The teacher must have a sufficiently winning personality that his students would want to be like him— not merely want to know what the teacher knows— and parents must not allow endless, irrefutable competition against the teacher to swindle the student’s heart away.
If we step outside of our current historical moment and listen to the wisdom of the past, we might find a healthier alternative. For thousands of years, figures like Plato, Cicero, Augustine, and C.S. Lewis have carried the torch for a different kind of education: the formation of the soul.
Christian education demands that we teach students what to love and how to love, for love is simply the greatest kind of knowledge. A classical education aims to train the affections and show a man how to “rightly order his loves” (ordo amoris), though a man cannot order his loves until he knows what they are.
