A few highlights from the Association of Classical Christian Schools conference

Yesterday I returned from Dallas, Texas, where I enjoyed the four day, entirely normal, a thousand plus people, conference of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. (And credit to the ACCS for daring to schedule a normal conference this summer.) It was nice to live in a classical Christian bubble for a week, and made the rest of the world, looking out from that bubble, look even more mad than usual, which is probably healthy. Speakers whose names you may know included Rosaria Butterfield, Anthony Esolen, Michael Farris, Douglas Wilson, Louis Markos, Neil Shenvi, and others. Although there was lots of practical advice shared (like how to integrate Socratic discussions into your classes), in this forum I thought I’d share just a few blurbs of more general interest.

Full disclosure, all of the below does derive from my quickly written notes, so especially the stuff in quotation marks is more likely to be almost-exactly what they said, not necessarily actually exactly, since it came from quickly written notes.

Michael Farris, Alliance Defending Freedom, “Stopping the Assault on God and Man”

It was not the primary purpose of his talk, but he did get applause for saying that he thinks there is a real chance the US Supreme Court will reverse Roe v. Wade in the next year. I’m not sure I’d agree, but he is in more a position to know than I am. He said to pray.

But the larger point of his talk was that the way the United States understands itself is changing… or rather, the radicals pulling down the statues and writing curriculum for the “1619 Project” would sure like it to change. Was the founding of the United States mostly a good thing or mostly a bad thing? Progressive activists today sometimes speak as if their real problem is racism… their real problem is not racism. They don’t confine their targets to Confederate memorials, they’d just as soon tear down George Washington. Nor do they really want to “tear down America”, because they have no problem with the powerful bureaucracy, they like the bureaucracy. Their real target is the Christian worldview embedded in our laws and culture. That is why they are generally out to destroy monuments and memory of America’s greatness. They hate God, love power, hate freedom, love “equity”, and are Marxist in both their premises and their aims.

In Farris’ mind, America didn’t exist before 1776, and America, you might almost say, is the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. America was built on its principles, not the fidelity to those principles of the people who wrote them, or their successors. Ask someone what the purpose of government is and you understand their politics. If they say “to provide for the people’s needs”, then they’re socialists. If they say to protect life, liberty, and property, then their thinking is in line with the political purpose of the United States.

Until very recently, US history was understood to be a story about growing into greater conformance with our ideals, and we need to recapture that story. The eradication of slavery was not contradictory to the founding of the US, but was rather about living up to the ideals in the Declaration. Ending segregation was about living up to the ideals in the Declaration. If you look up LBJ’s speech before he signed the Civil Rights Act, LBJ in many ways an awful president, but he appealed to the premises of the Declaration and the Bill of Rights. The way forward must be based on the ideals of our 1776 Revolution. We need to recapture that story, and also restate the connection between socialist ideals and violent coercion. Today’s radicals are just a product of what they’ve learned in school.

Anthony Esolen, “The Power of Poetry in a Classical Christian Education”

I might summarize this talk with a couple sentences he spoke. “Satan tells his demons, we can concede the youth group, we can concede the theology books, just let us take the heights of the imagination. Puny man is less a reasoner than an imitator.” (And dwell on that last sentence for a bit, because that is how the world attacks the Church today. It doesn’t argue against Christianity in any sort of explicit way. It just models, encourages, or mandates behaviors that will confuse or weaken your faith. I doubt Kermit the Frog will make many explicit arguments during Disney’s “This is Me” celebration of Pride.) And, “don’t hand over the imaginations of your children to Hollywood.”

Poetry is powerful, story is powerful. You read a book on philosophy, you can follow the argument while you’re reading it well enough, but will it stick with you like a book of fiction? Story makes us better humans in ways just reading an argument will not. Recover your poetic heritage, Christians. We are like squatters in a vast and abandoned palace. The poetic riches a farmer who owned only ten books would experience every Sunday when he went to church and sang hymns by Isaac Watts or Henry Francis Lyte are remarkable. George Herbert, probably the best lyric poet in the English language ever, and he was a Christian, and do we even read him? We all have gardens to cultivate. Put sacred song and the natural poetry of the human voice in the gardens of your children.

One other comment - it seems to me that Esolen puts a strong connection between religion and culture. When Boniface went to Germany and found them worshipping a tree, he could tell them that they had the wrong tree. When Christian evangelists visit India, they find the people already singing religious songs, they just have to teach them new songs. Never until modern times would the evangelists have also had to teach the people how to sing. A society like ours that rejects religion isn’t even so good as to have a bad culture. It has no culture at all.

Daniel Coupland, “Learning from Rodents: Mentorship in The Wind in the Willows”

If you’re not going to hand over the imagination of your children to Hollywood, how about to classic children’s books? The Wind in the Willows (WW) is that book you may remember involving Rat (teacher, domestic, loves organization, loves the river), Mole (childlike, honest, curious), Toad (wild, impulsive, proud), and Mr. Badger (older, wiser, somewhat anti-social - Coupland said the older he gets, the more he wants to be Mr. Badger). Coupland mentioned that Teddy Roosevelt, while in the White House, heard his wife reading the book to his children, and lingered and listened to her. He then read it twice himself, and then wrote the author, Kenneth Grahame, thanking him and saying he had come to accept the characters as old friends. When TR later visited the UK and was asked to make a list of people he wanted to meet while he was there, Kenneth Grahame was on the list.

The big question of WW, Coupland said, is “what does it mean to be a good friend?”. He went through five images of mentorship in the book in which Rat is usually the mentor, and Mole is usually the mentee, illustrating values of patience, responsibility, maturity, humility, and trust. (This was illustrative of Esolen’s point that it burrows into your heart more to learn these lessons from a book of fiction, than from a nonfiction book about how to be a good mentor.) I’ll give you just two of the examples.

Patience: When they’re in a boat early on Mole, convinced he can handle it, grabs the rowing from Rat. He rows terribly, falls down, the boat flips over, in a real “pride comes before the fall” moment. Rat pulls Mole to shore, “rubs him down” a bit. The Mole is “wet without and dismal within”, and Coupland mentioned that, for children’s literature, it is important that the exterior and the interior match like that. Rat retrieves the boat and the sunken lunch basket. Mole gives a stupendous apology to Rat that itself is a great model of how to apologize, and Rat says “That’s all right, what’s a little water to a river rat?” It’s a good response. Mentees will want to prove themselves and go too far, but mentors should be gracious with them, said Coupland.

Responsibility: When Toad (“talk about your old river”) insults Rat (“I don’t talk about it. But I think about it, all the time.”), Mole comforts Rat, gives his paw a little squeeze. But Rat explains that he has to stick with Toad until the trip is ended. He has an obligation to his friend that is more important than his feelings.

Louis Markos, “Rehabilitating Beauty: How C.S. Lewis Fought the Cult of the Ugly in His Fiction”

Louis Markos talks very quickly, and that’s how you know he is worth listening to. :). This was significantly a talk about the nature of beauty. He said he realized he was a good parent when his kids told him they didn’t like the ending of Shrek because the princess isn’t supposed to be ugly at the end. His kids understand how fairy tales work. Beauty matters. Some Christians have this idea that it’s a great thing to teach kids that beauty isn’t important, we’re more spiritual than that or something - that’s crazy.

In a talk that leaned significantly on Lewis’ space trilogy, he said that to understand beauty you have to understood two things: hierarchy (you could also say difference and distinction), and masculinity and femininity. A culture that attacks distinction in the name of egalitarianism or equity is also attacking beauty, and that is our culture. Yes, ugliness exists in our world, but it is something we can accept eschatologically, not something we should glorify. Bonhoeffer said it is only blessed to be poor if we’re doing it for the sake of Christ. Lewis said we are all born with an innate memory of Eden. Even Darwinists insensibly (from their perspective) admit that they know the world should be better than it is.

Nothing illustrates the Fall better, Markos said, than an attitude of “if I cannot have that form of beauty or happiness, then I will seek to destroy it in others”. C.S. Lewis said that you need Hell because if you let the people in Hell into Heaven, they would make a Hell of Heaven. He warned against making the dog in the manger the tyrant of Heaven, a reference to one of Aesop’s fables. In the last thirty years we have seen a cult of the ugly, an embrace of the ugly. Some people seem to have a hatred of the physical body, they seek to mutilate it. A cult of the ugly has always been there to some extent, but now it is winning.

Justice, Markos said, is a kind of balance. It isn’t about treating everyone the same, it’s about treating people the way they should be treated. Treating everyone the same is fairness, something of interest to adolescents and politicians. We should recover the beauty of hierarchy, the beauty of how we all function together. Our world today would uglify everything in the name of the idol of “equity”. Transgenderism is the ultimate expression of this. It has also entered Bible translations that remove gendered language - if you’ll change the words in red to fit your egalitarianism, you’ll never stop.

In Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, a character is put in a lopsided room, where the goal is to make him despair of truth, goodness, and beauty. That is what government schools have become. One of our jobs in teaching children is just to restore stock responses. We have forgotten how we’re supposed to respond to things.

He ended by telling everyone to email their church’s worship director and tell him that, next Sunday, we need to do a hymn where everyone sings verse one, then just the women sing verse two, then just the men since verse three, then everyone comes back together for verse four. And he said what you’ll notice is, when it’s just the women singing, they slow down, they start to harmonize with each other. And then when it’s just the men singing, it’s like a march, and they speed up, and we’re going through this! And then when everyone comes back together, it’s like a marriage, we are now one again but still distinct. Bring back an understanding of beauty.

Rosaria Butterfield, “The Making of a Monster: Frankenstein, Transgenderism, and Government Education”

This talk was significantly about the book Frankenstein, which has been an academic focus for Butterfield. She spent a lot of time going through the book (again the power of story), but I cannot really do that here. One comment was that "tragic flaws don't destroy you until they do". Our tragic flaw is rejecting God's order for the family. One of the more common places you hear Frankenstein referenced today is the awful situation of, as they later understand themselves, victims of the botched surgeries of transgenderism, who mutilate perfectly good bodies and later develop a sense that what they've done was horribly wrong.

Government schools are Frankenstein’s monster. Teaching on transgenderism in government schools is presented as anti-bullying initiatives rather than sexual education, so there is no opt-out for parents. But Rosaria said she has read some of the materials and what they are giving your 8-year-old is pornography. The California Teacher’s Association fought to allow trans-identified minor students to leave campus during the day for hormone therapy without “bullying”, by which they meant parental awareness. Mom and dad are the bullies. Butterfield said she first realized she couldn’t send her own children to government schools when taking the RPCNA baptismal vows when baptizing their first son, which included “in this light, do you promise… to provide him with a Christian-centered education”.

She ended with a call that the classical Christian education movement has a responsibility to make it so than any Christian student or teacher in government schools can get out of them. Right now most of them think that is impossible, either because they do not know that other options exist, or there is no room for them, or they cannot afford it. It is our duty to try to solve all three.