A Classical Education Is Not About Finding Your Passions

“Parent: High school is the time and place to figure out who you are and what you love.

Gibbs: It’s really not.

Parent: No?

Gibbs: No, I wouldn’t say it’s the place to figure out who you are and what you love. At very least, a classical Christian school isn’t that sort of place. I think that plenty of public schools bill themselves that way. Perhaps some Montessori schools do, as well, but not classical schools.

Parent: That’s a little baffling. Aren’t high school students figuring out what they want to do with their lives? What they want to study in college? What sort of careers they want to pursue?

Gibbs: Yes, and that’s fine, but the fact those things happen during someone’s high school years doesn’t mean a high school exists for that reason. A classical school exists to help students love the right things—and to help them love the right things in the right way, and to the right degree.”

-from A Classical Education Is Not About Finding Your Passions

The Modern World Simplified

Cashier: This store has recently begun charging you for services we used to give you for free.

Incompetent thinkers: Wow, you must really care about the environment and justice.

Cashier: Yes, thanks. Pay up.

Incompetent thinkers: Sure. No problem.

Numerology In Paradise Lost

Book III: God first appears/Three is the number of the Trinity

Book IV: Man first appears/Four is the number of man, the earth

Book VII: Creation is first described/Seven days in the creation week

Book VIII: Sex is first described/Eight is the number of new beginnings

Book XIII: The twelve tribes of Israel are first described, as are the twelve apostles

Megachurching Classical Christian Schools

“Classical Christian education has gotten popular enough that we’re probably only a few years away from naming schools Lift, Summit, Impact, Sponge, or whatever church names are fashionable at the time…

A good many classical Christian schools already style themselves after megachurches. They talk about “taking over this city for Christ,” have dope Instagram accounts, bring motivational speakers in for assemblies, won’t shut up about “the culture,” and are generally one pair of Air Jordans away from getting sued by Stephen Furtick for copyright infringement.”

-from my latest, A School Named Sue: How Should We Name Classical Schools?

Film As Metaphysical Coup

“As I near my 40s, the most fundamental question I ask when my wife and I are deciding what movie to watch on an evening is not “Drama or Comedy?” Neither do I first ask, “New movie or old movie?” Rather, the first pebble we drop down the well of our souls is, “Something we have seen before or something new?” This is the metaphysical coup of film. The occasions when I want something new are always attended by flightier moods, not a spirit of adventure. When I have my gravity, when my faculties are strong, I want something I’ve seen a thousand times.”

-from Film As Metaphysical Coup, originally published in 2017, and now available for the first time online.  

This article was so difficult to write, I wrote almost nothing for two months following its completion. Since I began writing at seventeen, I’d never produced so little.

Too Catholic: A Classical Odyssey

“It is probably safe to assume that every classical Christian school in the country sees itself as the rival of some better funded, more liberal Christian school across town.”

Too Catholic: A Classical Odyssey is now available on the CiRCE website. This piece originally appeared in an issue of FORMA several years ago, but this is the first time it has been available digitally.

Of all the essays I’ve ever written, I’m most proud of this one.