Perhaps I like grandparents because before too long I will join your ranks. On the other hand, perhaps I like grandparents because of my own fond memories of fishing the cold deep lakes of northern Washington State with Grandpa Julian, or swinging onto the combine with Grandpa Jesse during the annual wheat harvest. Perhaps it is because I can still feel the deep sorrow as I wept by the coffin of Grandma Marion, who loved me always, or of sitting with Grandma Pauline as she turned 100 years old a couple weeks before her passing. She did not remember me at that moment, but when she learned I was living in Texas, she remembered stories of her grandfather’s homestead in Pilot Point. 

Recently, a mother told me that she knew Coram Deo Academy was in God's providence; she believed that students, families and staff here are blessed, maybe even with a special calling. It is true that we have been blessed as we have collaborated with you to train students in a Christian worldview through a vigorous classical curriculum. As I considered her thoughts, I began to reflect over what has now been a decade of commitment to CDA: a commitment to see wise thinking and ethical leadership realized in our children; a burning desire to see the differences our graduates could make in their surroundings. What would truly happen as these CDA Lions were loosed? Would they transform their campuses, their communities? Have we truly been a resource aiding their families in an effort to help shape and mold their learning experience so that they were equipped and ready to stand firm and apart? To read the whole letter click here.

I look forward to lecture and conversation with 11^th grade history students on the subject politics and ideology Wednesday and Thursday October 1 and 2. When a political vision offers a total explanation for the world it becomes an ideology and all ideologies contain totalitarian elements.   “Politics is content to make do with the existing state of society and to conciliate whatever interests are currently there. Ideology attempts to remake, not only government, but education, industry, art, even domesticity and private affections. All of these are accountable to this all-embracing ideology, which in trying to politicize society, ends up destroying politics altogether.” (From Political Visions and Illusions; A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies, By David T. Koyzis page 21)

 

This morning my wife’s mother died of natural causes after a long life of generosity. She gave life and care to four children, loved her husband of many decades and cared for her neighbors, church members and the family farm. As her last act before falling into a coma yesterday, she asked Robi to place a twenty-dollar bill in an envelope and write a thank you card to the physical therapist that helped her through the last six months of multiple strokes. I will be out of town for a while in memory of her. 

Classical education in the presence of God at Coram Deo Academy includes academics or the liberal arts, athletics and the fine arts as a proportionately integrated whole. The liberal arts lead in priority supported by and integrated with athletics and the arts. The liberal arts give the Academy its reason to exist because no other Christian school in the region provides the same kind of superlative academic preparation with a genuine academy – family collaboration. However, absent the fine arts and athletics the student's preparation lacks the appropriate symmetry, soul and physicality. That is why we exhort every student into physical conditioning, at least one sport and one or more of the visual, musical or oral arts. Achieving appropriate proportionality in academic, athletic and artistic pursuits will prepare the whole student for a whole life rather than part of the student for part of life.

 

Replete with reliable ethics and the time-tested tools of learning, a Christian liberal arts education will provide the best defense against unemployment for the next generation of Americans. Twenty-first century workers will require the intellectual agility to change careers five times and the ethical strength to define their relativistic work environments. They will need to think, decide and act under pressure and find solutions to the rapidly changing array of socio-economic, scientific-technological and political challenges that open before them while advancing the Lordship of Jesus Christ in every arena of life. The fully scoped and sequenced thirteen-year Coram Deo classical – Christian curriculum prepares students to succeed in this environment by teaching them to think for themselves and then to act wisely. They gain tools to learn for a lifetime so they can make a lifetime of difference in their own families, vocations and communities. Those who invest this education in their children will secure its blessings for them and leave transforming power to the mid-twenty first century and beyond.