Worldview
What is worldview and why does it matter?
The intellectual and spiritual integration in our curriculum is designed to help students develop a thorough Christian worldview. Why is that so important to us? Students who develop an accurate Christian worldview are able to take God out of His “compartment.” Many of us grew up going to modern schools learning “secular” subjects and attending Sunday school or Bible class. This has conditioned our minds to think categorically about the world. Our brains inadvertently think in terms of the “spiritual” and the “day to day.” Inconsistencies between our formal education and our Christianity have further polarized our thinking. This mental separation results in a dysfunctional worldview.
Covenant Classical School solves this problem in several ways. First, we integrate literature, art, history, and theology into a single framework with the latent philosophies of each subject brought to the forefront. Science and math are closely tied as well. Thinking and proper understanding are emphasized in our methods and our study of logic.
Rather than confining Christianity to a Bible class, we view all subjects through the lens of Scripture. No single truth is adequately comprehended till it is viewed in harmonious relations to all other truths of the system in which Christ is in the centre.
–A.A. Hodge
What is the result of a classical Christian worldview education?
(Covenant Classical School) seeks to graduate mature students who are well-suited to challenge the conventions of our society, rather than falling prey to them. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.
–C.S. Lewis
Often, even Christian educators adopt the “tool box” of the modern educator. Their texts, their educational structure and their educational frameworks inadvertently compromise true education. [Christians] don’t realize that, in their haste, they are borrowing not an isolated tool, but a whole philosophical toolbox… The toolbox may be Freudian, Hindu or Marxist. Occasionally, the toolbox is right-wing; more often today it is liberal. Rarely—and this is all that matters to us—is it consistently or coherently Christian. When Christians use tools …which have non-Christian assumptions embedded within them, these tools eventually act back on them like wearing someone else’s glasses or walking in someone else’s shoes. The tools shape the user. Their recent failure to think critically about culture has made Christians uniquely susceptible to this.
-Os Guinness
Beyond Christian maturity, classical Christian education seeks to restore Christians to a place of leadership in intellectual thought. We will train Christians who can be excellent in their field, and provide the world with a vantage point that is uniquely and thoroughly Christian. This vantage point will permeate every subject.
What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent. …Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But is whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. …In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble [the unbeliever]. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian. Its Christianity would have to be latent, not explicit: and of course its science perfectly honest. Science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be sin and folly.
-C.S. Lewis
The academic excellence permeated by a Christian worldview at Covenant Classical School allows our students to become good stewards of their God-given minds. However, we don’t stop there. We value students who serve with their hearts as well as their minds. To the extent God’s grace allows, we seek to encourage great servants with great minds. |
