Classical Education for Those Long Out of School – Religion & Liberty Online

An education in the classics, including the Christian classics, is not something for the college classroom only—it should be a lifelong habit.

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Over the past 15 years, Scott Postma has completed seminary, earned a Ph.D. from Faulkner University, launched two classical schools, and become CEO of Kepler Education. Across those years, he developed a philosophy of humane education that unites the seven liberal arts within the classical Christian education renewal movement. Now Postma has published an account of his intellectual journey as Becoming Classically Educated: Humane Letters on Education, Culture, and the Great Conversation. “I started wrestling with the ideas contained in these essays more than a decade ago, attempting to discover and articulate the Christian humanist vision for education.” Rather than a memoir, this volume shows the development of ideas through deep reading. In following the author’s journey, the reader becomes more attuned to the tradition modernity has largely abandoned.

It’s a propitious time for such a volume. Classical education appears to be entering a tipping point. The Classical Learning Test (CLT) keeps announcing new states that have accepted their test and new initiatives to challenge the College Board. In addition, 17 states have passed school-choice bills, and the Big Beautiful Bill has a federal option for parents in states that have not yet established a mechanism whereby the money follows the child. Arcadia Education projects that by 2035, 1.4 million students will be enrolled in classical schools if current trends continue, and those children will require 70,000 teachers wearing the classical tradition “as a crown and mantle,” to borrow Mandi Gerth’s phrase. New institutions, like Robert Jackson’s Florida Institute for Classical Learning, James Shuls’s Institute for Governance and Civics at FSU, or my own Logres Institute, hope to help this movement grow well. Many new teachers, leaders, and edu-preneurs are entering classical education. So it’s the right time for a content-rich volume to highlight all that is involved in gaining a classical education as an adult.

Becoming Classically Educated meets the standards outlined by the author in his preface, even as the author recognizes limitations: The 14 essays are organized into three parts, enabling readers to move sequentially or haphazardly. A coherent vision emerges, but it does so with excessive repetition and word count; this volume, if revised for a future edition, would benefit from a sharp editorial eye. But writing a tight monograph was not Postma’s goal. Instead, as he notes, “writing these essays were both my own attempt to find the language I needed and also my reasonable service of returning down into the cave.” As a work of intellectual biography, this volume is well suited for those entering classical education; it is particularly appropriate for reading groups, whether faculty or book clubs. Postma “frequently cites swaths of text from classical sources that would be well worth commonplacing or simply meditating on.”

One of Postma’s most impressive achievements lies in the demonstration of the complex nature of classical education. While practitioners often describe curricula, school networks, charter documents, and other practical elements of an educational movement, Postma illustrates that having a classical education lies in being transformed through participation in the great conversation happening throughout the eras that mark Western civilization. He puts it this way: “Obtaining a liberal arts education is a way of life where one desires to know the highest good, maintain a lifestyle rooted in leisure, finds pleasure in reading the best books of the Western tradition, remains eminently teachable, and is willing to surround himself with friends and reliable guides who also desire knowledge for its own sake.” Consider the following texts Postma draws from:

• Augustine’s Confessions
• Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler’s Great Books of the Western World series and their Great Ideas collections
• Thucydides
• Aquinas
• Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
• Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences
• C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man
• Plato’s Dialogues
• Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
• John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon
• Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon
• James Schall’s Life of the Mind
• Richard M. Gamble’s Great Tradition
• Sister Miriam Joseph’s The Trivium
• Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture
• G. Sertillanges’s Intellectual Life

These sample titles are representative of how widely read Postma is, and they support the implicit thesis: A truly classically educated man is one who continues reading, contemplating, and integrating ideas into his life.

Postma defines classical Christian education as “a human education that seeks to apprehend and appreciate what is good, true, and beautiful in the cosmos and then help each individual with his or her endowments and attainments approximate one’s self to that revealed or discovered truth.” This definition introduces three chapters, each meditating on the meaning of one of the Platonic transcendentals. While abstract, his meditations add substance to the sometimes pithy statement “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” Classical education, in Postma’s view, requires students to recognize the Real, perceive it as beautiful, and learn to submit themselves to Reality.

Throughout this book, I found myself engrossed in a grand literary journey; the best chapter in this sense focused on Tsundoku, or the “art of acquiring books and letting them pile up unread.” Postma’s footnote explains that there is no precise English equivalent for this Japanese term. The one who is on the journey to becoming classically educated must do so through the route of books: physical books, difficult books, incomprehensible books, books that stretch the understanding. Such a journey is aristocratic—only a few will undergo tutelage at the feet of the best masters. Yet the way remains open to all who will begin. Postma’s story is an encouragement to any teacher, parent, or grandparent who looks at a homeschooling or classically trained student and thinks, “How can I get the education this child is getting?” The voice Augustine heard still rings true: Tolle lege, tolle lege. Take up and read.

Postma made an authorial choice to lightly edit his essays for size, but he left them largely as originally written. I hesitate to indict him for the obvious flaws: Several essays use the same quotations as proof, eudaimonia is defined at least four times in the exact same way, some essays feel like research papers while others feel like Substack posts, and too many sentences are written in the passive voice. To be fair, though, if one were to gather my writings from 2015–25 and republish them unrevised, I am confident they would have the same faults. But in the midst of these writings, Postma’s gift for the well-chosen word still shines through. Below are seven such passages:

• “The Classical Christian tradition has consistently maintained that the good is that which fosters and leads to human flourishing. And flourishing is only achieved when the soul operates in accordance with virtue and in pursuit of the goodness of God Himself.”
• “Education is the experience of being led out of, or delivered from, the cave of images so one is able to see reality by the light of the sun and order his soul with virtue.”
• The liberal arts “create a set of tools in the mind that are exercised toward wisdom, and exercised for the benefit of acquiring that knowledge that makes people free to create meaningful and purposeful lives.”
• “Rational public discourse depends on a society’s proficiency in rhetorical skills; without these, there can be no political cosmos, only chaos.”
• “Where screens train students to scan, the page trains them to commune and converse with the author, and to contemplate his or her ideas.”
• “The gospel is the very best conceptual foundation for art and beauty because it is the gateway to the ultimate truth, the power to secure the greatest good, and the very paradox of beauty.”

Becoming Classically Educated is worthwhile reading even for those who have no specific interest in homeschooling or new and improved pedagogical programs. It highlights the journey into the liberal arts, emphasizes classical education not as a series of methods but a way of life, and unveils the close connections between traditional education, Christianity, and Western civilization. These three categories are distinct, but they form a Venn diagram with classical Christian education in the intersection. Heads of school, deans of faculties, leaders of book clubs: Put Becoming Classically Educated in your rotation and encourage those you read with to contemplate truth, goodness, and beauty alongside Scott Postma.