Focus on Learning, Not Grades
A number of years ago, I heard a speaker named Dr. John Patrick, a medical doctor, researcher, and professor who spoke about the need for a consistent Christian worldview. He recounted his experiences from around the world working with starving children and the transforming effects those experiences had on his own children, who shared the work with him. When you’ve held a starving child in your arms as he dies, Dr. Patrick said, you lose interest in the latest fashions at the mall.
Dr. Patrick also described his children’s education. Each evening over dinner he would ask them questions about their classes. But his question was never, What did you make on the test? It was always, What did you learn?
To be interested in your children’s education does not require that you merely want or demand certain grades. Grades and scores might have their place, certainly, but what is their place? Are grades and scores the goal? Or are grades and scores merely indicators of progress toward the real goal?
Obviously, I’m suggesting the latter. Our real goal in classical Christian education is the cultivation of the mind, heart, and soul in wisdom and virtue. It includes the acquisition of knowledge and skills, but it primarily consists in the formation of character and the shaping of a consistent Christian worldview. That takes time, something we seem somehow to have less of than previous generations.
If we consistently ask our children the question, “What did you learn?,” and then if we engage our children’s answers and show them our interest and our own thirst for knowledge, then we can help lead them toward real education. The English word “education,” by the way, comes from the Latin root educere, meaning “to lead forth.”
Toward what goal do you want your children led forth? We are joining together at Providence Classical Christian School, parents and teachers together as partners, to lead our children not toward higher test scores, though higher test scores tend to be one wonderful side-effect of a classical Christian education. We are leading not merely toward jobs and money and acclaim, though we are thankful for all of these and recognize their place. We are leading our children toward the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, real knowledge and usefulness to God in His kingdom.
And speaking of grades, Providence is joining many other classical Christian schools to examine our grading system carefully. We are asking some hard questions about why we use the grade system we use, where it came from, how it affects our students, and whether it fits with the classical vision. This school year you should expect to hear a lot about grades, the limitations of grades, and assessment practices that accord well with classical Christian education. Our desire is to make our school the absolute best classical Christian school it can be so that we can serve your family well with excellence and effectiveness.
We begin this new school year with optimism and faith, with confidence and humility, because God is good and He has given us a truly wonderful school family. I’m looking forward to many rich and enriching days ahead when the answers you get from “What did you learn today?” spark stimulating and engrossing conversations and signal deep thinking and real learning.