Dr. Arthur Hippler (’89): On Church Teaching & Classical Education

Writing at The Imaginative Conservative, Dr. Arthur Hippler (’89) asks a question both timely and timeless, namely: Does the Church Have a Teaching on “Classical Education”?

The question is timely because, as Dr. Hippler explains, “One of the more remarkable trends in the past five years in Catholic education is the noticeable increase of schools embracing a ‘classical education’” approach; even “whole diocesan school systems … have embraced the classical model.”

But the question is also timeless, for, as Dr. Hippler puts it, “As a matter of historical fact, for centuries ‘classical’ and ‘education’ were nearly synonymous,” and “Catholic education grew up as an evangelized form of classical education.” Indeed, the shift away from a classical model in Catholic schools is a recent anomaly. “It is for this reason that one does not find ‘magisterial’ statements on classical education,” Dr. Hippler says. “The classics were so much a part of education, for so long, that their essential relationship was given and unquestioned.”

The chairman of the Religion Department at Providence Academy in Plymouth, Minnesota, as well as a member of the Board of Directors at the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, Dr. Hippler cites recent Church councils and papal pronouncements to show that the Catholic Church continues to give a “priority of place” to classical models of schooling. 

This matter, he notes, is not simply pedagogical, but bears directly on questions of faith and morals. “The problem with the view that a Catholic school could adapt a range of curricular approaches, or simply create a kind of curricular pastiche by parts of various curricula, is that no educational program is ‘value free,’” Dr. Hippler observes. “A curriculum carries with it a view of man’s place in the universe, his ability to know, and the goods that perfect him.”

His brief article, well worth a few minutes’ time, can be found at The Imaginative Conservative.