The Cruel Trick
Here is how it works. A Christian parent looks at the state school system and sees exactly what is there: sexual corruption, nihilism, the systematic deconstruction of the image of God in their child, the replacement of any coherent moral framework with therapeutic relativism and ideological noise. The parent is right to be alarmed.
Into that alarm steps the classical Christian education movement with its pitch: go back to the roots, the foundational documents of Western civilisation, the great texts of Greece and Rome. Elevate your children above the noise. Give them wisdom. Make them free men, in the tradition of the liberal arts.
The parent, desperate for an alternative and recognising the word Christian in the title, says yes. They may take a second job to pay the fees. They make a genuine sacrifice for what they believe is the good of their children.
The cruel trick is this: the source of the pollution they are trying to escape is the very source they are being pointed toward.
The Renaissance Was Not Christian
The classical approach has been tried before. Several times. The results are not ambiguous.
The Renaissance was a classical movement — a deliberate return to the ancient documents of Greece and Rome as the source of wisdom, beauty, and human flourishing. Its fruit was immorality, the elevation of pagan aesthetics over Christian ones, the attempt by civil rulers to subordinate the church, and the beginning of the process that eventually produced the thoroughgoing secularisation of the West.
The Reformation interrupted it. The Reformation’s approach was not classical. The Reformers went back to the Bible — specifically to the Bible in the vernacular, available to ordinary people. That is where the Reformation’s power came from. Not from Aristotle or Plato but from Paul and Moses and David, read in the language the common man actually spoke.
And then came the Enlightenment — the Renaissance in a more advanced philosophical form. The same move: back to the original sources of Greco-Roman thought. The same claim: this is where wisdom, freedom, and true human development live. The fruit is what we are living in today: the progressive, accelerating de-Christianisation of every sphere of public life. This is not an accident of the Enlightenment. It is its logical conclusion.
Classical Christian education is a third attempt at the same experiment, in a context where the previous two attempts have already produced their results. To call it Christian is to smear Christ with the mud of what produced the problem. It is the equivalent of theistic evolution — trying to hold two contradictory frameworks together in order to purchase respectability from the world.
The Opportunity Cost
Here is the practical argument, for those who want it in those terms.
Time is finite. So are the years of a child’s education. Whatever you spend time on, you are not spending on something else. This is what economists call opportunity cost.
Classical Christian education requires specialist teachers in Greek and Latin. It requires a curriculum built around the canonical texts of the Greek and Roman pagan tradition. It requires years of engagement with those texts in order to develop competence in the languages. All of that time is time not spent on something else.
What is the something else? The Bible. Hebrew. Greek, certainly — but biblical Greek, read in service of the scriptures. The history of Israel, of the ancient Near East, of the covenant tradition. The law of God and its application across spheres of life. Meditation, memorisation, the deep internalisation of the word of God so that it is not merely known about but known.
The classical curriculum tells students, in effect: Plato and Cicero are where the serious learning happens. The Bible is important in the way that a religious text is important to the people who hold it. But the real intellectual formation happens here, with these pagan writers, in these pagan frameworks.
This is not an exaggeration. It is what the curriculum does, regardless of what the marketing says.
What Plato Actually Believed
Plato was a paederast. He believed that erotic relationships between adult men and adolescent boys were a vehicle for the transmission of wisdom and virtue — that eros directed toward a beautiful boy was a legitimate pathway to philosophical truth. This is not a peripheral feature of Platonism; it is woven into the Symposium and the Phaedrus, two of the central texts of the Platonic tradition.
When a Christian parent is told that their children will be reading the classics of Greek philosophy to be formed in wisdom and virtue, they are not always told this. When they are told, the information is often absorbed without consequence, because the investment in the framework is already so deep. The mark of a successful deception is that it continues to operate even after it has been partially exposed.
Drink from the source, by all means. But know what is in the source before you drink.
The Alternative
The alternative is not no education. It is education built on the right foundations.
The Bible is accessible. The tools for understanding it are better than they have ever been. An immersive week of biblical Greek — designed specifically to give access to the tools in Logos and similar software — can equip a student to work with the text at a meaningful level. A programme of meditation, memorisation, and deep reading of the law, the prophets, and the apostles, structured and taken seriously, produces graduates who know the word of God in their bones.
This requires curriculum development. It requires skilled teachers who believe that the Bible is sufficient as the foundation for all genuine learning, not a devotional supplement to a pagan intellectual tradition. It requires parents who are willing to make the same sacrifice they might make for the classical school — but directed toward the real alternative rather than the false one.
It also requires honesty about what the current alternatives actually are. The state school is openly hostile to the faith. The classical school is covertly hostile to it, dressed in language that makes it look friendly. Neither is what it is presented as being.
What would a genuinely Christian education look like? It would look like the Deuteronomy 6 instruction: these words shall be on your heart, you shall teach them diligently to your children, you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. Not as an addition to the real curriculum. As the curriculum itself.
That has never really been tried at scale. It is the education that needs building.