Becoming Classically Educated

Reading maketh a full man, so Francis Bacon declared, and so Scott Postma has spent his career discovering. Becoming Classically Educated: Humane Letters on Education, Culture & the Great Conversation is the fruit of more than a decade's wrestling with the Christian humanist vision for education, written with the conscientious intention of discovering what can be said accurately about humane learning so that its ideas might transform and enrich the reader as surely as they have transformed and enriched the author.

We are living through a Renaissance, an exponentially growing renewal of the classical and Christian intellectual tradition. Yet the majority of schools today, awash in images and slogans, fail to teach students how to think, reason, and discern truth. Becoming Classically Educated offers a return to the tried-and-true path. Classical Christian Education, Postma argues, is not outdated, nor a luxury for an elite class. It is the inheritance of a free people; it's a gift from the generations before and a responsibility to pass on.

Organized into three parts, the essays carry the reader through a path similar to the grammar-logic-rhetoric paradigm of humane letters itself.

Part I examines the aim of education: what a classical Christian education is, how it locates identity not in expressive individualism but in the imago Dei, and how it seeks a more certain knowledge of truth in a culture saturated with lies.

Part II defends the liberating arts and the life of the mind, a way of life rooted in leisure, great books, teachability, and the friendship through which ideas are drawn out, challenged, and refined.

Part III turns the reader's ordered judgment toward the disorders of the age, insisting that the classically educated person must eventually bring wisdom to bear on a world increasingly confused and fragmented.

These essays are polemic and personal, accessible and demanding, brief and exhaustive in turn. There is much meat on the bone here . For any generation reckoning its education as a journey toward the truth of things illuminated by the sun, this collection offers both companionship and a reliable guide for that ascent.

___

SCOTT POSTMA, PhD, is a Christian humanist and ardent advocate for classical Christian education. He serves as president of Kepler Education and chief editor of The Consortium: A Journal of Classical Christian Education. Dr. Postma brings more than thirty years’ experience in Christian education and twenty years’ experience in pastoral ministry to his writing and leadership. His formal education includes a PhD in humanities (emphasis in literature) from Faulkner University, and an MA in Christian and Classical Studies from Knox Theological Seminary. His undergraduate work focused on literature and creative writing. A father of four adult children and a papa to more than a handful of grandbabies, he resides in North Idaho with his wife of thirty-five years.

You can find more of his writing at scottpostma.net.