‘The battle to take the land’: Higher education and the classical Christian education movement

Among the distinct strands composing the present attack on institutions of higher education, that associated with the classical Christian education movement is of crucial importance for understanding conservative Christian evangelical support for the assault. Tracing the historical roots of this movement, and its self-understanding as a repristination at once of a medieval model and of the liberal arts college of the early American republic, this essay uncovers innovative features of contemporary classical Christian education. The cultivation of what Danielle Allen has called ‘civic strength’ should be a priority for higher education today, but there are temptations to foster ideological conformity rather than capacities for civil disagreement and civic friendship across lines of difference. It is instructive to juxtapose the contemporary classical education movement with a vision of higher education similarly focused on the importance of moral formation: that associated with the late 18th and early 19th-century Bildung tradition. Here, the classical ideal of paideia was taken in a more inclusive, egalitarian direction, which fostered the development of intellectual and moral virtues for deep listening and dialogical encounter. This ideal remains a live possibility today, including a possibility for classical Christian education.