Teaching By The Book Classical Education Alternative From Idaho Spreading To Christian Schools Nationwide

In an elementary classroom at Spokane’s Oaks Classical Christian Academy, students conjugate Latin verbs with the ease of reciting nursery rhymes.

“Amo, amas, amat, amamus amatis, amant,” two dozen students chant in sing-song unison, as if it were “fee, fi, fo, fum.”

After the Latin lesson, teacher Dana Peterson moves on to English grammar.

For a refresher on prepositional phrases, Peterson cues them to recite a jump-rope jingle of 49 prepositions. Then come the adverb and adjective chants and diagramming sentences.

The lessons - often the stuff of high school curricula elsewhere - are handled with ease by the 9-year-olds.

Both in the way it teaches and the results it gets, the Oaks school flies in the face of modern education. Even in the realm of private religious schools, something very different is happening here.

Though a nearly dead language, Latin is an integral part of the curriculum at the Oaks, a K-9 private school that rents space in Knox Presbyterian Church on Spokane’s North Side. So are other nearly extinct approaches to teaching.

Rote memorization is used heavily in the elementary grades. Corporal punishment keeps discipline problems nearly nonexistent. The teaching approach used - known as the “Trivium” - predates the Middle Ages in Western Europe and has been all but dead for a century in this country. The curriculum focuses on the basics: reading, writing, math, science and history.

The results are impressive, teachers and parents say. Students are testing well above state and national averages. Even though the Oaks school isn’t state-certified, its popularity is growing rapidly among area Christians. Across the country, similar schools are forming almost monthly.

Oaks Principal Bruce Williams says parents are attracted to the rigorous academics rooted in Christianity.

“They basically want an opportunity to educate their children well with a biblical world view,” Williams said.

The Spokane school has grown from 33 students when it started in 1996 to 173 students this year. It plans to expand to K-12 in three years. The school`s biggest challenge is keeping up with growth.

As classical Christian schools grow outside of mainstream education, interesting questions are raised. Is a medieval education model appropriate for children in the 21st century?

A movement is born

When Williams and two colleagues opened the Oaks school three years ago, they modeled it after the Logos School in Moscow, Idaho. Started in 1981 in a church basement, the Logos School unwittingly started a national movement within the Christian community.

It began with Douglas Wilson.

“My wife said, `I can’t see sending (our daughter) off to someone we don’t know,”’ said Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow. “I said we’d have a school started by the time she hit kindergarten. We did.”

Public education wasn’t an option for his family and existing private Christian schools left much to be desired, Wilson said.

“We wanted rigorous academics and thorough Christianity,” Wilson said. “We didn’t want baptized secularism, a pagan school with Christian flavoring.”

Wilson wrote a book for the Turning Point Series on Christian worldview thinking in 1991. Titled “Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education,” the book chronicled the teaching philosophies and successes of the Logos School.

Then it hit.

“We were blindsided,” Wilson said. A flurry of letters and phone calls came from around the country as the book made its way through Christian circles. “The correspondence swamped me.”

In response, he and his colleagues formed the Association of Classical and Christian Schools. The nonprofit association holds annual conferences on teaching the Trivium. Nearly 100 schools around the country are modeled after Logos.

The Logos School, which occupies a former roller rink, has about 300 students and is growing.

Yvonne and Greg Harmon moved from southern Michigan in August to enroll their three children at Logos.

Unhappy with private Christian schools, Yvonne Harmon homeschooled their children for five years. She then came upon Wilson’s book.

“Once I got my hands on that book, I couldn’t put it down,” she said. “This was the educational model we wanted.”

After she and her husband were unable to launch their own classical Christian school, they decided to make the move west. Greg Harmon got a one-year leave of absence from his engineering job at General Motors and is now working part-time at the University of Idaho.

“It has truly been a blessing to us,” Yvonne Harmon said. “This school isn’t Christian in the aspect that they have chapel every day or have Bible verses typed on the bottom of their assignments. The teachers are trained to look at their subjects through the lens of God’s world.”

Grammar, dialectic and rhetoric

The Trivium, an educational model rooted in Roman education, was adopted by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages.

Based in Latin, it consisted of three parts: grammar (facts and rules), dialectic (logic) and rhetoric (expressing thoughts in verbal and written form). The Trivium equipped students with the tools of learning to undertake the Quadrivium - the study of various subjects.

In their original forms, the Trivium and Quadrivium were the standards for a liberal arts education at the collegiate level through the 19th century. The teaching method carried over into America during its colonial beginnings. But as common education modernized, classical education faded.

Rote memorization, the standard pedagogical style for centuries, also went by the wayside. As the government took over schools in the late 1800s, a progressive movement was born to replace recitation of facts with a problem-based approach to learning.

“People were worrying that students were memorizing things but they weren’t learning to think,” said Nancy Beadie, associate professor of education at the University of Washington. “With the problem-based approach to learning, the idea is that it would be connected to real experience and understanding, rather than just imitating.”

Wilson’s approach is based on a model devised by the late Dorothy Sayers, a classically educated British novelist. Sayers matched the three stages of the Trivium to three stages of child development in her essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning.”

That made sense to Wilson, who stumbled upon a reprint of the essay in a magazine more than 20 years ago.

“Grammar is the accumulation of facts, when kids love memorization,” Wilson said. So rote learning is used heavily in the elementary grades.

By the seventh grade, children become argumentative and like to challenge adults, he said. During this dialectic stage, students are taught formal logic and how to argue intelligently. By grade 10, according to the model, students become more concerned with how others perceive them. In the rhetoric stage, students are taught how to express themselves verbally and in writing.

Classical Christian teachers say the model fits kids perfectly.

“Kids will memorize a cereal box or the license plate on the back of a car if you don’t give them something to memorize,” said Sarah Farley, a second-grade teacher at the Oaks. “I’m convinced kids learn this way and that’s the way God made them.”

One recent day at the school, students squeal with excitement when Farley announces they will do their history “sound-off.”

One by one, students pop from their seats reciting lines that span several centuries of ancient history, based on the Old Testament, starting with the seven days in which God created the Earth.

By the end of the year, the students will be able to recite names, dates and events packed onto 32 history cue cards. By the end of the sixth grade, they will be able to recite all 160 of them, which cover ancient Western history all the way through the 20th century.

Proponents say it isn’t knowledge for the sake of knowledge. By the time the students reach the dialectic and rhetoric stages, they will have a large base of information to draw from, which will help them argue their own ideas and express them effectively.

Strict discipline

Like rote memorization, corporal punishment has vanished from modern education circles. It was made illegal in Washington’s public schools in 1994.

Even the majority of the country’s Christian schools have moved away from spanking. Of the 470 Christian schools that are members of Christian Schools International, for example, less than 10 use corporal punishment.

Tom Garfield, superintendent of the Logos School, said he was taught that corporal punishment was wrong as he pursued his master’s degree in education administration.

“The professor would bring up corporal punishment and away we’d go,” Garfield said. “They’d say how can you justify child abuse? And I’d say the Scripture justifies it.”

Two wooden paddles hang in Garfield’s office. The thinner one is used on the young children; the thicker on the older. Three whacks are standard. Garfield does not paddle girls. He has a female teacher do it instead.

Students get several warnings before they get sent to the superintendent’s office for spanking. It’s used sparingly, Garfield said - once every few weeks, if that - and parents are informed before it happens. Swearing at a teacher, stealing and cheating are some of the violations that may warrant it, Garfield said.

In general, discipline problems are not tolerated at the Logos or Oaks schools, and students are screened before being admitted.

“We aren’t here to turn bad kids into good kids,” Garfield said. “If parents can’t do their job, we can’t do it for them.”

Garfield gives little credence to behavioral disabilities. He refers to attention deficit disorder, known as ADD, as “adults denying discipline.”

Matt Petersen, a senior at Logos, said he got the paddle a couple of times when he was younger. Though he hated it at the time, he believes corporal punishment is a good thing.

“When you are being spanked, you object to it,” he said, “but a few days later, you realize it was helpful.”

Educated or sheltered?

Classical Christian schools have sprouted mostly without the notice of conventional education circles, so most criticism comes from other Christian schools.

Dan Vander Ark, executive director of Christian Schools International, questions whether students are being protected from the harsh realities of modern culture.

“There is a feeling in classical Christian education schools that to learn older material is safer,” he said. “By looking at older history, older literature, children come in contact with less problematic things to parents.”

Vander Ark said parents enrolling their children in private Christian schools are often asked whether they want their children to be sheltered from modern culture or prepared to be an influence in it.

Parents who support classical Christian education, more than not, favor the former, Vander Ark said.

“Doug Wilson would disagree with that big time.”

And he does.

“We don’t study the older stuff because it is safer, we study it because it’s better,” Wilson said. “It has stood the test of time.”

Pagan literature is as much a part of the curriculum as is Christian literature, Wilson said.

Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” Virgil’s “Aeneid,” and the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles are among the classic “pagan” works students read, he said.

“They provoke the kids into discussions about the great perennial questions, those of faith and personal responsibility, but you are interacting with it in the context of a great work of art,” Wilson said. “If you watched MTV for 45 minutes, it would provoke the same questions but in the context of cultural sludge.”

Contrary to modern education, neither Logos nor the Oaks uses computers in the classroom.

“It’s like drinking out of a fire hose in terms of information,” said Garfield, superintendent of Logos. “You have huge volumes of information blasting out of the screen.”

Computers do little to help teach students to process information or read and write well, he added.

Natali Miller, a senior at the University of Idaho, says she has adjusted well in a secular environment since graduating from Logos in 1996.

Culturally, however, it was a big change.

“I don’t think I was shocked but it was definitely different,” Miller said. “I’d hear about frat parties and then there would be people sitting next to me in class complaining about their hangover from the kegger last night. That was definitely different.”

After learning for so long in the context of a Christian world view, learning within a secular mindset was a whole different world, she said.

“I took Geology 101 and it was really irritating because they were just teaching evolution as fact,” she said.

But overall, she said she was much more prepared for college than most of her fellow students.

Having written 6,000-word essays at Logos, a 1,500-word paper for a college class was easy, she said. Meanwhile, she’s had to sit in classes while professors went over basic grammar with students who have trouble writing complete sentences.

“We learned that in elementary school at Logos,” she said.

And with seven years of Latin before starting college, Miller said she had a head start on an expanded vocabulary, as well as learning Romance languages.

With all the practice she got at memorizing, she said it’s very easy for her to learn new French vocabulary words.

Miller is also pursuing an additional undergraduate degree at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow. The classical Christian college, started by Wilson six years ago, has about 80 students.

She already has had three job offers around the country to teach at other classical Christian schools. Miller is now teaching a class at Logos, but expects she will go on for a master’s degree in history after she finishes her two undergraduate degrees.

Though Miller is pursuing multiple degrees, Garfield said it’s not uncommon for female graduates from Logos to marry young. Their education, then, is used to teach their children.

Academic performance

In Doug Wilson’s class called “Practical Lordship Readings” at Logos, students discuss eschatology, the branch of theology that deals with death, immortality and judgment. They poke holes in alarmists’ theories about sightings of an Antichrist.

The discussion is rigorous and rises to the level of college or graduate studies. Students are amused when Wilson writes “Ronald Wilson Reagan” on the board, then counts the letters in each name - six, six, six.

Students at both the Logos and Oaks schools score above public schools on standardized tests, which is consistent with other private schools.

On the ACT college entrance exam this year, Logos students had an average composite of 28, compared with a national composite of 21.

Garfield also noted that five students in its graduating class of 22 this year have been named National Merit Scholars.

Williams, the principal of Oaks, said students there also score high on achievement tests, although the school has not compiled average scores.

“Naysayers would say you’ve picked the cream of the crop,” Garfield said. “We don’t recruit like NBA players. We don’t say bring us your highest GPAs, your wealthy and your gifted. Many of these families are not wealthy and they sacrifice to bring their children here.”

Annual tuition is $2,500 at the Logos School and $3,300 at the Oaks.

Though children come from all socio-economic backgrounds, what they do have in common is the Christian philosophy of their parents, Garfield said. They believe educating their children is their primary responsibility and are very involved.

“Dropping off your child and the tuition check isn’t enough,” Garfield said.

The majority of teachers are parents of students. State certification isn’t required, nor is it considered a plus.

And an endorsement from the state board of education isn’t a concern either.

In Washington state, school-age children by law are required to either attend a public school, a state-certified private school or be homeschooled by their parents.

The Oaks school isn’t certified because it doesn’t meet the state’s curriculum requirements. So technically, its students are truant, said Marcia Riggers of the state office of superintendent of public instruction.

“We realize that, but it gets down to who is responsible for the education of the students,” Williams said. “The government or the family?”

According to the Bible, it’s the parents, he said.