Classical Charter Schools as a Cut Flowers Display

Introduction

American Christians will still go to great lengths to avoid naming the name of Christ outside their religion boxes, otherwise known as churches and sanctuaries. The gods of secularism have failed, and it appears that the last group to recognize this ugly fact will be the Christians who invested heavily in secularism as a possible viable compromise. A glaring case in point is the support still given to classical charter schools by Christians. The cut flower civilization around us is withered and dead, and so the thought arose that we should try it again, only on a smaller scale, and subsidized by the bankrupt owners of the previously flourishing cutting garden. But go outside and look. The cutting garden isn’t there anymore, having been outlawed by the Warren Court. The only thing they have out back any more is a howling wilderness, a haunt for owls and jackals.

Now I am planning to say a number of hard things in this post, but I can assure you that I am not trying to be mean. It will only seem that way.

Woke Supremacy

The classical school movement has really taken off, and now all kinds of people want a piece of the action. There is the explicitly Christian classical school movement, and good for them. Doing it right, they are. They should just keep on keeping on.

But there is now a burgeoning classical charter school movement—taxpayer supported schools, with lots of Christians involved, but Christ left out. And, inevitably, naturally, right on schedule, there are now voices demanding the incorporation of marginal voices into the classical curriculum. In a sane world, some of those voices might even be considered as a possibility, but this is not a sane world. A world with no center has no business trying refine the circumference. So considered collectively, those marginal voices should be regarded as coming from the mob on Lot’s front porch.

For a pretty decent survey of the landscape, you can consult this recent article in The New Yorker. And in that article, you can see the strategy against us taking shape before your very eyes. Why, look here at one of the failings of the classical-education model! Consider this weighty complaint, one that actually made it into the pages of The New Yorker.

That’s a red flag, right there. Apparently there are lots of those. Pederasty was a big part of classical education at the very beginning, back in olden times, and apparently there are some parents today who want a “classical” education for their boys, but who are resistant to having their sons mentored by the faculty.

How It Will Go Down

I need to explain how these classical charter schools—I said I would speak frankly—are doomed to go woke. Not only are they doomed to wokeness, but any business model that is hitched to them is going to go the same direction as well. Here is why.

A Christian account of the development of Western Civilization can (and should) give all the glory to the grace of God in Christ. Grace and forgiveness go where grace and forgiveness go, and they can do so without flattering any kind of ethno-conceit. If two drunks went forward at a revival meeting, would it make sense for one to turn to the other and say, “I got down front first”?

In the providence of God, the gospel spread west and north, taking deepest root first in European countries. The Christian classicist can look at that heritage with gratitude, and anticipate similar but distinct glories as the gospel takes deep root in China, and South America, and India, and Africa. It is all of it the grace of God. What do you have that you were not given as a gift? And if a gift, then why do you boast as though it were not a gift (1 Cor. 4:7-8)? The soil in which Christian classicism grows is gratitude, and gratitude can only be extended to a person. It is Christ who has done this for us. Because grace is undeserved, there is no merit in being among the first recipients of it. If a governor were to pardon three inmates on death row, would the one who had his pardon signed at 10 am be able to gloat over the one who had his signed at 10:15 am?

But charter schools remove Christ, the gospel, the holy apostles, and any mention of this astounding grace of God. And so when you take Christ out of this story, what do you have? Now all you have are dead, white guys, and nothing in the story whatever about unmerited grace.

Given the forces that have been set loose in our culture—the hyenas of DEI—you will then have two choices. You will either stick with your dead, white guys, arbitrarily selected as the representatives of your curriculum, in which case you will be pronounced what is today called “racist,” or you will give way to the voices that are clamoring for you to include everybody—including that Inuit lesbian poetess who had a year of Latin in high school—in the curriculum. And by everybody, I do not exclude any of the alphabet people, down to the + sign. If there were ever a generation that should know how slippery the slippery slope is, it would be ours. But somehow we still don’t.

Apart from Christ, it will not be possible to prevent this from happening. You must either stick with the classical curriculum, or you must alter it. If you stick with it, the absence of Christ will mean that your stubbornness really will be ethno-centric. And overwhelmingly male, that’s another thing. If you alter it, the absence of Christ will mean that you will have no resources for standing up to the woke mob. Because of that toxin empathy, you will be supremely susceptible to the hurt feelings of advocates of various smart people who never made it into the canon. There will be little adjustments at first, so that you can reassure yourself that you are doing okay, holding the line, and then the rest of the changes will come in over you a like a flood. You will then look around and perhaps realize that you spent years of your life building a school that is now exactly like the schools you fled.

So apart from Christ, you can become an actual white supremacist. Easy. Go right ahead. Set up your Eurocentric white guy curriculum, and do it in your own name, on your own authority, and with your own skin tone so glaringly privileged. But if you do that, the hyenas will have their way with you, and your charter school will have its charter yanked. Your school will be no more. The court decided.

And apart from Christ, you can also become a wokester. Also easy, and you get to keep your school. A careful read of that New Yorker article should reveal to you that the full court press is already on. This is what is going to happen, and we know this because it is already happening. As Peter Berger once put it, you should learn how to identify the future that has already happened. Doing that can be accomplished by the simple expedient of opening your eyes and moving your head around.

Shameful

So you must know what I am going to say next. It is Christ or chaos. In the public square, it is Christ or chaos, and in the public school—charter schools included, and especially classical charter schools included—it is Christ or chaos. If you will not confess the name of Christ, then you richly deserve everything you are going to get, good and hard. And what you are going to get, good and hard, is chaos.

What can we say of a classical charter school, even if populated with a lot of Christians, when that school is ashamed of Christ and His words? Well, one of the things Jesus says here is that He will be ashamed of that school. When the hyena packs encircle the school in order to drag off the kids, it will do no good to gather the student body in the school cafeteria in order to offer up a prayer to your unknown god. You don’t know Him? Well, it turns out that He doesn’t know you either (Matt. 7:23).

The sin of Christless classical charter school is the same sin that America continues to commit. These are public schools that are sinning the same way the public square is sinning. It is all the same sin, all the same impudence, all the same cluelessness. This is the wickedness of secularism, a rot that has gotten into everything. As we all know, the public square is dominated by secularists. But the classical charter school movement is dominated by secularists who really should have known better, and who have absolutely no excuse whatever.

Those Christians who will survive the coming maelstrom will be Christians with soft hearts who have done some hard thinking. The intellectual softness that characterizes the classical charter school idea is a softness that is already advanced in certain sectors of the Christian classical education movement. We can see this in the New Yorker article as well.

Just two observations about this. Of course there is nothing fundamentally conservative or Christian about classical education. But there is something fundamentally conservative and Christian about conservative Christian classical education, rooted in an actual faith in the living God. There is nothing ahistorical or myopic in recovering that tradition, a tradition in which the flowers that we are growing are provided with some additional perks—things like soil, sunlight, fertilizer, and rain. And a place to grow.

Bauer may love speaking for a “diverse constituency” now, but some of us have already seen that diverse constituencies will eventually come after you like a ravening beast. A number of us have grown suspicious. Without a shared principle of integration—and follow me closely here—there will be no integration. And Christ is that arche, that principle of integration, the one who holds all things together (Col. 1:17-18).

It is not being a theo-bro to remember that Christ is important. He is our life.

Cut Flower Culture in a Vase

God is not mocked, as somebody once said. You cannot plant Canadian thistle and harvest barley. You cannot plant paganism seeds, and harvest anything but paganism. You cannot plant studied neutrality and harvest classical liberalism. You cannot plant diversity, equity, and inclusion, and harvest anything but godless tyranny.

And if you find yourself in a beautiful garden, planted by somebody else—grown back when Christians used to believe stuff—and you cut a bunch of beautiful flowers there, and invite a bunch of people over to admire your arrangement, it will work for a time. Classical charter schools will be impressive. For a time.

But the flowers will wither, and will be replaced with plastic ones. And then someone will complain that one of the flowers was written by a slave owner, and even the plastic flowers are a painful reminder of that time. So gradually the plastic flowers will go, and then we will have a collection of vases. Jewish vases, Muslim vases, atheist vases, Marxist vases, and Inuit vases. We lost the Christian vase. It might be in storage somewhere.