Building a Culture of Classical Learning in Your School

Camille Pissarro, The Artist’s Garden at Eragny (1898)

In a previous article, I noted a few ways in which pioneering parents and teachers might develop a culture of classical learning in their communities. What if you have already founded your school, but that classical culture isn’t quite there yet? Or what if you find yourself at the helm of an existing school that needs reorientation? The latter, after all, is an increasingly common phenomenon in North America, where hundreds of Christian schools which had once been academically and even spiritually adrift have been turned around by the adoption of a classical model.

Here we will take a closer look at how the head of any school, new or old, might go about cultivating classical learning right where they are.

Take your families and teachers with you

No one can start a school, or turn one around, all alone. Visionaries need a critical mass of colleagues who both understand the vision and have the skills and determination to implement it. And the expert administrators need those visionaries.

Pastoral wisdom is also essential. School leaders are sometimes tempted to change course overnight, only to face threats of mass resignations from teachers and of mass unenrolments from families. And even if a school manages to scrape through such a crisis with its rosters largely intact, it may yet face a needlessly protracted and uphill battle. Call it the ‘bulldoze and blast’ model. It’s dramatic, but it could cost you your topsoil.

By contrast, the heads we see at the most thriving school communities tend to help their teachers and parents turn with them so as to see the vision that they see. This takes patience and courage. Call it the ‘gardening’ model: lay out the beds, till the soil, plant those seeds and saplings, water regularly—and, yes, pull weeds and prune as needed—and wait. 

Two examples from my recent trip to America often come to mind. In one case, a Lutheran pastor and headmaster had inherited a Texan school where some of the teachers already had classicising inclinations. But most were either not really aware of the classical tradition or not yet convinced by it. Rather than attempt a coup, this headmaster started a reading group for his teachers, featuring contemporary writings, works by classical authors, and educational texts from Lutheran theorists of the sixteenth century. Meanwhile, he established fortnightly drop-in events for parents, one in the early morning and another after work, so as to accommodate different families’ schedules. The sessions for the parents were partly social and partly formative, with readings on the nature of education set in advance, but left strictly optional. All of this precipitated slow but deeply rooted changes. Within a few years the spirit of the school and its curriculum were unmistakably classical. All of these reading and discussion groups still meet.

A few miles away, a lay director at a new Catholic boys’ school had been in a similar position. His teachers were already keen for the classics. But he knew that prospective families in the community, however much they wanted religious formation for their sons, were not necessarily sold on the classical side of the curriculum. So he organised a series of sporting events, including clay shooting (this was in Texas, after all), and cookouts for the dads. At first this was purely social. But as friendships formed between the teachers and the fathers, their conversations over pints turned from athletics to the great questions of life. Here the authors of the past, from Euclid to Aquinas and beyond, inevitably made their entry and then became fixtures in their conversations. Before long a consistent reading group emerged. It, too, continues to meet regularly. 

Finally, schools like these take care to put on events where parents can see what their sons and daughters are learning: musical performances, poetry recitations or oratorical declamations, plays, debates, geography contests, and so on. Many parents who are not able to commit to a reading group will certainly come to see their children’s hard work on display. They will come to know and love the tree by its fruits. Parents involved in reading and discussion groups, and others who regularly see the fruits of their children’s efforts, enrich the life of the school in countless tangible and intangible ways. They also tend to be some of a school’s most enthusiastic advocates and promoters.

Help your teachers go deep

Nourishing the intellectual life of your teachers is essential. For one, it goes a long way toward building and maintaining consensus about curriculum and ethos. But a school which recognises its teachers’ own love of learning does more than that. It shows them that they are respected not merely for what they already know, but also as lifelong pursuers of truth and excellence, both in and beyond their particular disciplines. That respect will do wonders for institutional esprit de corps. In their turn, teachers who know they are respected in this way are less likely to suffer from burnout and more likely to be excellent models of the classical ideal for their pupils. 

Many older schools in the United Kingdom support such teacher formation. Winchester encourages teachers to develop elective courses on subjects of their choosing; Eton sometimes gives its teachers sabbatical years for their own research and writing projects. This sort of thing is rarely possible at newer schools. What we do regularly see in the classical revival is school support for the intellectual lives of teachers in after-hours pursuits or in the vacation periods. Today there are excellent distance programmes available to help teachers go deeper in the tradition of the liberal arts and the great books, including seminars, continuing education courses, and even master’s degrees.

Some teachers may wish to run their own reading groups with their colleagues. Literature from the secondary school curriculum is often a good place to start. After all, great books were lacking from many of our own educations. So why note provide a space to catch up on Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Shakespeare, and to do it in good company? A termly public lecture given by a teacher for the broader community, or a monthly seminar given just for other teachers, or essays for a school journal will give your faculty members more opportunities to share their passions for history, science, philosophy, art, theology, and more with their peers, while simultaneously continuing to develop their talents and interests. You could offer extracurricular clubs for pupils that play to teachers’ strengths. Consider, too, what an annual formal dinner for the teachers and their families might do.

All of this points to the third of the three fundamental tasks that a school performs. In its curriculum and its ethos, a school will shape minds, form characters, and transmit culture. A good school transmits a good culture, including the knowledge and practices consistent with human flourishing. 

Usually we think of this last task, cultural transmission, from the pupil’s perspective. What knowledge is the pupil learning from the teacher? But while the pupil’s side of the transmission is essential, the role that a community of teachers plays in transmitting both knowledge and the spirit of learning from one generation to another is every bit as vital. A school can be a place of learning for pupils precisely because it is first a society of collegial teachers. Such a collegium of teachers works together in pursuit of a shared vision that is refracted through the various disciplines they teach. Remove the teachers and the trusting relationships that form their collegium (as twentieth-century totalitarian régimes very deliberately did), or undermine their knowledge and their ability to communicate it (as ineffective educational theories still do), and a once healthy school culture will turn sickly. Yet the reverse, so far from being impossible, has happened and continues to happen in countless classicising schools even now.

If you are in a position to set the cultural tone for a school or home-education co-operative, you are very lucky indeed. There are plenty of things you can do today to move your school’s community of parents and teachers toward the way it ought to be in a year, or in three or five years. You need not—and should not—worry about having everything tomorrow just as you want it to be ten years hence. Take those ideals as lofty goals for yourself, for your colleagues, for your pupils, and for their parents. Take them seriously and work toward them stubbornly. But do all that as a gardener would. That is to say: bulldozer sparingly and trust in spadework.