In Zion Lutheran Academy, in the inner city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, all of the mostly African-American students, from grades to 2 to 4, learn how to play the violin.  The Zion Academy chess club placed third in the state and fifteenth nationally.  The students parse grammar in English and Latin.  They put on plays for their classmates and learn how to read by engaging with real literature.  The students, in their crisp uniforms, are proud of their achievements, as are their parents.  As a model of inner city education, Zion has been attracting attention, not only in the local community but as far afield as the “Wall Street Journal,” which published an article about the school.

Zion calls itself a “classical Lutheran school” identifying with a curricular movement that is sweeping through Christian schools.  Many of the non-parochial evangelical schools were once thought of as a narrow religious enclaves, but today the so-called “Classical Christian Schools” are building a name themselves for their academics.  Today, the Association of Classical and Christian Schools has close to 100 members scattered throughout the country, with annual conferences, teacher training seminars, and an accrediting program.  Whole  publishing companies have  sprung up to provide schools, and increasingly, homeschoolers, with classical curriculum.  Classical tutorials - offering instruction, exercises, and real-time chat in such subjects as philosophy and literature have established themselves on the Internet.  Because classical education - which has long been the approach used by elite private schools of the privileged works especially well for minority and disadvantaged children, a whole network of classical schools have been organized in the south as part of a ministry of racial reconciliation.  And now, the classical approach is being discovered by Lutheran schools.  Today's classical Christian education is not, however, simply a return to the education of the past; rather, it has been contemporized, adapted to today's educational subjects and needs.  The result is an approach to Christian education that fosters academic excellence, that goes beyond the basics in teaching thinking skills and creativity, and that integrates the faith in a sophisticated way.

The Liberal Arts And Science
Classical education can be summarized in terms of the so-called liberal arts.  The term derives from the Latin word "libera," meaning "freedom."  The Greeks and the Romans practiced two kinds of education for two kinds of people.  A strictly vocational, job related training was reserved for slaves.  Their sole purpose was to serve the economy and obey their masters.  Free citizens, on the other hand, needed an education that would equip them to be an active participant in the Athenians democracy and the Roman Republic, one that would help and develop their full intellect and human potential.

An education for freedom centered around certain “arts,” or skills of the human mind.  Though the liberal arts were pioneered by Greek and Roman thinkers and educators, they were not fully systemized until the advent of Christianity, as the church fathers were thinking through what elements of the pagan culture could be adapted into the Scriptural world view.  It was Cassiodorus who was apparently the first to articulate and systematize the “Seven Liberal Arts.”

The first three liberal arts were grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the foundational skills that constituted what was called the trivium.  These are, first of all, arts of language, and classical education and its beginning stages concentrate on the cultivation of language skills -- reading, writing, speaking, and learning foreign languages.  Someone who learns a language must master its grammar; that is, the structure, vocabulary, rules, and conventions that constitute a language.  Mere grammar, of course, is not enough; one must move on to logic, learning how to think in that language and participate in the dialectical give-and-take of conversation.  Genuine facility and language next requires “rhetoric,” that is, original expression, learning how to express oneself in a creative, effective, and persuasive way.

The fact is, every subject has its grammar, logic, and rhetoric.  To be educated in any discipline, one must know its basic facts (grammar); be able to think deeply about the subject (logic); and be able to act on that knowledge in a personal, original, and independent way (rhetoric).  Put it another way, every type of learning requires knowledge (grammar), understanding (logic), and creativity (rhetoric).

The classical trivium in fact anticipates the findings of contemporary educational psychology, including Bloom's taxonomy and studies in the four "Higher Order Thinking Skills."

1. Data Accumulation (grammar).
2. Analysis (logic).
3. Decision Making (logic and rhetoric).
4. Communication (rhetoric).

Mortimer Adler (1982) uses a sports metaphor to describe what classical educators have always done: the teacher needs to function as a coach -- supervising practice, planning drills, motivating performance, and working one-on-one until the skill is mastered.

Coaching involves the teacher (whether a pedagogue or a parent) sitting down next to a student and working together.  This can involve correcting the student's reading, helping with math problems, critiquing writing assignments, or playing with flash cards.  Students, just like athletes, must drill, condition their (intellectual) muscles, and practice, practice, practice.  But for this work to bear fruit, they must have guidance of a coach who can provide direction, keep up their motivation, inspire them to excellence.

After learning the basics on the grammar level, the student must next learn to understand what they have learned and develop the skills of
thinking.  They move to the next level of the trivium, to logic.  This stage is often termed “dialectic,” referring to the way those intellectual skills were taught; by dialogues, that is questions and answers in a back and forth discussion.  This is the so-called "Socratic method," after the dialogues of Socrates, whose leading questions helped Athenian teenagers stretch their minds and discover the truth.

In describing what the Socratic teacher does, classical educational theorists referred to the "Maieutic" method, from the Greek word for “midwives.”  Switching from the rather masculine metaphor of coaching to the feminine metaphor of the midwives, the conviction is clear:  The teacher helps the student “give birth” to an idea.  This is done by the teacher asking the student leading questions.  On the grammar level, the student asks the teacher questions, but in dialectic the teacher asks the student questions.  This is not to be confused with testing, with assessing how much the student knows about something or whether the student has done the assignments.  Rather, the questions are designed to lead the student through a thought process.

In the stage of rhetoric, the final level of the trivium, students must function on their own.  They must use the knowledge they have acquired from grammar and the intellectual skills they have mastered in logic and apply them in their own original expressions.  For rhetoric, teachers must set students on their own paths, at the same time providing supervision so the work gets done and giving feedback on how effective it is.

The Quadrivium
The trivium is the core paradigm for the new classical schools, but these are only the first three of the “Seven Liberal Arts.”  The remaining four, the quadrivium are mathematics, music, geometry, and astronomy.  These relate to the range of material that is taught, engaging on the four basic kinds of learning.

Mathematics is abstract, absolute thought, encompassing the complexities of calculus and the systematic careers of scientific formula.  Music is aesthetic awareness, including not only the performance and appreciation of music, but also, for the Ancients, the study and enjoyment of poetry.  Astronomy meant the observation and study of the stars, but by extension this can stand for the whole range of empirical knowledge, the careful observation of nature that is the hallmark of all sciences. Geometry relates to spatial knowledge, the apprehension of objects and their relationships in space.  For the Ancients, this would include architecture and the visual arts and could be extended to the contemporary disciplines of design and even engineering.

Natural Science dealt with knowledge of the objective world, including empirical inquiry (biology, physics, and by extension, the various kinds of science).  Philosophy was also considered a natural science, since it dealt with truth about objective existence.   Moral Science dealt with knowledge of human beings.  History was considered a moral science (suggesting, too, how history was interpreted according to moral reflection).  This would include the study of human interaction, encoded in law and what we would call political science.  Today, moral science would include what we term the social sciences, as well as the humanities.  Theological Science was knowledge of God and His revelation, the study of Scripture, theology, and the Christian life.  This was the science, the sphere of knowledge that integrated and undergirded every other kind of learning, from the basic elements to the trivium to the truths of natural science, since God is the creator of them all.  This is why theology was considered “the queen of the sciences.”

The liberal arts and sciences make up the conceptual paradigm for classical education.  They are not courses, as such; rather, they are a model for approaching and organizing a curriculum.  Most classical schools offer pretty much the same courses as other schools - biology, history, computers - but they are approached in a more systematic, more integrated way, so that the knowledge builds on itself and, in contrast to the fragmentation of much learning today, coheres into a connected whole.

Another characteristic of classical schools is the effort to expose children to works of excellence.  Classical schools favor real literature, instead of dull and inspiration-free primers written according to a word frequency chart.  Children are taught to listen to great music and are introduced to great works of art.  Drawing is part of many classical schools - not just finger painting or coloring, but learning how to draw likenesses of the objective world, an art that, according to many classical educators, develops skills of observation and attention to the world outside oneself.

Classical education is by no means stuffy and conservative; though rigorous, it is stimulating.  As the name of the “liberal arts” implies, it is designed specifically to be liberating.

Christian Classical Education
The development of a distinctly Christian classical education - and the attempt to apply the liberal arts in a systematic way beyond just the “great books” approach favored by Adler and Hutchins - was the work of Douglas Wilson, a Reformed pastor in Idaho.  He read an essay entitled, The Lost Tools of Learning, by Dorothy Sayers, the British author and Christian apologist who was something of a female counterpart to C.S. Lewis.  In her essay, she outlined the “Seven Liberal Arts,” emphasizing the trivium as a developmental model that imparted, in a systematic way, the tools necessary for every kind of learning. Wilson resolved to start a school based on Sayer’s model.  Founded in 1980, The Logos School, in Moscow, Idaho, is a K-12 school, which has been in existence long enough to turn out students who have gone through the whole program.  A recent class of Logos seniors had a composite - that is, an average SAT score in the 96th percentile, meaning that the entire class ranked in the top 4% of students in the nation.   The approach was popularized with the publication of Wilson’s book Recovering The Lost Tools of Learning in 1991. . . In the meantime, publishing companies - such as Canon Press and Veritas Press - sprang up to supply curriculum for these new classical schools and for the growing number of homeschoolers looking for an alternative approach to education.

When Pastor Schaibley moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, he took his interest in classical Lutheran education with him.  His church, Shepherd of the Springs, began a classical Lutheran High School.  In 1998, Dr. Steven Hein, a theology professor from Concordia River Forest, became its headmaster.  In the meantime, other Lutheran schools became interested in the classical approach. An e-mail discussion list was started named after the seventeenth-century Lutheran educational theorist Johann Sturm.   Another classical Lutheran high school is in the works, Robert Preus Lutheran High School in [Peoria], IL.  Wyoming has become a center for classical Lutheran education, when William Heine, one of the original pioneers, became Education Executive for the district.  Mt. Hope Lutheran School in Casper has gone classical, as have, to various degrees, the other two established schools in the district.  As many as ten other churches in Wyoming are contemplating starting classical day schools.

Two Classical Lutheran Educators
Classical Christian education offers the pursuit of those elements and ideas which are anchored in God and consequently are true, good, and beautiful.  Lutheran schools should be all about providing students with skills and resources to grasp such elements and ideas.  For Dr. Hein, such an educational model is even more necessary with the advent of postmodernism, with its relativism and erosion of cultural norms and standards.  In contrast, classical education emphasizes the liberal arts, which are designed to offer a transcendent perspective of culture, enabling the individual to avoid becoming a slave to culture.  Classical education equips students to learn and thus liberates the learning process.  The trivium is a group of liberating arts that provide the foundation for critical learning, as well as a transcultural perspective.

Both Pastor Brondos [headmaster of Zion Academy, Fort Wayne IN] and Dr. Hein associate classical Lutheran education with confessional Lutheran theology.  By balancing the best of secular learning with the spiritual mission of the Church, the doctrine of Two Kingdoms - in which God reigns in both the secular and spiritual arenas - is expressed in a tangible way.

The pedagogical approach of most Lutheran schools has generally been to adopt the current secular educational theories and practices, adding to them the teaching of the Christian faith.  The current intellectual climate in our postmodern age - which tends to see all truth as a subjective construct - is increasingly incomparable with a Christian world view. Moreover, many of the current educational theories, with their constructivist assumptions, often seem to be failing to educate children with the knowledge and skills they need to know. In search for an education alternative, many Lutherans are rediscovering and updating their own educational heritage.