Last week, we began to answer the question “What should you look for in a Christian school?” with a discussion of how we teach. But there is more to the distinctly-different Trinitas education including what we teach.

It is our aim at Trinitas to indoctrinate students in their western heritage by teaching them classical content rooted in the western tradition.

For example, we begin with Bible before moving to Greece, then Rome, the modern European age, the industrial revolution, the founding of America, and finally to contemporary American history. We complete this cycle in the grammar stage and then over again in the logic and rhetoric stages, going deeper each time into primary sources. We read the positive and the negative, the Christian and the secular; we read both Augustine and Hitler. This study of our western heritage, both the beautiful and the blighted side, prepares students to live in and understand the world.

Because post-modern government education clings to the theory of evolution as fact, they have spurned history in general, and western culture in particular, as a valid means of understanding themselves and the world they live in. Consequently, graduates of government schools sometimes find themselves having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, each time they encounter a crisis in life because they have no grounding in absolute truth and insufficient experience with the history of their culture. Again, most Christian schools simply adopt the government curriculum, replacing the study of evolution with a Bible class. Because we teach the classical content of the west at Trinitas, our graduates will have a firm understanding of their own culture that will allow them to better understand the whole world. Trinitas is different, then, not only in how we teach but also in what we teach; and the difference, again, is distinct.

And that’s what we’re all looking for, isn’t it? The government schools, and in many cases even the Christian schools, have been weighed and found wanting, and so we are all looking for something distinctly different for the education of our Christian children. That is why we’re taking time over three weeks to briefly consider the main areas where Trinitas differs sharply from government schools and even other Christian schools and then explore the reasons why we should be different in these ways—in some cases, that part will be self-explanatory.