We ought to be men who take one another’s “word for it.” That is to say, when someone says they are helping an elderly woman out of the goodness of their heart, we ought to believe him until he proves otherwise, or unless his track record makes the purported benevolence suspect. This goes for small things and big things. This is how basic courtesy and kindness function. However, this kind of “benefit of the doubt” gets a bit more complicated when dealing with something as complex as starting a new city.

This is precisely what has happened with St. George, which just yesterday was voted into incorporation, though by no means voted in by a landslide. It has seceded with approximately one-fifth of a capital city in the modern United States and launched the fifth largest municipality in Louisiana.  We must remember there is still approximately 46% of the area which does not support the incorporation. This means that a vast minority of the new St. George citizens will have to take the leadership’s “word for it,” until St. George makes good on its promises. What are those promises?

Let’s just consider one, the most important one. From the very beginning, St. George has pitched itself as a new city pursuing a new educational standard. Rightly fed up with East Baton Rouge Parish schools, proponents of the new municipality have used education reform as the top motivation in creating the newest city in the United States. To be sure, I believe those who have led the St. George break truly want something other than what EBR schools have become. And I truly believe they have an opportunity to not only surpass all the standards but to create a model modern city which is the first of its kind educationally. However, for several reasons, I am also highly suspect that it will happen. Still, if I take the man’s “word for it,” how would they go about creating a new educational model?

1. Look outside the state. They must not only look outside the state, they must look outside the public system to create something worthy of all the effort of starting a new city. Educational leaders in St. George need to look at the national classical movement, the fourth most important educational renaissance in western history; they need to read back in educational treatises from Hesiod to Heidegger. They need to consider a fundamentally different starting point than modern educators have to offer.    
   
2. Get back to the liberal arts. I do not mean getting back to what we think the liberal arts are today. I mean getting back to those core methods and subjects which truly form a child to the five academic competencies of reading, writing, thinking, speaking, and listening. Require logic in middle school and high school. Require rhetoric in high school. Teach grammar properly. Utilize the beauty and bounty of Latin to form the architecture of our children’s linguistic faculties. Teach literature in its historical and artistic brilliance. Require the students to memorize poetry. Teach math and science in the fullness of their claims and not just for their pragmatic and capitalistic ends.
   
3. Major on the majors. There will be lots of people who show up to St. George with an agenda, almost all of them being financial gain or social manipulation, and curbing mischief will have everything to do with the leadership determining he educational majors and the educational minors. The fastest way for the whole thing to go south, other than starting with the wrong fundamentals, is to get side-tracked off the major issues, those few things which have always been at the center of a good city and a good education. The leadership will need to identify “the majors” and then work on those for the next decade. After that, they can consider polishing the minor things, if the success of the major things has not already done so.
   
4. Minor on the minors. If they are going to major on the majors, they must not let the minor things of education creep into becoming distractions or pseudo-majors. What are those? Big sports. Standardized testing. Innumerable electives. First-class facilities. Social clubs. Technology. State accolades. These are the minor things, and they puff their chest up quite often to look like majors. Don’t be fooled.  
   
5. Don’t worry about state testing.  If this seems counter-intuitive to the leaders of St. George, then they have already lost at creating a great education in their new city. Undoubtedly, one of the greatest signs of a weak education is its over-emphasis on end-of-grade testing. Teachers know it. Parents know it. Students know it. History proves it. Future generations will look back at us, if they get it right, and wonder how we could be so short-sighted with education. State testing is a minor thing, if it should be a thing at all. And when the new St. George schools major on the majors in the students’ academics, they will soar past their counterparts on state testing.
   
6. Don’t look at college admissions as the standard for success. This is merely another expression of the previous point. College readiness and admissions testing is a minor issue in a child’s education. Because of that, the child should focus on the major parts of their academic formation and let the minor parts take care of themselves. When the school does push the gas on college admissions testing, they should do so no sooner than the student’s sophomore or junior year. Treat the child like a human whose mind and soul are to be delighted in the glories of learning, and then watch how the much less glorious things of modern education (e.g. standardized testing) are hurdled with no problem and much less anxiety.
   
7. Have a higher standard for teacher readiness and accountability. Our instructors need to be scholars and shepherds. They need to be zealous learners and model citizens. We need administrators willing to make hard decisions on teacher hiring, faculty training, and teacher accountability. The most important thing about the St. George schools will be their teachers, and if the schools go about selecting and training faculty like EBR and LSU propose, they will already lose the education they so desperately want to build.
   
8. Require parent leadership and participation in the schools. This goes beyond PTA. This would be a new standard for parent accessibility, parent sovereignty, parent accountability, teacher relationships with parents, parent education, and parent leadership.  This would put parents in the driver-seat of many things, and it would require the local school to acknowledge that and set up the organizational structure to that end. This could be as simple as no bus system or as complex as parents being required to sign up for one of a number of volunteer and leadership groups in the school.
   
9. Educate the child for their vocation. This does not mean we create technical schools and follow much of Europe’s current model of dividing children in middle school down an academic track or a technical track. This means every child, as much as they are created fully human and ought to be treated with equality, ought to learn to think well, speak well, listen well, read well, and write well, to the fullness of their natural aptitudes and divinely dispensed abilities. They ought to be trained in virtue and not vice. They ought to be matured in their human faculties, guided in their natural aptitudes, and shepherded toward that next stage to which the parent and student sense the student is being called. That could be college. That could be trade school. That could be a job. That could be the military. That could be seminary. That could be a host of other opportunities for that 21st century American student. The higher education bubble is a mess, and we had better realize that it’s a mess into which many of our children are not called to go. If we educate them well, giving them the social and academic foundation for which their souls long, we will be setting them up for whatever they may be called to do, despite technological trends, despite market ups and downs, despite global peace, despite partisan politics, despite the future of Amazon. We would truly be giving them a liberating education.  
   
10. Be brave. This will not happen without some serious conflict, asking hard questions, and being brave enough to answer hard questions asked of the leadership. One of the reasons why Louisiana education continues to prove itself greatly impotent is because we don’t have enough educators willing to be brave. This is most especially true in the public sector.    

So, what are the odds that this will happen? A better question is “How genuine is the leadership of St. George about surpassing all the state and local education standards?” What I have proposed here is a kind of neo-humanism, getting back to education which accords with some of our more central and most human characteristics. More specific, it is a kind of secular literary humanism. What is the center and purpose of such humanism, and can such humanism last? Those answers are for another article. But unless St. George is willing to follow its name and run headlong into a kind of incarnational humanism, the model I’ve proposed here is at least the one most in their reach, a reach which is really a promise to reform education for their new citizens. If the leadership of St. George adopts the same fundamental principles and practices in education as EBR and the rest of the state, if the leadership of St. George is not willing to cast its own mold, if the leadership of St. George sets its roots in the soils of modern education, they will build the same thing from which they are running. If a man wants apples, he had better not plant a peach pit.
 
Brian Daigle is the headmaster of Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and is the author of two books on starting schools: So You Want to Start a School? and So You Want to Become a Classical School?  

In response to the “Geneva Dads,” those jolly, thoughtful, and fearless friends:
 
Whether calculation is more frequent than engineering: It is. While all engineering requires calculation, not all calculation leads to engineering. (Engineering as the application of mathematics with the physical sciences, purposed toward technological expression and advancement, and calculation as mathematical reckoning.) We should conclude then that calculation is more frequent than engineering.  
 
Whether calculation is more potent than engineering: It is. Calculation guides the soul toward the truth through the science of numbers, and can do this on its own, prior to the other departments, especially without engineering. It would have done this pre-fall, and it does this post-fall. To be sure, engineering would have as well (pre-fall and post-fall), but an ordered soul precedes an ordered physical space. And because greater potency and authority belong first to the parent and not the child, so it belongs to mathematics over engineering. That is, there is no engineering with calculation. Furthermore, potency belongs first and last to the Lord, and mathematics, especially the “reckoning” at the essence of calculation, resides in the mind of God long before engineering resides on the hands of man. We should conclude then that calculation is more potent than engineering. 
 
Whether mathematics is more than calculation: It is. Mathematics allows for calculation, but it is also arrangement, investigation, measurement, recognition, worship, spiritual enculturation, and in creation spatial enculturation. It is call and response with the science of numbers. To show this, and push against mathematical pragmatism and secular scientific humanism, was the purpose of the original piece on “Rescuing Mathematics from Troy.” That is to say, our classical Christian schools, above any, have the tools to rescue mathematics from inside Troy’s walls, precisely because we see mathematics with greater consideration. Hence, why this thread is happening in the "Geneva Dads FB page" and not over at the Louisiana  Board of Regents meeting. We should conclude then that mathematics is more than calculation. 
 
Whether building or designing requires calculation: Building and designing, either God’s or man’s, always requires mathematics (especially geometry), as Rhabanus Maurus states in his quote. And if we define arithmetic with Maurus as “the science of pure extension determinable by numbers” then designing and building, like music, also requires arithmetic. This is why I have called architecture, “concrete poetics,” or “visual music made with rocks.” And if we see the word calculation for what it is, then we should not forget that calculus is Latin for stone. By definition building is calculation and designing is "marking out." We should conclude then that building or designing requires arithmetic, geometry, and calculation. 
 
Whether the purpose of learning can be known: It can be known. It is not only known, but it can be gained. The purpose of learning is to accomplish that which sums up all the law and the prophets: that we would love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and that we would love our neighbors as ourselves. Learning for us exists, then, to repair, restrain, reconcile, rejoice, which all lead to the ultimate end, the education which God gives: “The education that God gives is the imparting of the truth that will guide us correctly to the contemplation of God, and a description of holy deeds that endure forever.” (Clement of Alexandria, “Christ the Educator”)
 
Whether that is also my purpose in learning: In my finest hours, yes. In my worst, no. In Christ, it will be so.
 
Whether pizza stirs the soul more than mathematics: “For just as a child cannot be born without a mother, so without the rudiments of geometry, pizza would have never come into existence. We must, therefore, forsake the pagan way of cutting circle pizzas into square pieces, and we must likewise do all we can to ensure mathematical order is respected by no crude or disproportionate slices.” – Basil of Little Caesarea, “De Pepperonicis”

by Brian G. Daigle

 
Like Helen, many things have been abducted and taken from their homes, brought as a foreigner among a strange city, perhaps enticed there by a beautiful Parisian prince. Many such things indeed. Despite, however, what one’s sentiments are toward Helen’s culpability in her fiasco, we can rest assured that in the abduction of mathematics, math itself has merely been the victim. There is no Aphrodite strong enough to entice mathematics away from her family and friends. She is too dependent upon them; they are too dependent upon her. But abducted is the current state of mathematics in education.   
 
To be sure, mathematics is good for children. Mathematics is very good for childhood. Mathematics is necessary for childishness. Yet, even with all the push in mathematics and the sciences, there is a real sense that math instructors may feel quite isolated in today’s classical Christian academy. There are a few reasons for this, some which the classical community must own and fix as soon as possible, but the main reason is that mathematics in general has gone through quite a change over the past few centuries. In academic institutions and popular sentiment, mathematics has been captured, removed from its home, and placed inside a four-walled room closed in by technology, economics, business, and engineering. But math must be liberated, and here is how it starts. Take these quotes and read them to your math classes. Consider the much broader and more beautiful place mathematics has in the formation of our souls. Consider, “non-math” teachers, how math finds its place among the beauties and bounties of your subject.
 
“…I even commend that which has been set up in our own day—I mean geometry, astronomy, and the so-called eristic dialogues…I urge those who are inclined towards these disciplines to work hard and apply themselves to all of them, saying that even if this learning can accomplish no other good, at any rate it keeps the young out of many other things which are harmful. Nay, I hold that for those who are at this age no more helpful or fitting occupation can be found than the pursuit of these studies.”  - Isocrates, Panathenaicus
 
“You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies. My answer is this: I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making. Such studies are profit-bringing occupations, useful only in so far as they give the mind a preparation and do not engage it permanently. One should linger upon them only so long as the  mind can occupy itself with nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our real work. Hence you see why ‘liberal studies’ are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman. But there is only one really liberal study,--that which gives a man his liberty. It is the study of wisdom, and that is lofty, brave, and great-souled. All other studies are puny and puerile. You surely do not believe that there is good in any of the subjects whose teachers are, as you see, men of the  most ignoble and base stamp? We ought not to be learning such things; we should have done with learning them…The mathematician teaching me how to lay out the dimensions of my estates; but I should rather be taught how to lay out what is enough for a man to own. He teaches me to count and adapts my fingers to avarice; but I should prefer him to teach me that there is no point in such calculations, and that one is non the happier for tiring out the bookkeepers with his possessions—or rather, how useless property is to any man who would find it the greatest misfortune if he should be required to reckon out, by his own wits, the amount of his holdings. What good is there for me in knowing how to parcel out a piece of land, if I know not how to share it with my brother? What good is there in working out to a nicety the dimensions of an acre, and in detecting the error if a piece has so much as escaped my measuring-rod, if I am embittered when an ill-tempered neighbor merely scrapes off a bit of my land? The mathematician teaches me how I may lose none of my boundaries; I, however, seek to learn how to lose them all with a light heart...You know how to measure the circle; you find the square of any shape which is set before you; you compute the distances between the stars; there is nothing which does not come with the scope of your calculations. But if you are a real master of your profession, measure me the mind of man! Tell me how great it is, or how puny! You know what a straight line is; but how does it benefit you if you do not know what is straight in this life of ours?” – Seneca, On Liberal and Vocational Studies
 
“And geometry, sowing the seeds of equality and just proportion in the soul, which is fond of learning, will, by means of the beauty of continued contemplation, implant in you an admiration of justice.” – Philo, On Mating with the Preliminary Studies
 
“Arithmetic is the science of pure extension determinable by number; it is the science of numbers. Writers on secular science assign it, under the head of mathematics, to the first place, because it does not presuppose any of the other departments. Music, geometry, and astronomy, on the contrary, need the help of arithmetic; without it they cannot arise or exist…the holy Fathers were right in advising those eager for knowledge to cultivate arithmetic, because in large measure it turns the mind from fleshly desires, and furthermore awakens the wish to comprehend what with God’s help we can merely receive with the heart. Therefore the significance of number cannot be underestimated. Its very great value for an interpretation of many passages of Holy Scripture is manifest to all who exhibit zeal in their investigations. Not without good reason is it said in praise of God, ‘Thou has ordained all things by measure, number, and weight’ (Book of Wisdom 11:21).” – Rhabanus Maurus, Education of the Clergy
 
“…the Holy Trinity makes use of geometry in so far as it bestows manifold forms and images upon the creatures which up to the present day it has called into being, as in its adorable omnipotence it further determines the course of the stars, as it prescribes their course to the planets, and as it assigns to the fixed stars their unalterable position. For every, excellent, and well-ordered arrangement can be reduced to the special requirements of this science…This science found realization also at the building of the tabernacle and temple; the same measuring rod, circles, spheres, hemispheres, quadrangles, and other figures were employed. The knowledge of all this brings to him, who is occupied with it, no small gain for his spiritual culture.” Rhabanus Maurus, Education of the Clergy