Abbie's Corner: Thoughts on Classical Education and Shaping a Student’s Affections

Hi. I’m Abbie James, a new mentor at Innovate Academy this year. I’ll be teaching a plethora of subjects, but right now I want to focus on literature and fine arts. I’m also excited to share with you my love of classical education and my background.

From a very young age, I have loved both literature and fine arts, but the arts have always held a special place in my heart. Some of my favorite memories as a young girl are of hours spent singing into a tiny, hard, plastic microphone that was hooked into a small electric piano as my favorite Amy Grant songs played on my tape player.

And I continued to love the arts (although I would concede that Amy Grant is not the highest art form). I went to public junior high and high school, and academics there meant almost nothing to me. However, I was blessed to have an incredible choir and drama and arts program there. Combined, each day in high school, I was in more hours of arts than I was in academic classes. I intentionally scheduled it that way. Math, Latin (which I took for four years!), and even English were only blocks of time I had to get through to get to arts classes.

Although I had some fine academic teachers and was in honors and AP classes, I instinctively knew that what I was learning during my public school experience was barely scratching the surface of knowledge. I felt like a skipping rock, briefly plunking into the very top of a deep lake, before being propelled back out again, skimming over a great distance, and then speeding back through the shallows again. Over and over. Even back then, the depth of that inaccessible lake underneath really bothered me.

But the arts were the antidotes to that gloomy prospect.

In that season, at that school, were some of the most gifted arts teachers I have ever known. They have since gone on to receive many awards, and articles have been written about their many successful students. Our music and our drama productions had that depth to them because of such leadership.

I sank into the depths of truth and beauty and goodness—words I would never have known to use back then. My little skipping rock of a soul was allowed to stop in unhurried wonder at the beauty of what we were performing.

I later went on to college and found the depths in other subjects as well. I went to a classical university, and I fell in love with literature, poetry, philosophy, and history. I sat in awe as my professors—many of them grouchy academics with little polish and no charisma—fell apart at the feet of poets long dead and were rendered speechless at the perfection of the way their words fit together. Their eyes shone, and they were suddenly transformed into inspiring figures, passionate and amazing, as they waxed poetic about Greek history. If high school shaped my affections for the arts, my classical college shaped my affections for academics. 

My classical college experience gave me what I instinctively knew I was missing.

My experience is not singular. I’m not especially bright or thoughtful or instinctive. 

I believe that, because of who we are as creation and because of the image in which we are made, we all feel the pull to depth. Especially as young people, we abhor any hours we may be forced to spend in a pretense of learning random facts and stories that seem irrelevant to the rest of life.

Shaping a student’s affection, which is what true education is, is about telling them the truth and then linking that one truth to another, as like calls to like, making connections about the world around them.

Children are born with the instinct to learn all they can about the world. We (parents and teachers) either give them truth and depth and the reality a child craves, or we give them tiny sips of knowledge—like skipping rocks—that do nothing but frustrate and eventually sicken their appetites all together.

Therefore, to teach scholars well, arts and academics must be taught and experienced together.

That’s the classical model. They are opposite halves of the same circle. Fine arts are, to some extent, where learning is expressed. A student learning ONLY one or the other (as I did) can’t fully appreciate either. Only when I learned the incredible mathematical loveliness of music theory could I appreciate why the choral melodies and harmonies I loved hit me so hard, sounded so perfect—so soul-wrenchingly beautiful.

Holistic discoveries propel learning and a love for what’s seemingly the other. Understanding fosters love. 

A few years ago, I was directing Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I had a young man, an 8th grader, wait until after class—when all his friends were gone—to tell me that he had just realized how funny Jane Austen was…and he “might even like her now.”

Arts take theoretical truths of language and math and reason and give the students a chance to embody them. For instance, I had this beautiful moment in rehearsal of Anne of Green Gables. There were two young girls, playing Marilla and Anne, who were having trouble with the scene where Anne, facing away from Marilla, tells her life story: an orphan’s story of neglect, abuse, and servanthood. She has never been a daughter who has ever been loved. 

Just the three of us sat there in that big, silent gym. Anne stopped in the middle of that monologue and said, “Why does she say this so matter of factly?” And Marilla, who happened to be from a family who fostered abused children, said, “because...it’s the only thing she knows. She doesn’t know what she’s missing.” Then her face lit up, and she said, “Oh, Mrs. James, I have been looking for this! I looked through the script for where Marilla decides to keep Anne, and it’s THIS MOMENT!” With tears in her eyes (and mine!), she went on to say, “She realizes that she either allows this cycle to continue to happen to Anne, or she can do what’s right and break the cycle!” Immediately, she inquired: “How do I show that?!” 

We rehearsed how to give Marilla the visible moments that had just hit these two girls. Marilla being horrified, saddened, and outraged…then hit by the realization that she was called to help this girl until she finally makes the decision to keep Anne—all within about 30 seconds. 

What was really amazing about these learning moments was what happened to that scene thereafter. It went from being their least favorite to their most cherished performance. They rehearsed it so frequently because it became personally important to them. Learning had impacted their head, heart, and now their hands, as the audience experienced what these two girls understood to be true.

Classical education allows such learnings to take place. It’s about letting knowledge sink down deep inside. A student can enter into a moment of despair or brutality or pain, and highlighting the truth of that history is important. Teaching them that history or Bible really happened and that this feeling they feel—the injustice and the anger—that captures their hearts and makes them devoted to justice, to God, or to country—is important. Learning can come alive inside them so they’re determined to fight the good fight and not to repeat the mistakes of humanity.

The arts offer students a chance to bathe in the knowledge we are teaching them. To become a part of great moments in literature, history, and music. To imitate and grow like the geniuses of our past. To sink down, into the deepest, thickest parts of knowledge and soak them in.

Arts give life to truth. 

Arts give enthusiasm and life back into  academics. 

Arts are the other half of our classical circle.

Arts are how we reproduce, display, and live out the truth of the good and the beautiful that we are taught to love, which comes from the heart of God.

So for me, that’s my why. Why classical? Why teaching? It’s the most important job we can do—together.