Passing the Torch: An Apology for Classical Christian Education
By Louis Markos.
IVP Academic, 2025.
Paperback, 240 pages, $30.
Reviewed by David Hein.
This fine study by Louis Markos, an English professor at Houston Christian University and the author of many books, discloses the strengths of classical Christian education and the weaknesses of progressive education.
It comprises two parts: The Nature of Education and The Nature of the Debate. Part 1 deals with the liberal arts, the canon, the humanities versus the social sciences, virtues versus values, and related subjects. Part 2 enters into dialogue with such dominant figures in educational theory as Plato, Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charlotte Mason, Mortimer Adler, E. D. Hirsch, and Neil Postman. In this discussion, the author realizes his stated intention: “to sift out the wheat from the chaff, the perennial from the merely fashionable.” In other words, he is fair to all parties, unwilling to dismiss everything an influential educator says just because his name is “Rousseau” or “Dewey.”
Markos believes it is essential for both teachers and theorists to begin with a realistic understanding of human nature. “Pedagogical theories … can be … compromised if they deny that man, though noble, is fallen, broken, rebellious, and depraved.” Here, of course, he parts company not only with Rousseau but also with most social scientists. Misunderstanding the nature of man—seeing him not as sinful and disobedient but as merely the victim of ignorance or inequality—will affect educational theory and practice: “educators who deny original sin in their students and themselves run the risk of setting up new, utopian values and then using education to indoctrinate students in those values.” Acknowledging human fallenness, classical Christian educators will look to the proven “bulwarks against depravity,” including accumulated wisdom, the cardinal and theological virtues, and a sense of duty.
Human beings are also moral agents, habitual beings, subcreators, “grown children,” and political animals. The best educators will engage all aspects of human selfhood, properly orienting their charges to “the three transcendentals”: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, which are the Platonic forms of the limited goodness, the partial truth, and the imperfect beauty that we are familiar with in our common experience. These worldly goods point beyond themselves to “the absolute standards” of morality, reality, and beauty in the light of which classical Christian educators seek to prepare their students.
In his chapter on the liberal arts in contrast to vocational training, Markos does not assert that everyone should complete a liberal-arts degree in college. But he does affirm that all students would benefit from a good bit of liberal-arts education from grade school through the secondary years. Holding that vocational education is “functional,” not “formative,” and that it “trains the body” while neglecting the “soul,” Markos denies that it offers the sort of “holistic paideia” that citizens require if they are to transmit the wisdom of the past to future generations.
No doubt he is correct in large part, but I am a bit more reluctant to say that the virtues cannot be taught effectively in a setting focused on vocational training. Practical judgment, self-discipline, devotion, fidelity…: I’d be hard-pressed to name a single virtue that is not an ingredient in the practice of many craftsmen or technicians and that—if pointed out—would not be quickly grasped and acknowledged by vocational students and teachers, whether their trade is making fine furniture, managing a small business, repairing motorcycles, or baking bread and decorating cakes. I think of the virtues learned by Booker T. Washington’s students at the (largely vocational) Tuskegee Institute.
Markos’s confidence that all students would benefit from what the great books have to offer reflects his anti-elitist view of classical Christian education. “Those who accuse the canon of being elitist,” he says, “are sadly mistaken.” The noblest works of western civilization have been instruments of liberation—the greatest tools for attaining true freedom that the world has known. They provide the perspective for “self-correction.”
In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, for instance, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. relies on classic writings to make his case for justice. In this canonical text, he “does not throw out the accomplishments of our Founding Fathers.” Instead, he carefully reads and reflects upon the sage counsel of our forebears; “he completes their work by drawing out” the implications of their mighty sentences for his own time, with its distinct challenges. He examines the texts of the natural-law tradition, for example, and uses these insights to make his well-known distinction between just and unjust laws. Because the barbarians are not only at the gates but also here in our midst, we need this wisdom today: “The canon offers the best weapon for fighting for true equality (not sameness), true freedom (not license), and true individuality (not individualism).”
Markos is for a rigorous liberal-arts education. What he opposes is education in which students are “taught to feel morally superior to their backward, superstitious parents,” blinded to “our innate, universal capacity for greed, prejudice, and disobedience,” seduced into championing the political cause of the day, or led to embrace “a therapeutic, utopian approach” that affirms “expressive-autonomous individualism, not courage, wisdom, self-control, justice, faith, hope, and love.” He worries that, since the 1960s, the humanities have not only given way to the social sciences; they have largely been overwhelmed and colonized by them. Thus the solution is not simply to flee from the social sciences to the humanities, for if the latter are corrupted, then they will do us little good. Everything depends on whether the great books are taught, how they are taught, and by whom. What is at stake is nothing less than civilization itself, which, as Markos states, “is a beautiful but delicate garden.”
The second part of this book contains much of value. A current debate rages around the question of whether education should be teacher- or student-centered. In his interaction with Plato’s Republic, Markos observes that the pedagogical approach of the Allegory of the Cave indicates that Plato stakes out “a compromise position” on this question. Markos concludes that, although the teacher should be in charge, taking care to ensure that his pupils do not fall prey to the fads of the moment, he must also work to “rouse in his students a desire to search and to grow.” Through the example of his own passion and commitment, he can lead the way. The students, in turn, should be willing to do the hard work and suffer the occasional stresses “that devotion to wisdom and virtue calls for.” That is, they need to bear and practice the virtue of docilitas.
Markos’s chapter on Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Education) is especially valuable for reminding us of the care that the bishop of Hippo takes to ask and answer questions revolving around the use of classic (pagan) texts by Christian educators. In fact, during a recent presentation on teaching the virtues, I was asked how the classical (i.e., cardinal) virtues could be blended and taught with the Christian (theological) virtues.
Drawing upon the writings of Origen and the Bible, Augustine says that “every good and true Christian should understand that wherever he may find truth, it is his Lord’s.” Augustine believes that all truth is part of God’s truth. Therefore, if a pagan writer offers perceptive comments on justice or the other virtues, his words should be read and profited from. Regarding interpretation of the virtues, I also point out to students the significance of a particular framework of meaning (or historical and normative context): love for Paul meant something different from what it meant for Plato. Courage for the early Christians, who honored the fortitude of the martyrs, meant something different from what it did for Homer, who prized warriors’ valor. Markos wisely states: “The role of the good teacher is not to throw out all pagan literature but to purify it by identifying what in it is good, true, and beautiful and then baptizing it as a fit source of godly wisdom and virtue.”
Markos’s pages on Sayers and Mason offer a good perspective on recent theories undergirding the teaching practices of classical Christian schools. This chapter is solid and informative, but I would have appreciated being given more evidence in support of the author’s assertion that “traditional Christian schools … tend to follow the same progressive models used by public schools—albeit with chapel services, Bible classes, and stricter moral codes.” Classical Christian schools, on the other hand, follow the trivium, teach Latin, read the great books, and so forth.
Is the author at this point being altogether fair to “traditional Christian schools”? Do they in fact follow “the same progressive models” as the state schools, except that they have religious services, stricter discipline, etc.? I suppose the answer depends in part on what Markos means by “traditional.” If he means simply “typical” or “usual” or “conventional,” as in “historically, this is what we’ve mainly seen,” then, yes, he is referring to what is really a tradition-lite school.
However, when I use the phrase “traditional Church school,” I am thinking of those fairly rare, countercultural foundations—i.e., some Anglican and Roman Catholic schools—that are unusually disciplined, focused, systematic, integrated, conservative, and intentional about—at the very least—teaching the cardinal and theological virtues according to their traditional understandings. Most of these tradition-strong schools—the Catholic and Anglican ones, anyway—accept children of all faiths, are decidedly non-woke, and are orthodox and traditional in their creedal affirmations, devotion to the sacraments, rejection of idolatry, and moral guidance. Perhaps Markos is overly eager to draw a sharp boundary between the schools he’s defending and other Christian schools.
Or he could be right: even tradition-strong Church schools, lacking a great-books curriculum and intentional absorption in classic texts, might not in the end be able to resist the lure of the zeitgeist. To many of us, however, that remains an open question.
Written in a clear, straightforward style, Passing the Torch is thoughtful, engaging, and useful. It not only orders and presents leading arguments for the worth of classical Christian education; it also makes its own distinctive contributions along the way. Highly recommended.
David Hein is Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, the author, most recently, of Teaching the Virtues (Mecosta House, 2025), and a trustee of Saint James School (Maryland).
Support the University Bookman
The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated!
