{"id":2669035,"date":"2026-09-24T09:14:46","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T13:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignhow-classical-christian-education-can-save-america\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T09:25:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T13:25:20","slug":"utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignhow-classical-christian-education-can-save-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignhow-classical-christian-education-can-save-america\/","title":{"rendered":"How Classical Christian Education Can Save America"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">14<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Futm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignhow-classical-christian-education-can-save-america%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2669035&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>in the summer of 2022, Pete Hegseth&#8217;s bestseller. *Battle for the American Mind*, highlighted how progressive educators have gradually transformed American public schools sence the 1860s, replacing classical virtues with values like diversity and environmentalism. He found hope in the classical Christian education (CCE) movement, wich aims to recover customary wisdom, virtue, and eloquence through a curriculum rooted in the trivium-grammar, logic, and rhetoric-and the study of the Great Books, fostering students\u2019 ability to discern truth from falsehood and develop moral character.<\/p>\n<p>Goodwin emphasizes that CCE trains students to synthesize all truth into a coherent system reflecting reality,grounded in divine revelation and reason,with Jesus as the unifying Logos. This approach contrasts sharply with secular and Islamic models, which often dismiss divine revelation or subordinate reason to other authorities. CCE also fosters an atmosphere of solemnity and beauty, emphasizing the importance of cultivating an environment that reflects divine and aesthetic excellence.<\/p>\n<p>The curriculum aims to produce virtuous citizens who understand history as a moral story and develop habits aligned with truth and goodness, resisting modern tendencies toward self-expression and moral relativism. Goodwin advocates for traditional structures and clear hierarchies in education,which help shape students&#8217; love for the good and their humility,grounded in faith that God&#8217;s truth is ultimately knowable.<\/p>\n<p>The ultimate goal is to forge students with moral integrity, sound reasoning, literary competence, and a love for Christ-individuals prepared to uphold and transmit the rich culture and truth of Western civilization, ultimately defending the future of a free and virtuous society.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>In the summer of 2022, the publishing world was taken by storm when Fox &#038; Friends co-host and soon to be Secretary of War Pete Hegseth released his #1 New York Times Bestseller <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Battle-American-Mind-Uprooting-Miseducation-ebook\/dp\/B09G6TJ6KR?ref_=ast_author_mpb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Battle for the American Mind<\/a><\/em>. With great energy and conviction, Hegseth documented and exposed the incremental takeover of America public schools by progressive educators and policies, a process that began, not in the 1960s, but in the 1860s.<\/p>\n<p>Slowly and systematically, the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian props of education\u2014which Hegseth identified as reason, virtue, wonder, and beauty\u2014were replaced with a secular ethos grounded in such fashionable pseudo-virtues (or values) as diversity, equity, inclusion, multiculturalism, and environmentalism. The situation Hegseth described in his book was bleak, but he discerned hope in the classical Christian education (CCE) movement that has spent the last four decades recovering a traditional pedagogy grounded in wisdom, virtue, and eloquence. <\/p>\n<p><em>Battle for the American Mind<\/em> was inspired and co-written by David Goodwin, founder of the classical Christian Ambrose School in Boise, Idaho. After serving as headmaster of Ambrose from 2003-2014, Goodwin became president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a position he continues to fill with distinction. Based on his many years of experience, Goodwin has written a much-needed sequel to <em>Battle<\/em> titled <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Forging-American-Mind-Year-Year\/dp\/0063329034\/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Forging the American Mind: A Year-By-Year Guide for Classical Christian Education<\/a><\/em>. The book defines well the mission and vision of CCE and provides a practical guide for instituting that mission and vision in grades K-12.<\/p>\n<p>Borrowing a metaphor from <em>Battle<\/em> that compared our modern educational system to a capsized cruise ship that we have gotten used to living on, Goodwin argues that classical Christian schools have the wherewithal to \u201cright the ship. We train students in the <em>tools of learning<\/em> and then we transmit the rich culture of the West. CCE trains a child to synthesize all truth together into a system of knowledge that reflects reality.\u201d A great deal hangs on the phrases \u201ctools of learning,\u201d \u201ctransmit the rich culture of the West,\u201d \u201csynthesize all truth together into a system of knowledge\u201d and \u201creflects reality,\u201d and Goodwin does an excellent job parsing each of them.<\/p>\n<h2>Forming Virtuous Citizens<\/h2>\n<p>CCE does far more than teach students discrete facts to prepare them to take standardized exams. It supplies them, via the trivium of grammar, logic (or dialectic), and rhetoric, with the necessary learning tools to \u201cdivide truth from falsehood, goodness from evil, and beauty from ugliness. It teaches children to rightly divide the truth themselves rather than simply learn it by being told outright or through mimicry.\u201d While the grammar phase ensures that students possess the foundational information on which to build a holistic understanding of history, ethics, and the philosophy of ideas, and the logic phase equips them with the ability to distinguish logical thinking from logical fallacies, the rhetoric phase gives them the skills and the courage to defend the truth and live lives of virtue.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to the trivium, the main tool for forming virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens is to invite students into the Great Conversation that has shaped and defined the best of Western civilization. The role of the CC educator is to preserve and \u201cpass down\u201d (what tradition means in Latin) the Great Books through which that Conversation has been conducted. Goodwin refers often to the multi-volumed <em>Great Books of the Western World<\/em>, published in 1952, but with a second edition in 1990 that includes more works by the Fathers of the Church. The set, primarily edited by Mortimer J. Adler, who also edited the <em>Encyclopedia Britannica<\/em>, includes a two-volume Syntopicon that traces 102 key ideas \u2014 angel, being, God, good and evil, nature, justice, monarchy, philosophy, time, truth, virtue and vice, war and peace, and so forth \u2014 through three millennia of pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian writings. <\/p>\n<p>Adler and his team, Goodwin explains, called this the Great Conversation because \u201conce an idea first emerges in ancient literature, it is referenced and developed by later thinkers and in later works down through time. This creates a conversation of sorts, but one that is conducted through the greatest thinkers throughout history! The ideas of the Greeks may travel through the Roman Republic and the Empire, the Byzantines, the Anglo-Saxons, the Gauls, the Irish, and so on up until about 1900.\u201d To invite students into this Conversation is to take them behind the scenes to see how the rich culture of the West was fashioned. Such students will not be fooled by political propaganda, isolated by purveyors of identity politics, manipulated by advertisers, or seduced by ideologies that have been tried and failed.<\/p>\n<p>The trivium and the Great Books form the backbone of CCE, but the goal is to synthesize all knowledge into a unified, coherent system. Throughout <em>Forging the American Mind<\/em>, Goodwin asks a simple question: How do we know? The CCE answer is the same as the medieval Christian answer: By combining \u201chuman reason with God\u2019s natural and direct divine revelation.\u201d Secular, progressive schools, by throwing out divine revelation and willfully blinding themselves to God\u2019s design in nature, have been left with a desiccated reason that cannot resist the slide into subjectivism and indoctrination. Meanwhile, Islam, which \u201ccontributed to the early rise of knowledge in the Middle Ages,\u201d went astray as \u201cconflicts between the Koran, reason, and natural revelation caused Islam to retreat back to a single source of knowledge\u2014the Koran.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Which is not to say that Godwin advocates putting reason and revelation on exactly equal scales. He makes it clear that Christ \u2014 the Word (logos) that became flesh (John 1:14) \u2014 is the unifying factor that allows for a full synthesis of goodness, truth, and beauty. This is what allowed the Judeo-Christian revelation from Jerusalem to complete and perfect the Greco-Roman legacy from Athens. \u201cThe Greeks understood logos to mean a sort of disembodied entity of divine reason, causing the cosmos to be intelligible. What John revealed was that Jesus is logos made flesh. Divine reason took on a body. Reason is more than a matter of the mind. God is more than simply an abstract concept,\u201d Godwin writes. The wisdom and virtue taught at CC schools is grounded in the full self-revelation of God, a historical event (the incarnation) that gives providential shape to all human history, meaning to all human philosophy, and a story pattern to all human literature.<\/p>\n<p>And that leads to Goodwin\u2019s fourth phrase: that the unified knowledge instilled in CC students should reflect reality. Goodwin is at his most insightful when he reminds his readers that CCE is not about a series of dos and don\u2019ts but about conforming the human person to the cosmos. The telos (purposeful end) of CCE is to bring students to \u201cthe realization that God\u2019s truth just makes sense. And that the only way to be happy and free is to align oneself with the world as God created it.\u201d \u00a0Those who think that CCE is about retreating from the \u201creal world,\u201d or about looking at life through rose-colored glasses could not be more mistaken. CCE looks reality in the face with all its horror and its joy, its cruelty and its altruism, its sin and its glory. CC students learn to see things as they really are and to discern their place in God\u2019s cosmic plan. Rather than force the world to conform to their own private desires and passions, they learn to conform themselves to the world as God created it.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, as central as classroom instruction is to CCE, atmosphere and ethos play an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/illicit-iranian-oil-sales-hit-90-billion-under-biden-fueling-tehrans-terror-proxies\/\" title=\"Biden&#039;s administration fuels Tehran&#039;s terror proxies with  billion from illicit Iranian oil sales\">equally vital role<\/a> in aligning students with reality. \u201cThe concept of <em>solemnity<\/em> in a medieval sense is important to know. CCE gives students an aspirational vision\u2014a vision for greatness in truth, greatness in virtue, and greatness in beauty,\u201d observes Godwin. At the risk of offending Christian parents and teachers who prefer chorus songs to hymns, pop music to classical music, utilitarian buildings to beautiful architecture, no-frills classrooms to havens decorated with great art, and personal clothing styles to uniforms, Goodwin insists \u201cthat God planted a desire for beauty in the human heart, and fulfilling that in our homes and schoolwork spaces is honoring to God.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Thus far, I have referenced only Parts I and II of <em>Forging the American Mind<\/em>, which make up 25% of the book. They contain the theoretical presuppositions on which Goodwin builds the practical curriculum he lays out in Parts III and IV. Not being a K-12 teacher, I expected to skim this part of the book, but I quickly abandoned that plan. In addition to the incisive, concrete, implementable suggestions Goodwin offers \u2014 suggestions that will aid teachers, administrators, and homeschooling parents alike \u2014 he loads Parts III and IV with gems of wisdom on the true nature of human beings, history, habits, heroism, and humility.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cProgressive schools,\u201d Goodwin argues, \u201chave imbibed the culture\u2019s belief that children at this age [5-6] should self-direct their education. Conformity and compliance have long been the bogeymen of our cultural story. Rather, our modern stories tell us, true freedom is found in rebellion and self-expression.\u201d The pedagogical upshot of such a false understanding of human nature is that students are left without any proper guidance and are encouraged to adopt self-focused, disordered strategies that will destroy them and their societies in the end. Children learn more, and are happier, when they are provided with structure, order, and proper hierarchy. \u201cInstead of prizing authenticity and self-expression,\u201d Goodwin explains, CC schools \u201cprize truthfulness and integrity.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2>The Vision of a Graduate<\/h2>\n<p>This dichotomy between progressive and traditional anthropology is also reflected in their differing perspectives of history. \u201cModern historical methods tend to teach history as the story of forces and trends, as if it were one big sociological soup, flowing passively up its evolutionary chain. . . . Christians teach history differently, embracing a model that is more like storytelling, where characters \u2014 that is to say, people \u2014 move the plot along,\u201d Godwin notes. Despite the progressive focus on the autonomous individual, its worldview is deterministic; only in CCE are students treated as fully ethical beings with moral agency and a role to play in God\u2019s metanarrative.<\/p>\n<p>Uniting CCE\u2019s anthropological focus on proper conformity with its historical focus on proper agency yields a classroom that seeks to instill habits of virtue in its students. \u201cTo our modern ears,\u201d Goodwin explains, \u201chabits are equated with words like <em>mindless<\/em> and <em>bad<\/em>. We may fail to realize that well-formed and intentional habits actually shape our love for the good. We believe we are creatures driven by reason, but we are not. We\u2019re a complex mix of reason, emotion, and affection.\u201d A teacher\u2019s unspoken assumptions about habits will determine whether he urges his students to break all boundaries and be true only to themselves, or to conform all areas of their mind, heart, and soul to that which is good, true, and beautiful.                     <\/p>\n<p>Schools that do this will be less likely to fall into the progressive trap of heroizing villains and demonizing heroes. In CC schools, students are made \u201cwary of pseudo-heroes who love disrespect and disobedience, and pseudo-villains who love good things like tradition.\u201d The acquisition of knowledge is not enough; students must be molded in accordance with fixed, absolute, transcendent standards. They must learn to love the good and hate the bad, and for that love and hate to become habitual.<\/p>\n<p>And they must learn to do so humbly, with a knowledge of their own limits balanced by their faith that they serve a God who is Truth itself (John 14:6). Thus does CCE both mimic the best of the classical world and transcend it through Christ. Like Socrates, CCE students \u201cneed to develop the humility that neither they, nor possibly their teacher, are capable of answering the question completely and perfectly. But we should not leave them in despair. This is where Christianity offers hope. There is always an answer, even if we fail to find it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If this is done properly, Goodwin promises, we will forge students who \u201care deep and serious people with an ability to engage on any topic.\u201d Students, that is, who live up to the \u201cVision of a Graduate\u201d that Goodwin helped develop for the Ambrose School: \u201c<em>students with a heartfelt moral compass, sound reason and a sound faith, a masterful command of language, well-rounded competence, and literacy with a broad exposure to books, and who have a well-developed aesthetic, with maturity, virtue, and a love for Christ.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I have met and conversed with many such students over the years, and they have filled me with hope for the future of our nation. If the battle for the American mind is to be won, it is students who possess this combination of faith and virtue who will win it.                                                                                                                                                 <\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hc.edu\/contact\/louis-markos\/\">Louis Markos<\/a>, professor in English  and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His books include &#8220;Apologetics for the 21st Century,&#8221; &#8220;On the Shoulders of Hobbits,&#8221; and &#8220;Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2022, Pete Hegseth&#8217;s bestseller exposed America&#8217;s public school takeover<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":645,"featured_media":2669036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Book-Cover-Image-5-1.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[45884,86166,52018,86167],"class_list":["post-2669035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-american-values","tag-classical-christian-education","tag-educational-reform","tag-faith-based-learning"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Book-Cover-Image-5-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2669035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/645"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2669035"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2669035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2669048,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2669035\/revisions\/2669048"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2669036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2669035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2669035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2669035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}