The following are notes from Mr. Higgins’ talk at the recent Information Night.
Humans are bad at doing what we need to do. Why? Sometimes we don’t know; we have to learn. Especially with our kids, we catechize them and quiz them so that, we hope at some point, they can remember for themselves. But, knowledge is only part of our need. Lots of us can answer the test questions correctly. Our own experience teaches us that we often fail to do what we know is right because we don’t feel like doing it. And, it turns out, we won’t ever learn what is right if we don’t feel like learning in the first place.
Because of how God made the world to work, we always do what we most want to do. We have wants that compete with each other. Paul said that he didn’t do what he wanted to do (Romans 7:15), but, in the moment, the stronger want always wins. You pay the bill because you really want to avoid a bigger fine. You do the dishes because you want to avoid a mess of drosophila melanogaster (a.k.a., fruit flies). A student stays up late to write the paper because he wants a good grade or to avoid embarrassment.
The point is: our choices come down to which want you want more, not whether or not you choose what you want. Of course we don’t like to think about it this way because regularly our outcomes show that our wants were messed up. And, okay, this is a lifetime project, here we are. What do you want?
What do your children need most? Knowledge? Character? Diligence? Persistence? Imagination? Sure. But what they need most is for you to WANT them to learn to want the best wants, the blessed wants, to have driving desire for the true and good and beautiful. A good school is a factory for good wants. A good education exposes students (and their families) to desirable things, challenges them not to be satisfied with lesser things, and supports the process until all our wants are the best ones.
Note: the proper standards for our wants are outside of us. God tells us what we should want. He gave us a Book all about it. Christ’s disciples grow up as they learn the content of right wants, repent when they realize they were wanting the wrong things, and then love the standard more and more. That’s what our emotions try to trick us into forgetting. We think we can’t help but have certain feelings. We think that they are our feelings. But while they are personal, they aren’t actually allowed to be subjective.
Lewis quotes a couple ancient heavy hitters that use different language to make the same point.
“Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” (The Abolition of Man, page 17)
A good eduction shows what God says is good and what good things good brings about. A good education shows good examples of those who want and receive the good.
Note also: the popular standards for our wants are really cheap today. Our collective wants have been gutted, torpedoed, castrated, and drained, and state schools are driving the power drill with a 6” hole saw bit into the bottom of the barrel. Christians should want better than the state schools anyway. But for those who only want to stay above the state’s want factories, well that takes almost nothing. In 2020-21, all we had to do to be attractive to parents was stay open and not require five year-olds to wear masks. The Marysville school district in particular keeps finding spectacular ways to be MEH.
The overall feeling about education in our current culture is that it doesn’t take much to get what you need; maybe it’s still the three R’s, but just text it, lowercase, no apostrophe, no punctuation. Programs or schools pursuing a higher bar are seen as wasteful, even annoying. How many parents want to be bothered as little as possible, in bank accounts and homework expectations and questions around the table? Parents want very much, or maybe they don’t even know what they really want for their kids.
One of the parts of our new family application process is a Pastoral Reference. One of the questions asks the pastor to select the best description of “The family’s church attendance.”
- Surprised to see they listed your church as a reference
- Occasionally present
- Regular worshippers
- Would crawl over glass to be at worship
That’s it: we always do what we most want to do.
ECS is a fire in the bones sort of place. Not everyone wants that; fire is hot. But we want parents to want to increase their own wants. We want to spark their flame thrower. We want parents to encourage each other in wanting more. Each of our teachers (save one) are parents or grandparents (or alumni), because we are trying to inform and inflame the wants in our own kids, and then also in your kids, in ways that we don’t think are happening anywhere better.
The younger grades focus on naming all the things that God has given; the Grammar of Good Wants. The middle grades focus on distinguishing between good and the sounds-good; the Logic of Good Wants. The older grades focus on wanting to better adorn and embody the good, and to enjoy working together for good; the Rhetoric of Good Wants. Put it all together, with students sharpening each other, sharing with each other across grades, and everyone gets to have their bucket of wants both expanded and also more filled.
At ECS we’re conforming our wants to God and His Word, and our wants are compounding in ways that just one student’s best want couldn’t add up to.
ECS wants to offer better wants, for you and your kids and your family. We exist to train and shape and exercise wants because all things are ours because we are Christ’s. We’re not doing it for the money, though we do need tuition dollars to pay our teachers and bills. We’re doing it because God wants big wants for us.
The following quote keeps being a favorite kick in the pants:
“The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.” (“Learning in Wartime”)
We want to challenge you to want more, support you when wanting more is hard, and rejoice with you when God blesses you with more than what you wanted to begin with. What your kids need most is for you to want the best for their wants.