Lesson 4: Measuring Success: Beyond Assessments, Achievements, and Accomplishments

I want to ask you a question that I suspect no one involved in your child's education has ever directly asked you.

What does success look like—not at the end of the school year, not at graduation, not when they enter college, not at their first job—but at forty-five?

What does success look like at forty-five? What kind of person do you want your child to be when they are forty-five years old? To clarify, I’m not asking, What do you want them to have achieved” I’m asking, Who do you want them to be—when they’ve hit mid-life?

I ask because the way we measure educational success almost entirely determines what kind of education we provide. And most of us, without realizing it, are using standards and measuring devices borrowed from a tradition that holds a very different vision of the human person than the one we actually profess.

The modern educational system measures specific inputs and outputs. Inputs include: seat time, curriculum coverage, instructional hours. Outputs include: standardized test scores, grade point averages, college acceptance rates, graduation statistics. 

Not these aren’t meaningless measures. They do track real things so they do have their place in the service of the greater good. But to track only these things is to prioritize the wrong things if what you actually care about is wisdom, virtue, and the capacity for a genuinely good life. 

Aristotle made a distinction that helps clarify this point. He distinguished between things that are good as means and things that are good as ends. Wealth, for instance, is good as a means—it enables other goods. But nobody in his right mind pursues wealth for its own sake; he pursues it for what it can provide. The person who pursues wealth as though it were a final good has disordered his loves. The one who treats accumulation as the point rather than the instrument has confused the means with the end. 

The modern educational metrics are almost entirely metrics of means. Test scores are means. Credentials are means. Even knowledge, strictly speaking, is a means. The end that we’re looking for—something Aristotle called eudaimonia, what we might translate as human flourishing—cannot be measured on a standardized test. It is not a score. It is a condition of the soul.

So what does this look like? What are the marks of a person who has been genuinely well educated?

I’m going to suggest at least four.

The first mark of a genuinely educated person is ordered loves.

The well-educated person loves the right things in the right order. He loves God above all, his neighbor as himself, beauty more than mere novelty, truth more than comfort, and goodness more than approval.

C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, makes a point that is worth contemplating here. Lewis is responding to a pair of textbook authors—he calls them Gaius and Titius—who believe they are doing students a favor by debunking emotional responses to the world, by teaching children that such responses say nothing about reality and everything about the person feeling them. 

Lewis's reply to this is pointed: the task of education is not to hack down the jungle of desires; it’s to irrigate deserts. His imagery here is powerful if we understand the ancient conception of the soul that recognizes noble sentiments (chest) and baser sentiments (belly). 

The problem with the modern student is not an excess of sentiment that needs pruning—what Gaius and Titius are trying to do; it’s actually an aridity of soul; the modern soul (the chest) is dried up and needs cultivation. We build up just sentiments not by dismantling the baser ones through skeptical critique, but by nourishing the noble sentiments and the student’s capacity for a right response to the world through long exposure to what is genuinely worthy of love, wonder, and reverence.

The goal of classical education has never been to extinguish desire. This is where modernist education, and frankly, fundamentalist Christianity, get it wrong. They are both out to kill desire, not to cultivate it

Classical Christian Educators, on the other hand, want to train the heart to respond rightly to what is genuinely worthy of response. The educated person’s desires are cultivated and shaped—not extinguished or hacked down—but nourished and formed by that long and patient irrigation of the soul. That shaping is what Lewis calls the stock of "just sentiments," and it is the indispensable foundation of a fully human life.

That’s the first mark of a genuinely educated person: ordered loves.

The second mark is intellectual humility.

Socrates said the beginning of wisdom is knowing that you do not know. But I want to be precise here, because intellectual humility is often confused with its opposite—a kind of performative self-deprecation that is really just arrogance in disguise.

I once had lunch with the wing commander of an F-22 fighter pilot training squadron, and he told me something I have never forgotten. He said their recruiters were always on the lookout for cocky pilots, never arrogant ones. When he said it, he got the curious pause from me he was looking for; and the distinction he made is worth the pause that it required. 

A cocky pilot is one who says, I have something to offer. He knows his skills, he trusts his training, and he’s willing to press the engagement. An arrogant pilot, on the other hand, is one who says, I have nothing left to learn. He stops listening. He trusts his instincts more than the instruments. He is, in the most literal sense, flying blind and is likely to get himself and other crew members killed.

That distinction maps strikingly well onto the intellectual life of a well-educated person. 

We stand in the tradition of the Western mind—a tradition that stretches back through Augustine, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Homer—and we may indeed have something to offer our present moment; so, we shouldn’t be timid about stepping up and engaging the disorders of the age. But we can never forget how many people have lived and thought before us, how much has been worked out at great cost, how much we have yet to understand. The well-educated person holds his judgments and conclusions with appropriate tentativeness. He listens humbly and carefully before he speaks. And, he recognizes that the tradition he has received is far larger and wiser than he is on his own.

The third mark of a well-educated person is the capacity for genuine conversation.

Not contentious or polemic debate, but conversation—rational public discourse. He possesses the ability to sit with another person, hear what they are actually saying rather than what he expects them to say, engage their ideas honestly, and allow his own thinking to be genuinely challenged by the encounter.

I want to be clear about what I mean by genuinely challenged. I do not mean the hollow affectation of open-mindedness that never actually changes anything. I mean something with real stakes: the willingness to have your assumptions examined, your conclusions tested; and, when something has been sufficiently demonstrated, the moral courage to follow the argument where it leads—even when that is inconvenient. 

Intellectual integrity is not a posture. It is a discipline of the mind.

This capacity for real conversation, for rational public discourse, is rarer than it should be, and it is almost entirely a product of formation—of having been in many conversations, with many interlocutors, including the dead ones we meet in books.

The fourth mark is what I call the long view.

The well-educated person is not owned by the present moment. He knows enough history, and has enough knowledge of the human condition and spirit, to understand that the crises of his age are not unique, that the tradition has survived worse, and that the virtues required to navigate difficulty are not invented; they are inherited. 

He is, in C. S. Lewis's phrase, a native of a larger country than the one his passport says he belongs to. He is cosmopolitan, not provincial, in his thinking. He is, like Erasmus, a citizen of the world and a patriot to the Republic of Letters.

Because he inhabits that larger country, he is not easily rattled by the shrill, inflammatory language of the media cycle or the opportunistic outrage of politicians. He has read enough to know that such language has always been with us, that it is a feature of those who wish to bypass reason and commandeer the passions. 

The person with a long view reads the media headlines without being consumed by them. He takes the present seriously, but he doesn’t mistake it for the whole of reality. And because he does so, he is capable of responding responsibly; he doesn’t merely react to the next scary thing on the news. He doesn’t fall for all the propaganda and conspiracy theories that are rattling the demos.

None of these marks—ordered loves, intellectual humility, capacity for genuine conversation, and the long view—appears on a transcript. None of them is measured by a standardized test. All of them are the product of years of deliberate formation: reading great literature, engaging the great conversation, lot’s of practice, and the slow cultivation of habits of mind and heart.

The question worth asking is not whether your child is on track for the college or career of choice. It is whether or not your child is on track for a good life.

Those are not the same question. And the education that answers the second one well is the education worth pursuing.

Lesson 3: Consider the Alternative: The High Price of NOT Educating Children Classically

Here in lesson three, I want to make an argument that might make you slightly uncomfortable. I'm going to make it anyway, because it's true — and because if we're being thoughtful, we'll recognize that the discomfort that comes with wrestling with this argument is itself instructive.

Here is my argument: choosing not to pursue a classical Christian education for your children is not a benign or neutral decision. It is a choice that comes with a price tag. And the cost of not educating classically and in the Christian intellectual tradition is much higher than you might realize — perhaps higher than you've ever been asked to calculate.

Let me be careful about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that every child who attends a modern public school is doomed. I'm not saying that classical Christian education is the only path to wisdom and virtue. What I am saying is that the alternative — the modern progressive educational model that the majority of American children inhabit — has a specific shape, a specific set of assumptions, and, therefore, a specific set of outcomes. And those outcomes are not accidental.

Modern education is, at its core, utilitarian. It is designed to produce workers and buyers — or, as I prefer to say, consumers and cogs. I'll grant that some of its earlier, more ambitious forms did attempt to cultivate informed citizens. But that, I would argue, is no longer an accurate description of our contemporary situation.

In any case, I cannot honestly say that a utilitarian approach to education is wicked, exactly. But there is something deeply impoverished about it. And that poverty doesn't always show up in academic failure. It shows up in something harder to measure and far more important — but it does show up.

It shows up in young adults who are technologically competent and spiritually adrift — adults who may hold degrees but possess no framework for asking what kind of life is worth living; adults who were never taught to love what is objectively beautiful, to recognize what is actually true, or to order their desires toward what is genuinely good; adults who arrive at the great questions of human existence — Who am I? What am I for? How should I live? — with no resources to answer them, because their education never considered those questions worth asking.

Modern education also measures success by standardized metrics: test scores, graduation rates, college acceptance, and potential employment outcomes. It treats knowledge as a commodity and learning as a transaction. If you pay in the currency of time and tuition, modern education will ensure you receive credentials and some level of earning potential within the system it cultivates. It is rather like the old Fingerhut catalog, which would help you "build up your credit"— but you could only use that credit to shop their catalog. It is useful only in the limited ways that serve their interests.

And because secularism always creates a vacuum, it opens the door for something far worse than mere utility to take up residence.

Dorothy Sayers, writing her landmark essay "The Lost Tools of Learning" in 1947, put the matter rather sharply. She argued that modern education had produced a generation easily manipulated by propaganda, because students had never been taught to recognize it, let alone argue against it or see through it. We give children words, she observed, but not the tools to discern truth from fiction, nor the ability to identify and refute the fallacies embedded in those words. That was 1947. I leave it to you to assess how much has improved since then.

Now—what does a classical Christian education offer instead?

It offers, first, a different answer to the question of what education is for. Not credentials. Not employment. Not even knowledge, strictly speaking. Education is paideia — the formation of the whole person toward wisdom and virtue. Classical Christian education is the cultivation of a soul capable of recognizing the true, loving the good, and being moved by the beautiful.

It offers, second, the Great Conversation—nearly three thousand years of the best minds of the Western world wrestling with the questions that matter most. Your child, formed in this tradition, will sit with Homer and Virgil, with Plato and Aristotle, with Augustine and Aquinas, with Shakespeare and Milton, with C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton. Students don't merely come to know about these thinkers; they come to know them as conversation partners, as intellectual friends, as voices from the past that illumine the human condition.

And it offers, third, a language. Not Latin alone—though Latin is part of it—but a shared vocabulary for talking about what matters most. A student who has read the Republic can speak meaningfully about justice. A student who has read Augustine's Confessions can speak with equal depth about desire. A child who has read The Abolition of Man can recognize—and resist—precisely the manipulation of language that Sayers warned about.

The price of not educating your children in the classical Christian tradition is the forfeiture of their intellectual and spiritual inheritance. And as we all know, once forfeited, inheritances are exceedingly difficult to recover.

In lesson four, I am going to talk about something that costs almost nothing and takes almost no time — but that begins, for those willing to take it up, the work of recovery.

There is a word that has almost entirely lost its meaning in our culture, and I want to try to give it back to you before summer slips away into another season of busyness dressed up as rest.

The word is leisure.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: I know what leisure means. It means time off. Vacation. The weekend. And you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that—most people in our culture use the words leisure, recreation, entertainment, and amusement interchangeably, as though they all meant roughly the same thing.

But they don’t. And the confusion, as Josef Pieper argues, is not a trivial one. In his remarkable little book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Pieper suggests that the totalitarian work state—a society in which human beings are valued only for their economic productivity—is the clear historical consequence of our faulty understanding of leisure. That may sound alarmist. But stay with me, because I think he’s right.

Let’s consider what these words actually mean.

Recreation comes from the Latin recreare—to create again, to renew. It is what we do to restore ourselves so we can return to work. Entertainment comes from the Latin inter and tenere—to hold among, to maintain in a certain condition. We entertain ourselves by holding our attention pleasantly. And amusement comes from the French amuser—to divert one’s attention. That’s it. That’s all it does.

Every one of these—recreation, entertainment, amusement—is something we do for the sake of something else. We refresh ourselves so we can go back to work. We divert our attention so we can return, somewhat recovered, to the demands of ordinary life.

And here is what Aristotle observed with his characteristic clarity: work itself is also something done for the sake of something else.

We work so we can eat, pay our bills, sustain our families, and occasionally buy something we want. Work is noble—do not misunderstand me—but work is also, by its nature, servile. There is a reason the classical tradition distinguished between the liberal arts and the servile arts. The liberal arts were those suitable for a free man—arts which serve to free men, not from work entirely, but from the kind of existence in which nothing is ever done for its own sake.

That is what leisure is. The word comes from the Latin licere—to be allowed. Leisure, rightly understood, is not the absence of work. It is the presence of something done for its own sake—something meaningful in itself, not merely as a means to something else.

To flourish as human beings, we need to recognize that work is not an end in itself. We work so that we can have leisure—so that we can engage in those things which are good or meaningful in themselves. And that is precisely what recreating, entertaining, and amusing ourselves does not give us.

Now, what does any of this have to do with summertime? Everything!

I want to borrow an argument from C. S. Lewis that I have found clarifying on this point. In his essay “Learning in Wartime,” Lewis raises the question of why students should continue to take an interest in what he calls “the placid occupation” of learning when lives and liberties are at stake. “Is it not,” he asks, “like fiddling while Rome burns?” (a reference to the Emperor Nero, who reportedly played his instrument on the balcony while the city below him was consumed by fire.)

Lewis’s answer is worth reading carefully:

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.

Now Lewis was answering the weightier question of why we should learn in wartime. But his logic applies equally well—inversely—to the lighter question of why we should learn in summertime.

We don’t have to wait for normal times to pursue knowledge and beauty, because there are no normal times. There is only the permanent human situation, which is always pressing, always urgent, always threatening to convince us that now is not the right moment. Lewis puts it plainly: “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable”—be it wartime or summertime.

What makes human beings different from the animals, Lewis observes, is that while animals respond only to immediate circumstances, men have always been capable of something more. They “propound mathematical arguments in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae.”

We might add: in modern times—times not threatened by war but bombarded by amusement and assaulted by entertainment—free men and women study in summertime. They don’t wait to be told they have to. They pursue the things that make them better human beings.

So let me suggest three reasons why summertime is not the enemy of learning but one of its best opportunities.

First: summertime is a defense against ordinary academic distraction.

There will always be distractions to learning—that was Lewis’s point. Sometimes the distraction is a war. Sometimes it’s a global pandemic. But for most students most of the time, it’s the competing demands of academic schedules, extracurricular activities, and institutional rhythms that prevent the kind of deep, unhurried engagement with ideas that genuine formation requires. Summertime, used well, affords real leisure—time to dive deeper into a subject, to read more slowly, to think without a deadline pressing from behind.

Second: summertime learning is a defense against the false leisure of mere amusement.

Here is where Pieper’s argument bites. The entertainment and amusement that fill most people’s summers are not leisure in the meaningful sense—they are sophisticated forms of recreation, designed to divert the attention pleasantly until the fall semester begins. But as Pieper rightly argues, if we cannot identify something worth doing for its own sake—not for the sake of a grade, a credential, a paycheck, or a screen—then we have not yet discovered the meaning of our existence, and we will never be able to justify ourselves apart from our economic usefulness to society. That is a hard word. It is also a true one. Reading a great book, learning a language, studying history, cultivating a genuine intellectual interest—these are not merely fun alternatives to Netflix. They are exercises in becoming fully human.

Third: summertime is an opportunity to get ahead, get caught up, or simply resist the fog of forgetfulness

The fog of forgetfulness settles over most students between June and September. The research on summer learning loss is consistent: students who read nothing and pursue nothing intellectual during the summer arrive in September measurably behind where they left off in May. Summertime learning doesn’t have to be rigorous to be restorative. It simply has to be intentional.

Let me close with the observation Pieper leaves us with—the question this whole argument raises but cannot answer for any individual person: What is the point of leisure? What can we rightly call something done for its own sake, an activity meaningful in itself?

If we can’t answer that question, we have not yet discovered the meaning of our existence. Summer is your annual invitation to begin answering it. I hope you’ll accept it!

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Bonus: Try All Three of These Suggestions

Read aloud together. Not just to the young children in the home, to everyone. Pick a book that is slightly above the youngest member of your household, and read it after dinner, or before bed, or on Sunday afternoons. It doesn’t need to be a Great Book, though it could be. It needs to be worthy of attention. The act of reading aloud together is one of the oldest and most powerful formation practices in Western civilization, and it has been almost entirely abandoned. You could use this summer to reclaim it.

Second: Have one serious conversation a week. Not about logistics or family issues, but about ideas. Choose a perennial human question and put it on the table—literally, make it the dinner table. What is man? What is courage? Is justice always fair? What would you do if you knew you could not fail? The question matters less than the habit. Families that talk about ideas raise children who think about ideas. It may be rare, but it’s really not complicated. It is simply rare.

Third: Read something that is above you. I don’t mean tackle something impossible, just something slight above you, something you have to reach for. Choose something that requires you to slow down, re-read a sentence, look something up, or sit with a thought before moving on. This is the experience most of us try to avoid. We have been conditioned to move quickly, to consume efficiently, to stay in our comfort zone of comprehension. But growth happens when we pursue the edges, not in the center. This summer, try to find that edge.

Let me begin this lesson with a confession. When I first started working in Christian education—more than thirty years ago now—I made all three of the mistakes I’m about to describe.

It wasn’t because I was a bad parent or a careless educator. I made these mistakes because I had not yet been taught to think differently. I hadn’t yet discovered, at least in any meaningful way, the older Christian intellectual tradition. I actually didn’t have the furniture I needed to cultivate a robust life of the mind. As a result, I did what many sincere Christian parents and educators do: I tried to build a better version of the same thing I had inherited.

So, we adopted better standards and expected better behavior. We purchased better textbooks and added Bible classes and chapel services. But, to change metaphors, the differences we produced were often more in the wallpaper than in the foundation.

I suspect that if you are honest with yourself you’ll likely recognize at least one of these mistakes in your own home.

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Mistake Number One: Confusing Information with Formation

Here is the assumption many of us absorbed from our own schooling without ever examining it: education is primarily about filling the mind with content.

Education is accumulating as many facts, skills, and knowledge as we can. And, success is measured in completing assignments, getting good test scores, and how focused we are on college readiness and career preparation. The more a child knows, the better educated he is!

But the classical Christian tradition would say this gets things almost precisely backwards. Education is not the accumulation of lots of information. Education is “the passing down of wisdom and knowledge from one generation to the next.” It is where “every culture tells the truth about what it believes and what it loves.”

See, education is never neutral. It is always forming loves. It is always shaping the student’s attention. And, it’s always cultivating some vision of what a human being is for. The ancients called this paideia: the rearing of a young person in a proper view of the world.

Paideia is synonymous with “upbringing, training, instruction,” but not in the sense of just data transfer. Paideia is the formation of the whole person—intellect, will, imagination, affections, appetites, and desires.

Classical Christian Education “seeks to educate the whole person, human qua human. It is not finally about training workers for an institutionalized society. It is the education that makes for “a full and free human being.”

So the child who has memorized a thousand facts but has not learned to love what is good, recognize what is true, and be moved by what is beautiful has been trained, perhaps even efficiently trained, but he has not yet been educated.

The practical consequence of this mistake is that we begin to measure our children’s education almost entirely by what they can produce: good grades, better test scores, assignments completed, facts recalled, and credits earned. But those are not the deepest or most meaningful measurements.

The question can’t simply be, “What did my child learn today?” The better question is, “Who is my child becoming?”

Mistake Number Two: Outsourcing Formation Entirely to the School

This mistake is subtle because it feels responsible. You have chosen a good school. Perhaps a classical Christian school. Perhaps an online academy. Perhaps a rigorous homeschool curriculum. You trust the teachers. You care about the books. You are involved enough to know your child is receiving something better than the public schools or mainstream approach to education.

And so, without intending to, you begin to assume that the formation happening during school hours is sufficient. It’s enough to do what you expect it will do. But formation is never outsourced. It is either intentional or accidental.

The school can cultivate, the teacher can guide, and the curriculum can even order the mind toward truth. But the home remains the first and most powerful culture your child inhabits. The books on your shelves, the conversations at your dinner table, the jokes you laugh at, the stories you tell and return to, the things you admire, the things you dismiss, even the way you spend your leisure; all of it teaches. Your home has a liturgy, whether you have written it down or not.

Classical Christian education can give a child tools of freedom. It can introduce him to the liberal arts and the great conversation. It can teach him that “humane learning is ultimately a discipline of attention toward that which is worthy.” But the home either strengthens that discipline or dissolves it.

If the school teaches attention but the home practices distraction, the child will learn distraction. If the school teaches reverence but the home practices cynicism, the child will learn cynicism. If the school teaches that wisdom is more precious than utility but the home speaks as if education is mainly about college, earning a good income, and building one’s résumé, the child will likely believe the home.

This doesn’t mean parents have to become professional educators, but it does mean they have to recover confidence in their own vocation. Even though the school may assist you, it can never replace you.

Mistake Number Three: Assuming the Tradition Is for Children, Not for You

This may be the most common mistake among parents who have chosen classical Christian education for their children but did not receive it themselves.

You believe in it. You have seen what it does. You can see your children flourishing in ways you did not flourish. They are reading books you never read. They are learning Latin words you never learned. They are discussing Homer, Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, and Lewis while you’re just trying to remember what you read in high school.

And somewhere in the background, you feel the gap, the gap between what they are receiving and what you were given. The gap between the education you now admire and the education you never had is real; and parents tell me this all the time.

Here is what I want to say to you directly: the Great Conversation is not age-restricted.

Plato didn’t write the Republic for twelve-year-olds. Augustine didn’t write the Confessions for people who had grown up in classical schools. And, C. S. Lewis certainly did not write The Abolition of Man only for professional philosophers.

The great tradition is for any person, at any stage of life, who is willing to sit down with a serious book and give it the attention it deserves. In fact, there is a particular gift that comes to the adult who encounters these texts with the accumulated experience of a life already lived. You bring questions a child cannot bring. You bring sorrows a child has not yet carried. You bring all kinds of things—loves, losses, regrets, hopes, and longings—that make the old books speak with a startling intimacy.

Augustine’s restless heart is not a metaphor to a forty-five-year-old who has spent twenty years building a life that doesn’t quite satisfy. It is a diagnosis, an analysis of lived experience that’s recognized from the inside. And this is one of the great recoveries of classical Christian education for parents: you are not simply choosing an education for your children. You are being invited into the life of the mind yourself.

You do not need to return to school to begin. You don’t have to pursue a degree to get this kind of education. You just need a book, a chair, and a pencil; perhaps a little courage and a few friends with whom to read in community might even be helpful. But this kind of education is for adults too, and it’s accessible.

Bonus Mistake: Failing to Fully Entrust Teachers Who Are Truly Your Allies

There is one more mistake worth naming, especially in our present moment. Some parents choose teachers who share their deepest convictions—at least broadly speaking—and then fail to entrust them fully.

They scrutinize every assignment. They suspect every difference. They talk down the teacher at the dinner table. They assume that if a teacher doesn’t agree with the family on every detail, then that teacher must not be safe, faithful, or trustworthy.

Of course, parents need to be discerning. Teachers are not substitutes for parents. And no parent should blindly entrust a child to a teacher who is hostile to the family’s faith, values, or vision of the good life. That would be stupid. But there is a difference between discernment and suspicion. There’s also a difference between alignment and total agreement, unity and uniformity.

A teacher may not share every preference, every emphasis, every denominational nuance, or even every household practice, and still be a true ally. Indeed, a good teacher often serves the family precisely by bringing gifts the family doesn’t possess in the same measure. Maybe it’s the mastery of a particular subject; maybe it’s pedagogical wisdom; maybe it’s patience born of practice and a love for students ordered toward their intellectual and moral good.

A good teacher knows the telos of education. They know education is not job training and that it’s not only civic formation. They also know it’s not helping students become whatever they want to be. “The purpose of educating children is to prepare them to be virtuous and wise, free men and women in the kingdom of God.”

When a teacher is genuinely laboring toward that end, parents should be careful not to undermine that labor with careless words or a bad attitude. Children learn how to regard authority by watching how their parents speak of those to whom they have delegated a portion of authority.

If a parent constantly corrects, belittles, mocks, suspects, or second-guesses the teacher, especially in front of the child, the child may end up learning more than the parent intended. The child may inadvertently learn that teachers are service providers and not authorities. He may learn that education is a consumer transaction rather than a shared vocation. He may even learn that every disagreement is a betrayal.

That’s not classical. And it is certainly not Christian.

The better way is covenantal, not consumerism. Parents and teachers are not competitors. They are not rival claimants over the child’s mind and soul. At their best, they are allies in the same work: both helping the child apprehend wisdom, appropriate noble judgment, and become the kind of person capable of bringing ordered judgment to the disorders of the age.

So, by all means, choose teachers carefully. Choose teachers whose loves are rightly ordered. Choose teachers who understand that humane learning is a discipline of attention toward that which is worthy. Choose teachers who know that education is ordered toward wisdom and virtue. But once you have chosen them, entrust them and speak well of them.

Ask honest questions, sure. But assume good will where good will has been demonstrated. And when disagreement comes, as it surely will, treat it as an occasion for conversation, not as an occasion for contempt.

So there they are, the three mistakes parents make without even knowing it—and one bonus mistake that may be more common than we care to admit.

* We confuse information with formation.

* We outsource formation entirely to the school.

* We assume the tradition is for our children but not for us.

* And sometimes, having chosen teachers who are truly our allies, we fail to entrust them with the work we asked them to do.

The good news is that none of these mistakes is fatal. They are all correctable. And the correction begins with a simple shift from asking what your child is learning to asking who your child—and you—are becoming. I think that’s a question worth sitting with. Because in a confused and fragmented world, recovering such an education for our children is now more essential than ever.

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In episode 4 of the BOOKS AND LETTERS Podcast, I was privileged to chat with Curtis Miller, and discuss his journey from being a high school English teacher to becoming a full-time professional writer.

C. M. Miller is a columnist, playwright, and kids writer who enjoys tackling books and ideas for a Christian-contrarian audience. He writes professionally for PragerU Kids but his writing has also appeared in numerous other outlets like Blaze Media, The Federalist, and City Journal. He is married with two children and lives in L.A.

After listening to the podcast, I encourage you to check out his Substack, A Shelf of Crocodiles, and consider signing up for his Playwriting workshop at the Christian Vision Writers Conference in the Spring of 2026.

The BOOKS AND LETTERS podcast explores the fullness of what it means to live as a steward of words in this modern world, in an age dominated by fleeting trends and digital noise.

It’s no secret that Western culture is fragmented, transient, and untethered from the language and ethical norms that once grounded society. Granted there has never been a univocal posture toward the perennial human questions; nor, has there been any kind of “golden age.” But, historically, there existed in the West a conversational relationship about matters of faith, culture, and creativity. Even in disagreement, there was enough common sense parties could understand each other and rational public discourse about ideas could ensue (consider the Federalist Papers a contemporary example). Some have called this The Great Conversation.

Today, the West lacks a realized sensus communis to the degree that rational public discourse is nearly impossible. Reasons for this deficiency are vast and complex, and there is an urgent need to recover our legacy. To rekindle any sense of thoughtful engagement in an age that is dominated by fleeting trends and digital noise will be no small task, but it is one worth pursuing. The BOOKS AND LETTERS podcast is an attempt to participate in, and by doing so help recover, the noble tradition of The Great Conversation.

Whether we are grappling with the works of modern writers like G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, or Josef Pieper, reflecting on the enduring relevance of Greek philosophers and Church Fathers, engaging the medieval scholastics and humanists, or simply savoring the tactile joy of a well-loved book, the constant endeavor of THE BOOKS AND LETTERS Podcast will be to lead my readers to think deeply, communicate clearly, and live wisely.

If you're interested in the perennial human questions about the meaning of life and human flourishing, exploring the Christian humanist imagination, or creating things that are good, true, and beautiful for the world, I hope you'll join me as a paid subscriber and tune in for dynamic monologues and intriguing conversations with featured guests. And from time to time, when the breeze is just right, I may even be inclined to chat it up some about life's little pleasures, like briars, beards, and good bourbon.

The BOOKS AND LETTERS podcast is available to paid subscribers. To listen in, and gain access to additional exclusive benefits, consider becoming a paid subscriber or Poiema Fellow.

The Consortium: A Journal of Classical Christian Education is currently accepting submissions for the Summer 2025 issue which will focus on writing and rhetoric in Classical Christian Education.

If you would like to submit an article for consideration, please send it along with a short bio of yourself to [email protected].

Article submissions should be between 2000-6000 words; book reviews should be between 800-1500 words.

Submission deadline for the summer issue is April 1, 2025.

The Consortium is a semiannual (June & December) academic journal promoting classical Christian education and fostering human flourishing for generations to come.

Review past issues of The Consortium.

What is Classical Christian Education?

Watch my short film about modern education, We’ve Been Schooled, published by Romans Roads Press.