Classical Education: Mind & Heart Together

It has been said that the most expensive part about having kids is all the wine you have to drink.

In their early years, kids at home or at school all tend to operate like an ant-pile after you jab a stick in it, which is basically Armageddon. Chaos is every child's middle name at some point or other. Yet this environment is just what education is designed for — turning those crazed ants into adults. To put it far more academically, education is about turning monkeys into men, lil munchkins into mothers, and all of them into creative culture-builders.

In short, education is holistic. We have this idea that education is about learning Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic, but that’s only half of it, or a tenth of it. Education is about both the mind and heart, body and soul, intelligence and character.

Character is the mental and moral qualities distinctive to someone. The bible says that even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right (Prov. 20:11). Even a child must develop mental and moral qualities. In other words, a child must develop character, and that is what classical Christian education at ACA is all about. Mind and morals together.

But we have to be careful here. Education takes practice, not just assent to a creed. God could have given us perfectly developed kids, mature and independent straight out of the womb. Instead, he wants us to shape them and help them grow, as a design feature of being human. We have to help our kids practice good mental and moral habits, every day, and practice means pain.

Think of it this way. If you want to have a backyard garden full of weeds, what do you have to do? Nothing. The weeds just come. But if you want a fruitful garden, you have to get muddy and pull stuff up. The weeds in our kids lives want to be there. They’re fun. They feel good. Pulling them up is a daily thing, and it hurts. But this is the way God ordained it.

Each day of each academic year, we celebrate our students’ growth. Their academic growth is plain to see, but so is their moral growth. They are learning to take ownership of their lives. They are learning to avoid being impulse-driven. They are learning to think independently, like adults, with eternity in their minds.

Christ has given us the world as a gift, and as a garden to tend and care for till his return. At ACA, our students are practicing, in many small ways, how to be good stewards of the world for God’s glory and for the good of all people.