Trinitas Blog

One of the toughest days for parents is their child’s first day of school. The event is especially difficult for mom. Let’s face it, there is something unsettling about handing your child over to a group of strangers who take her behind locked doors where you are not free to follow. Whew! The first day of school leaves more than a few moms feeling, well, is guilty the word I’m looking for here? One begins to wonder while driving away from the school, just what is the parents’ place in education.

If you have stumbled upon this blog, there is a good chance you are trying to make a decision about your child’s education. Should you send her to a public school like most everyone else you know, or should you spring for a Christian school? Make no mistake, this is one of the two or three most important decisions you will ever make. No pressure, right? If you are a Christian, there are a lot of reasons you should consider a Christian education over a secular one. Here are three that top my list.

Christmastime is nearly upon us. Many parents are spending these last few shopping days searching for gifts for their children. Electronic games will be on most children’s Christmas lists. This age is such an exciting one when it comes to technology and the way it has advanced games, making them more life-like and realistic. Communication within games, online games to be specific, seems like one of the most significant advancements of all because it allows us to play in community with others. A down-side to the advancement in gaming communication, though, is that one may not always know with whom he or she is playing and communicating.

How often do we see someone driving erratically only to learn a moment later that he or she is texting or checking Instagram or performing a similar task on a smartphone? Most of us see this on the road every day…if we look up from our phones long enough to notice.

One distinguishing mark of God’s people should be thankfulness. Over and over again in Scripture we are exhorted to be thankful. James says, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17). God has given us all that we have, all that we need, so it is only right that we should be grateful to the One who has given us every good and every perfect gift, indeed, every thing.

Parents who send their children to classical schools often have to defend that decision to their siblings, their friends, and even their own parents. The conversations can be tense, and especially so if everyone involved received a free public education. It isn’t as though your friends and relations know a lot about education; it is more likely their opinions have been informed by public debate, federal initiatives, and the latest trends. If the parents defending classical are sacrificing financially to afford the education, they often find themselves doubly on the defense. Points of debate include uniforms, classroom rigor, Latin, and always, always classical education’s lack of emphasis on STEM.

Like many in the Trinitas community, lately, I have been reading Joshua Gibbs’s first book How to be Unlucky: Reflections on the Pursuit of Virtue. (Actually, I have been listening to it, which isn’t quite the same thing as reading it, but that is a discussion for another day.) Gibbs uses The Consolation of Philosophy and his years in the classroom (several of them at Trinitas) to approach the subject of pursuing virtue through classical education. Pursuing virtue is an educational activity we allude to from time to time, a catchphrase we hold up as an important goal of classical education, even a claim with which we sprinkle our marketing brochures, but really, what does it mean to pursue virtue? And why only pursue it? Do any of our students ever actually catch up with it?

As the school year winds down, we enter the season for reflection. For students, now is time for final performances, academic awards, and the accumulation of all kinds of accolades for the year. I am always a little in awe of Trinitas students as I look back over their accomplishments and realize all they have done, and done well, in a single year. Surely this euphoria upon reflection holds true for any hardworking student in any school—it is not reserved for Trinitas students. I am, however, always amazed at the number of Trinitas students who do so very well over the year in such a wide variety of activities. What I have found is that classical education exposes students to a broad range of experiences and then provides opportunities for students to learn, perform and compete in activities as different as baseball and drama. By encouraging students to drink deeply from many fountains of knowledge rather than specializing in one, classical education creates Renaissance men and women.