I would argue that the medieval fourfold method of interpretation, carefully done, offers a lot of value to the Christian interpreter. I would also argue that it may legitimately be done on texts other than Scripture and to great benefit.

Each student who walks through your door has a unique identity. He occupies a specific chair and comes from a specific family. However, each student also needs to learn that he is not the most important person in the room. He needs to learn how to place himself under the authority of the teacher, but maybe more importantly, each student needs to learn to take their place in the corporate body called the classroom, participating in the communal experiences requisite for true education and virtue formation—practices that shape the soul. 

Updates about the Beza Institute as we head into the next year. Join us as we rise up & build!

Parents are teachers. They can imitate effective teacher moves to formulate better conversations with their kids. They can join their children in the pursuit of intellectual virtue. They can ask better questions.

In the world of Classical Christian Education, there is an important resource that needs to be recovered: Protestant educators. We have a profound debt to pay to our Protestant fathers who built classical education for the last four hundred years. If we ignore them, then we will fail to recover the true powerhouse in classical education.

Calvin understood that covenantal succession is at the heart of both resistance and reformation. May we faithfully walk in his footsteps as latter day Bezas.

Leaders and educators should keep a weather eye on the horizon. The astonishing spread of classical schools—like all rapid growth—comes with new dangers. I’m not talking here about attacks from outside (those these will undoubtedly continue to increase), but rather the temptation leaders will face to sacrifice what is rigorous and counter-cultural about classical education for the sake of avoiding criticisms of their schools, and benefiting from the movement’s popularity. In short, there will be a temptation to give up precisely those distinctives that make this form of Christian education classical.

I am willing to politely propose and contest that the trivium are first and foremost distinct arts, not primarily stages of a child’s education.  The contemporary shift in understanding the trivium is not entirely harmful, but it does risk losing a comprehension of the consistent classical tradition that is represented in works such as the Metalogicon by medieval twelfth-century scholar John of Salisbury.

It’s not the young zealots you should be worried about, it’s the young apathetic do-littles you should fear for most. How will they ever get further if they do not strive? C. S. Lewis famously wrote “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

Logic is the art that teaches us how to reason properly so that we can know what is true, and in every other art, we apply the art of reasoning to accomplish the specific end of that art.