Classical Education
There are signs of a movement in Wichita to bring an Orthodox Classical Christian School to the burgeoning metropolis. It is a movement that I hope will not take long to gain a full head of steam.
The current educational system that is found in the public educational system is bankrupt. There is no way for the system to be fixed, a tourniquet will temporarily stop the bleeding but it does not solve the problem. Many of the private schools across the nation are not much better.
The inherent problem with educational system both public and in some cases private is that the program centers around the student. It encourages the student to think only about themselves and seek for their own pleasure.
Students must learn that they are part of a larger whole. They are not the complete humanity but only one fractional part of it. Modern society continues to inform the student that they, the student, is the only one that matters, that the cosmos revolves around them. Orthodox Christianity on the other hand tells us that life has to be lived out in communion with other people. We are told that we do not live for ourselves but rather that we live for others, we live to lay down our lives for others, not ourselves. One of the ways for students to recognize that they are part of something bigger than themselves is getting them to dig into the classics. They need to learn that life hasn’t just evolved in the last century but rather many of the things which we take for granted were sorted out centuries ago.
Educating the whole person is another goal of Orthodox Classical Education. This is not found in public education for they only seek to educate and form the mind and body. The same can be said for most private schools. In the Orthodox Church we learn that the whole person is to re-made. We do not focus on the mind and forget about the spiritual and neither do we focus on the spiritual and forgo the mind. The focus and goal of Orthodox education is to form and educate the whole of a person. Latin and Greek are one of the ways that the mind is formed and the daily prayers and services are ways that the spiritual is formed. With that being said it does not mean that the mind cannot be developed in the prayers and services and that the spiritual cannot be developed in the reading of classics and learning of languages.
In closing there are numerous arguments to put forth but the most convincing argument is to put forward what His Grace Bishop BASIL said, whether we will go with the flow and not instill the Faith in our children or go against the flow and begin to raise up schools in Wichita and across the country.
