#39 - Letter from a Teacher (Non-Oaks, still counts)

(To view the interview clip between Natasha and Thomas, click here.)

 To the alumni, faculty, and parents of the Oaks, as well as all other Classical Christian Academies,

 

I would like to share my story with you, though I am not an alumni of the Oaks community. I am, however, a former teacher from a Classical Christian school near Austin, TX. I taught English in this school for four years, from 2012 to 2016, and in that time I learned a lot about how Classical schools operate. My experience was complicated at first, and by the end troubling. Since leaving, I’ve sought out conversations with teachers and alumni from Classical schools across the country, and invariably I’ve found the same experiences repeated.

If I could go back to 2012 and change one thing, it would be to trust my instincts. Trust my concerns, my doubts, and ultimately my values.

 Though I knew little about Classical Education at the beginning, I had many concerns about teaching in a private Christian school. I thought it might be elitist, a stuck-up institution that existed to make itself feel superior to its neighbors. I feared it would be stifling, forcing me to teach literature only as Christian allegory, rather than windows into the rich diversity of human experience. Though I wasn’t a science teacher, I feared the school would force me to espouse a faith in young-Earth Creationism, a form of anti-intellectualism I had already grown past and wasn’t eager to return to. But mostly, I was afraid this would be a place that didn’t accept any sort of dissent or questioning from the accepted dogma. A skeptical person by nature, I didn’t think I could thrive in that environment.

 Within my first week, each of these fears had been denied by official statements of the school leadership. By the end of the four years, each had been confirmed by their actions.

 The school’s leadership frequently spoke of the school not as a mere institution, but a community. The school existed to raise up the whole person, in a Christian Paideia, and to help parents fulfill their God-given responsibilities. In many ways, their actions backed this up. I watched as the school rallied behind students who lost parents to cancer and families who lost kids to suicide. I saw the ways a community comes together in celebration and in grief. I also saw the ways that this tight-knit community was built on a foundation of exclusion.

 I first noticed this in the way the school leaders spoke about academic accomplishments. The student body consistently scored high above their public-school peers in SAT and AP exam scores. The school boasted a much higher college acceptance rank, including a higher percentage going on to Ivy League schools. To the school leadership, this was clear evidence of the superiority of the Classical Education model, and at times, clear evidence of the superiority of our students as people.

One day, I was sitting in the teacher’s lounge, when my colleagues were discussing a student who had graduated two years before. This student had struggled at our school, requiring a do-over on his senior thesis and finally graduating with a C average. He went on to attend Austin Community College, then transferred in his sophomore year to a state school.

 Halfway through his first year in the state school, he came back to visit and chat with his former high school teachers. To his surprise, college was easy! He was consistently scoring at the top of his class, a favorite student among his professors. Our high school principal (excuse me, Head of the School of Rhetoric) gave the definitive analysis:

 “Well, the dumbest student here is the smartest there. It’s a different league.”

 In my view, we didn’t have a better system of education — at least, we didn’t have the evidence to say so conclusively — but rather, we had a carefully-designed selection process. The admissions process included a written test and a family interview, to make sure the family was a good fit for the school community. Families paid tuition. The process seemed designed to select for supportive, upper-middle-class Christian families, almost entirely white.

 I wondered — at times to myself, at times aloud — how a family or student that did not fit the mold would fare in Classical Education. Would a Latino family, where both parents worked (of which there are many in central Texas) be able to fully engage with a Classical Education? Would they care to, given its focus on European authors and history? What about students with learning disabilities? Did they have a place here? My questions were poorly received, and eventually I realized that this school had been designed to exclude the majority of our neighbors.

 To continue this narrative of Classical exceptionalism, the school built an image of respectability, hiding certain aspects of their anti-intellectualism. During my first week on the job, I asked my new boss (who had been a biology teacher earlier in his career) how the school approached evolution. He told me, quite definitively, “we teach it.” I made the mistake of believing him.

 I discovered that this statement was, at best, incomplete. While the school taught about the scientific theory of evolution, it also taught, more or less, that this theory was wrong. In 2015, I attended the Society for Classical Learning conference and was subjected to a multiple-day talk by Stephen Meyer that argued vehemently against Darwinian evolution. Since leaving, multiple former students have explained to me what exactly they were taught in their biology classes, and it wasn’t all science.

 In this, and other times, the school revealed its hidden curriculum. It wasn’t really about teaching students to think; it was seeking to instill dogma, and any intellectual pursuit that went against their dogma was not given space. I heard statements from colleagues, administrators, and big-name leaders in the Classical Education movement, in which they dismissed entire fields of study, from psychology to anthropology to child development.

 Despite statements to the contrary, the job of the Classical teacher was to explain what to believe, and the job of a student was to accept it. Questions were not given space for real exploration, whether they came from students or teachers. One day, after sitting through my defense of questioning, my boss said:

 “I’ve seen this time and time again. People ask one question after the other, whittle their faith down to nothing, so that they can do whatever they want.”

 I had tried to push back against the attitudes of exclusion and anti-intellectualism, but I was unable to. Classical Education is designed to mold people into its image, to “form their affections,” and this is a hard pull to resist. By the time I had enough distance to evaluate my time as a Classical educator, I realized I had failed. Rather than sparking important questions and conversations, I had mostly found myself suppressing my doubts and questioning my values.

 After leaving, I spent several years trying to process my experience in Classical Education, and eventually I resolved to write about it. The result was two essays, “Wisdom and Virtue” and “Good Man Speaking Well,” in which I told stories my experience and others. The essays were, first and foremost, an attempt to better understand for myself what I had been a part of, though I hoped that others might find answers in them too.

 Soon, the essays spread, and I began to receive emails from others who had been a part of that community. I heard from parents, teachers, and students (including some I had taught). Some were involved in other Classical schools, in parts of the country I had never even been to. Suddenly, I did not feel alone. Many other people had felt exactly the way I had in Classical Education. Some of them, such as the LGBTQ students I spoke with, felt much worse. Where the stories differed, it was a difference of degree, not of kind.

 

Thank you for your time, and I hope my reflections have been useful for you. If you would like to reach out and talk more about anything I’ve written here, please email me at thomaswhite.writing@gmail.com.

 

Thomas White

www.thomaswhitewriting.com