When I pass many modern public schools, it is often hard to know if I’m looking at a corrections facility or a school. Ugly buildings surrounded by high fences, with inmates or students bussed in and out. Some schools even have metal detectors and guards at the entrance. Recess and time periods are on the bell.
Why are these students here, and what is the goal of their education?As Dr. Scott Postma says in We’ve Been Schooled the goal of modern education is “…to produce a society of both consumers and cogs—citizens that participate efficiently in a producer/consumer economy for the stability and success of the modern industrialized state.”
In the modern era, education is institutionalization.
A modernist education proponent such as Matt Greenfield of Rethink Education and former professor of English, would positively state it this way “The goal of the American public education system is to prepare students to be responsible, healthy, engaged, self-aware citizens and experts in the performance of a socially useful task.” (source)
A socially useful task. The form matches the function. Next time you pass a public school, you can accurately turn to the person next to you and say, “oh look, an institutionalization factory. Look at those soon-to-be socially useful people.” Ironically, the failure rate on even that goal is high.
True Education.
What is the alternative? For the classical educator, education is not institutionalization of individuals for the purpose of a socially useful task. Rather, education is the formation of human souls for their purpose, which is the worship of God.
As Chesterton put it, education is the “soul of society as it passes from one generation to the next.” It is the receiving and transmission of an inheritance. The motto of Roman Roads Press is “inherit the humanities” because we believe we are heirs of a great cultural fortune. The cultivation of wisdom and virtue is to receive that inheritance, and grow up into it.
Form and Function.
The purpose of education will affect the form. If your school looks like or functions like a prison or factory, it may be because in some sense it is.
Our modern five-day school system that runs on segregated grades, periods, and classes didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of the Prussian model. Watch We’ve Been Schooled for a quick history.
Over the past two decades, millions of American families have challenged this model not only in theory (classical education as an idea), but in practice, through the restoration of truth, goodness, and beauty as a guiding principal of forming humans. Even those schools that kept the five-day, class-period model are doing so in ways influenced by homeschooling, university models, and one-room schoolhouse approaches, pushing back the advance of utilitarian modernism.
In Part III, I will talk about three ways this is happening. Through Classical Recitations (or “flipped-classroom” approach). Through hybrid or university model schools. And through mastery-level approach vs age-segregated classrooms.
I was homeschooled most of my k-12, attending a couple years of private school.
In 2011 I founded Roman Roads Press with the specific goal of publishing classical curriculum for homeschoolers, as most of the curriculum at the time was merely adapted for home use.
But since 2011 and 2025, some fairly major shifts happened in private education, and the great divide between “traditional schools” (5-day, brick-and-mortar schools), and homeschooling all but disappeared. The majority of private education now happens in an “in between” that did not exist when I was growing up. The “solo-homeschooler” has all but disappeared, and traditional schools are borrowing more and more from homeschooling principles. Most of the clientele of Roman Roads Press is now somewhere in that “in between.”
I plan to unpack this in a series of posts, but to start, a question:
If you grew up with a Christian education, from your vantage point, how has education changed? (If you have kids, what are you doing for their education?)
Image: A one-room schoolhouse from early America, to illustrate just how much change has happened. Likely none of us experienced anything like that, yet I’m including to illustrate how norms change.
“Dad had enough gall to be divided into three parts,” opens one of America’s beloved tales, Cheaper by the Dozen, published in 1948. To the audience of the day, this colorful description would evoke a commonplace pun from the ubiquitously read Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, which opens “All Gaul is divided into three parts” (or Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres as the Latin student would have had to translate).
The chances are, neither you nor your children have read Julius Caesar and his famous Gallic Wars. However, your grandparents very likely did, and nearly every educated (certainly college educated) American for hundreds of years before that. What changed, and why does it matter?
America has been robbed of true education
John Adams, the second president of the United States and one of the original Founding Fathers wrote to his teenage son, John Quincy, who would later become the 6th U.S. president:
“I wish to turn your thoughts early to such studies as will afford you the most solid Instruction and improvement for the part which may be allotted you to act on the stage of life.There is no history, perhaps, better adapted to this useful purpose than that of Thucydides, an author of whom I hope you will make yourself perfect master.”
Like Julius Caesar, most Americans haven’t read, and perhaps even heard of Thucydides. If that is you, you are not alone! The books and authors that were essential and foundational to the American founders (and generations before and after them) have been stripped from our schools and curriculum over the last 100 years.
This is not a coincidence. These books and ideas, and the art of wrestling with them (once the core of American education) are essential to a free people. As Dr. Scott Postma of Kepler Education says in the mini-documentary We’ve Been Schooled (WATCH: 11 min), “to understand why the modern man has become so dependent on the State, we need look no further than our public education system.”
It would be easy to focus on today’s falling standards, the woke ideology taught in schools, or just glance back a moment at the rich education that was so common to previous generations to know that something needs to be retrieved. But these are past and present comparisons and miss the even bigger picture that is essential to understand if we are to renew true education: what is education?
It’s Time to Reclaim Real, Freeing Education
The education that we have lost has a name: Classical Education, or the Liberal Arts. The word liberal used here has nothing to do with our common use of the word in politics and culture today. Liberal comes from the Latin liber, meaning “free,” and historically described the kind of education expected of a freeman–especially one in a position of leadership, like landowners, lawmakers, innovators. It is the education that equips students with the tools of learning. It teaches how to learn, how to think, how to reason, and how to persuade. This is why nearly every US President was trained in the Liberal Arts, and so many current CEOs and leaders around the world have Liberal Arts degrees. In fact, there is one institution that still has nearly every graduate read Thucydides: West Point Military Academy. Even today, those who are training elite leaders still recognize the essential education that was once commonplace to every American.
The opposite of the Liberal Arts are the Servile Arts, those arts and skills related to “how to do a thing” and not “why to do a thing.” And historically this was the education given to servants, slaves, and the lower classes. If you examine the education students are commonly given today, especially in college, you will recognize these servile arts have taken over our education system. Why? Because those steering our education system value citizens trained to be cogs in a machine, and dependent on the state. Free men and women who know how to think, how to question, and how to write are dangerous to tyrants who want to control a people.1
The ability of the American founders to carefully draft our Constitution was not created in a vacuum. It came from generations steeped in Scripture and the great books. They read the Bible, they read Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Plutarch, Cicero, Julius Caesar, Augustine, Dante, Milton, and so many others. And it deeply informed who they were as Americans. So much so that George Washington was called the “Cincinnatus of the West” (after the 5th century B.C. Roman).
(Photo: Statue of George Washington dressed in a Roman toga resigning his commission, a reference to his imitation of Cincinnatus.)
The American education system has destroyed the Liberal Arts by watering down the curriculum in high school and often replacing great books with woke books. The career preparation we now have in schools (in place of real education) used to be done primarily through apprenticeships. This hijacking of the Liberal Arts has been so successful that we now respond to the “shell” that remains of the Liberal Arts in college with the joke, “Want fries with that?”.
How do we Revive Classical Education?
While much damage has been done, this is not the first time in history that true learning has languished and had to be reclaimed. In fact, it was the church throughout the Middle Ages that preserved many classical texts for future generations. Christians not only founded the first universities in Europe, but made a classical education (a Liberal Arts education) the cornerstone of higher education. In early America we see how Christian this education was in the founding statements of Harvard College.
Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well [that] the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisdom, let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seek it of him (Prov. 2:3).
I believe that a retrieval of classical education is impossible without the perspective and foundation our American founders and the founders of Harvard University shared. The renewal of Classical Education must be Christian. To try to revive classical education that is not explicitly Christian is like trying to regain a cultural appreciation for fine wine, but ignoring the art of viticulture. Christianity is the soil in which classical education grew. Even the pre-christian pagan works were cherished, preserved, and used by Christians, so much so that the 4th century pagan emperor Julian the Apostate forbade Christians from teaching the classical texts (pre-Christian epics like the Aeneid of Vergil) in their schools. The cancelling of the classics by those opposed to Christendom is nothing new!
Practical Steps
The first step is probably the hardest for many Americans. I don’t believe it is possible to give your children a truly classical Christian education if they are in government schools. You must opt-out. Whether you choose homeschooling, private education, or online classes like Kepler Education, take the step of faith, and get your children out!
Once you have made that decision, there are so many wonderful options. I am a second generation homeschooler, and homeschool my own children. When my parents homeschooled us overseas, there was very little available in terms of support or curriculum. Today, there is an almost overwhelming amount of choice for how to give your children a Christian and classical education.
Old Western Culture
I have worked with classical educators over the past ten years to develop a curriculum that I believe is a must-have for every family.It is a four-year great books curriculum called Old Western Culture, and while it is primarily a high school curriculum (history and literature), parents (and even teachers) often use it themselves. As a decade of parents who have used the curriculum can testify, this is an excellent way for a teenager or adult to acquire the core of what it means to have a true (classical) education.
But whether or not you use Old Western Culture (presented in more detail below), read the great books! Join the conversation that has been happening for centuries by all educated men and women. Through these books, you will converse with the American founders, Reformers of the 16th century, and early church fathers who all had this education in common, and from that education learned what it means to be free.
Don’t cancel the classics!
We responded to schools and universities stripping away the classics with our own “apology” for the great books.
Watch our “Apology” for the Great Books video, and hear the full letter from John Adams to his homeschooled son.
A Practical Tool for your Family: Old Western Culture
The great books of Western civilization form the core of every effort to revive classical education. Roman Roads Press has developed an award-winning curriculum for high school students and adults that makes the study of the great books enjoyable, easy, and affordable.
Old Western Culture is a lecture-based curriculum that guides students through the great books themselves. Read the books that inspired and equipped American Presidents and Statesmen, authors throughout all history, the Protestant Reformers, the Medieval Christians, and the early Church Fathers.
Daniel Foucachon grew up homeschooled in Lyon, France where his father was a Presbyterian minister. His family moved to Moscow, Idaho in 2005 where he attended New Saint Andrews college, graduating in 2010. He is the founder of Roman Roads Press, a publisher of classical Christian curriculum, and Kepler Education, a platform for independent teachers to offer online classes. He is married to Lydia, and has seven children. When he is not promoting classical education and the great books, he loves to spend time with his family attempting to small-scale farm.
The motto of my company, Roman Roads Press, is to “Inherit the Humanities.” This motto assumes a few things. First, there is something to inherit. There is a rich heritage to receive (the collection of works and ideas held in common by all those who preceded us in the West). Secondly, it is a verb: Inherit! You have to do something about it. So, inherit the Humanities today, both you, and your household.
Testimonials for Old Western Culture
This has to be the best curriculum we have found for studying the great classics! We’ve been homeschooling for about 15 years and have not found anything like this.
Stephanie W, Homeschool Mom
It is a program my kids have loved the most this year. And I love that I am able to learn alongside then too. After many years of misunderstanding some of The Great Books, I can safely say I am closer to realizing what they mean now. I am truly amazed by this program!
Amy F, Homeschool mom
As a homeschool mom just venturing into classical education, I can tell you that Old Western Culture: The Greeks is super-easy to use. With schedules carefully laid out for you, you can easily plug and play. I like that all preparation is done for me and I need simply to enjoy listening to my children as they begin to think and talk and discuss ideology together.
Lynn, Homeschool mom
I’ve tried a lot of “great books” materials in the past. All have left me feeling inadequate and incapable. All of them. Old Western Culture though? This one is different.
Debra B, homeschool mom
But what if there was a single program that adequately covered key texts of Western literature; that was well-written, accurate, and Christ-centered; and that didn’t just mimic all the other courses? Well, there is. Old Western Culture: A Christian Approach to the Great Books is everything other Classical-style courses wish they were.
Caleb Cross, Exodus Books
God is in the process of redeeming my education as I educate my sons. Thank you for aiding us in that journey.
Jen R., Old Western Culture homeschooler
We love Old Western Culture and how it has made attaining a classical Christian education in the humanities very achievable and enjoyable! We used several other classical Christian humanities programs before realizing that they weren’t very homeschool friendly and we are so so blessed to have found Old Western Culture.
As a boy I lived for a period in Florida, the capital of retirement homes. As a result, for various reasons, we visited a few of these homes. They were nice. Like little vacation villages. Yet they were also tragic. This is where the most essential members of our society spent their most important years.
We were living in Florida because my grandfather was dying of cancer, and we lived with him during his last days. He never lived in a retirement home, and died Christmas morning in his own bed, surrounded by family. What a gift to him, but what a greater gift to us.
In book II of Vergil’s Aeneid, we encounter one of the most moving scenes in the epic story. Aeneas carries his father Anchises from the burning ramparts of Troy, while holding his son’s hand. In one image famously depicted by artists throughout the centuries, we see Aeneas preserving both the past and the future; his father, and his son. It’s easy to understand the need for the future, but even his father argued with Aeneas, telling him to “Make haste to save the poor remaining crew / And give this useless corpse a long adieu.” (Aeneid Book II.870). His father feared he would be a burden, and unneeded. But Aeneas needed Anchises. He didn’t need his strength, or even longevity. In fact, Anchises would die on the voyage. He needed his father for his wisdom, but more importantly, he needed what every father represents to his son: identity. To abandon his father, while alive, even if it made logical sense, would have symbolized an abandonment and death of his identity.
Even after his death, we are reminded what his father represents when Aeneas goes into the underworld in book 6, and speaks to his father. There Anchises reminds Aeneas who he is, and what he is destined for. This is what fathers are for.
Earthly fathers give their children a name, a household, and a lineage.
Our Heavenly Father also gives us His name in baptism, a household, and a lineage.
Our spiritual fathers have gifts to give us as well.
The theologian Hughes Oliphant Old explored the concept of fathers in the faith this way:
“It is an old custom to call John Chrysostom ‘our father among the saints.’ John Chrysostom, however, was celibate. Not one of us can claim him as our ancestor. What makes him then our father? Augustine had one son, who died at the age of twelve…How is it that we call such men Fathers?
The answer is this: Chrysostom, Augustine, and Jerome have again and again engendered spiritual children, in one generation after another, in one culture after another…The Fathers were the seminal thinkers of Christian theology. If it were not for this ability of theirs to speak to the most devout and fertile of minds of every age and nation, they would have been forgotten long ago.” (Hughes Oliphant Old, Worship Reformed According to Scripture, 168.)
We need our fathers. Our earthly fathers by blood, our spiritual by faith, and our cultural fathers by inheritance. We need to carry them on our backs if our city is sacked. They are not dead weight, they are the treasure to retrieve from the flames.
This Father’s Day, honor your earthly father, honor your Heavenly Father, and honor your spiritual and cultural fathers. This exhortation is embedding in our motto, “Inherit the humanities.” “To inherit” assumes the heritage is already yours and that it is a blessing to receive.
Happy Fathers Day!
Daniel Foucachon, for all of us at Roman Roads Press
“We are giving small instructions, while professing to educate an orator. But even studies have their infancy, and as the rearing of the very strongest bodies commenced with milk and the cradle, so he, who was to be the most eloquent of men, once uttered cries, tried to speak at first with a stuttering voice, and hesitated at the shapes of the letters. Nor, if it is impossible to learn a thing completely, is it therefore unnecessary to learn it at all.”
Kepler is a consortium of independent teachers unified by a shared vision and innovative Chegg answers free online platform to bring classical Christian education with to junior high and high school students.
What does this mean for you and your kids? A wide choice of instructors and teaching styles (curricula and methods), and fascinating courses options!
With course offerings ranging from Algebra 2 to Monsters as Metaphors, Kepler classes are taught by passionate instructors who have the freedom to teach to their strengths and the subjects they most love.
Does Kepler Replace Roman Roads Classroom?
Roman Roads Classroom and its teachers are now part of Kepler, and you will find many of the same courses and teachers on the new platform, along with dozens of additional instructors and over one hundred course offerings, with new instructors and classes being added every week!
Do you offer full grades?
Yes! You can choose one or two courses à la carte, or a build a Diploma Track, but in both instances, you are choosing the courses and teachers, along with learning styles, curriculum, and schedule to match the specific needs of your family. All this unified on a new platform built for the purpose of streamlining the process from registration to transcript.
Our motto at Kepler is “Empowering families by liberating teachers.” By creating an environment and platform where teachers can craft and offer their own courses, we bring all that choice directly to families.
We are excited about registration, and to celebrate our launch we are giving a $50 Amazon gift card and a Kepler T-shirt to every one of the first 50 families that register for one or more classes, and shares about it!
Kepler Education is a consortium of independent teachers, united by a vision for classical Christian education and on a single platform.
Learn how this unique approach to online classes offers a tailored education to your family as you go through jr. high and high school with your children.
See our current (and growing) number of class offerings and teachers at https://kepler.education
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s Christians recover classical Christian education, they are unearthing old treasures, once the possession of every educated man. Some of these treasures are words and descriptions–terms like “Trivium” and “Quadrivium,” “paideia,” and “liberal arts.” Of all these terms, “liberal arts” lays at the heart of what classical education is all about. So what did our forefathers mean by “liberal arts”?
“Liberal”
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he word liberal has nothing to do with our modern use of the word in politics and culture. Liberal means “free,” and historically described the kind of education expected of a freeman–especially one in a position of leadership, like nobility. Our culture has so alienated itself from a historic education that it’s very difficult for us to think of education without thinking of jobs and vocational training.
Dr. Roy Atwood, founding President of New Saint Andrews College, was once asked by a student, “Who are you”? His automatic response was to give his profession: “Uh…I’m a professor.” But the student responded, “No, I don’t mean what you do, but who are you?”[1. Dr. Roy Atwood, Educating Royalty, Reformed Perspective: A Magazine for the Christian Family, Vol. 33, No. 6, April 2014.] We are programmed to answer that question with what we do, with our job title. And we likewise think of education in terms of answering the question, “Will this education prepare me for a job?”. The modern definition of education has the effect of not only defining the education process in terms of pragmatic usefulness, but also defining human beings themselves in terms of usefulness. Like in the world of Thomas the Train which our children didactically watch, our identity is wound up with our usefulness. “Who are you?” asks the modernist? “I do this job” we reply catechetically.
Christians of previous generations viewed education, and themselves, differently. The opening lines of the Westminster Shorter Catechism would have been familiar to nearly every child in early America: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” That is who we are: worshiping beings, who delight in God. Or to use Dr. Atwood’s conclusion to the question “who are you?”, we are royalty, heirs of Christ. And we should educate our children in that light.
Some may object that this identity is a fine thing, but has nothing to do with education. “How does it help you get a job? How is it useful?” In 1646, the founders of Harvard College defined education in their “Rules and Precepts” in this way:
“Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.”
Christ is both the source and the goal of education.
“Who are you?” We are liberal (free) Christians, pursuing wisdom and virtue through the interwoven arts of theology (study of the knowledge of God) and humanities (study of ourselves and of mankind). “Knowledge of God and knowledge of self” is how John Calvin sets the stage for his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and is also how Harvard and other universities in the United States prior to the 1900s set the foundation for education.
So the term “liberal” points to the purpose of education and our identity. But what precisely does this looks like.
“Arts”
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f the foundation of education is knowledge of self and knowledge of God, how might the liberal arts help us in this endeavor? The Liberal Arts are an education in first principles–in the foundations of things. The Western heritage is the cultural soil into which Christ was made flesh, and the common inheritance of all God’s people. This specifically means recovering an education which includes Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Dante, Augustine and Boethius, Cicero and Plutarch, Homer and Vergil, Milton and Shakespeare. These and many others are so much woven into the fiber of ourselves and our culture that we cannot truly know ourselves without knowing them. It includes the classical study of logic, rhetoric, grammar, and language. These disciplines inform our understanding of the written and spoken word, the means God gave us for understanding Himself and ourselves.
We may have only recently re-discovered this birthright, but it is not presumptuous to receive this rich heritage as our own. Our culture is in full-blown identity crisis. The liberal arts educate our children in their identity, giving them the tools to understand the world around them in wisdom and virtue. And with this education in first principles–these freeing, liberal arts not defined by usefulness–our children will possess tools of learning that are surprisingly useful in a confused world.
Daniel Foucachon grew up in Lyon, France where his father was an evangelist and church-planter with Mission to the World. He moved to Moscow, Idaho in 2005 to attend New Saint Andrews College, where he graduated with a BA in Liberal Arts and Culture in 2009. In 2009 he founded a media production company, and was the producer of Canon Wired (the media branch of Canon Press) until 2013. His love for classical education and desire to publish curriculum designed for home education led him to found Roman Roads Media in 2011, which has since produced and published award-winning liberal arts curriculum for high school students. He and his wife Lydia live in Moscow, Idaho with their three sons and one daughter.
Follow Daniel: Facebook | Twitter
It was a real privilege to contribute to A Better Admissions Test: Raising the Standard for College Entrance Exams by Classic Learning Initiatives! It was especially delightful when my search for a primary source brought me to the University of Idaho special collections, and the inaugural address of Frederick Kelley, President of the University of Idaho in 1928. Kelley, the original creator of the standardized exam in 1915, changed his views with age and wisdom, and spent the latter part of his career advocating for classical liberal arts.
My chapter (Chapter 1) gives a brief history of entrance exams in the United States, starting with an overview of the classical liberal arts, a needed foundation to understand the change brought about by standardized testing.
Robert Bortins of Classical Conversations said it best about this book: “A must read for anyone in education or admissions who is brave enough to admit that things aren’t quite right in higher education any more.”
“We are all—more or less deliberately—students of English; we all recognize the value of accurately expressing our ideas and of exactly understanding the ideas of other. Now, though the notion has never dawned upon the large, good-humored, unenlightened public opinion which indirectly shapes our educational policies, to the serious student of English some acquaintance with Latin is not merely convenient, not merely valuable, but quite literally indispensable. At every onward step towards the mastery of his own language and literature he must use his Latin lamp if he has one, or stumble and go astray in the darkness if he has not. In this position the value of Latin is unique.”
—The Classical Weekly, Vol. V, No. 26. May 1912. Full column HERE (highly recommended!)
“If the unhappy day ever comes when teachers point their students toward these newer examinations, and the present weak and restricted procedures get a grip on education, then we may look for the inevitable distortion of education in the terms of tests.”
“Education is a lifelong process. How well any of us becomes educated does not depend essentially on how much he comes to know in his school and college years but rather upon how effectively he has come to be imbued with the spirit of study in school and college years so as to assure his remaining a student throughout life. It is amazing how general the notion seems to be that we study only when we have teachers who require it. Learning is the result of study! Teaching is not a substitute for learning but is only a stimulus to it. Teaching, then, should be confined to those fundamentals which serve best as a basis for subsequent learning. College days should not be wasted on those highly differentiated aspects of subjects, the mastery of which will naturally follow if genuine intellectual interests are created or stimulated during college years…College is a place to learn how to educate oneself rather than a place in which to be educated.”
—Frederick Kelly, The University in Prospect, Inaugural Address as President of the University of Idaho, 1928.
“How does Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain echo the main theme of the Aeneid?
The Aeneid describes in an epic fashion the destiny of the Roman people to bring peace to the world through conquering the nations and bringing civilization. Geoffrey directly echoes this idea as Brutus receives a prophecy that his descendants will govern the earth. So Geoffrey depicts the British people as being the heirs of the Roman destiny.
What the entrance exam to Harvard university tells us about classical education in America.
In 1646 Harvard University adopted the following words, based on their mission statement, as part of their “Rules and Precepts”:
Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).
Thoroughly dedicated to Scriptures as the source of all Truth, Harvard sought to equip ministers and laymen with the tools for being effective citizens in the world, to the glory of God. How did they do this? Through classical education.
Some Christians hear about “classical” or “liberal arts” education, and assume it is an ancient, pre-Christian form of education. Historically liberal arts, meaning “freeing arts”, was the education of a freeman or nobleman, while vocational education was for a slave or serf. Some object that it is a pagan way to educate children, as opposed to Christian, and that “Classical Christian” is simply some kind of syncretism or oxymoron. Not only is this untrue, but it is ironically untrue. In order to dismiss “classical education” as pagan, you have to dismiss the entire history of Christianity in regards to education. The founding fathers of the United States provide a clear example. Not only were they classically educated themselves, but they considered classical education to be an important component to being a faithful, educated Christian. The entrance exam below, paired with the mission statement of Harvard, demonstrates this:
The HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY portion of the Entrance Exam for Harvard University, July 1869.
I. Bound the basin of the Po, of the Mississippi, of the St. Lawrence.
II. Name the chief rivers of Ancient Gaul and Modern France. Is France later or smaller than Transalpine Gaul? What are the two principal rivers that rise in the Alps? Where is the Mount Blanc?
III. Where is the Source of the Danube? of the Volga? of the Ganges? of the Amazon?
IV. Describe the route of the Ten Thousand, or lay it down on a map.
V. Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander.
VI. Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, — geographically and historically
VII. Supply the two names left bank in the following passage from the Oration for the Manilian Law:
“Non dicam duas urbes potentissimas, Carthaginem et Numantiam ab eodem ________ esse deletas; non commemorabo nuper ita vobis patribusque esse visum, ut in uno _________ spes imperii poneretur, ut idem cum Jugurtha, idem cum Cimbris, idem cum Teutonis bellum administraret.” Who was Jugurtha? Where was Numantia?
Students would answer from their knowledge of Julius Ceasar’s Gallic Wars in Latin, Xenophon’s Anabasis in Greek, and from the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. It was this education that enabled the American founding fathers to intentionally reject the (failed) “experiment in democracy” of ancient Athens, and to instead build a Constitutional and representative Republic, which was more like the Republic of Rome. Classical education shaped men like George Washington, and John Adams. But the Founders were not returning to something merely ancient. They were continuing the tradition of classical education as it was handed down from the earliest of Christian history, starting with the Apostles themselves, and going into the early Church, and on into the Middle Ages, and particularly strong among the Protestant Reformers. As little as 60-70 years ago, it was still taken for granted that an educated person would have a classical education. The idea that education would not be classical, or that classical education is opposed to Christian education, is a very novel and modern idea.
Wondering how to give your children the kind of education that would allow them to pass the entrance exam to Harvard in 1869? Roman Roads Media is the right place.
Christian, is your child in a public school facing yet another wave of attacks on sanity and religious freedom? Will your daughter be using the restroom alongside a disturbed boy who “identifies” as a girl?
It’s time to opt out!
I’m not going to spend time making the case that you should opt out. I really hope that Christians are seeing that in most situations today, this is the obvious conclusion. But rather, I want to answer the objection “what is the alternative?” How do we opt out?
It may not be easy, and some situations are harder than others, but there are incredible opportunities available today to give your children a CHRISTIAN education. You really CAN opt out! More than ever before in history, parents are equipped with the tools to make this possible, whether books, video courses, online courses, curriculums for every learning style, and of course, private schools. There is a solution for just about every situation, every budget, and every style of learning. All of these scenarios require dedication, but nearly every true obsticle is now removed.
I have dedicated my own career to providing one answer to this question. Through the company I founded, Roman Roads Media, we provide Christian classical curriculum designed specifically for the homeschool, with an emphasis on video and online learning. Our speciality is 6-12 grade classical subjects.
It’s now obvious WHY you should #optout of #publicshools – but here’s HOW you can do it
But we are one of many. Let me name you just a few of my friends, all doing their part to answer this question:
Can you not afford the education? There are ways: scholarships, talk to your church, or talk to me if you’re interested in our curriculum.
But please, Christian, #OPTOUT! For the dedicated parent, there are always opportunies. And I will help any way I can.
Sincerely,
Daniel Foucachon.
Founder, Roman Roads Media,
publisher of Christian classical curriculum
Wesley Callihan on the opening lines of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars
Mark Twain is attributed with the saying “Those who don’t read have no advantage over those who can’t.”
We are now a couple generations away from our forefathers who abandoned classical education. We are now the generation that does not even know what it has lost. Wes Callihan gives a glimpse at the kind of richness we have lost in this excerpt from the Old Western Culture curriculum on the great books of Western civilization. If you don’t study the classics, you have no advantage over those who can’t. Roman Roads Media provides tools to help you accomplish this task! Get started today!
Daniel Foucachon grew up in Lyon, France where his father was an evangelist and church-planter with 
