Those Trips to the Woodshed

There are two kinds of education.  Or if you prefer, two battle plans.  One pursues results, the other seeks wisdom.  The one is a ticking time bomb, and the other is the only way to a truly educated person.

Bear with me, though -- this isn't a false dichotomy.  You can go wrong (and right) in many other ways than being "results-oriented" on the one hand, and pursuing wisdom on the other.  And you'd also be right to say that we should be results-oriented.

To a point.

Let me put it this way.  Classical Christian schools are not the ticket to Harvard, or to Heaven.  They're not the ticket to having a nice degree from a solid, middle-pack university, a slick career, and a godly family.  They don't magically produce interested, respectful kids who do the dishes without being asked.

In fact, it's much more likely that Classical Christian schools will do just the opposite -- if their priorities are off.  And one of the biggest oversights they can make -- that ACA can make -- is to be results-oriented at all costs, over against the pursuit of wisdom.

When students hear the words "results," "scores," "grades," and "college admissions," and all they see in their minds' eyes is a gnarly metaphorical club, there's a problem.  They've been taken out to the woodshed one too many times to get thrashed with Bible memory verses, math drills, and SAT prep.  Sure, they're nailing their grades, they know their atomic orbitals, their Plato and Homer, and what the Ten Commandments say.  But boy, when they get outta this house, they're going to do something different in college.  They've paid their Western-Culture dues.  Check classical education off the list.

Maybe even check Christianity off the list.

We should want our children to fill all sorts of colleges and universities in the country, from the local community colleges to the Ivies.  We should want them to fill a wide variety of careers -- even the ones that weren't in our plans for them.  And this all takes a ton of hard work. Lots of drills.  Lots of grit, stamina, and just plan results.

But here's the key: that's not the end of the story.  We want our children to see why they're going for the results. All their work is so that they can start serious education once they leave the home, and continue it throughout their lives.  The results they accomplish are to make them into men and women of action for God's glory, to bring his kingdom to earth.  There are battles to fight out there, and they won't be won by kids who have scars, and a premature skepticism.  They'll be won by children blessed with the gift of wisdom and with the open eyes of thankfulness.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Summer Picnics on the Living-Room Rug

Amid these Denver rains fit for an equatorial jungle, I hope the first two weeks of Summer Break have been fulfilling.  Of course, it's only "Break" for the kids, which often means just the opposite for the adults.

This reminds me of a tremendous reality from Job: "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward" (Job 5:7).  Fact of life.  No escaping it.  But there are a couple different kinds of trouble involved here: tragedy and hardship on the one hand, and the day-to-day toils of life on the other.  Losing a child is an example of the first; raising a child is an example of the second.

Summer, for parents, is more of the second kind of trouble.  A healthy sort of trouble, but exhausting nonetheless.  Constant focus, constant events, constant messes.  Interestingly, though, God thought this set-up was a good idea for our sanctification, and so when we think life couldn't get any more stressful, he's thinking about how much he's blessing us.

In the spirit of Messy Picnics on the Living-Room Rug (and Other Stories), let's continue to be all-in for our kids this summer.  Read with them every day, whether haphazardly or on a schedule, or after work.  Take them on hikes.  Take them to the library.  Create a playlist of musical classics for regular listening.  Check out audiobooks.  Color with them.

Give exhaustion a bear hug and invite it back tomorrow.

Being comes before doing.  We want our children to love beauty and excellence from their hearts -- and they look to us for cues.  My blessings to each of you as you continue this arduous but wonderful task.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Our Stories

In the rich and fascinating novel, The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco writes that “to survive, you must tell stories.”

Sounds overblown. To survive (really), we need to eat right, sleep well, and look both ways before crossing streets. But tell stories or die? That’s an ultimatum from a philosopher-poet who needs to cut his hair, shave, and get his head out of the clouds.

Except that it isn’t. All of our lives are stories, and we cannot live without telling them. This is the way God wired up the motherboards at creation. He had a Story to tell, one of creation, fall, redemption, and glorification, and we are all its subplots. Each action and word, from the smallest to the most momentous, develop the plots of our lives, move us individually toward our climax, falling action, and denouement, and, collectively, show us as actors in God’s grand Play. “All the world’s a stage,” yes, and all of life is a Story. The only way to stop telling your story is to die.

We’ve told a remarkable story this year at Augustine Classical Academy. Amid unexpected circumstances, God has led us in new directions, challenged our assumptions, and compelled us to look to him for provision. And as he provided for Abraham in his wandering, and later for the Israelites, he is providing for us. We have a new and wonderful building space in Lakewood, and a community of families united around their commitment to classical Christian education in Denver. We have a Board of Directors, sacrificial to the core. We’ve been blessed with committed, high-quality teachers who love their students and spur them on toward excellence. And we have bright-eyed students, learning about God’s beautiful but broken world, about the importance of being young men and women of action, and about the great promises for the future. This is classical, Christian education, and this is the story God is telling through ACA.

Thank you for loving your children this year, and for seeing the tremendous value of a rigorous, Christian education. I have greatly enjoyed seeing our students grow, from Preschool through Grammar School, and am eager for their future at ACA. May God’s blessings go with you this summer, and may it be a time of rest and joy.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Celebration Days

Friendly question: What does Proverbs 22:6 have to do with racing bikes and hopping around in colored sacks?

Friendly answer: Everything.

This morning at our Bandana Dash and Field Day, I was blessed to witness one of the lesser-emphasized applications of a great truth: "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it" (Prov. 22:6).  Though no lectures were given, no Scripture verses recited, no quizzes administered, our students were "trained up" with joy and festivity today. As all those bright-eyed children hoofed it around the lake (careening bikes on their heels), as the field events put flush into cheeks and sweat on brows, and as parents, teachers, and older students came together with their time, money, and service, those two things stood front-and-center above all else: joy and festivity.

It's the way God does things.  He didn't just administer the Law; he also gave us days for celebration (Lev. 23; Is. 25:6). He wants us to be sober-minded (1 Peter 5:8), but he also gives us the wine of gladness (Eccl. 9:7; Is. 25:6). And perhaps above all, he desires mercy and love, not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6).

Today, our students tasted and saw that Gospel life is good. As a parent, I'm grateful to each of you for a school family that shows our children love, sacrificial energy, and blessings abounding.  Thank you for continuing to make ACA such a wonderful place.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Hard Work and Dessert

As some of you know, Augustine Classical Preschool students have been learning about teeth and dentists this week.  Clyde, my three-year-old son, has taken to the subject admirably.

"This is junk food," he says contentedly, taking great bites out of a lollipop.

We teach our children the important habit of brushing their teeth regularly (circular motion, please), but at the same time it's a rare child who never has sweets.  That's because candy isn't exactly junk.  Used reasonably, it's more accurately a treat -- a gift -- for the special moments.  Sometimes, we tend to think of certain foods as "bad" (naughty food! moral failure!) and so campaigns are launched to kill them dead and blot their names from the Book of Life.  But "the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof" (Ps. 24:1), and "for everything there is a season" (Eccl. 3:1).  We taste and see that the Lord is good, usually with the spinach, potatoes, and chicken, but sometimes with the sundaes.

Think of education the same way.  We don't ever want to use education to stomp students flat, as though they are insects to kill, and Scripture agrees: "You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk" (Deut. 14:21).  Education is food, not a cauldron.  It has life-giving beauty and should not be used as an instrument of death (like in a Dickens novel).  So education both in the classroom and at home needs an occasional dessert.

But this is a tough balance, and many schools with great mission statements serve up lamesauce standards in the actual classroom.  And in the home, some students do nothing but hammer the video games (after homework, of course), or perhaps worse, have no honest notion how to spend after-school time except by surfing their smartphones.  Bad, naughty video games?  Satan-spawned social media?  No, just too much dessert.

The good things of life are hard to master.  Great books, mathematics and science, logic, high music, abstract thinking, age-old stories -- these are the deep-magic gifts of God.  With faithful training comes love, and with love comes an appreciation of gifts in their unique places.  So have a lollipop.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Glutted with Knowledge and Wisdom

Earlier this week on our Twitter and Facebook, you may have come across this quote from Dwight Moody:

"So few grow, because so few study."

Today, many of us operate under the unchallenged assumption that learning and study end after college or graduate school.  And understandably, too: there are jobs to get and keep, families to manage, community groups to run, and sports programs to plug into.  And then, in the precious, exhausting moments at the end of the day, we must give quality time to our smartphones.

Tongue-in-cheek.  (A little.)  But Moody was speaking to us as time-frazzled, modern-day adults, not to our children, and not to an idyllic, unhurried people of the past.  He understood that one of the key purposes of education is to become life-long learners, to be parents and citizens who have both the ability and interest to self-teach.  He understood that without this life-long learning, we will not grow.  And as we hopefully learned from Biology class, if you're not a growing organism, you're a dead one.

Mental and moral growth requires study and learning, entirely distinct from our day jobs, separate from our child-rearing.  Sacrifice is required. But if we claim (and we do) that art, beauty, and the enjoyment of God are at the center of existence, and if we claim (and we do) that high grades, the Ivy league, and fast-lane jobs are not the first reasons we educate our children, then these claims have to come out our fingertips.  Vision must become tangible mission.  We want our children to study and grow -- but are we content to land our jobs and coast to retirement ourselves?  As Malcolm Muggeridge once said, "Only dead fish swim with the current."

Let's continue to show our kids how to learn -- and not just because it will benefit them.  We all have a duty to glorify God and enjoy him forever, and true enjoyment takes focus.  Let's commit to steeping ourselves in the stories of the Old and New Testaments, to exploring the great books we've never read (and which make little sense to us at first), and to engaging in the cultural conversation of ideas.  Our children are watching us, watching whether we practice what we preach.  But we should also watch ourselves.  May we always be interested, bright-eyed Christians, glutted with knowledge and wisdom for God's glory.  May we work tangibly to bring Christ's kingdom to earth, and may we always be able to "taste and see that the Lord is good" (Ps. 34:8).

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Spring Break and Recess Metaphors

One of the main points of life is Recess.  God loves taking breaks, and he loves ordaining times of rest.  God created us to work, but he also made us to work toward something, and that is the establishment of a New Heavens and a New Earth -- Christ's kingdom on earth.  In other words, rest.  Even in that new kingdom there will be work, but rest will be at its center.

Recess metaphors are pervasive in scripture.  During the conquest of Canaan, Joshua and the Israelites rested in the 7th year from their battles (Josh. 11:23), God ordained rest for the land every 7th year (Lev. 25:4), we devote the first day of every week (originally the 7th day) for rest and worship, and during the creation week, God himself rested on the 7th day (Gen. 2:2).

As Spring Break 2015 comes to a close, may we fully enjoy our remaining time with our families, knowing that rest is a good and necessary gift from God.  And as we do, may we be strengthened for an energetic and productive close to the school year.  God continues to be good to us.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Classically Educated Cyborgs

At ACA, we're behind the times.

We make students memorize things.  We require them to recite, chant, and argue.  We make them use their brains.

What could we be thinking?  Haven't we heard of Google?  Of Siri, the cheerful, all-knowing informational guru, who can tell us in an instant how to get from our house to Mt. Everest base camp (useful), and who knows how to differentiate among definitions of free masonry, Rosicrucianism, and theosophy?  Haven't we heard of smartphones, those delightful boxes-of-ten-thousand-servants that fit in your back pocket?  And of the informational age, in which nearly every human being on the planet has access to near omniscience?

A friend recently shared with me how her children had been told that classical education, and specifically memorization, were "a waste of time."  Our fast-paced, technological society is beyond all that stuff now.

If the purpose of education is to transform our children into machines, then ACA has got it all wrong.  If "the mannishness of man" (as Francis Schaeffer put it) is an outmoded concept, or if the arts, culture, imagination, and morality are the antiquated projections of God-biased thinkers, then our students are just spinning their wheels every day in class.  Poor things.

Of course, we hold robustly to the happy truth that this isn't the case.  Our students aren't wasting their time.  We affirm that there is a profound distinction between knowledge and wisdom, between information and understanding, and between facts and beauty.  While we gladly affirm that knowledge, information, and facts are necessary and good, we also understand what they are not.  Running a Google search doesn't mean you know something (though it's a handy tool), processing a peer-reviewed statistical set does not mean you understand the moral question at hand, and plotting the species distribution of organisms in an ecosystem does not mean you appreciate natural beauty or understand its greater significance.

Does this mean that numbers are bad and imagination is good?  That we should discourage statistics majors in preference for budding artists?  Not a bit of it.

What we should do is understand the right place for information and technology on the one hand, and the right place for wisdom and beauty on the other.  Both categories are important, but they are vastly different.  And we must understand that one of the fundamental purposes of true education is to develop an appreciation for, and an ability to reproduce, great ideas, great works of art, and great arguments.  An educated human being thinks for himself, communicates with his own thoughts, and creates his own works.  He is not a slave.  He has made the world's knowledge his own; he has developed what is called copiousness. He feeds his brain just like he feeds his body, and then he digests it.  He meditates on the knowledge he has gained.  He turns it over, considers it, and makes it his own.  He is a man, with plenty of "mannishness," and so he takes his knowledge-turned-wisdom and creates.  Made in the image of creator-God, this is only natural.

But this overflow of rich, composted knowledge -- this copiousness -- is never achieved by smartphone thumb-tapping.  Your pocket-sized ten thousand servants have their time and place, but they are your occasional dessert, never your entree.  Homer, Sophocles, King David, Pericles, Caesar, King Alfred, da Vinci, Galen, Faraday, Washington, Curie, Einstein, Churchill, Chesterton, Schaeffer -- these were all great humans exercising their own minds.

To create -- or to be able to influence our culture for Christ -- our students must have something to say, and they must be able to say it winsomely themselves.  Heartfelt apologies, Siri.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Getting it Done

One of the great historical problems of humanity is the gulf between what's "true" in theory and what's done in practice.  It has made the philosopher's pen run dry, the pastor's heart ache, and the parent's resolve waver and crack.  We believe and proclaim -- and then we act in an entirely different way.

Sometimes, this is because we've been silly and run the numbers wrong.  For example, many a long-haired, grass-smoking philosophy major has revolutionary ideas about how moral absolutes are antiquated -- but then he never seems to be able to take someone's wallet without spending the night in jail. At other times, the gulf between belief and practice is due to our laziness as fallen man.  As the old Book of Common Prayer puts it, "We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done."  We just don't have the resolve to stay in the trenches day after day.  Doing the right thing is hard.

Transfer this idea into the sphere of classical education.  At ACA, we have high standards for educational method and curriculum content.  We believe that students should work hard, that teachers should be exacting (and of course loving), and that our curriculum should be devoid of drivel, rich in the high mountain air of Western ideas.

But unless those ideas become flesh, everything ACA stands for is worthless.  Unless teachers consistently give bad grades when needed (in addition to the good ones) and are strict with their students (in addition to being loving), there will be no progress.  Unless parents sit down with their children every day for a time of reading, quality discussion, or Bible study, the best classical Christian education possible will fail to get through.

As parents and teachers, we need an every-day faith.  An every-single-day faith for the tough journey we're taking with our children.  The vision of classical and Christian education is glorious, yes.  But getting it done is all about grit, determination, and no-breaks-allowed commitment.

Funny thing is, that's just how our Christian walk should be -- and just how God likes to reward us with lasting joy.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

If It Ain't Broke . . .

When God builds something, he always has a distinct game-plan: he breaks stuff apart first.  When he "built" the first man and woman, he broke Adam in two (the removed rib on the one hand, sleeping Adam on the other).  The rib became a woman, and then he put the two parts back together: Adam and Eve became "one flesh" (Gen. 2:24).  When God breaks, he's always up to something glorious.

This breaking-while-building method is all over the place in Scripture.  God broke Jacob's hip right before he blessed him with land in Canaan (Gen. 32:25); God "breaks" the children of Israel with slavery in Egypt while he simultaneously builds them into a nation of 600,000+ (Exod. 12:37); God "breaks" David by allowing Saul to chase him without cause, all to build him up into a faithful king (1 Sam. 19 - 2 Sam. 5); the nation of Israel is "broken" through sin and exile so that God can bring them back to Canaan and build them up again for his glory (1 Kings 25:21, Ezra 2:1); and of course, Christ's body was broken for us on the cross so that we could be resurrected -- rebuilt -- into new life with Christ.

The key point is this: stories with hardship in them, where people and things get broken, are the rule, not the exception.  They're God's way, not God's mistake.

Right now, ACA is doing a lot of building.  We're "building" lives (metaphorically) in the classroom, and we're building classrooms (actually) over at Vietnamese Central Baptist Church.  What does this mean?  That there are still road-blocks and fender-benders ahead.  There will be lactic acid buildup and sore muscles, and probably some band-aids needed.

But this is how glory works.  It stoops, it scrapes its knee, and it gets its hands dirty -- like Christ did.  The way up is down.  We delight ourselves in the Lord -- the humble, unexpected ways of the Lord -- and he will give us the desires of our hearts.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern