Education is, or should be, a conservative undertaking. It’s about conserving and conveying an inheritance of wisdom, knowledge, and virtue from generation to generation.
In biblical terms it’s represented by the psalmist when he speaks of God establishing a "testimony in Jacob" and a "law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children; that the generation to come might know them, the children who would be born, that they may arise and declare them to their children. That they may set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments" (Ps.78: 5-7).
Only this kind of multi-generational teaching and learning can promote true community, defined memorably by English statesman Edmund Burke as "the dead, the living, and the yet to be born, joined in perpetuity by a moral bond."
In specifically American terms, we would do well to ask what legacy particularly we should be passing on. Many, of course, see America as a land of nearly unrestrained individual freedom. Others would point to capitalistic prosperity or, more recently, multicultural diversity and pluralism as defining characteristics of our national identity. But as historian and sociologist Allan Carlson observes, "for a long time now America’s public leaders and intellectuals have trafficked in a distorted reading of the American past." Carlson agrees with political historian Barry Shain who has shown that the ordered liberty of the Founding Fathers was planted in soil "best described as reformed Protestant and communal." Simply put, the men of Washington’s time were much more interested in the independence of families, churches, and local communities than in dreams of "personal liberation." The founders, says Carlson, "did not consist of the nascent individualists and proto-capitalists presumed in contemporary liberal and libertarian thought. Instead, they were a people bound by family, spiritual community, and social convention."
This true "American Way" has stood the test of time, though it has had to endure and overcome repeated assaults and setbacks going back at least a century or more. Indeed, as the "culture wars" rage on in the present day, Veritas Academy aspires to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. We hope, by the grace of God, to make a unique educational contribution to the modern family and faith-centered American Way.
It is commonplace in Christian circles to call the natural family the centerpiece of society, the fountainhead of material and spiritual nurture, and the agency ultimately responsible for the education of its offspring. The fact is, however, that families in America, even Christian ones, are struggling to play any of these roles, as the forces of gender-neutral individualism, corporate capitalism, and welfare-state collectivism have sapped their strength and pushed them to the periphery of what matters in modern times.
None of this occurred overnight. As early as 1925, Princeton’s J. Gresham Machen laid a good part of the blame for what he called "the lamentable ignorance in the Church" at the doorstep of the family. "The most important Christian educational institution," he said, "is not the pulpit or the school, important as these institutions are; but it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work."
Succeeding decades have seen little if any improvement in the situation. Not only do ideas (e.g. secularism, individualism) shape society, but society in turn shapes ideas. One can trace the family’s diminishing size and influence in America, punctuated by intermittent renewals, as far back as the nineteenth century when she began to lose many of her productive economic and educational functions. Not only was the separation between church and state widened, but a wedge was driven between home and both work and school. For some time fathers and children would be the ones absent from the hearthside for the better part of each day, but increasingly all members of the household are absent, either because of economic pressures or because it is mostly in the marketplace where one’s work seems significant enough to yield some satisfaction.
There are undoubtedly many factors combining to create today’s disastrously high divorce rate and abysmally low birth rate, but we are willfully blind if we fail to see the unplanned yet deleterious "divide and conquer" influence of modern urban and suburban life.
Prospects for a large-scale recovery of cottage industries and the family farm, where some gains have been made, are still not that promising. Dr. Carlson asks, "What language about family and community might be fit for twenty-first-century Americans?" Among six recommendations he encourages " ‘deindustrialization’ and the return of vital functions to the family circle, with ‘home schooling’ as the most practical and successful recent model." Any substantial move in that direction, however, will also require "protection from political interference and economic exploitation for those spontaneous communities, religious and secular, that nurture and sustain families."
Veritas Academy is one of those "spontaneous communities" in the educational realm. Its chief aim is to give parents the occasion, inspiration, and support they may need, not only to oversee, but actually to participate in the learning process with their children. Parents are free to visit or take the classes we offer, while home-study days during the week allow them to know what their children are studying and make their own evaluation of their progress. They are not merely at the mercy of professional teachers and school systems that may, for reasons of convenience, make the child’s performance look better than it is or just pass him along to the next grade level.
Veritas Academy also recommends to parents various daily readings of a historical and theological nature that can be used to enhance the educational and spiritual climate of their own homes.
The ideal is a genuine community of learning, both within individual families and among a larger covenantal network of families, friends, and neighbors.
The apostle Jude urged Christians to "contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). He was referring to the everlasting doctrines revealed by God and culminating in the Word of Jesus Christ Himself, but, tragically, doctrine is all but a pejorative term today.
In fact, there are presently a number of orthodox pastors and thinkers who believe that our time is the most anti-intellectual the Church has ever had. Clearly our bent is toward an exclusively experiential or practical religion. Of course, it is well and good to apply Christianity to life, but, as Machen so shrewdly pointed out, we must first have a Christianity to apply.
Accordingly, a biblical, classically-Protestant Christianity will be taught and reflected in the Veritas curriculum through catechisms, hymns, historical study, and theological course offerings at the upper grades. We wholeheartedly embrace the great ecumenical creeds of the early Church (e.g. the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds) with their emphasis on the triune majesty of God, His saving purposes in the sacrifice of His Son, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to form among the nations "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church."
Moreover, we believe that God, in His providence, has continued to superintend His Church through trial and triumph, and from time to time has granted to her substantial advancement in her understanding and practice of the Scriptures. The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, despite much turbulence and conflict, was such a time. Thus the rich theology of men like Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox and many others who followed in their stream of thought carries with it a measure of enlightenment that we simply cannot do without today.
As noted above, we are here concerned with that "reformed Protestant and communal" worldview which without question served as the foundation of American liberty and justice, and gave us many of our seminal thinkers from Mather and Edwards in colonial times to Machen and Schaeffer in modern times.
It is troubling, to say the least, that so many professing Christians on the contemporary scene have scant if any knowledge of this heritage, and as a result do not see the relationship between the decline of America’s historic character and the decline of her historic faith. As belief undergirds and supports practice, the erosion of classical Protestant theology in this country preceded in time the devastating decline in morals. The latter can now hardly be denied, yet the former is still shrouded in mystery for many.
Rediscovering our religious roots is therefore the order of the day. The biblically sound faith of our forbears not only teaches us the way of salvation but instructs us in the divine duties that accompany it. We will not sincerely and steadfastly "turn our hearts toward home," nor attend to the worship of the living God in our churches, nor build a culture with Christian content and character until we relearn the revealed truths that seemed so "self-evident" when the federal union was born.
That being said, the chief reason for studying the Christian faith is not all the earthly good it can do. As the apostle Paul taught us, if we have hope in Christ for this life only we are of all men most miserable (1 Cor. 15:19). Sin and death are ever-present realities and will remain so. An education, in the words of the great Thomas a Kempis, that teaches men "how the heavens go but not how to go to heaven," is a disservice to our children and a crime against mankind.
Just a few years ago, Mrs. Hillary Clinton wrote a book on the rearing of children entitled, It Takes a Village. Deficiencies of both author and text notwithstanding, there is some truth to the title.
If no man is an island, as Donne said, neither is a family an island. She cannot fulfill her sacred tasks in isolation and apart from the nurture of church, neighborhood, and community. Simply put, we need each other. And it isn’t just individuals who have unique gifts and qualities to contribute to the general welfare, but often entire families take on a certain character which can enrich other families while being enriched in return.
In education it’s relatively rare when any one family, of itself, can cover all the bases with respect to an ever-expanding knowledge of God’s Word and world, the full scope of creation and redemption, or the essential integration of faith and reason. Various disciplines—languages and literature, the arts and sciences, mathematics, logic and rhetoric—need a proper historical context to be understood at all, not to mention a depth of spiritual insight that can distinguish the true from the false, and the valuable from the vain.
If many hands make light work, then many minds and hearts, provided they are mature in the things of God, make lighter the academic load. At Veritas, a dedicated and experienced teaching staff aims to assist parents in the fulfillment of their responsibilities, but without monopolizing their time, usurping their authority, or otherwise leaving them without a job.
Any learning community open to the public must support, not supplant, the indispensable role of the family. We agree with nineteenth-century, Virginia theologian Robert L. Dabney when he said, "The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God—this is his task on earth."