In a world full of chaos and vice, how can we help our children build a stalwart character, a strong moral compass, and a highly attuned sense of self? Let us look at the time-honored methodology—content and approach—of classical education. This methodology, put simply, is based in wholeness; rather than breaking a subject (or child) into an assembly line of parts, we must first form a relationship with the whole. Only after there is familiarity, intimacy, and connection with the subject of study are we ready to dissect and break it down into the disparate pieces, otherwise the child’s spark of wonder, intrinsic motivation, and moral investment never have a chance to form.
Let’s look at just three examples, through a classical education lens, in which moral education is powerfully enacted:
Stories
Everything we know about ourselves, the world, the cosmos, and even the Divine is a result of stories that have been passed down to us through the ages. Memories in and of themselves are a collection of stories of our lived and inherited experiences. Classical education, for this reason, is solidly built upon the backs of myths, fairytales, legends, poems, creation stories, classic novels, and works of philosophy and political and natural science because they are the on-going human story. Why do we perpetuate these stories? As classical educator Vigen Guroian powerfully stated, “While fairy tales are not a substitute for life experience, they have the great capacity to share our moral constitution without the shortcomings of either rigidly dogmatic schooling or values-clarification education.”1 Classic stories allow us to learn life’s toughest lessons vicariously. If there’s a mistake to be made, you can guarantee someone else has already made it before you!
Rather than forcing a parent’s value system into their child through indoctrination, we can instead allow stories themselves to be the moralist. Two wonderful things happen when we do this: Firstly, parents are no longer the bad guys! They allow characters like Edmund, in C.S. Lewis’ famous The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, to do the moralizing so they don’t have to. Secondly, children don’t feel lectured at, talked down to, or controlled. The reader walks every misstep with Edmund, keenly aware of his feelings of insecurity amongst his siblings and in being separated from his parents in wartime, his choice to betray Lucy’s confidence, to place his trust in the White Witch and jeopardize the safety of not just his family but all of Narnia. And they also witness his path of redemption, his journey back to self.
Which is more effective, to directly instruct a child, “Don’t be naughty. Don’t betray people. Don’t trust bad guys.” Or, to indirectly allow Edmund to make all those mistakes, without any real-world consequences, while your children read along, and you simply ask reflective questions: Why did Edmund betray his family? Why was he willing to trust the White Witch over his own sister, Lucy? What leads good people to make bad choices? It was Dr. Seuss that wisely noted, “Kids can see a moral coming a mile off.” But with stories, the morals are tucked sneakily in between the lines and spark to life in their consciousness and blossom in their hearts only after they have connected with the wholeness of the story and have had a loving mentor with whom to discuss deeper themes. Which leads me to the next example.
Mentors
Socrates is one of the world’s greatest examples of mentorship, particularly his “maieutic” approach, or “way of the midwife.” Raised by a midwife, Socrates keenly observed his mother’s approach to birth and took note: the midwife was there to assist the natural process, not control or commandeer or overly meddle; above all else, the midwife trusted in the woman’s ability to deliver the child from within herself. Socrates believed mentorship should look very much like traditional midwifery, where we view the mentee not as an empty vessel to be filled but as an embryonic philosopher, with all the components already there in dormancy that simply need to be fostered into life from the inside out. Guroian affirms this truth, “The teacher must not introduce values into the classroom but instead work to ‘draw out’ from children their own moral beliefs and through a process of clarification help them better formulate their own values.” (Guroian, 35) Mentorship is an essential component of moral education because it’s founded on trust, genuine connection, and loving guidance. It is predicated on, first and foremost, modeling upstanding character, secondly, supplying rich content that sparks big ideas, and thirdly, asking excellent questions.
But mentorship extends far beyond the direct one-on-one relationship between teacher and student or parent and child when excellent stories and big ideas are foundational to the child’s schooling: children can be mentored by figures of the past! They are certainly gaining a moral education when learning about Gandhi, Mother Theresa and MLKJ. Suddenly, history is a portal through time, where mentees come face-to-face with The Greats that have lived, breathed, and died, but not before adding their footnote on the pages of history. Michael Allen, a classical historian, said it so well, “On a grand level the study of history is literally the study of His Story, the story of God’s green earth throughout the thousands of years mankind has been blessed to inhabit this planet.”2 Taking it one step further, a wise mentor helps the mentee to see that His Story as actually yours and mine; their story is my story is your story because we’re part of humankind, we’re asking the same questions, we’re facing the same moral dilemmas.
Wholeness
If classical education is building a relationship with wholeness, what does this look like in application, and how does it lend itself to moral education? If we were to study the Dust Bowl as a “piece” of history, separate from the whole, we would see an agricultural crisis combined with sustained drought that led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of families. We see an unfortunate event that came and went; it lands in the head but doesn’t necessarily penetrate the heart. But when we see the Dust Bowl in its wholeness, intersecting with all parts of the human experience at once, profound moral lessons take root: What led to the Dust Bowl? How did the Plains Indians manage their natural resources for thousands of years and never experience such a catastrophe? What are the dangers of monoculture? What is reciprocity? How much of the Dust Bowl was man-made and how much of it was a natural disaster? What role did advancing farming equipment have in displacing America’s farming population? What happens when a people can no longer sustain themselves by the sweat of their own brow?
A simple thread is pulled upon deeper inquiry and we see that it’s interwoven with the whole tapestry. You can’t understand the Dust Bowl without also looking at sustainable agricultural practices, industrialization, urbanization, colonization, economics, and, here it is again, ethics and morality. Wholeness is all around us, is us, and as we help our children see the big picture, capture the vision of the tapestry, they come to see the power of choice: a choice we make in one area of life is not isolated but ripples into every other sphere of the human story. You change one agricultural process and a few generations later, the land is barren, bellies are empty, homes are abandoned, lives are disrupted. But we can only see that interconnectedness if we train our eyes, and hearts, to see it.
The more your family immerses themselves in the world from a place of wholeness, moral education is underway. It only takes a determined mentor to supply the mentee with rich stories, a willingness to pause and ask reflective questions, and a training of the heart to feel and uncover the wholeness of every story.