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Self-Discovery vs God-Discovery

“You be you."  

"Be true to yourself."  

"Follow your heart."

"Find yourself.”  

The cultural emphasis on individual autonomy and self-discovery, reflected by these slogans, is often found in the pedagogy of modern schools as much as it is in popular media. While a Christian classical education certainly acknowledges the dignity of the individual as an image bearer of God, it focuses less on self-discovery and more on God-discovery.  

The Classical Education Movement

God-discovery involves enabling children to discover the world God designed and how to participate in His grand plan of redemption, joy, and service.

For parents discerning if they should join the classical education movement or stick with modern education, they should consider how an emphasis on ‘self-discovery’ versus ‘God-discovery’ plays out in the classroom today.

The Progressive Education Myth

It is misleading to think that progressive education is religiously neutral in contrast to a Christian classical school, because “every form of culture has worship at its core,” says Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain in their book, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. [1]

Every formal education is promoting the worship of something, Clark and Jain assert, because “whatever men believe will provide true happiness is what they worship.”[2] School faculty who are not purposefully forming children to become worshipers of God will be forming them according to the religious ideal they believe will bring supreme happiness.

The Key to Happiness

Modern education often believes personal autonomy is the key to happiness, usually connecting this fulfillment to whatever job the child will get in the future. Modern education in part becomes an information download so students are set up for success economically. The minds of the children receiving the information are treated as overly distinct from their hearts and bodies, minimizing the importance of their loves and desires. However, a child can have all the right information, get a good job, and have little love for His neighbor or integrity.  

Indeed, “you can get all A’s and still flunk life.”  

A Christian classical education in contrast believes God Himself is the source of true happiness. It contends that by pursuing a virtuous life through the emulation of God in Christ and other exemplars, children will be happier than if they focused on their autonomy as paramount.

Moral Constructivism  

Furthermore, Christian classical thinking differs from modern education’s conviction that a child will find happiness through determining their own moral values, without reference to God or wise thinkers from the past. ‘Moral constructivism’ is a theory often employed by modern education that encourages children to construct their own values.

John Dewey

John Dewey, the educational reformer, enabled the theory of moral constructivism to flourish in modern education. Dewey recognized a causal connection between morality and whether there is a God. In his writings, he explained how the rejection of the idea of a Creator in the natural sciences formed the idea of a universe without design and ultimate meaning.[73] This led to subjective moral values because universal moral truths become obsolete in a universe without purpose.  

Dewey described how assertions of moral truth became substituted for relativized values of right and good, because in his view, values must be constructed by what pragmatically works in each situation.[74] Attaching moral value to something without a situational context, like determining a universal standard of behavior or ideal, is to him “a foolish quest.”.[75]

Dewey thought the teacher’s role in school settings is to pose problems and then empower students to “construct their own answers based on what works best – a kind of mental adaptation to the environment,” similar to the Darwinian macroevolution notion of survival of the fittest.[76] Teachers are not instructors, in his view, but are meant to enable students to discern what morals work for them.

Parents vs Teachers

William Kilpatrick, in his book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong, investigated whether parents and teachers would rather have exemplars from literature and history model virtue for children, or would rather have the children determine their own moral values, akin to Dewey’s constructivism, so that there are no wrong answers.  

The overwhelming majority of parents join the view of classical education for over two millennia since Plato’s academy. In ancient Greece even the philosophers saw education as a means to cultivate the cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, justice, and wisdom, while teaching children to hate falsehood, evil, and distasteful things.[1] These parents saw how directly teaching virtue and providing examples to their children would be an effective moral education.  

However, Kilpatrick reports that most teachers surveyed said they would refuse to teach specific virtues, preferring moral constructivism.[68]They did not want to teach students “about the great moral ideals that have inspired virtually all civilizations," Professor Nancy Pearcy from Houston Christian University commented, "but [train] them to probe their own subjective feelings and values." [69] While the survey results do not represent the views of all instructors in modern education settings, it does provide perspective into the values of individual autonomy and self-discovery that teachers in modern schools, particularly public schools, often hold.

Let the Children Decide

Thomas Lickona, a developmental psychologist, told the story of a teacher in a classroom of low achieving 8th graders who sought to enable them to determine their own moral values through the moral constructivist process.[70] By following the teacher's required steps, the class agreed that drinking and skipping school were among their most cherished activities.[70] The instructor had no foundation to argue against their constructed morality despite knowing their values were antithetical to flourishing.

Is Morality Culturally Relative?

Moral constructivism often shows up in humanities courses throughout modern educational institutions, seen in the assertion that all ideas are valid because all ideas are culturally relative. One school textbook aligned itself with Dewey’s moral constructivism by rejecting moral standards and ideals by denying that objective truth about morality exists. It said that people cannot be sure of any agreed upon definitions of truth, falsehood, goodness, and badness, and that people’s definitions may not work for others, so everyone should construct their own.[77]

However, if there is no objective morality, and everything is justifiable relative to its culture, teachers would have to come to the conclusion that Pol Pot’s communist ideals that killed about three million in the Cambodian genocide was an equally valid cultural idea to Mother Teresa’s idea of a home for orphaned children in Kolkata, Shishu Bhavan. Upon reflection, all parents and teachers would agree that these leaders’ ideas were not equally valid, because they cannot help but presuppose an objective moral order, grounded in God.

More than an Information Download  

In contrast to modern education, a Christian classical education recognizes that children need both “moral and intellectual direction,” not simply an information download to help them discover themselves and get a good job one day. [1]  

The classical model’s focus on moral virtue helps children learn to serve and love both God and neighbor alongside gaining the information needed to flourish. To do so, classical Christian schools highlight godly and wicked characters from literature and history to form children’s character into ones that can discern good from evil.  

Mimicking Exemplars

One such curriculum that inspires the moral formation of children is Memoria Press’ series on famous people throughout history, which many classical Christian schools use to teach the wisdom of exemplars throughout the ages. Memoria Press explains its curriculum's purpose by saying,

“In order to attract and hold the child’s attention, each conspicuous feature of history presented to him should have an individual for its center. The child sees himself as this individual. It is not Romulus or Hercules or Caesar or Alexander that the child has in mind when he reads, but himself, acting under the prescribed conditions. Prominent educators, appreciating these truths, have long recognized the value of biography as a preparation for the study of history and have given it an important place in their scheme of studies.”  

Teachers build upon the child’s imaginative world in a similar way, enabling the child to envision herself as Joan of Arc or Queen Elizabeth. This will develop the child’s affection for the best of human nature and a just distaste for selfish living.

Great Texts Inspire Good Living

A Christian classical education's study of great texts inspires good living. While the education has often been critiqued as not diverse enough due to its emphasis on Western Civilization, it does present a diverse curriculum – both pagan and Christian – that asserts a consensus on the reality of an objective moral order.  

Joshua Gibbs, a classical education writer, summarizes how a “classical curriculum borrows from pagans, Jews, Catholics, Anglicans, Puritans, Presbyterians, Greeks, Italians, Africans, Americans, Arabs, Russians, Germans, and the Chinese, and draws from antiquity, the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment.”  

The problem then progressive education often has with classical education then is not its failure to have diverse content, but that its curriculum presents a consensus on what is truly good and beautiful, as opposed to the modern view of moral constructivism that modern education has often adopted.

A knowledge of great texts from these ancient and modern thinkers is the best classroom-based approach to form students into educated persons who have the critical thinking skills to discern good from evil, truth from falsehood.

‘Mankind at the Center’ vs ‘God at the Center’  

The starting point then of ‘mankind at the center’ versus ‘God at the center’ has consequences in terms of what kind of moral education a child will receive while they are at school. For those parents who pursue a Christian classical education, they recognize the school’s role in forming the child’s virtue as a secondary means after themselves, enabling children to grow into virtuous people who care more about the service of God and mankind then their individual autonomy.