the metaphysical category. Don't be afraid of that big word. It just really poses the question, what is reality? What is? What is the stuff of being? What is a human being? Well, he's different than a tree, but what exactly is he? Metaphysics grapples with those kinds of questions. What is reality? Epistemology is the study of, not so much reality, but study of knowledge. How do you know? What is the warrant upon which we proceed to know anything, and when we know something, how do we know that we know it? There's a wonderful chapter in Descartes' Meditations, the very first chapter, actually, it's not that difficult to read. He describes how he was sitting in his pajamas by the fire somewhere in Bavaria one night, and it occurred to him that he might not be real. I know that sounds strange, but he actually entertained the question quite seriously. Could I be a self-conscious actor in someone else's dream? Have you all seen that movie, by the way? It was made into a movie not long ago. It's men in black. That's the question they deal with. Everything goes as it goes. And then at the end it all zooms out from the eye of the dinosaur. Remember the scene at the end? That's just being an actor in someone else's dream. Men have been toying with that, and Hollywood producers have too. That's an epistemological question, but it's not new to the 20th, 21st centuries. Ethics, you're more familiar with. This is the category of worldview that asks the question, what is good? What is the good? Plato had something to say about that, as does Jesus. And as a subcategory of that, we will entertain this tonight, politics and aesthetics. to other categories. Politics is really what is the good for everybody? How do we govern ourselves? And then aesthetics, what is beautiful? How do we know what is beautiful? When Paris steals away the beautiful Helen, why did the Greeks all go to battle against Troy? Ever wondered that? Maybe you haven't. But they fought a big battle over it for ten years. It comes down to one question. You have to have beauty in your life, and when the most beautiful woman on the planet was taken away by the Trojans, she had to be reclaimed. It's that simple. Now maybe beauty is not that important to you, but it is a philosophical question. Well, what indeed then has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Both of them answer all of these questions. Is there any concord, Tertullian asks, between the academy and the church? What between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from the ports of Solomon. who had himself taught that the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart. What is the relationship of the two worlds? Jerusalem and Athens collide on first things. That is, the nature of God. Is there God? How do we know? What is the basis of what we would call epistemic certitude, warrant for belief? We disagree on matters of ethics. We have a code of ten things. Lots of pagans have other codes which agree on some points, disagree on other points. We have a different idea of what is good and what is evil. So on first things, there's often very little conversation that can be had. But does that mean that there is conflict on all things? Well, no. And out of this comes a sort of synthesis which has blossomed into what we call classical Christian education. What is reality? Epistemology, how do we know what is good? All of these things are entertained by both by both schools of thought, Christian and non-Christian. Augustine, who by the way lived in between those great tectonic plates of history at the close or the fall, really the waning days of the Roman Empire and the emergence of the Christian era. Augustine died in 434 and the legend says that the that the Visigoths were literally banging on the gates of the city, and he was found, apparently due to a heart attack, on his knees in his house. So he lives literally as the Roman Empire falls, and it's pretty clear that Augustine brings into existence what we call the Middle Ages, which were anything but dark. They were quite illuminated. Augustine said that a Christian is a person who thinks in believing and believes in thinking. Pagan learning is not entirely made up of false teachings and superstitions. It contains also some excellent teachings well suited to be used by truth. These are, so to speak, their gold and their silver, which they did not invent themselves, but which they dug out of the mines of the providence of God, which are scattered throughout the world." Simply put, Augustine would agree with me if I said, you don't have to be a Christian to add 2 plus 2 equals 4, whether you're a Christian or a non-Christian. You don't have to be a Christian to shoot men to the moon. Non-Christians have done this. You don't have to be a Christian to think rightly. In fact, we all know Christians who don't think rightly, and that's tragic. We of all people should think rightly. But you don't have to be a Christian necessarily to get some things right. No, we don't make that claim at all. That's silly. But he does say that because the world is created by God, all the world belongs to him. In a sense, what he's claiming here is that all the truth that's in the world is true because God is true. So if a pagan denies God and still gets it right, Well, he's borrowing something. It's the gold and silver that he's plundered from the Egyptians. It's not really his. It's something that God had first. In contemplating Jerusalem versus Athens and the world that was, let's think about world history in two broad categories. This is not on your note sheet, by the way. I don't believe, but I will get to that momentarily. The world that was, and then let's talk about the world that came to be. And I'm going to use it as the historical fulcrum here. the advent, the incarnation of Jesus. Jesus divides world history right down the middle, and things change when Jesus comes. But the world that was, St. Paul describes this world, and I'm going to break in Galatians here, the letter to the church at Galatia, you're well aware, I'm sure, that this is a long and complicated argument. So in breaking into it here, we're risking misunderstanding. Nevertheless, what I want to focus on is something that's probably not the main point of this text. As long as the heir is a child, notice how he refers here to the Jewish people under the Old Covenant. He refers to them as childlike. This is fascinating. He is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. Everything belonged to the Jewish people of God. But there is a child-likeness to their estate in the Old Covenant. They are not yet in maturity and full possessors, because the fullness of the inheritance hadn't come yet. He is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. And when the time fully came, God sent his son born of a woman that we might receive the full rights of sons. There is a kind of incompleteness to the old covenant world. This is not only true for the people of God, but it is also true for everyone else who lived in the world. There is an incompleteness because there is so much about God and his world and ourselves that we do not and cannot know until Jesus comes. It is a world of immaturity, of child-likeness. And if you think of the human race as one big being, one human being, there's a kind of maturation that occurs. Think of it this way. In the book of Kings, what kind of sins are the people committing? They're throwing their children into Moloch, burning them alive, doing things that even Nero didn't do. They were abhorrent, and the people of God did them. But by the time you get to Jesus, are people doing this? You don't find that showing up anywhere on the pages of the Gospels. People don't worship idols in Israel. No, 70 years in Babylon, whatever else they were, they weren't idolaters when they got back. But they were hypocrites. They had different sin tendencies. But history had moved and people had moved. It doesn't mean that it had gotten better, it means that it had gotten different. So, on the one hand, we move from being Moloch worshippers and apostates of one species, but history changes, and people do change, and by the time we get to Jesus, we have a whole set of different sin tendencies. And that's kind of clear if you read the first several chapters of the book of Revelation. You have letters to those churches, and you have sin tendencies of all different kinds in those exhortations, don't you? Well, that's because history is moving, and God is bringing his people to maturity. It is childlike, and in some sense, Jesus breaks into history as the first mature man. Now, I don't mean to give the impression that Jesus was born like you sometimes see him in Eastern Orthodox icons. You know, you've seen the pictures that look sort of stale and fragile, where Mary is pictured and her head is cocked to one side, and then she's got you know, Jesus on our lap. Have you seen the icons I'm talking about? Only he's like a full, he's like a little boy, but he looks like a man. Okay, there's a reason for that, but it's kind of strange. It's like Jesus comes into, you know, his infancy fully mature. That's not exactly true. Jesus didn't understand algebra or the calculus when he was 16. He wasn't inventive yet. He was probably quick, but... You can imagine growing up in a household with Jesus, James's brother saying, you know, mom, there's no chance here. I mean, there's no way to blame Jesus. I've always done it. So maybe he was perfect in that sense. But when I say mature, I'm speaking more broadly here, that Jesus brings into history the possibility of spiritual and philosophic and spiritual maturation. In fact, Jesus is called the first mature man in the book of Ephesians. The goal of history, in some sense, is maturation of humanity into a bride for the son. What is the Bible about? It begins with a garden and it ends with a city. It begins with a woman and it ends with a bride. It starts with a marriage, the marriage goes badly, but it ends with a remarriage at the end. That's the broad story. Yahweh is preparing You've always read it daughter of Zion in your Bible, but in Hebrew that's just appositional. It's daughter who is Zion. It's daughter Zion who is the bride for the son. Jesus is the bridegroom. We know this very clearly from New Testament theology. The goal of history is to unite Jesus with the bride. So the goal of history is to mature the bride in preparation for that great event. That means you're moving. And it means that God will continue to mess with us in history because maturity and growth happen through tribulation. There's no such thing as stasis in God's world. There's no such thing as sitting on the island of Calypso for seven years with Odysseus while nothing changes. Nope, things will change. God will change them for you, because he's maturing you into something else. And that's what the goal of education is, the maturation of the whole person in knowledge and understanding and wisdom. These are the biblical words for it. In classical education, we would refer to these as grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. They loosely correspond to one another. So, what is education about? Well, first we have to be concerned about restoring the image of God which is stamped on every child who walks into our door, whether he is a believer or not. Secondly, we want to bring a student to the self-conscious embrace of his calling under God. The Puritans had a word for this. They called it, from the Latin voce, the idea of vocation. You didn't grow up and have a job so that you could earn a lot of money and drive a BMW, although that can be nice. But the purpose of work and labor is to achieve a lawful calling and to embrace that immaturity and responsibility and then to honor God through that. It was Luther who taught us the honorability of work. Because he taught us that every believer is a priest. You don't have to be a priest to be pleasing to God or to have a real vocation. No, the real people who work are the doctors and lawyers and farmers and architects and car mechanics and carriage builders and home builders and brick masons and everything else. Those are the people who make God's world work. And that's honorable. And whatever it is you do, if you self-consciously embrace this as God's call on your life, then you honor God in that. That's the goal of education. So the missing link. Jesus Christ. How is this? Let's talk about this. St. Paul says, he continues in Colossians, he says, My purpose is that you may have the complete understanding, complete understanding, that's total, exhaustive, of the mystery of God. namely Christ. So there are some things that we can't know about God until Christ comes. Christ is the full divesting of God in the flesh. And to the degree that we can understand Jesus, we have understood the mystery of God. Because in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Well, let's unpack that for a minute. What is that suggesting to us? There is a sense in which the world before Jesus, the world before Christ, could progress only so far in wisdom and knowledge because it worked with an incomplete field of knowledge. Now this is evident with Greek philosophers, but even the Jewish prophets lacked the full revelation of God that would come in Jesus. Remember that curious verse in Peter? where it talks about how men under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit wrote, and even the angels desired. Concerning what they wrote, they didn't understand. There's that passage in Peter which suggests that even the prophets sometimes wrote down things, and then they read them, and it's like, what does this mean? Daniel said that. He writes everything down, and Daniel says, what does this mean to the angel? The angel says, seal the book up, Daniel. It's not for you to know. Put it back on the shelf. Well, it's not until Jesus comes. Well, think about being a Phoenician in that world. You might be good at building ships, but you can only proceed so far in understanding of other things. How about this one? And I know this might be difficult for you to put aside your Christianity, but if you could put aside your Christianity for a minute, which will give you an immediate answer to this question. Let me just pose a question that might be a problem if you're a 5th century BC Phoenician. What happens when I die? A split second after I'm dead, what happens? Do you know? Well, they had a theory about it, but how could they know that they knew? Does that frighten you? Would that have frightened you as a 5th century Phoenician? It should. It should terrify you now. Because right now you probably hang your hope on the Bible, but on one specific verse that says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. That's the singular place in the Bible that says what happens a split second after you're dead. But how do you know it's true? Have you ever been there? You see the problem? There's some things we can't know. We can't know. And men can only proceed so far in history because there's an unknowability about certain things. But when Jesus comes, well, it's great. You can know the answer to those questions if you can talk to someone who's been there. Jesus' claim is that he's been there, and he's come back and he's told us. So you really know, not because you've been there, but because you have a reliable first-hand account of someone who's been there. In my father's house were many rooms. If it weren't so, I would have told you. I'm going to prepare a place for you, and if I don't prepare a place, I'll come again and take you to myself. Where I am, there you may be." That's great. See, that really comforts me. Does that help? Well, sure it does. If you understand Jesus to be who he claims to be. But if you take Jesus out of that, then you proceed only so far till you get to the end of the question, and the question is not resolved. It's not answered in the way you want it answered, with the kind of certitude that you need to put your eternal existence on it. This is the great horror of life outside of Jesus. It is horror. Jerusalem and Athens collide on first things, but not necessarily all things. The Christian faith asserts a distinctive metaphysic, a view of being or ontology with its creator-creature distinction. We believe that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and when God creates man, he makes man, and man's being is human being. It's not divine being. You see, God and man have different kinds of being. This is a metaphysical question. They're separate. God never becomes man, and man never becomes God. You say, well, wait a minute, what about Jesus? No, the fathers were real clear on this. 451, they all got together and said, let's be clear. The Council of Chalcedon, God becomes man, takes to himself a human nature without division, without confusion, without separation. So he continues to be both God and man in one person forever. So even when Jesus takes to himself, when divinity takes to himself humanity in the person of Jesus, they don't commingle. In other words, the beings are not blurred. They are distinct. In fact, they are held in what the church calls a hypostatic union. That's important. That's a metaphysical. We're not ever going to be God. Well, that just separated us from half the world that does believe that we will. Just move east of Jerusalem and you're in the map. You see? The Christian faith asserts a distinctive epistemology, a way of knowing based on revelation. How did Plato know that the forms that he postulated were true? How did he know what the good was? Well, he couldn't. It was ultimately speculation. How can we know what the good is? How do we know? Well, because we have someone who's been there who tells us. The Christian faith asserts a distinctive ethic, a way of behaving, the Ten Commandments, what we might call the Law of Love. But I'm trying to quickly and rapidly overwhelm you with a comparison between Jerusalem and Athens, that on every point there is tension on first things, but not necessarily on all things. That was the world it was. We speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. As it is written, no eye has seen, no ear heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him. Those who love Him, when people who intend to comfort you speak to you the first half of this verse. Going through a hard time, need some cheering up. Hey, look, cheer up. Nobody has seen, heard, or no one has ever conceived what God has prepared for those that love Him. So look forward to what's coming. Well, actually, the verse continues and says, God has revealed it to us by His Spirit. There's a sense in which we know, we intuit the future because we are connected to one who is timeless. Those things are ours as a present possession. I think that's what St. Paul is getting at. So he's going to talk, I want to talk now about the world at Kings V, but before I do that, let me change files, and let me stop and take some questions if you have them there. Anyone? Now the question is, Are there any other religions that make these sorts of claims? Yes, the answer is partially so. I don't think there's any other faith that makes the kind of comprehensive claim. Because not only does Christianity make a claim about eternal future, but Christianity claims a divine being who existed eternally before history, who is comprehensive in both directions. In other words, the very nature of being that we posit is unique. No other religion that I'm aware of posits a trinity of divinity. That's a unique concept. But in terms of maybe the other part of your question, thinking of religions that make claims to have access to information that is beyond us. The ancients had ways of getting at this, and if you read Homer, it's pretty clear. If you read Virgil, they all had ideas about the underworld. It was commonly called Hades. And all of the great heroes of the epics go there. Odysseus goes there. Achilles goes there. and the Eskos there, and the Iliad, they're all looking for assurance that their adventures will succeed, and they're always pointed to Hades, and they always go down into the underworld and they meet people. And it's astonishing, because the people that they meet always seem to have a recollection of the past, they know how they got there, but they have no sense of the present. When Odysseus talks to one of his soldiers that's killed at Troy, and the soldier says, I forget his name, it's one of the funny Greek names, he says, my body was left on the seashore. Make sure that you go back and bury me with my armor so that I can be at peace and I can be forever remembered. And then he goes on to say, now tell me what's going on with so-and-so. So he remembers being killed, and he remembers that he's not been buried. But he doesn't know what's happening now. And yet, Odysseus consults him for what will happen in the future. And he seems to have an idea. Well, you're going to go from here and go off and do such and so. It happens that way with all of the heroes. I don't want to get off too far on this, but it's interesting the way the ancients conceive of information through channels that they don't have access to. And it seems quite universal, at least from Homer down to. Well, Virgil writes, you know, at the time of the first century B.C., he's writing for, you know, for the emperor. That's not the only view, but it's one and it's shows up in various versions in history. Your question could take a lot longer to answer, but. But I would answer it. I'm sorry. We sharpen it up a little bit. Yes. Yes. Mohammed, yeah. Fill in the blank. Right. Right. Right. That's an apologetic question. It's a good question. Let's set up Jesus and Mohammed and Confucius and let's compare all their claims and then see which one is warranted. And we can do that systematically. We take a lot of time. But I would say that I would say that the claims of Christianity are exhaustive on the basic questions and they are and they are. They do proceed, in my judgment, on a unique epistemic trajectory, meaning that the way we get certitude and warrant far and away leaves in the dust the claims of Mohammed. I have a person who claims to be God in the flesh, who was seen and touched, for whom the record is undeniable. That's for starters. There's no question that the historical account of that is true. I accept it lock, stock and barrel. And if I do, then the claims are astonishing. Someone who not only makes a statement about my future, but who makes a statement about everything that existed in the past. Good question. It's maybe the best I can do with it right now. Well, the world that was and the world that came to be, we have to take into account the Greeks, who were among the first to conceive of what we call the Trivium, and the Romans, Cicero and Varro, who initiated a process, what we call the Encyclopedists. An encyclopedia is just a word that means You know, one eyeball, you've heard of the cyclops, that's at the root of this word. He's a Homeric character. But an encyclopedia tries to take all knowledge and to put it down into one place. And as it doesn't mean every single detail, but it means it was an attempt by the first century Romans to just sort of catalog the categories by which human knowledge could be could be sort of, well, hierarchical, put into a hierarchy, managed. But they only got so far with it. It was the Western church that eventually develops and takes over the model. Now, it might be just because the church was the last man standing in 500 AD, and so picked up the task. But I think in doing so, maybe that's a historical accident. But nevertheless, the church is well equipped to do so because it has this metaphysical and epistemic starting point, which makes it uniquely able to take knowledge further than it could have gone otherwise. I've already mentioned St. Augustine, who dies in 434, and I think I am now somewhere located on your handout. Am I close? Page two? Ah, yes. Anybody know what this picture is on the page here? It is. It's Notre Dame. Very good. Does anybody know when the foundation was laid? That would be really good. It had to be before about 1100 and something. I remember because Aquinas was teaching there in 1254 and had to be built by then, but here we are. These things take a lot of conviction to make. OK. Most of these buildings take in excess of 200 years to build with primitive tools. The one in Salzburg, France, took 600. Yeah, people were born, you know, baptized, educated for one thing, which is to lay bricks on the cathedral. And they laid bricks all their life and then they died and they were buried somewhere out in the yard. And their grandchildren, their children and grandchildren, fourth and fifth generation did that. That was the origin of the first labor unions, the guilds, the guild system. What kind of conviction does it take to build something like this? It's estimated that in Paris at the time Notre Dame was built, the population was about 150,000 people. That's just about the size of Metro Lynchburg. All right? Must have been a big employer, but imagine siphoning off all the resources for something like this. Well, these things didn't exist in 200 B.C., 200 A.D. What was in Europe in 500 AD, just after Augustine? No cathedrals. There are hundreds of them there now. No, you had Visigoths and Tartars and everyone else running around in loincloths, chucking spears at each other. That's what you had. What changed? Well, what changed was that the Gospel went forward and converted those people and civilized them. The Gospel brought this. You may not be a Catholic, but you sure got to respect it. It's incredible. With the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages came the development of an educational system that was never before known in all the world. Augustine, to whom we have already made reference, was the Bishop of Hippo from A.D. 354 to about 430. I think he actually died in 434. He wrote several works. The City of God was his monumental apologetic in which he argued that the Romans themselves were to be faulted for their downfall, not the Church, as was commonly asserted. He also wrote the Confessions, which is one great, big, long prayer. We commend that to you for the rest of your life, because it will take you that long to read it. I mean, it's slow going, but it's good. It's worth reading. Read it in small chunks, like a paragraph at a time, and then go to bed. You can't do much more with it than that. And he deals with lots of things. But in the City of God, he talks about two cities. There's the City of God and the City of Man, and these two cities are at war in history. It's Jerusalem and Athens recast. It's Tertullian's question revisited in a long... And it really is this work that brings into existence the Middle Ages. I'd like to date the Middle Ages from 451, which is the Council of Chalcedon, which was held right after Augustine's death, in which the person of Jesus is clarified definitively. And if you just run the tape forward to about 1451, we can just end the Middle Ages right there. Because what happens in 1452? Good class. Now, Leonardo da Vinci is born. So, you know, the Renaissance happens. So you're driving down, you know, the road in 1451 and you turn on NPR and it says, good morning. You know, it's 751. This is, you know, today the Renaissance begins because da Vinci was just born. Well, not exactly. That's not how history works. They didn't know they were in the Renaissance, but da Vinci really is maybe the first Renaissance man. So we can neatly date the Middle Ages from 451 to 1451. Just make it an even thousand years. That's an easy way to remember it. I should mention Cassius Doris here in talking about education because he's the first one around 500. Just almost a contemporary of Augustine to speak of the seven liberal arts in this really curious book called The Marriage of Philology and Mercury. Don't even bother with that one. Stay with Augustine. It's more interesting. But speaking of liberal arts, let's ask the question, are you a liberal? Arte Liberalis, the Latin for liberal arts, comes from a Latin word meaning liber, which means free. From this word we get liberty. We also get library. The word book comes from this word. In Latin, liber also means book. So, if you are a reader of books, you have a tendency to be free. Those who are educated can be free. In fact, the liberal arts education was conceived as essential for the free man. This is what the church begins to develop. Stringfellow Barr was the president of St. John's College up until 1947, 42 I guess. that I would suppose this is why, for many long centuries, many turns of books, Liber, in order to tune in on the great conversation that we call civilization. This is what it means to be the child of a great civilization and not a cultural bastard. Someone who can read can talk to people who are dead. You can enter into the conversation, and that's a good thing. But what does the concept of the trivium and the liberal arts. Where does it come from? Well, think about this. Only a fraction of the learning of ancient cultures is extant. For example, Egyptian and Babylonian, they wrote down a lot of interesting things. Difficult to read, lots of pictures. They left behind some huge architectural wonders. But there's not very much extant from that culture. Really, there's not very much. He realized that the single greatest repository of ancient literature of all the ancient world, roll it all into one, collect everything that the pagans ever wrote, put it in one book, and it's not as big as the Old Testament. There's just not that much stuff. What do we actually know about these ancient cultures? I mean, the clay fabrics would stack up pretty high. I mean, there's about 103 of just the Epic of Gilgamesh alone. They're big, space-wise, but they don't really say a whole lot. The Epic of Gilgamesh is about 100 pages. It's just not that much, and that's one window onto ancient Sumer. That's all we know about Sumer. Well, for our purposes, then, the heritage that comes to us in education is Jewish, Greek, and Roman in its origin. And with that comes the idea of the trivium, which is at the heart of classical education, and the quadrivium. Literally, this means the three ways and the four ways. Tri-wia, three ways. Quad-wia, quadro-wia. The four ways. Well, what are the three and the four ways? Well, the three ways, the trivium, that's the starter. This is what we would refer to as grammar school, consisting of the divisions of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. I'll say more about those later. The quadrivium would be built on the basis of the trivium and would include these four categories, mathematics, music, astronomy, and geometry. This was the basic way that the ancient encyclopedias organized human knowledge into these branches. Now, this is not all there was to know. It's just the way they organized it. The ancients had a way of thinking in sevens. And this nicely divides into four and three, to sevens. In fact, coalesces into what we call the seven liberal arts. Here's a fun picture. This gal here is philosophy. And you can see that she has seven umbilical cords right out of her chest. Where's my flashlight? Let's see. I actually have a pointer. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, you see right out of her, right out here, right out of her chest, she's got this long worm-like thing. These are actually umbilical. All these creatures down here are sort of suckling at these things. And they're all, that's strange, isn't it? And they're all holding, they're all holding symbolic objects in their hands, which are hard for you to see. But these represent, these represent one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, the seven branches of human learning. Grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, music, mathematics. geometry, and astronomy. And they're all nourished by philosophy. Philosophy is held, in this picture, to be that which makes all knowledge possible. Now think about that in terms of Platonic philosophy, pre-incarnational philosophy, with the limitations that I've already suggested, and you'll see why the Church took this over and changed it. The Church transformed. Here's another woodcut, somewhat different. It looks very similar, but it's different. This lady here has wings. She's also got four faces, only three of which are visible. And she's not really nourishing anybody, but she's standing here with a scepter. She's sort of the queen. She's the queen. Well, she is the queen. This is theology. She's taken the place of philosophy. And she's got her maidens down here, and they're also holding the same symbolic objects. These are the seven liberal arts, and we actually named them here. You have rhetoric and grammar, arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy, and so forth. And, of course, you see these guys up here in the mitres. These are bishops. which suggests to us that the Church is displacing ancient philosophy, taking its place as the agency on earth which makes knowledge possible through the Word of God. We should like this one better. We can appreciate it a little bit more. These are fun to look at. But you probably heard the idea that theology is the queen of the sciences. Does that mean it's better than science? Well, no. It just means that theology addresses things that make science possible. Let me see if I... Yes. The seven liberal arts... are linked to an epistemic presupposition. Let's play a little game here. Fundamental unity within diversity. Particular knowledge exists within a unified field. So if you take the idea of unity in knowledge and you add to that diversity in knowledge. Unity in diversity. We're standing by. Is the power on up here? Jeff, I'm out of power. Oh, you know what? Brilliant. Let's see. I plugged my cord into the table, which is... You got any power for your machine? Yes. Okay, so the tray is not plugged in. All right. I just went on batteries. Here, I think I can do it this way. You got it. Let's see if that helps. I was just getting ready to make this fantastic point. Ah, we're back. Well, unity and diversity, the great problem in... One of the great problems in philosophy has always been, how do we deal with diversity within the obvious unity that we see? How do we make sense of the fact that there are 30 or 40 of us gathered here tonight, we all basically look the same, but it's pretty clear we're all different. I'm about 5'8", well, I'm overweight. But I'm unique, but yet I do possess the same properties as Pastor Jeff and you. I'm the male of the species. How do we account for all the diversity within what we would call the manishness? We're all mankind here. So there's unity in our manishness, but there's great diversity. The whole world is this way. There's diversity and unity. How do we know that two plus two always equals four? Well, the problem of unity and diversity is resolved in the Church in the idea of the university. This is where we get the idea that you could study mathematics in one department, and you could study art, or you could study literature, or science, or astronomy, or geometry in another place, and there would not be, we can safely proceed in any branch without contradiction. But that's only possible where there is an epistemic transcendence which guarantees that truth over here is not contradicting truth over here. Now that's not at all certain outside of a Christian worldview. Let me show you. A unified field of knowledge is predicated upon the rationality and constancy of God. Well, Aristotle figured this out when he said that A can't be non-A in the same way in the same relationship, same time, same relationship, the law of non-contradiction. It can't be yes and no at the same time. Objective and absolute truth exists and the world is real and we can investigate it empirically. Let's play this game. Let's assume that this circle here represents everything that can be known. Exhaustively. This is everything that God knows. That's a lot. This is everything. And let's just assume that all together here, you and me, with the greatness of our minds, know half of it. That's a lot. I'm spotting you something here. I realize that. Let's just assume that that's the case. And you know these little dots. Let these dots be data dots. These data dots represent things that you can know, individual facts. And you're sure of these facts. And there's lots of them. And there's some over here in the area that we don't know. There's some things off our collective knowledge. We just don't know as much about Sumer as we might want to know. So how can we be sure that everything that we know over here is not going to be contradicted tomorrow by something that we discover over here? Have you ever thought about this? Well, it's a serious problem. If Jesus died and rose again, so shall we also who sleep in Jesus be with him. I want that to be true tomorrow. I don't want that to be fantasy. How can I be sure that that's going to be true? I can only be sure if the whole circle is guaranteed and it's one unity. See, it doesn't matter how much of the circle I know, as long as the circle is internally consistent. And when we talk about the world that God made and everything that there is to know, What we're saying is that the entire field of knowledge is internally consistent because it's guaranteed by a rational God with whom there is no shadow of turning. In other words, it's the way the world is hardwired. But that is not the world of Darwin. Darwin's world changes dramatically. It's not fixed. It wasn't even certain that this kind of world would come into existence. And we're certainly not sure where it is going. All right, this is why theology makes possible all knowledge. There's a sense in which Jesus is the... in Jesus is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. That's what Saint Paul said. In other words, Jesus is the epistemic starting point and integration point for everything. This means that education is inescapably religious. It can't be conceived in any other... It is the Christian faith which makes education possible. It's the word of God that makes knowledge possible. It's the word of God that makes us who we are. That makes our brains fire and function in the neurons the way they do. It's possible because our God exists. And if our God doesn't exist, they can have the world because it's over. The seven liberal arts then take their place. I can see I must hurry now. The seven liberal arts then develop out of this idea of the trivium and the quadrivium. And they figure largely into Christian history and theology. This is another cathedral founded in 1145. It burned twice in the process. This is Shartz and one of my favorite. This one I've not been to. I've been to several, but not this one. It was finished in 1170 record time, by the way. Hardly any births on this one. But what I want to call your attention to are these doorways here. You can see, let's walk up closer, get a little view. Here they are. You can see there's three main doors, and each of them have what they call a tympanum over the top threshold with multi-layers of ridges in here. We're going to take a look at this one on the right, because it's the most interesting. Here it is up close. I've got a good afternoon sun here. This is Jesus. He's dead. That's in the tomb. Well, you know, in a freeze, you get a lot of things happening all at once. Time is moving, but it's frozen. So this is the entombment of Jesus and the apostolic witness. But then these guys here, what's interesting on this outer On this outer ridge here, this rib of the doorway, you can't see it very well. In fact, you can't see it at all. But if you went back and compared this to the woodcut, they're holding the same symbols as theology and nourishing. Here's the seven liberal arts. Got that? And they're sitting on pedestals. Alright, so here's... I think this is Mathematica, and she's got a pedestal, and she's sitting here on this guy's head. That's Pythagoras. Alright, so they're related to... to some ancient character who's from that, who does groundbreaking work in that field. And my purpose here is to show you that if you were to walk into Sharks, that the message is that the liberal arts are developed as a way of coming into contact with the world. In other words, our journey to God, if the doorway is the beginning of that journey, I think architecturally here, the journey to God is one with the mind. It begins with rationality. The clear message of such an artistic presentation is that these academic disciplines, the paths to philosophical understanding and theological wisdom, are part of the rational foreground of the apostolic faith. If you were to walk into the narthex and into the nave and look down the nave at charts, what would be at the other end? Well, the high altar would be there, which represents what? Rationality? No mystery. God incarnate in the Eucharist. That's a mystery we don't understand. No matter what your view of the Eucharist is, there's four or five different ones. You have yours, I have mine. Who knows? It's not the same as the liberal arts which are grounded in reason. In other words, the ways of learning are the gateways to what God has revealed through the Church, to our souls, and through our senses, to our imagination. In other words, the medieval concept of a liberal arts education is predicated upon the foundation of knowledge by reason and by revelation. There are some things that we can know because we go out and we explore God's world in the various branches of human endeavor. But there are some things we cannot know unless they are revealed to us supernaturally by divine revelation. And there are some things, frankly, which God has not chosen to reveal to us. We can't know. There are limits to human knowledge and understanding. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now we know in part, we prophesy in part, but when the perfect thing has come, when we get to the end, the telos, the perfected state, then we will know even as we are known. Those are incredible claims. Those are not just religious claims, they are religious claims, but they are comprehensive claims. They're not just making a comment about spirituality, they're making a comment about human endeavor and what we are as people. These two modes of knowledge are not in conflict, nor can they be successfully separated, as the history of philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche has indisputably demonstrated. If you take revelation away from the powers of reason, what do you wind up with? Modern man. Post-modern man. Despair. Ever read Kafka? Well, there's lots of them out there you could read, but take God out of human knowledge and you move quickly to despair. So what is the Trivium? What are the three ways? Well, they are, as I said, grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, which really aren't subjects at all. They're ways, actually, of getting at subjects. Grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric are really methods of getting at subjects. And at New Covenant, or any classical school, we concern ourselves in K-12 with grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric as modes of knowledge, not as subjects in and of themselves. Although we do study dialectics, logic, we do study rhetoric, and we do study English grammar, and Latin grammar too, and Greek. So they touch on subjects, but they're really understood as methods. They are the very tools of learning. So what is grammar? Let's take grammar and apply this to something that you know, something near at hand. If I wanted to apply grammar to the art of cooking, and I wanted to become a cook, I would need to know the grammar of my tools, pots and pans. I found out my birthday was yesterday. Don't say happy birthday. It's been said to me 300 times this week, 300 students. No, I'm appreciative of that. But after a while, just two words you don't need to hear anymore. But my wife made a cheesecake. I didn't realize there was a special pan for making those. You used to make them in the college dormitory in the sink. That was the kind you didn't have to cook. It was the gelatinous kind. He's going, yeah. It was. Well, she actually made one you cooked, and it has a special pan. I'd never seen one. Married 20 years, never seen a cheesecake pan. Anyway. Pills, utensils, right? Those are sort of the grammar of cooking. You know, vegetables, there's all... I mean, every food group has its own grammar. The world of cheese, you know, is an infinite world. The world of wine is another whole world in and of itself. On and on. Those are grammatical questions as it comes to cooking. What would the dialectic of cooking be? Well, what goes together with what? If you make something, I assume the cheesecake has baking powder in it, but it might not. But it doesn't. She's shaking her head. It doesn't. It takes a special pan, but it doesn't take baking powder. Some cakes do. And if you don't put it in, I know bad things happen, but I don't know why. The dialectics answers the question of why, not just the what, you know, the ingredients, the whole, the grammatical issues, but the why. I mean, why does it work? All right, answer this question. Pizza and... Coke. Okay, you're Baptist here, it's Coke, see? When I go to the Episcopal church, there's a pizza and beer, you know. Got it, okay. To move on to the second, I was going to say, I was going to say, you know, you know, why does good go so well with? Well, the answer is chardonnay, but I wouldn't move on past that. All right. Get one. You can answer peanut butter and jelly. This is where you live, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. OK, well, why does peanut butter go with jelly? I know you wake up nights thinking about these kinds of questions. It just does. Yeah. Salty and sweet. Good. See now. No one has. You're the first one to ever say that in one of these. I've done this several places. First one ever. That's terrific. Salt salty and sweet. It goes it goes together. That's not the case with pizza and beer. I'm not sure what it is. But Coke works, too. It's a good thing it does. Or you would be in trouble. All right. Those are dialectical questions. They answer the why. And if you take those and apply them to disciplines, you get the idea of where we're going educationally. When we talk about the rhetoric of. Well, here's my cheesecake. Actually, I like it without the chocolate on top. Some people think cheesecake goes well with chocolate, but it doesn't. It's actually best plain. And you can goop it up with strawberries, which I also like that that just messes up a good cheesecake. But it does. It goes OK. These things go together. But rhetoric is the art of display. It's a presentation. Well, we don't sit down to a nice dinner and put out paper plates. We just don't. Now, for pizza and beer, we do. But not for for a special dinner. You don't do that. Well, you're something of a practicing rhetorician in that case, in the case of cooking. All right. Now, if we can take this and apply this educationally, what would the grammar stage be? What would be the process of acquiring recorded fact? Recorded fact. Every well, Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote, who gave a speech called The Lost Tools of Learning, said that the grammar stage is one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearance of things, like one likes to recite the number plates of cards, one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes in the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables, one enjoys the mere accumulation of things. The eeny, meeny, miny, moe to a six-year-old is no more difficult than a moe, a moss, a mot, or the woe, the waste, the way, Greek or Latin paradigms. They can learn that just as easily as they can learn nursery rhyme. Why not teach them? And gospel education pedagogically recognizes that. The grammar stage contemplates two things, a method, a way of teaching, as well as core knowledge of recorded fact in various disciplines that furnishes the student with a foundation upon which to build. Every discipline has its own grammar, which must be mastered to a certain level before you can proceed to the next level. If you don't do your multiplication tables by the end of third grade, you cannot do long division in fourth grade. It's just that simple. And if you don't do Algebra one before Algebra two, you'll never get to the calculus. And if you don't do the calculus, you can never work for NASA. Well, at least not as a scientist. See, math has its grammar. Patterning, sequencing, multiplication tables, addition, subtraction, facts, all those things. That's just grammar. You've got to master that stuff. History has grammar. Names and dates, events, developments, movements and sequence. It's out of educational vogue to make kids memorize dates. They need to do that. They need to have hooks in their minds on where things go. They've got to have a sense of sequence. We live in 2005, not 1605. What happened in 1605? Lots of things. Some are irrelevant, by the way. Some things are important. Some things are not as important. But that's a dialectical question. What's important? And in the grammar school, we start with Latin. Why do we do that? I'm in a hurry here for the sake of time. Basically, because it's the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Romance languages, to the structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents. That's pretty good reason right there. But no, if you learn Latin in first, second, third grade, you get 10 Latin roots, or one Latin root, you got 10 English words. SAT scores go through the roof, at least on the verbal side. Sayer says that it helps cut down the arduer of learning any discipline by 50%. I think that's an overstatement, but the point is well taken. That filling a child's mind, organizing it with Latin, is a great way to start. In the dialectic stage, we test recorded fact. Why would you want to teach children to argue in 7th grade? Sayer says that my answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow, and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be channeled to good purposes as allowed to run away into the sands. So, you know what your children obediently did in second grade? Now, take out the garbage, son. Seventh graders say, why, dad? And because I said so, it just doesn't work anymore. And students at that age want to know why, and every discipline has its dialectic. The dialectic stage develops analysis and clear thinking, and it should foster the willingness to ask why. Don't you want your kids, while they're at home living under your roof, to ask the why questions about Jesus and their faith? Yeah, I want them to do that before they get to college. Someone will tell them why and how. Dialectics imparts the ability to do one's own thinking and draw one's own conclusions as supported by the facts. In the rhetoric stage, the communication of fact, the rhetorical studies, is the discovery and extension of thought, original thought. the ability to take grammatical tools and dialectical tools, tools of analysis, and come to one's own conclusions and then to present them in a way that is most appealing to the audience, whatever audience that may be. And so the rhetoric stage seeks to develop powers of original thought and the ability to draw upon the tools of grammar and dialectic with clear-minded expression. Now these don't have ages. Sayer said that students typically in the past centuries went to school at college, university, at age 14, 16. That was not uncommon. After they had mastered grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, which included a lot of disciplines, including Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. before you went to the university to move on. Jeff, it's 719. Should I stop here? Take some questions? I think probably so. Do you want to hasten and do a summation? Yes. I can do that. I brought more material than we can cover, but we don't need to. The rest of what I have to say here largely has to do with the liberal arts. And with the structure of those as transitive and intransitive, I think the core of what I'll say here and finish up is that. The trivium, as the basis of the quadrivium, I had shown you previously where these disciplines of geometry and astronomy and math and music are the four branches, but they're by no means exhaustive. They embrace what we would divide into issues of multitude and issues of magnitude. Mathematics deals with the science of absolute quantity, while music is relative quantity. Music and math are related at bottom, whether using octaves or some other modes. Issues of magnitude. Geometry is something you can do microspatially on a slate in your lap, while astronomy is macrospatial, but they are related. The movements and motions of heavens. But all of these four elements of the quadrivium are intended to encompass all of the modes of human learning and the disciplines of human learning, which are much broader now than they were in the 12th century. Of course. This is not a limiting factor. It is just a way of getting at them. All of the disciplines are subsumed under these categories, including medicine, art, law, The liberal arts are the basis for all other educational pursuits. So to wrap this up, jumping from slide 38 to slide 47. I'll just do that. I'll just conclude with this. The liberal arts are not meant to convey information. They are meant to provide the tools and initiate the movements of mind necessary for a reasoning concerning the relationship between what a man encounters amidst the toil of life and the ultimate reasons for and purpose of those things. This is critical. Everything else in human endeavor is crafts, meaning handcrafts or something of that nature. So a classical education is both a mode of thinking as well as content. It is that which puts us into touch with the liberal arts and with the great conversation of human history, whether that's math and science or whether that's literature and language. Let me stop here and take any final questions. You've been very patient. I'm overwhelmed. Your school is a classical Christian school. What about the rediscovery and the establishment of these kinds of schools? in the last 20 years or so, Christians as an alternative for Christian schools and Christian education. There has been a renaissance of classical schools that has started among Christians, has sprung largely out of the soil of Reformed circles, not entirely. But in addition to the Catholic schools, which largely no longer exist, Yes, there are probably 150, 200 schools that have started in the last 20 years that self-consciously pursue this model. New Covenant is one of them. And it is different than, say, your evangelical Christian school, which may have many strengths and which may unconsciously follow much of what we're talking about. It's just that there is a conscious pursuit of this kind of thing. There are other secular models out there. Mortimer Adler, who started the Adler Project, he was at University of Chicago. He just died not too long ago. And the Paideia Project, which is life's work, and it's used by 100 or so public schools across the country. There are other colleges like Hillsdale College, which perpetuate a an ideal of this, whether it's consciously Christian, I'm not sure, but it's certainly open to faith. And we are part of that. We got started 15 years ago. So we've been affected by the blossoming of this all over the country. Schools from east to west, recovering this. Do you require a teacher to be a Christian in order to teach there? We do. We require our faculty to be professing Christians. I'm switching off to a little bit of history of our school. We require them to confess faith and to be in agreement with Christianity as it's historically expressed. So we ask them to adhere to the creeds, but they're free to attend any church that they wish. Yes? Yes. In fact, people are so much taken aback by that. We teach a lot of things that aren't Christian, but it's important to do that so that students understand. what the other what the other side is. In fact, sometimes we make them argue that in debates and make them take the other side on purpose so that they understand the literature that they're dealing with. But but the school has a point of view and we don't teach those things as fact. We teach them as ideas that challenge what we believe to be fact. Yes, ma'am. With the idea that rhetoric means that there's not a need for it per se, I've heard people in high school, in high school, English class, and some writing, you don't normally write text to do that, you're going to a particularly unqualified paper. If you're doing just grammar in elementary, like, say, K through 4, and I don't know when you start dialectics, but if you're basically doing grammar initially, then is there any purpose in saying, let's do writing, let's do critical thinking, let's tell a story about your summer, or whatever, or would that, from a classical Christian perspective, just be like, There's no point in that until high school because they haven't even got a gram of debt. Well, the answer to that question was actually discovered about 1,500 years ago. And the way it was settled, the Greeks actually came up with a set of exercises. They're rhetorical exercises for the young. They're called the pro, meaning before. Gumnos, which is gymnasium exercise. Progumnasmata, the before exercises. Gumnos, by the way, means naked. Gym, that's just the Greek word. Because when they went to the gym to exercise, the Greeks always did that in the box. But it. But when I talk about the. But the program is not that are not naked exercise. No, they're. These are. No, no, no. But there's actually a well-defined series of 16 exercises, starting with something as simple as a fable or a proverb, and they have certain forms, which are appropriate to teach a student who's six years old. So my daughter learns fables, and she gets up and she recites those to her class, and those are ways of rhetorizing a grammar school. It's the grammar of rhetoric, if you can get that. so that there's a systematic bringing along into the most difficult of the progymnos motto, which is impersonation, which we would sort of allocate to drama. It's actually taking on another character, but not just the accidents of that character, the costume, but actually thinking the way that character, and understanding what that character would have said. It's a way of getting at knowledge that's quite complicated. The short answer is that, yes, sir. Did you have a question? You just need to stretch. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. No, no, sir. No, I live near him, but I don't have to do it. He does. He does. He has a he has quite a large one. Yes. But you're not connected. No, no, no. No, he's a Baptist. We're Episcopalian. He's a Baptist. We're Episcopalian. We were we were started by the Reformed Episcopal Church in in Lynchburg. Very small parish and no connection. When I came here, I figured I was going to hear something. The fact that the state schools, the public schools, are monogamous, and ever since the Supreme Court banned the Bible and banned prayer in schools, what the ninety-five percent of the American kids now attend schools that are anti-Christian. which I think ought to recognise my thought and everyone else's. 95% of the American kids now attend schools which are anti-Christian and are secular humanist. It gets a lot better now. There's no violence. You can't, you know, our friend here talked about evolution and so on. That's forbidden, for the most part, in school. So, I thought we were going to ask somebody about school choice, to tell you the truth. I think that's urgently needed, isn't it? School choice, that we can choose whether or not we want to attend these atheist, anti-Christian, secularly humanistic, public school, or whether or not we can have the choice of going to school chops with school lunch. That's a political question. But I'm interested, I got the wrong impression, I thought you were with your top class. No, it goes back to that pizza and beer thing. Part of the reason we had Don come here tonight is our church has a preschool, and we have been considering the possibility of expanding and future offering kindergarten if that was successful. But we were looking at the classical Christian model as one possible model, and that's part of the reason why we asked John to come here tonight, was to learn more about what they've done at Newfoundland schools. We do. In fact, we were blessed to this picture of our school. We were blessed to have a chapel. We actually were able to build one. My favorite room in the building. There it is. We have chapel once a week for all of our students. Grammar school. Kindergarten go in first or third and so forth once a week. And then we have religious instruction, Bible classes, K through six, seventh. And then in high school, we have theology and philosophy, apologetics, ethics. Yeah, those are crucial. I think different schools take different views here. But some of my friends have Christian schools don't have chapel, for example. They're unaffiliated with churches. We have an organic connection to a church and we have chapel right in the middle of that. Yes, sir. What is your name? Oh, really? I've seen your file. Yes. Yes, we do. We have the very same uniform that you had. Actually, it's been modified somewhat. But yes, it's still uniform code. Yeah. Well, it's labyrinth, actually. It took me three years to master it, as it probably did you. But for high school boys, it's just khakis and a blazer and a tie on dress days. They have a casual uniform, which is like a polo shirt and khakis, that sort of thing. Girls have dresses, but they're all the same. All cookie cutter. They hate it, too. Yes, sir. You started Latin in... Kindergarten. So my son is in fifth grade. I send him to your school next year. We would remediate him. We have ways. Start with peanut butter. And we students who come in at that age, we put through what we call Latin camp. Doesn't that sound fun? They go to Latin camp and they get a ramp up and they fall right in with their fifth grade class. Most of the students, you'd be surprised how quickly they pick it up. And they calibrate pretty closely because in 7th grade they go to high school Latin 1. So whether they've been a day at Grammar School Latin at New Covenant, they're going to go to high school Latin 1 together. Now students who've been there 6 or 7 years have a real leg up. So we actually sometimes split that Latin 1 class so that we have beginners. But we have ways of bringing them in right along no matter where they are. That's a pretty common question. Pretty common problem, actually. We have fewer and fewer students coming in at that age now because the classes are full so that most of them come in at the bottom. It's less of a problem than it used to be. Yes. Yeah, we knew we have. We have Jim. We have a wonderful gym that was part of our our first first part of our project here. You'll see it. I'll show you the aerial view of the school. This is a big building in the back. So we have we have soccer and volleyball and basketball and all those things for the size of the school. It is. It's a school. Yeah, we come up here and play Covenant school in soccer. They kill us. I was telling somebody before. Are you at Covenant? Ron Sykes, the headmaster, is on our board, so we know them well. He's a wonderful man, but they're a bit bigger, a little stretch for us. Well, John, you guys have a beautiful multi-million dollar facility now, a large campus, but the school didn't start out. No, no. Where did you guys start out 15 years ago? Well, it started out just like you're thinking about now. We had 16 students. and three volunteer teachers, and we met in what is now a three-wheeled Baptist church. It was a little wooden structure way out in New London. Y'all know where that is? Probably not. I don't know where it is either. But it doubled every year, and it snowballed. It quickly outgrew the parent church, which is still about 40 members. They meet in our chapel, and we have an independent board that's organically related, but New Covenant Church and New Covenant School are really We have a wonderful relationship, but the school is far outgrown the church at this point, far beyond anybody's wildest dreams. I don't think they imagined that this would happen. two years ago, as it did. Yes, sir. So we're talking about starting a school here. What would be your teachers? I mean, would you say that it's imperative to have teachers that are firmly grounded in this teaching or if you've got the curriculum capable of teaching? Well, I think that's a great question. I think in today's world, you probably have an advantage we didn't have 15 years ago. I'm starting to hire kids now who went to Hillsdale to do this. So there's there's actually people. So he does. Yeah. Well, You know, ideally, you would want to have people who had some grasp of the basic basic principles. And those people now are more available than they were 15 years ago, because there's been not only a renaissance in schools, but colleges are adding these programs to their liberal arts as having something of a subterranean renaissance. You know, still not on the radar screen for most people. But but I would say if you're going to if you're going to start. to get the best qualified people you can. But please don't let this any of this intimidate you. I mean, nobody planned this. You bring to Jesus your loaves and fishes and then he just does great stuff. And that's what happened. I don't think there's a formula that says you have to start this way or that way. I think you start with faith and you move out from there and see what God does. It takes more faith in Charlottesville, actually, because the fishes have to go further. Apparently land is very expensive up here and cost of living. I was amazed that I told John this, how it seemed to me how reasonable their tuition was. Yes. Yes. It's what about what's the tuition? About half what it is here. Yeah. Our tuition is forty forty six hundred for a grammar school student in upper schools, about fifty five. So Covenant School, which is pretty reasonable, about ten or eleven, I think. I mean, that's not reasonable, but no, it's not reasonable. Yeah, it's astonishing to me, you know, because this is it's fascinating to many of us. I know for others that they have to get a hundred other things out of this. And I hope they'll stay. Yeah, I'd be free to say this.