The Form and Function of Education

The form of education follows the function of education in the same way form follows function in architecture. A building’s form naturally follows its function. A hospital looks quite a bit different from a fast-food restaurant. And, until only recently, a church looked very different from a department store and a school looked very different from a penitentiary.

To understand the function of Classical Christian Education, we need to begin by going to the Scriptures where the Apostle Paul teaches fathers to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). There is a lot to unpack from this verse, but the two words Paul uses translated nurture and admonition are words that would be familiar to any Greco-Roman person of the first century. Nurture is the Greek word, Paideia, which means guidance for responsible living. In the Greco-Roman world this word would naturally be oriented toward citizenship. Paideia was guidance for responsible living as a citizen of Rome (previously Athens). 

The second word, Admonition, is nouthesia and means counsel about avoidance or cessation of an improper course of conduct. Much like the idiom, Heaven and Earth, or vast and wide, paideia and nouthesia are a synergistic idiom to be understood together in such a way that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Additionally, the prepositional phrase “of the Lord” gives placement to the mandate. The key is that education given to a child is to be directed not toward the state but toward a different kingdom, the Lord’s kingdom–and a proper education includes learning about everything that belongs in it.

Therefore, the function of education is to cultivate free human beings who flourish in the kingdom of Christ. The function of education is not to create automatons, or cast more cogs in the industrialized state. It is not to put more laborers in the marketplace. 

It follows that the form of their education should be informed by that belief. In other words, the function of classical Christian education is to cultivate human beings and so the form of that education is, therefore,

• more conversationally driven than performance driven. 
• more interested in the students’ ability to conceptualize an idea and interact with that idea wisely in this world than in the empirical data points meant to reflect their performance at a particular time in history. 
• The form also includes being more interested in teaching students than teaching a curriculum. 

This form of education has a particular trajectory for learning everything which allows someone to know how to learn anything.