Christianity Today July 7, 2026 9 min signal 2026-07-07

What's different about classical Christian education?

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

July 7, 2026

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Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Broadside Books

“How do you know?”

## Forging the American Mind: A Year-by-Year Guide for Classical Christian Education – Transforming K-12 Learning: Practices for Teaching Virtue and Wisdom

David Goodwin (Author), Pete Hegseth (Foreword)

Broadside Books

464 pages

It may seem that a kindergartner, with a backpack that overwhelms her small frame and pigtails in perfectly even plaits on the first day of school, must be a million miles from this question. But don’t be surprised if she asks it before noon on the first day. The question “How do we know?” for an adolescent might be a challenge or critique. But for our kindergartner, she unknowingly hints at the basis of civilization itself.

Many of the things she asks overwhelm our patience. “Why is the sky blue?” is likely to get a frustrated “It just is.” For our kindergartner, she trusts adults and believes them. But she still wonders, How did you come to this knowledge? How can I learn this for myself? How can I know what’s true?

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This may seem odd to you since it seems we live in an information age, but our age is actually characterized by a lack of knowledge. All we have are answers! But look at your state curriculum standards, the average textbook, or graduation requirements. Each of these answers the question “What should students know?” This question merely serves to gather information, not meaning. “How do we come to know things?” is overlooked as a question, and that’s because our ship is capsized. If we want to teach students how to discern truth, how to rightly divide truth, and how to learn new things that weren’t in the curriculum, “How do we know?” is the better question.

And let’s face it, much of what our kids learn in the curriculum is outdated before they graduate. “How do you know?” or “How do we come to a knowledge of the truth?” is the question that should drive every school. Classical Christian education (CCE) schools right the ship. We train students in the tools of learning and then we transmit the rich culture of the West. CCE trains a child how to synthesize all truth together into a system of knowledge that reflects reality.

The information-forward approach to education promoted by progressive schools is the source of much of our modern confusion. We don’t understand things like gender, sexuality, purpose, or law because we don’t seek to understand reality as God made it.

Early on in my journey to understand CCE, I read a number of works on rhetoric by Greeks and Romans. Rhetoric, after all, is the capstone of the trivium, which is the basis for CCE. I was curious: If the arts of the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—were Greek in origin, why weren’t they grouped into the three ways until the Middle Ages? When I later read medieval authors, I noticed one important difference. The classical rhetoricians sought to persuade. The medieval rhetoricians sought to know rightly.

Classical antiquity used logic and human reason to ascertain truth. The medievals used reason to unite knowledge into a system that they could live by. “To know rightly and live according to that knowledge” was their educational telos, or purpose. The medievals greatly expanded the trivium into the three ways to achieve these two goals. It was after discovering this difference that I realized our educational heritage—that which holds the West and America together—is not just a classical product; it is a medieval innovation using classical sources. CCE is medieval liberal arts education, which helps us to find knowledge and live by the truth.

What the medievals had that the ancients didn’t was, simply, Jesus Christ. Whereas someone like Aristotle may have pictured a divine “first mover” who gave us austere virtues and cold hierarchy, the Christian story gave us “Immanuel,” a God with us—a human baby who suffered the pangs and arrows of life and death. As the writer of Hebrews attests, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4:15, ESV).

You might wonder how the answer to “How do you know things?” could be the driving force for a civilization. Then again, with fact-checkers checking fact-checkers, and narratives in conflict on every social media platform, and each of us coming to different and sometimes totally contradictory conclusions, maybe it’s time to look at this question more carefully. Many of our modern problems stem from the fact that common sense is no longer common. This is because, lacking a shared process of understanding of how we know what we know, there is no way to distinguish between two competing answers to the same question.

“How we know” may seem obvious. But every important answer is arrived at by some way of thought. The way the Christian West arrived at those answers was very different from any other civilization—and from our current civilization. This Christian way is the golden thread, based in the medieval trivium. It produces answers with more potency and goodness than any other civilization in history.

This one small golden thread weaves diminutively in and out of the great fabric of our civilization itself. If you look right at it, you might see its glint in the tapestry of time, but otherwise, it goes unnoticed. It’s woven in plain view if you know where to look.

CCE is so foreign to us after the past 120 years of capsized progressive education that we’re not likely to understand it right away. But for most parents and educators, the aha’s start coming quickly.

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The progressive answer to “How do you know?” is simplified to one source: their authority.

For example, progressive schools today infuse the idea that hate toward anyone who is “different” is rampant in our society. They present evidence that trans people are more likely to be bullied or commit suicide. The ethical conclusion is that we need to accept and embrace the trans lifestyle to help eliminate transphobia in society.

We can imagine our classical Christian kindergartner in pigtails, now grown and in college, encountering a progressive narrative. She asks questions: “What do you mean by hate?” “What do you mean by identity, and how is trans a part of it?” “What do you mean by bully?” “What do you mean by transphobic?” With terms now better defined (grammar), she leans on her mental model established through her long study of historic Christian theology and its narrative about the world. Without realizing it, she begins to see the story with more clarity (a Christian meta-narrative).

Her training in logic brings her to ask a few more questions: “Are trans people bullied because they are trans?” “Are those who are bullied likely to seek an accepting community of trans-identifying people?” She finds some clarity in Dante’s insight. She recalls Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the insanity that followed the witches’ transforming spell: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

She recognizes Shakespeare’s source: Isaiah 5:20. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” Her knowledge of great Western literature, theology, and the Bible joins with her mastery of logic to frame all of this through the lens of a Christian story.

She then leans on her training in rhetoric as she rethinks the narrative in a new thesis: “We are called to hate evil. We are also called to love people. If we encourage others in their confusion over evil, we only hurt them. This will cause further misery and self-loathing. Rather than encourage confusion, we should lovingly speak with clarity and truth.” In this (syn)thesis, we see the outworking of CCE in our imagined student. All of this is framed through the wisdom of the ages and an ethical solution with true compassion (virtue), rather than groupthink.

We might note that our imagined girl probably didn’t study transphobia, hate, or social justice in school. Her school spent time on theology, old stories, language, logic, and rhetoric. She probably will not get the opportunity to deliver this rhetorical thesis in a formal academic setting, but the ingrained way of thought will shape her actions in everyday life. In school, she learned how to pursue true knowledge. She learned how to answer the question “How do you know?” She learned how to think. The golden thread is not a subject, nor does it deal in subjects. It establishes a way of thought that becomes a way of life. Nearly every civilization on earth has examples of dogmas that form it. But only one civilization mastered a way of knowing that throws off bad arguments and imagines better ones. The golden thread braids filaments into a system of thought. CCE trains a child to synthesize all truth together into a system of knowledge that represents reality. That’s what CCE did until about one hundred years after America’s founding. It’s what we need to restore our republic now.

David Goodwin is the editor of The Classical Difference magazine.

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