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Christian education
Where has all the creativity gone?
Education needs to be about great books and great ideas...
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"Is This The Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?" That was the question asked by a recent Atlantic article about the sheer number of prequels, sequels, remakes, and expanding “cinematic universes.” Among the most notable recent examples in the world of film is Wicked, which reimagined the world of Oz.
The same creative stagnation can be seen in music. While earlier generations could produce distinct kinds of music, it’s increasingly difficult to find meaningful stylistic differences today. Some of the most popular songs aren’t even composed by humans but generated by AI. Where has all the creativity gone?
Many explanations could be offered, but one deserves particular attention. There’s been a precipitous decline of the kind of education in America that awakens the moral imagination, enabling students to think creatively and innovatively within a framework of what is enduring and true. In its place is an education oriented around expressive individualism, where children are encouraged to “follow their hearts” and “look inside,” rather than first know the true, good, and beautiful.
Classic stories develop a life-long love of learning
Classical Christian education is uniquely positioned to fill this void. At its best, the modern classical education movement seeks to recover what Dorothy Sayers described as "the lost tools of learning.” Such an education – centered on great books, great ideas, and classical languages – aims not merely at information transfer but at the formation of a virtuous life. Students are trained in virtue, encouraged to emulate heroes, and invited to explore and embrace visions of greatness. In the process, many develop a lifelong love of learning.
Vigen Guroian offers a compelling account of this formative process in his book Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classical Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination. He explains how classic children’s stories like Pinocchio, The Velveteen Rabbit, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe can shape a child’s moral imagination. Young readers are transported into worlds filled with wonder, surprise, and danger. As they imagine themselves alongside heroes and heroines, the images and metaphors of the stories linger and shape how they experience the real world. Children internalize concrete pictures of good, evil, love, and sacrifice by which they can interpret their own lives. When the moral imagination is awakened, Guroian concludes, the virtues come alive with personal, existential, and social significance.
C.S. Lewis made a similar point in The Abolition of Man. After criticizing the dominant educational models that fail to form human beings, he described how education should cultivate students “with chests.” The “chest” mediates between reason and appetite, enabling students to not only recognize what is noble and what is base, and discern between that which deserves love and that which does not, but to also choose rightly between them. This moral formation reflects what makes us truly human.
Creativity has to be grounded in Truth
If popular culture is to experience a renewal of genuine creativity and innovation, classical Christian education may well be the taproot. Ironically, the renewal of innovation doesn’t begin by encouraging innovation for it’s own sake, or from an obsession with what is trendy or new. Rather, it will begin with an immersion in what is permanent and true. It will begin with curious hearts and minds that are trained to think imaginatively within a meaningful moral framework. As Russell Kirk once observed, the works that endure are not those rooted in nihilism, but those that appeal to enduring truths and therefore to posterity.
If classical education is to be Christian, it must be tied to the grand biblical story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. Learning that is interpreted through a Christian worldview will affirm the dignity of human nature and will also acknowledge its limits, clearly distinguishing between Creator and creation. Within this rich moral universe, students are inspired to imagine and create in ways that honor what is true, just, pure, lovely, virtuous, and praiseworthy.
Classical Christian education offers a compelling model for education in an age of cultural decadence. It is anchored in Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” By forming the moral imagination, Christians are equipped to not only resist cultural stagnation but to create culture anew, as co-laborers with the One who even now is “making all things new.”
This Breakpoint was co-authored by Andrew Carico. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to Breakpoint.org. This is reprinted with permission from the Colson Center.
News
Court rules that Emergencies Act against “Freedom Convoy” was illegal
Four years ago, in February 2022, Canada’s federal government invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in our country’s history, granting itself extraordinary power to break up the truckers’ convoy that assembled in Ottawa and elsewhere to protest Covid policies.
By invoking the Act, the government received the power to prohibit citizens from assembling, as well as freeze bank accounts of those involved in the protests, and even ban and freeze crowdfunding, among other measures.
In January of this year, the country’s Federal Court of Appeal made a unanimous decision, agreeing with the lower court ruling from 2024, that the government was not legally justified to make use of the Emergencies Act.
The court ruled that the protests “fell well short of a threat to national security.” The court also found there simply wasn’t sufficient evidence to back up the government’s claim that the convoy posed a threat of serious violence.
“When all these legal and factual considerations are taken into account, we fail to see how the could ‘reasonably believe’ that a threat to national security existed at the time the decision to invoke the Act was made.”
This decision is a good example of why civil governments need checks and balances on themselves, given our sinful human condition. Particularly a check on the age-old thirst for more power. The legislative and executive branches require the accountability and safeguards that are supposed to come from the Constitution, through the oversight of the judicial branch.
For Christians, obeying the Romans 13 command to “be subject to the governing authorities” isn’t as simple as submitting to whatever the Prime Minister or Governor General orders in a given moment. In this case, it was the Prime Minister and Governor General that were acting illegally, and private citizens (the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation, among others), who successfully challenged them in court.
Today's Devotional
February 2- Taken into glory
“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” - Acts 1:11
Scripture reading: 2 Kings 2:9-18; Acts 1:1-11
The company of prophets saw that the spirit of Elijah was resting on Elisha, but their eyes were blinded to the >
Today's Manna Podcast
The waves of the Holy Spirit
Serving #1106 of Manna, prepared by J. Louwerse, is called "The waves of the Holy Spirit".
