It was recently brought to my attention that Gary North was asked about New St. Andrews College, and he replied in a characteristically exuberant fashion to the effect that all classical Christian education was simply refried paganism, and that Christian parents were foolish to have anything to do with it. Believing this to represent a radical misunderstanding of what we are about, I wrote to Gary privately, set a few facts before him, and asked him if he would be willing to consider qualifying his comments. He was good enough to reply, but said in effect that he wouldn’t qualify his comments, and that I did not know how much he had restrained himself in the comments he had made. In that spirit, I too will hold back.
The problem he described can be a very real one. There are uncritical “great books” approaches out there that could benefit from the exhortation. But Logos School and New St. Andrews (and ACCS, the largest classical Christian school organization) are all self-consciously and avowedly opposed to the kind of syncretism he described, and are firmly committed to what we call “antithetical classicism” — classical education that maintains and fights for the antithesis between the Christian faith and every form of unbelief. That stance is in our foundational materials, is part of our teacher training, and is woven into the culture of our schools. A good example can be found in Chapter One of Repairing the Ruins. We don’t study paganism the way Lydia admired Wickham. We study paganism the way Wellington studied Napoleon.
But to take just a few of Gary’s objections, what could be worse than studying history and philosophy by pagans who accepted the legitimacy of sodomy, who gloried in war, and who practiced polytheism? Oh, I don’t know . . . perhaps studying an economic theory developed by atheists?