Doxological Pedagogy (Part One)

What is Education?

What is education? What is education for? How is education to be pursued? And how can Dante’s Paradiso help answer these questions? What I will be suggesting as an answer starts with doxological pedagogy. The word pedagogy comes from the Greek words for “boy” and “guide”; thus a pedagogy is the means by which the child is guided toward a specific end. A doxological (literally, the speaking of the glory) pedagogy establishes the worship of God as that particular end toward which a child is led through every sphere of education. Put simply, a doxological education trains, or disciples, the whole person — heart, mind, and body — in loving God. Understanding why this is what education is and what it is for, how it works on the hearts and minds of students, and what this might look like in the classroom, is the goal of these posts.

The central argument can be summarized like this: the worship of God must be woven into the very fabric of a Christian education, not as a pious veneer overlaying an otherwise secular approach, but as the essential element both of its philosophy and implementation. Doxology lies at the heart of what it means to educate because doxology lies at the heart of what it means to be human. The experience of worship is inescapably human, just as present in a secular education as in a religious one. It behooves Christians, therefore, to understand and employ a philosophy of education that actively recognizes the Triune God at the center. If our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, the chief end of education ought to be to prepare us to do just that.

But other answers to those initial questions have clouded our understanding of education. Secularism is fundamentally deceptive in that it promises freedom from religion but in reality simply promotes its own version of god and worship. In the following post, we will consider two different wellsprings of this secular religion by briefly surveying Plato’s Republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. Why these two? Both are highly influential and present a faulty vision of man that has crippled our understanding of education. We’ll examine them in light of Scripture, which will point us toward the foundations of a doxological pedagogy.

The Real Engine of Growth

Finally, it should be noted that in none of this discussion of a right philosophy of education and healthy classroom practices is it being suggested that we can, by our own strength and skill, replicate the work of the Holy Spirit in drawing the hearts of fallen sinners to God by faith. Our fundamental creed is that, because of the Fall, mankind cannot achieve man’s created purpose apart from the gracious regeneration of the Spirit. Dante could not have made it out of the dark wood on his own initiative. Neither could we. Salvation itself is a work of Christ, accomplished by grace alone, through faith alone. The argument made in the following posts is necessarily predicated upon the divine work of God to open blind eyes and refashion dead hearts. A pedagogy of praise is praising something real, something that precedes it and gives it energy.

To employ theological language, education is a work of sanctification, not justification. But as a part of sanctification, Christian education is an element of our Christian walk that we are responsible for. This is an area where we must “keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25). But thankfully, Grace does not simply chart our course across the sea of wisdom, leaving us without a craft in which to brave the swells. She doesn’t get us started, and then leave us to our own devices. She carries us in her bosom, takes us from the dark wood of our self-centered lethargy and brings us to the very face of God. Thus we are meant to see Dante’s journey as our journey; his redemption, our redemption; his education, our own.

For those unfamiliar with what Roman Roads has to offer, we have an array of excellent texts and curricula, including

Old Western Culture: a fully integrated, 9-12th grade humanities course, touching on literature, philosophy, history, theology, and more, complete with a 16-volume set of original texts, spanning from Homer and Vergil to Jane Austen and CS Lewis;

Calculus for Everyone: a text that gets to the heart of why Calculus works… and why it is important;

Dante Curriculum: an in-depth, canto-by-canto consideration of one of Christendom’s greatest achievements, Dante’s Divine Comedy, from a solidly Christian perspective;

Fitting Words: a course in the classical art of formal rhetoric, training students to speak powerfully and elegantly;

Picta Dicta: A Latin curriculum in which students learn through all four language pathways (reading, writing, speaking, and hearing), making it both more enjoyable for them to learn and easier to retain. 

Furthermore, we have a growing collection of standalone works, such as Cicero’s On Duties, Dr. Gordon Wilson’s Darwin’s Sandcastle, Elizabeth Landis’ The Forgotten Realm: Civics for American Christians, and Christiana Hale’s Deeper Heaven: A Reader’s Guide to CS Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, plus several more.