Schools have cultures, just like civilizations, homes, churches, baseball teams, and every other society we’re part of. There are things I like and things I don’t like about every culture I’m in. For example, I don’t like how our national culture is obsessed with money; greed and consumerism seem rampant. Yet I am very glad that our culture has produced such amazing technology that makes so many astounding things possible that were only a dream a generation ago.

There are things I like and things I don’t like about the culture of Regents Academy. I was meditating on the culture of our school recently, and several things came to mind, both things I love about our school’s culture and things I would love to see changed about our school’s culture.

I love that Regents Academy’s culture is built on respect: honor for teachers and parents, respect for fellow students, respect for propriety and decorum, esteem for tradition, and reverence toward God.

I love that our school’s culture is marked by joy in hard work: rather than exalting laziness and shortcuts, our school exalts hard work and fosters seeking the reward that comes to those who achieve through diligence and not entitlement.

I love that Regents is serious about academics. Academic decline in our nation is well-documented and oft-lamented, yet Regents offers a positive environment that takes a classical Christian education seriously. There is a constant upward pressure on academic standards.

I love that Regents has been built on sacrifice and vision, not on baser motives like egotism, vainglory, profit, or power trips. The founders of our school have always been about the mission, not about personal ambition. That sacrificial love has trickled down into the cracks and crevices of the school’s culture, from teachers to students to families.

Are there things I want to see changed about our school’s culture? Of course there are, just like with every other culture in which I find myself. I happen to see the Regents culture up close and personal – and I know that many of its failings find their way back to its leadership (me).

There is a tendency in our school’s culture to be about grades rather than about learning. Those two things don’t have to be exclusive, of course – a student can strive for good grades and also love learning. However, the two can be mutually exclusive. A teacher sees it very clearly: the first question the student asks when presented with a new assignment is, “Will we get a grade on this?”

Something I have addressed with our junior high and high school students is their use of the tongue. Like all young people, our students are tempted to use their tongues to cut down and criticize one another and to speak inappropriately. I can think of no quicker way to foster a culture that oppresses the weak and that glories in crudity and rudeness than to allow an unbridled tongue. And even as I write these words, I am reminding myself also of the Bible’s teaching about the power of the tongue – both for good and for evil.

There are other things I could mention, of course. Everyone at our school is a sinner. But God’s grace is greater than our sin, so the keynote of our school’s culture is not sin and condemnation but redemption in Christ. Therefore, our school culture is really filled with thankfulness and joy.

The question I am left with is, What am I doing to foster a school culture that honors Christ and that lifts students up so that they reach the great heights that we aspire to?

I hope you will ask the same question, too.

One of the hallmarks of a Regents Academy education is exposure to the truth, beauty, and goodness inherent in the Great Books.

We do so through our course called the Omnibus, which students take in the 7th through 12th grades. In addition to studying writing, vocabulary, and the facts of history, students read the great authors, poets, philosophers, dramatists, and theologians who have shaped Western civilization. Unfortunately, this emphasis on the Western canon has gone the way of the dinosaur in most academic circles. It behooves us to remember why our school is seeking to recover this precious heritage.

The following excerpts from the article “The Necessity of the Classics” by Dr. Louise Cowan, first published in the Intercollegiate Review in 2001 and republished by Memoria Press in 2011, present a passionate assertion of why we need the classics in our children’s education. Dr. Cowan reminds us why it is so critical to recover a study of the Great Books – especially the classics – as we strive to endow students with a Christian worldview and train them to love truth, beauty, and goodness.

We have begun to see a world in which the classics have virtually disappeared—though they have been woven so tightly into the patterns of our culture that meaning, for us, is hardly separable from them. For a while we may be able to get by on the echoes of their past glory; but when they finally have become perfectly silent, what sort of world shall we inhabit? To lose the classics is to lose a long heritage of wisdom concerning human nature, something not likely to be acquired again. Yet most college curricula now remain sadly untouched by their august presence, or at best make a gesture in their direction with a few samplings for select students. Such neglect is one of the most serious threats our society faces today.
This body of writing, until recently considered the very center of European and American education, has stood guard over the march of Western civilization, preserving its ideals of truth and justice, whatever its lapses may have been. And the later writers included in this remarkable group of texts have continued the unsparing examination of conscience that the Greeks inaugurated three thousand years ago. Hence, the Greeks make up the unmistakable foundation of our body of classics. To be ignorant of Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles is to be ignorant of the range and depth of human possibility.

The primacy of the Greeks in the Western curriculum, then, as Bernard Knox, one of our foremost classical scholars, insists, is not a result of any decree by a higher authority; neither Church nor State has imposed them, nor even men of money and power. The Greek texts hardly compose a ―master narrative‖ enforced by conservative tradition. Nor has any ethnic group gained power or prestige from their study. They have had their effect, quite simply, from their intrinsic quality: and it is that quality—to which the classics call us all—that makes them immortal. . . .

Heroism is one of the fundamental patterns built into all of us, a universal potentiality that must, however, be ignited to be realized. America has been steeped in the classical heroic tradition. But it can easily remain merely latent if each generation simply starts over again without the guidance of the classics. Admiration for the heroic principle will surface from time to time in surprising ways; but without a tradition of reverence it is likely to be deformed and misplaced. A godlike aspiration, a selfless desire for a commitment to a calling, a sense that honor is far more valuable than life—these are aspects of the soul that must be awakened by a vision of the high and the noble.

And herein lies one of the great values of studying the classics: our poetic heritage gives imperishable form to the heroic aspiration. Shakespeare’s Henry V, Melville’s Moby Dick, Conrad’s Lord Jim, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Faulkner’s The Unvanquished, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—these and other works enter into a dialogue with the Greek and Roman classics to kindle the image of the hero within the individual soul. The heroic thus be-comes not a set of rules but a living ideal, incarnated in the lives of us all.

Our loss of the Greeks and Romans is symptomatic of our loss of the idea of quality and of aspiration, our loss of the heroic which is known in poetry. . . . Our need for the classics is intense. Yet any defense of them in our time must come from a sense of their absolute necessity— not from a desire to inculcate ―cultural literacy,‖ or to keep alive a pastime for an elite, but to preserve the full range of human sensibility. What is needed is to recapture their spirit of high nobility and magnanimity, of order and excellence, but to recapture that spirit in a framework of democracy engendered by a Biblical culture of radical openness. The things worth preserving, the things we ought to be passing down, far transcend any single heritage: they partake of the fundamental structures of being itself. Melville called them the ―heartless, joyous, ever-juvenile eternities. And if our children do not encounter these realities in their studies, they are not likely to encounter them at all. Greatness of soul is an aspect of human being as such, but it is not a quality that comes naturally. It must be taught. The classics have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul. Far from being a particular province of the specialist, they are the essential foundation of our educational process and the impulsion toward that forward movement of the human spirit for which schools exist. In an unpoetic age, we have to learn all over again what and how to teach our own children. We need to re-read the Greeks.

I strongly encourage you to read the full article online, and, even better, pick up the Aeneid or the Odyssey and then have a discussion with your children about them.

Imagine for a moment that you’re taking a long trip. You have a reliable map and plenty of gas money to make it to your destination. But a third of the way through your trip, you decide to toss the map aside and go a different direction altogether, one that you think might still get you there and save money as well. However, you find that without the map you actually run out of gas in the middle of nowhere a long way from your planned destination, and you’re cut off from the good things waiting for you there.

I hope this story doesn’t describe one of your family vacations! But I also hope this story does not describe the educational journey of your children.

Classical education is predicated on a final destination, an ending point, a vision for where the education is going. The vision for a graduate of a classical Christian school includes love for learning, virtue and mature character, sound reason and sound faith, service to others, a masterful command of language, well-rounded competence, and literacy with broad exposure to books. Don’t you want those traits to describe your children when they are 17 or 18 and are preparing to enter the larger world?

The Trivium – grammar, logic, and rhetoric – are the road map to arriving at this vision for a graduate. In other words, making the educational journey through the years of grammar school, logic school, and rhetoric school is a voyage toward a final ideal, a great vision for our children to become mature, thinking Christians who know how to learn and who are prepared for a lifetime of faithful service and vocation.

But if we get on the classical path for only a short time, though our children will certainly benefit, they will never gain the long-term, life-shaping benefit of completing the journey. I want my children to make it all the way to the final destination that the classical roadmap shows me, not end up in the middle of the wilderness with the map crumpled and thrown aside.

All of this is to encourage you, parents, to consider the long-term vision of classical Christian education in the lives of your children. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric are more than just buzz words. They are distinct stages in your children’s voyage toward a lofty vision of preparedness for all that will come next for them. The journey is arduous and can be expensive, for sure. The struggles of today are real, and the work is hard. But the undertaking is well worth the effort and expense. And though the voyage seems long, in fact travelling from kindergarten to graduation really just takes the blink of an eye. Ask a parent of a graduate how long it seems since their children were being dropped off for kindergarten!
What is your vision for your children? How high are your goals? What kind of person do you want them to be? Is classical education just a stopping off point on the road to a different destination? Today is the day to plan for your vision for your children to become a reality.

Regents Academy’s classical Christian education and Christ-centered culture is the best path I know for your children. Let me encourage you to stay on the path, to persist to the end, and then (to mix my metaphors) to anticipate reaping the good fruit of grammar, logic and rhetoric in the appointed season.

As Gandalf said to Bilbo when the hobbit entered the dark paths of Mirkwood, “Stay on the path!”