Some of you know that Andre and Tiana just finished kindergarden at Christian Leadership Academy in Troy. What you may not know is that it is a classical school. What is a classical school?

Well, Sarah and I had the same question, so we turned to the guy who kind of set the trend with Christian Schools going classical: Douglas Wilson. I recently had the chance to read his books Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning and The Case for Classical Christian Education. Recovering was written in 1991 and The Case was written in 2003. Reading the two back to back was a little redundant, but it did definitely clarify what schools like Christian Leadership Academy (CLA) mean by classical.

The model is based on an essay written by Dorothy Sayers entitled “The Lost Tools of Learning,” which can be read here.  Sayers submits that children go through three different stages as they develop: Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic. The Poll-Parrot age is when kids love to sing and memorize things. The Pert stage is when kids start to answer back to you and are starting to challenge the ideas that they hear. Poetic is the stage (near puberty) where kids want to express themselves and their own ideas.

Wilson agrees with Sayers that the best way to teach children is through the Trivium, which is tailor made for each of these stages of development. The Trivium consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. When we think of grammar we often think only of English class, but grammar here refers to all of the words, places, people, and math charts that a child needs to learn. At the younger age, students simply learn and memorize things. Then when they hit the Junior High age they begin to think about these things they are learning. This is when the school introduces the logic phase. Now the students are learning how to use the information they have been storing in their heads. Finally when they hit high school they are ready for rhetoric, in which they learn how to write and present their own ideas and theories.

What I love about this approach is that we are teaching our children how to think. That is one thing that unfortunately I didn’t learn until  few years into college. I remember my freshman year in college sitting through classes like a sponge just trying to retain information. I still was learning at the grammar level and had not matured to the logic or rhetoric stage!

Talking with the Principal of CLA, their passion is to train up ambassadors for Christ. The purpose of educating your child classically is not just so they get higher SAT scores (though most do), but to help them love God with all of their minds. If we teach our children how to think, they can read, interpret, and apply the Bible more faithfully and they can share its message more effectively. Everybody can look at the American public school and see its failures and shortcomings, but do we have a solution? I believe classical education is a thought-provoking and promising alternative. We are giving it a test drive, anyone else want to come along for the ride?

For more information on Christian Leadership Academy visit here.

Also watch the video below: