Understanding Christian Education (CLAA Article)

William Michael, the founder of the CLAA (Classical Liberal Arts Academy) has a great post about education. I really like this guy. He is a Catholic agrarian/Distributist type who runs his own family farm PLUS an incredible online school. He is also a former Calvinist and convert to Catholicism who wrote curriculum for Veritas Press, which is the Reformed curriculum we used pre-Catholicism. For those interested in homeschooling, I highly recommend the CLAA. My family has used it and will be using it more in the future. Here is an excerpt from the article...

"If you’re a parent, you are responsible for providing your children with a sound Christian education. Obviously, that includes a sound faith formation program, but what about everything else? Look, for example, at the painting featured with the article. It is titled “Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics”, and was painted in 1490 and today adorns a Catholic chapel in Rome. Christians today would be unable to interpret the painting or identify the characters and their significance. It is foreign to us because the modern Christian mind has been divorced from the historic Christian mind. Who are the women seated beside St. Thomas? Who are the men standing before him, or the man under his feet? Why would the artist go through the effort of creating such an image? Why would this image be on display in a Catholic church? We should know the answers to these questions. Cicero said, “He who does not know what happened before he was born remains forever a child.” We need to grow up as Christians and learn our history so that we can make right decisions in life and avoid wandering around like children. After all, we have children depending on our guidance. Wise people don’t live by trial and error, but by deliberation and forethought.


The women in the painting represent..."

 You'll have to read the rest of the article on the CLAA news site if you want to find out what the women represent! ;-)