The Fruit of Classical Christian Education? (Foundation Series)
The classical Christian education (CCE) movement has been around now for three decades. It began in the early 80’s, was formalized in the early 90’s, and has been fine tuned and perfected in more recent years. As exciting as this movement is, there are a lot of misunderstandings about it.
I have to laugh, because when I tell people that a new classical Christian school is opening in Kenosha, I can tell the wheels are turning. Some people immediately get pictures in their mind of chalkboards, one room school houses, corporal punishment, and mean old teachers with scowls on their face. I don’t blame them because, of course, we all have our first impressions of anything. It’s unavoidable. However, because this tends to be a misunderstanding of what the CCE movement is, I want to start a series of blog posts providing a foundation for what this means.
In this article, I want to explain what is so special about CCE…
The Fruit
“You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit; but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits.”
Matthew 7:16–20
When my wife, Kelly, and I were beginning to look at education options in Kenosha for our own young kids, we found that we weren’t fully satisfied with any one individual option. There were definitely some options that we felt were better than others, but again, nothing that fully satisfied us. We also found recent and reliable studies that showed us how two-thirds of kids growing up in the church are falling away from faith when they leave the home. Because of this, we thought we may home school. We felt well equipped because we are both educators, and we felt like we could design something that would meet our standards. Eventually, we ended up choosing against homeschooling, a topic for another article.
Soon after this thought process and after many conversations between Kelly and I, we discovered the CCE movement. When we first discovered it, we watched the following video.
After watching the video, I remember having a very interesting thought process. First, I was excited for what I just watched. The content and the concepts being presented were all things that we agreed with and we didn’t know this kind of education was being done anymore at all. At the same time, I paused myself and remembered the power of promotional videos like this. I knew that it had tugged on the heart strings within me, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t suckered into it because of the emotional tug a video had on me. That said, I knew we needed to look deeper into this.
When looking a little deeper, this is when my initial excitement for CCE was verified and validated. We were thrilled to find that there was an extensive study done recently in 2018-19. This study showed the fruit of CCE. Click below for the full study:
There are 7 different areas of life that this study analyzed in alumni coming from various schooling backgrounds. ACCS alumni repeatedly outperform majorly in almost all these areas! Three big ones that really stood out to us…
ACCS alumni were connected to a local body of believers at an 88% rate.
ACCS alumni were significantly more prepared for college.
ACCS alumni had much more successful and robust friendships in adulthood.
ACCS alumni tend to be much more independent thinkers.
While there are many other areas of life in this study, these were some that really stood out to us and were things we wanted for our own kids. After seeing the fruit this kind of education is bearing, we knew that we needed this in our community on two different levels:
Servicing individual families
Servicing the Church
We realized the impact that this can have for individual families as parents seek to raise their kids to know Christ and live for God’s glory. This education is a blessing to those families. However, we also realized that this education is a blessing to God’s Church. If the reality is that Christians are still having the most children in our country (by a long shot), but most of those children are not growing up to live for God’s Kingdom, what would happen if we actually raised generations that stand firm in their faith at an 88% success rate?
The answer: God’s Kingdom advances.
