Classical and Christian Education: Helping Students Understand the Differences and Similarities Between Them

One of the oddest and most interesting educational developments during the past few decades is Protestants’ embrace of classical education at both the K-12 and higher education levels. What makes it odd is that certain Protestant Reformers thought key elements of classical education were suspect. After all, they attributed the too-friendly embrace of some of these elements to the pre-Reformation era corruptions within the Roman Catholic Church that they sought to address. In this essay, I revisit those past critiques to help us understand one potential weakness of classical education and how to avoid it. My goal is to help contemporary devotees make classical education better and more faithfully Christian.

The Ordering of the Curriculum 

One basic problem particular Protestant thinkers had with classical education was the order in which its adherents approached the curriculum. Indeed, this difference is still the major curricular difference between Catholics and Protestants today. Reformers such as Peter Ramus, William Ames, and John Amos Comenius thought one needed to start with the Bible, Christian theology, and Christian ethics instead of pagan writings, even when teaching the rudimentary skills of reading, writing, math, and later the liberal arts. That’s why one of the first Puritan elementary textbooks in America, The New England Primer started students with the famous lines when teaching the alphabet, “A, in Adam’s Fall we sinned all” (although I would argue a more faithful biblical start would have focused on the doctrine of creation—All humans are created in God’s image).    

If one goes back further in church history, one sees this difference in the writings of two early church fathers. In Basil’s “Address to Young Men,” he argues that when teaching virtue, young men should “become first initiated in the pagan lore, then at length give special heed to the sacred and divine teachings, even as we first accustom ourselves to the sun’s reflection in the water, and then become able to turn our eyes upon the very sun itself.” This approach, I contend, as one can tell by the analogy used, is more Platonic than Christian.

In contrast, Augustine, in On Christian Teaching and later Cassiodorus in the Institutiones, argued for starting with and consistently referring back to the foundational teachings of Scripture. What is often noted by Christians is that Augustine argued in this work for using pagan writings just as the Israelites used the gold, silver, and clothing of the Egyptians. Yet, what is less quoted is his conclusion to this argument, “To the extent that the wealth of gold and silver and clothing which that people took with them from Egypt was less than what they afterward acquired at Jerusalem, especially during the reign of King Solomon. The knowledge collected from the books of the pagans, although some of it is useful, is also little as compared with that which is derived from the Holy Scriptures.”¹

The Problem in Medieval Universities

Unfortunately, medieval Catholic university curriculum designers prioritized Basil’s approach and extensively used pagan literature in the undergraduate liberal arts without first prioritizing Scripture.² For example, Thomas Elyot (1490-1546), who wrote one of the first philosophy of education manuals in the English language, argues, as was typical of his time, that seventeen-year-olds should be introduced to virtue by reading the first two chapters of the Nicomachean Ethics instead of readings from the Bible.

That approach is why certain Protestant Reformers complained Catholic universities highlighted pagan philosophy over and above the Christian scriptures, theology, and ethics.³ Comenius, the most famous Protestant educator of the seventeenth century observed in his well-known work, The Great Didactic:

we see that the chief schools profess Christ in name only, but hold in highest esteem writers like Terence, Plautus, Cicero, Ovid, Catullus, and Tibullus. The result of this is that we know the world better than we know Christ, and that, though in a Christian country, Christians are hard to find. For with the most learned men—even with theologians, the upholders of divine wisdom—the external mask only is supplied by Christ, while the spirit that pervades them is drawn from Aristotle and the host of heathen writers.⁴

Have Catholic universities changed? Not really. As I will share in tomorrow’s post, if you examine the core curriculum of American Catholic universities, only 13 of these institutions require a course on the Bible in their general education/core curriculum. Indeed, one is more likely to find a required course on social justice than a required course on the Bible in the required general education of a Catholic institution.

Thinking Christianly about Curricular Design

How might contemporary Christian educators prevent the marginalization of Scripture from reemerging in the educational curricular ordering?

First, classical Christian educators should take more of an Augustinian/Cassiodorus approach. They should help students understand and establish their Christian identity and then teach them to think critically from that identity. After all, we see this pattern in the New Testament epistles. Christian virtue must be directed to God, defined using the Christian story (i.e., we have been designed as image bearers of God to acquire and imitate God’s virtues), and motivated by one’s understanding of our fundamental identities (i.e., we have been restored to being children of God through Christ and fully understand Christian virtue through Christ, etc.). Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics does none of those things. 

Furthermore, students must be taught to recognize that there is no such thing as “critical thinking” in the abstract. Critical thinking always requires an identity and narrative from which one undertakes the critical thinking. There is Christian, utilitarian, Islamic, liberal democratic, secular, and Jewish critical thinking, but there is no such thing as critical thinking apart from an identity position. Elmer Thiessen provides an expanded explanation of this point in his book Teaching for Commitment: Liberal Education, Indoctrination, and Christian Nurture.

Thus, the idea of letting a child choose his or her religious tradition on their own, which I know some parents have tried, is pedagogically problematic. Whether you begin life or a practice such as playing a sport or music, you must learn a particular way of playing. Only after learning that one approach can one then start to examine and look at other approaches and make critical comparisons. In other words, once you start to achieve increasing levels of excellence in one tradition, you can then develop informed critical opinions about other people’s play. Yet, you cannot develop such critical thinking without first achieving some degree of excellence in the endeavor. The same is true for Christian thinking. Students must learn how to think within the Christian tradition before they can learn to examine pagan literature critically.

Second, to help students apply Christian critical thinking, we must teach classical texts in closer conversation with Christian theology than is the current norm. Interestingly, in my curricular study of Christian schools, colleges, and universities, I find students in classical schools and even Christian universities usually study the Bible and theology in separate religion classes, and then they read great books in literature, philosophy, classics, and great texts, in some other course(s). Astute students and teachers will bring the two into conversation, but the way that the curriculum is constructed at most Christian educational institutions does not always facilitate that conversation. In this respect, many Christian classical schools and Christian universities that claim to teach the integration of faith actually employ what I call a Christ-added approach in how they structure the curriculum.

I find that other early Christian thinkers provide helpful examples of how this dialogue can be engaged more productively. For example, it would be interesting to help young scholars of great texts read the fourth-century church father Eusebius’ Preparatio Evangelica (Preparation for the Gospel). What is fascinating about this book is how Eusebius brings Scripture and pagan thinking into direct dialogue. It would be helpful for teachers to engage with and evaluate this method. 

Structuring the curriculum to encourage more direct dialogue between Scripture, basic Christian theology, and significant books would address the kind of critique that Comenius made of Christians in his day.  

Through the agency of Hosea He [God] complained also that His people held too much intercourse with other nations, saying: “Though I write for him my law in ten thousand precepts, they are counted as a strange thing” (Hos. viii. 12). But, I ask, is not this what those Christians are doing who hold heathen books in their hands night and day, while of the sacred Word of God they take no account, as if it did not concern them? And yet, as God bears witness, it is no vain thing, but our very life (Deut. xxxii. 47).

Such dialogue would also sharpen our theological and moral evaluation of great texts. For example, when I teach Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, I find that students need help discerning how to apply biblical and theological analysis to his arguments. This aid is best supported by a robust familiarity with and dialogue with epistles such as Galatians and Ephesians or with critical Christian readers of Aristotle. 

Students need help from the Spirit, Christian mentors, and others with more developed Christian critical thinking skills to discern the differences between Christian and pagan thinking. Only by first establishing Christian academic instincts will our students be able to think, read, and love critically and Christianly and not simply as Classical Westerners.   

1. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R.P.H. Green (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 77-78.
2. Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, and Todd C. Ream, Restoring the Soul of the University: Unifying Christian Higher Education in a Fragmented Age (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 2017).
3. Perry L. Glanzer, The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).
4. John Amos Comenius, The Great Didactic. Trans. and Ed. M.W. Keatinge (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1907), 231.