Teaching Kids to Think for Themselves

By Lee Webb

CBN News

May 21, 2007

CBNNews.com – MOSCOW, Idaho - Over the last two decades, a number of Christian schools have popped up around the country employing what is known as the classical approach to education.

They are modeling the curriculum of one school in Moscow, Idaho.

CBN News traveled west to check out the school and discovered that its approach is not new at all.

At first glance, Logos School looks like any other school – busy hallways, lockers clanking shut, and students scurrying to class.

But it is in the classroom where the difference can be seen and heard.

Logos third graders greet teacher Julie Garfield in Latin. By the time these students are in the tenth grade, they will be able to converse and read original works in the ancient language.

Douglas Wilson was the co-founder of Logos. “At the beginning, all I knew is that I didn't want my kids to have what I got,” Wilson said. “I felt ripped-off, vaguely. And we were trying to impart the kind of education that none of us had received.”

Wilson had discovered an essay titled “The Lost Tools of Learning,” written by British author Dorothy Sayers in the late 40s.

Sayers wrote, "Although we often succeed in teaching our pupils 'subjects,' we fail lamentably, on the whole, in teaching them how to think."

That shift, in this country at least, began in the mid-1800s, when the focus of education became preparing young people for specific jobs.

Schools today place a premium on computer training, while only 31 percent of college graduates are able to understand lengthy passages from books.

Sayers argued for a return to the educational method that had been used for centuries. A method that employed what was known as the “trivium”: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Each phase was designed to take advantage of learning characteristics as children grow and mature.

Wilson embraced Sayers' ideas, and in 1981, Logos opened its doors with 16 students.

“And as we implemented it, we discovered she was really onto something,” Wilson said. “It really worked in a spectacular way.”

Tom Garfield was the school's first principal. Now, 25 years and 230 graduates later, he is still leading Logos and touting the classical method.

The trivium begins with the grammar stage.

Children -- kindergarten through sixth grade –are good at memorizing, Tom said. Singing and chanting are some of the ways they learn the facts about math, history and language.

“Rote learning is almost a bad term in many cases -- the idea that children should memorize something without having a complete concept of it,” Tom explained. “Well, we submit that they won't get a complete concept of it until they're much older and more mature."

And to make it more fun, they even play games to learn their Latin vocabulary.

But why teach a language long considered dead?

“The reason I teach Latin is that it teaches students to think in a detailed way,” said teacher Julie Garfield. “I also like the way it reinforces their English grammar.”

That is because much of the English language is derived from Latin.

By the eighth grade, students are ready to move on to the logic phase. While reading one of the logic lessons, a student said, “If one of the statements is true, the other must be false.”

Tom said, “They see the connections. They want to find out fallacies, they want to catch people out. And they love engaging in that back and forth.”

In other words, they learn how to reason and argue.

By high school they are studying rhetoric, and learning to how to convey all they have learned, persuasively.

Ninety-two percent of Logos graduates go on to college.

Many of them go no further than a couple of miles away, to New Saint Andrews -- the classical Christian college also co-founded by Wilson.

Greek is added to the mix of foreign languages taught at New Saint Andrews. Even the math is based on the classical method developed by Euclid, the founder of geometry.

The professors make no apologies for the heavy workload.

Sophomore Sarah Halverson stands next to all the books that New Saint Andrews students are required to read in their freshman year: a total of 85 books, with an emphasis on the classics of western civilization.

New Saint Andrews students are given at least 16 oral exams over a four-year span, and before they graduate, they are required to write and defend an 80-page thesis.

All of this prompts critics to say that the classical approach is only for the best and brightest.

“We're a small town in Northern Idaho,” Wilson said. “We've been accepting average kids of average American families and seeing what they can do.”

Apparently, they are doing well. Logos has had 25 National Merit semi-finalists, which is per capita the highest in Idaho.

And its students score 35 percent higher than the national average on year-end achievement tests.

Word of that success has spread. Wilson wrote a book called Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning.

Now there are 160 schools here and abroad based on the classical model.

One New Saint Andrews alumnus was Regent University Law School's Distinguished Graduate in 2004.

But critics also wonder how a classical education trains students for the real world. One of those critics is Kjell Cristophersen, the owner of an economic forecasting company.

“Kjell came to me,” said New St. Andrews College President Dr. Roy Atwood, “(saying) I wish you would teach these kids something useful, like economics or computer modeling - something like that. Give them some practical skills, so I can hire them.”

Atwood challenged Cristophersen to hire just one New Saint Andrews graduate.

And now, 12 of his 18 employees are from the college, and Cristopherson is one of classical education's biggest advocates.

“I have actually never seen anybody who can move up on the learning curve as fast as these kids have,” Cristophersen marveled.

Filling the workforce is not the focus at Logos or New Saint Andrews -- it is equipping young Christians to be life-long learners who think critically.

Halverson said, “I can pick up a book and read and pull things from it, and be able to explain something I pulled from it or something I came to understand through it, and then apply it to other areas of life.”

“They will know what it means to be a Christian,” Atwood said, “to have an identity that goes down to the very bones; that everything they do and think is going to, in a sense, be biblically-grounded and Christianly-oriented.”

And capable, Atwood says, of engaging an unbelieving world with a credible profession of the Gospel.

Wilson said, “You measure success by faithfulness to God.”

Does the next generation want to carry on in a covenantal faithfulness? Do they want to do it again?

Wilson says the answer to that question is overwhelmingly yes.

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