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How Classical Christian Education Can Save America

David Godwin’s new book ‘Forging the American Mind,’ ably explains how faith, virtue, and excellence can be the heart of K-12 education.

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In the summer of 2022, the publishing world was taken by storm when Fox & Friends co-host and soon to be Secretary of War Pete Hegseth released his #1 New York Times Bestseller Battle for the American Mind. With great energy and conviction, Hegseth documented and exposed the incremental takeover of America public schools by progressive educators and policies, a process that began, not in the 1960s, but in the 1860s.

Slowly and systematically, the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian props of education—which Hegseth identified as reason, virtue, wonder, and beauty—were replaced with a secular ethos grounded in such fashionable pseudo-virtues (or values) as diversity, equity, inclusion, multiculturalism, and environmentalism. The situation Hegseth described in his book was bleak, but he discerned hope in the classical Christian education (CCE) movement that has spent the last four decades recovering a traditional pedagogy grounded in wisdom, virtue, and eloquence.

Battle for the American Mind was inspired and co-written by David Goodwin, founder of the classical Christian Ambrose School in Boise, Idaho. After serving as headmaster of Ambrose from 2003-2014, Goodwin became president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a position he continues to fill with distinction. Based on his many years of experience, Goodwin has written a much-needed sequel to Battle titled Forging the American Mind: A Year-By-Year Guide for Classical Christian Education. The book defines well the mission and vision of CCE and provides a practical guide for instituting that mission and vision in grades K-12.

Borrowing a metaphor from Battle that compared our modern educational system to a capsized cruise ship that we have gotten used to living on, Goodwin argues that classical Christian schools have the wherewithal to “right the ship. We train students in the tools of learning and then we transmit the rich culture of the West. CCE trains a child to synthesize all truth together into a system of knowledge that reflects reality.” A great deal hangs on the phrases “tools of learning,” “transmit the rich culture of the West,” “synthesize all truth together into a system of knowledge” and “reflects reality,” and Goodwin does an excellent job parsing each of them.

Forming Virtuous Citizens

CCE does far more than teach students discrete facts to prepare them to take standardized exams. It supplies them, via the trivium of grammar, logic (or dialectic), and rhetoric, with the necessary learning tools to “divide truth from falsehood, goodness from evil, and beauty from ugliness. It teaches children to rightly divide the truth themselves rather than simply learn it by being told outright or through mimicry.” While the grammar phase ensures that students possess the foundational information on which to build a holistic understanding of history, ethics, and the philosophy of ideas, and the logic phase equips them with the ability to distinguish logical thinking from logical fallacies, the rhetoric phase gives them the skills and the courage to defend the truth and live lives of virtue.

In addition to the trivium, the main tool for forming virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens is to invite students into the Great Conversation that has shaped and defined the best of Western civilization. The role of the CC educator is to preserve and “pass down” (what tradition means in Latin) the Great Books through which that Conversation has been conducted. Goodwin refers often to the multi-volumed Great Books of the Western........

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