Ancient Greece and a Classical Christian Education

Classical Christian schools are undergoing a revival in the United States, jumpstarted from Douglas Wilson's Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning in 1991 and Susan Wise Bauer's The Well-Trained Mind in 1999. Of course, more continuous history of classical Christian education can be traced from classical Catholic educators.

The question of how to incorporate ancient Greek history, mythology, and philosophy often arises between different groups as well as different parents and educators. Here are some reflections from a book I'm reading by Gilbert Highet: "We read them not because they are "historic," but because they teach us, they make us think. Nowhere else in the entire literature of the world, in any language or any single period is there such a rich, varied, and deeply thoughtful collection of books as those produced by the Greeks and their successors the Romans...A wise man of our own time was once asked what was the single greatest contribution of Greece to the world's welfare. He replied "The greatest invention of the Greeks was (or "on the one hand") and ("on the other hand"). Without these two balances, we cannot think. The Greeks therefore taught one another, by thinking and talking, and writing."

Highet adds, "One of the chief pleasures of studying aesthetic and intellectual history is to see how their ideas...reappear in distant times...If we open Dante's Comedy...we recognize the moral system of the Greek philsopher Aristotle. If we see Shakespeare's Macbeth, we reflect that form of the tragedy and its basic sense were both created by the poets of Greece. The balance of powers on which the American constitution rests was first formulated by a Greek historical thinker, and Greek teachers first stated that lofty ideal, the brotherhood of man..."

And we all live among ancient Greek thinkers, today. One does not have to look far to find Stoics, Sophists, Skeptics, Aristotelians, Platonists, and Epicureans. Recently, John Mark Reynolds posted a rebuttal to a Heart of Wisdom article that suggested "adoption of classical methods but rejection of classical literature." In the spirit of and , I invite you to read and reason through both.

Certainly there are different ages when it would more appropriate to introduce the people and philosophical debates of ancient Greece, but Highet is right. If we teach ancient Greece as only a collection of historical facts, we have missed important lessons for our next generation.