Friendship in the Classical Tradition
Or What Makes a Classical School Cool
Anyone who has taught at classical for several years knows that students are not primarily concerned about the curriculum they study. What they are most concerned about, most interested in, and most blessed or hurt by are… friends.
This does not mean that students don’t enjoy the study of grammar, logic, rhetoric, math, and literature. Taught well by model teachers, most students will delight in their studies. As human beings, however, they are most interested, like we are, in the faces of those other humans all around them. And this means friendship.
How many students, in 7th grade say, report to their parents, teachers, and classmates, how cool it is that they get to study Latin and logic? We who are renewing the classical tradition of education think it is very cool. Sometimes we talk about our remarkable curriculum and sometimes ad nauseam to our students.
As a young head of school (1997-2007), I learned this after a few years. Students would delight in logic (especially the informal fallacies) when taught with verve and delight. They did not delight so much in my euphoric outbursts about the magic of the art. So I cooled down the rhetoric and tried to teach with love for the art but without overselling it front, middle, and end.
I remember the day when my (then) 14-year old son came back from soccer practice from a team consisting of community boys, almost all from local public schools. The exchange went something like this:
Me: Hi Noah–how did soccer practice go?
Noah: Pretty good, but I discovered something about my teammates.
Me: What’s that?
Noah: I don’t think they know any Latin.
Me: Right… that makes sense. Some public schools do offer Latin but most students don’t take Latin at your age.
Noah: I don’t think they know any logic either.
Noah, at age 14, was just becoming aware of the fact that he was studying a curriculum that differed from the various public and private schools all around him. Thankfully (for him anyway) he did not regard the study of Latin and logic as weird, unusual, or eccentric. For several years he thought that naturally, this is what every student studied in school. At age 14, he became conscious that he was studying a classical curriculum and began to do his own compare and contrast. Thankfully as well, he concluded that the classical curriculum was cool (he is now a Latin teacher).
What Noah was most concerned about throughout his classical education was not the curriculum but friendship. This is generally true of all classical students in my opinion.
Is the primacy of friendship part of the classical tradition? Yes, it very much is. Humans are designed for relationships with one another; we are attracted to one another, we need each other. When a baby is placed at birth on her mother’s breast, there is an immediate transfixed, gazing that transpires as the mother stares at this mystical human being who came from her and yet is not her. The baby stares back and is comforted by the sound of her mother’s voice even when she can’t focus sharply yet on her face. The baby learns the smell and touch of her mother; her hunger and thirst is satiated at her mother’s breast and she is in deep ways, “at home.”
C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, says that “We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.” The baby at birth seems aware of her helplessness and equally aware (perhaps grateful?) that her mother is her only help.
The relational connection that begins at birth is well-known and continues to extend to other family members and then others in relation with the family. When this little girl starts Kindergarten at a classical school–she is still most interested in the faces of other human beings, her classmates, her teacher, and any others who enter into her sphere of living and learning. She learns from other people; she adds words to her growing vocabulary at a rapid rate from her parents, classmates, and teacher. She will view her teacher as a kind of muse or wonder-worker, who introduces her to the magic and mysteries of the world that appears to her as a kind of living museum, as a cosmos, full of wonder.
Her teacher is, as Chesterton called her, a “star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition.” To this five-year old girl, her teacher is nothing less than a remarkable friend, though she can be more than that.
This kind of educational friendship continues, or should continue, throughout her education. We can cite many great authors from the classical tradition that confirm the essence of education as friendship between teacher and student. Let’s start with Augustine.
Augustine, in his short book about how to teach or catechize those new to the Christian faith writes this:
Once more, however, we often feel it very wearisome to go over repeatedly matters which are thoroughly familiar, and adapted to children. If this is the case with us, then we should endeavor to meet them with a brother's, a father's, and a mother's love; and, if we are once united with them thus in heart, to us no less than to them will these things seem new. For so great is the power of a sympathetic disposition of mind, that, as they are affected while we are speaking, and we are affected while they are learning, we have our dwelling in each other; and thus, at one and the same time, they as it were in us speak what they hear, and we in them learn after a certain fashion what we teach. Is it not a common occurrence with us, that when we show to persons, who have never seen them, certain spacious and beautiful tracts, either in cities or in fields, which we have been in the habit of passing by without any sense of pleasure, simply because we have become so accustomed to the sight of them, we find our own enjoyment renewed in their enjoyment of the novelty of the scene? And this is so much the more our experience in proportion to the intimacy of our friendship with them; because, just as we are in them in virtue of the bond of love, in the same degree do things become new to us which previously were old.
Note how Augustine describes teaching as requiring love for a student–the love of a brother, father, or mother. Are these not instances of the greatest forms of friendship? Is this not why we often say that when we send a girl to a classical school that we place her there in loco parentis (in the place of parents)? Do we not all want our children to be taught, as it were, by another brother, father, or mother?
This is precisely what is happening in thousands of classical homeschooling co-ops and schools across the country. In the typical co-op, several moms come together to teach one another’s children. In the typical school, you will find multiple teachers (fathers and mothers) who have their children enrolled in the school.
Note as well Augustine’s reference to a “sympathetic disposition of mind.” The teacher and the student (like any good friendship) share a similar mind, a similar love for the true, good, and beautiful. They have the same pathos. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says friendship is like a single soul dwelling in two bodies–sympathy indeed!
Augustine goes so far as to say that there is a mutual indwelling of teacher and student such that the teacher begins to live in the student, and the student begins to live in the teacher, creating a virtuous circle in which truth travels round and round from soul to soul, almost erasing the lines between teacher and student.
The classical tradition has regularly noted the way in which friendship (amicitia in Latin, philia in Greek) is essential to education. Christ says that “when a student is fully trained he will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40). Cicero explores the idea throughout his essay “On Friendship” noting that “friendship is given to us by nature not to favor vice but to aid virtue.”
A.G. Sertillanges, in The Intellectual Life, appears as if he is commenting directly on the words of Augustine:
Friendship is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgments, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm (p 56).
Regarding such academic friendship Sertillanges writes, “But how rare, in this age of individualism and social anarchy, is such kinship of minds!” (p 54).
Both Augustine and Sertillanges note that an academic friendship is dynamic–there is an interchange, a giving and receiving, a mutual indwelling, and also growth. Augustine says that enjoyment of learning, of truth, is renewed (particularly in the teacher) in proportion to the intimacy of the friendship. This is a remarkable truth for all classical teachers to grasp: Your love for your discipline and knowledge will be made ever new and fresh as you see it born in your students.
Once this kind of indwelling and mutual ardor emerges with a few students, those students become more meaningful friends to one another, and they begin to teach one another, as sparks fly among them catching flame, such that a class becomes a fellowship. Sertillanges quotes another author who expresses longing for such a fellowship of friends learning together:
What labor could be saved if people could join and help one another! If six or seven together, with the same idea, worked by way of mutual teaching; becoming turn by turn pupil and master of the others; if by some happy concourse of circumstances they could even live together! If besides lectures in the afternoon and study following on the lectures, they could talk in the evening, at supper, of all these noble things, so as to learn more by drinking them in in conversation, than by the very lectures! (p 54)
Augustine, in his early academic life as a Christian, enjoyed this very thing. For about a year, he and several truth-seeking fellows lived together in this fashion at a retreat in Cassiciacum–we even have some recorded dialogues from the times those friends spent together. The monastic tradition of learning continued this tradition of dedicated scholars and friends living and learning together (Sertillanges was a Benedictine monk). The original universities were an extension of the monastic forms of education in friendship; witness the 37 colleges of Oxford and the tutorial system of education and the “faculty of fellows” model that each college still retains today, if in a diluted condition.
Classical Christian schools and homeschools are seeking, if in initial ways, to recover this kind of education in friendship. The Alcuin Fellowship (of which I am a part) is another example of this. In many informal ways at conferences, in various schools, various fellowships of friends are emerging. We need each other as friends and teachers.
Our students at classical schools may not live together, but they do dine together (unless lunch is a mere fueling station) and they have seven hours a day to be together in what could be an academic fellowship led by their teachers and friends. Of course homeschooled children do live together! The home, and the homeschool co-op, certainly can be an academic fellowship.
How will our students grow to appreciate the classical curriculum? Not through our promotional talk but through friendship, fellowship, and sympathy. When they see a vibrant faculty of friends who appear as zealous students themselves, who with hospitality invite students to join their “college.”
It will be through a growing teacher-student friendship infused with the love for the true, good, and beautiful that the curriculum becomes cool to our students. The curriculum, it turns out, lives in the teacher and then is born in the students, which is then born anew in the teachers. This circle is really a spiral moving upwards. The curriculum turns out not to be a mere list of grammar, logic, rhetoric, Latin, mathematics. It turns out that the “curriculum” lives in the teachers; it turns out that the curriculum is a conversation, a dance, a fellowship, a never-ending friendship with kindred spirits. And that’s what makes a classical school cool.
Postscript:
I want to acknowledge my debt to Dr. Christopher Schlect who first mentioned the passage to me from Augustine’s On Catechizing the Uninstructed. He teaches on this subject in a great lesson on ClassicalU.com which you can find here.
Those interested in homeschooling communities aligned with the ideas of this article might appreciate the network of homeschooling groups called Scholé Communities that seek to foster restful learning and fellowship (scholé) in these communities.