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Introduction: Beauty and Education
Central to Roman Roads’s mission of uniting beauty and education is our flagship product Old Western Culture. Our emphasis on making a beautiful product which trains the eye, mind, and heart to behold beauty and cultivate wonder has set Old Western Culture apart from other curricula.
ART
Throughout the course we share and discuss the artistic accomplishments of the different ages of the West, as well as the art connected to the literature being studied. More on this in our forthcoming announcement of The Old Western Culture Companion!
SETTING
Instead of filming the lectures in front of a whiteboard or podium, our primary lecturer, Wes Callihan, sits in his own library, among the classics he’s discussing, letting the works of the ages set the stage for the poetry, history, and stories he shares. Our other authors have the studio adapted to their most natural setting. For Mitch Stokes, that was a traditional chalkboard. For Peter Leithart, it was the podium. For Joe Carlson, a desk. For Wes Callihan, his favorite chair in his study.
INTEGRATED USE
This curriculum is intended for more than just students: we want to see these works enriching the lives of whole families and future generations of Western Christians. That’s why we started the Great Books Reading Challenge for Parents. The parents of our students read the texts and watch the lessons of a particular portion of OWC which we offer for free during the challenge. Furthermore, Old Western Culture is used by teachers for teacher training, and adult learners of every age. Like Lewis’ comments about children’s literature, if a curriculum is loved and inspiring to students, it should be to university professors and teaches and entire families as well.
If you desire to inherit these great books of Western civilization in your home, Old Western Culture is a beautiful tool for the job.
Blessings, Daniel Foucachon
CEO, Roman Roads Press
“God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves—that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
God has given us beauty to partake in, not merely to behold.
Beauty in education is not just a day at the art gallery, murmuring politely about the influence of this artist over that. Beauty in education is not just posters and prints in your schoolroom. Beauty in education is more alive, more powerful, more dangerous, more potent. It is the teenager reading a gripping battle scene in an epic poem. It is a phrase well-turned in the mouth of a young student who just a few years prior spoke no words. It is seeing the mathematical relationship of a musical interval. Beauty in education partakes.
If the beauty of our homes, schoolrooms, books and textbooks evoke in ourselves and our students not mere admiration but the desire to participate – to tolle lege – if it moves us to action, then the beauty in our education is rightly ordered.
This week during our Spring Sale we will explore some of the aspects of beauty in various subjects pertaining to the education of our children and ourselves.
Our mission at Roman Roads Press is to equip families to “inherit the humanities.” One way to unpack our motto would be to say that we desire to equip families with the tools to partake in beauty.