Gary North

What if I came before a group of Christian mothers at a home school convention and asked this question?

Would you spend money to buy a curriculum program based on a philosophy of education that assumes the following? (1) The legitimacy of homosexuality, especially the seduction of teenage boys by men over age 30; (2) warfare as a man's supremely meaningful activity; (3) polytheism; (4) a personal demon as a philosopher's source of correct logic; (5) slavery as the foundation of civilization; (6) politics as mankind's only means of attaining the good life, meaning salvation; (7) the exclusion of women from all aspects of public religion; (8) the legitimacy of female infanticide.

Preposterous, correct? On the contrary, at least a third of them have already decided to adopt such a curriculum. It's called the Christian classical curriculum -- also called the classical Christian curriculum -- and it's all the rage these days in Christian home schooling circles and day schools. Parents line up to give their children the education they never had. Christian Parents don't know how blessed they were not to have had to endure it.

Not having to go through through the unstable hybrid known as the classical Christian curriculum is an advantage every Christian high school student deserves.

Greek society and Greek wisdom were based on all eight of the characteristics I listed above. Classical culture, which flourished for about two centuries, 600 B.C. to 400 B.C. Its primary religious and cultural document was the Iliad, and during the Peloponnesian war, the city-states fought themselves to exhaustion. Greece was easily conquered by Alexander the Great in the 330's. And why not? His tutor had been Aristotle, who taught him all about Greek culture. Alexander learned its weaknesses, and he took advantage of this. But Christian parents don't know its weaknesses, so they encourage their children to have respect for the culture that Paul called to repentance in Acts 17.

Parents who know nothing of Greek history and culture think they are doing their children a favor by assigning them the classics. What they are doing is to repeat the errors of the Middle Ages: mixing two ways of thinking into one unstable mass. Renaissance humanism triumphed culturally in Italy by scrapping the Christian aspects of that unstable mixture.

Of course, the assigned texts have been edited. They do not reveal openly to students or their parents what classical Greek culture was really all about, and what underlay it. Students are not told, for example, that Socrates admitted that a demon ("daimon") told him when his logic was wrong. But he did.

I wrote about this back in 1995. I have not changed my mind. Read what I wrote then. Click here.

This is probably why I never get asked to speak at home school conventions.