What We Believe

I. The Question

Every curriculum answers a question, whether or not it asks one out loud. Most modern curricula answer the question what should a child know? And they answer it with lists. Standards, scope-and-sequence, learning outcomes, grade-level benchmarks. We have nothing against the lists; we use them ourselves. But notice what they leave out. A child is taught to read so she can pass the reading test, taught arithmetic so she can pass the math test, taught history so she can name the dates, and somewhere in the assembly line, nobody asks what any of it is for.

Ashwren is built around an older question. It is the question Socrates put to the young men of Athens, the question Boethius asked Lady Philosophy in a Roman prison cell, the question Augustine put to himself in the garden at Milan, the question every parent and every teacher eventually asks of every child entrusted to them:

This is not a question a worksheet can answer. It is the question a worksheet exists to serve. When it disappears (when education gets reduced to skills, outcomes, and employability), what remains is a husk. Even "a love of learning," well-meant as it is, can become a way of dodging the question. Love of what? Learning for what? The husk may be efficient. It may produce graduates. But it does not form a person who can ask, on her own, what to do with the one life she's been given.

This document is our attempt to say plainly what we believe about that question, why we believe the answer matters more than any technique, and why the great teachers of the Western tradition believed the same thing for two and a half thousand years before us.

II. We Believe Education Is Formation, Not Transmission

A child is not an empty vessel to be filled, and anyone who has spent one school year trying to fill one knows it. She is a person being formed (in mind, in affection, in judgment, in habit, in love), and the only real question is toward what?

The classical tradition has always understood this. Plato's Republic turns on the formation of the guardian's soul.² Aristotle opens the Nicomachean Ethics by insisting that ethical inquiry is for those already well-brought-up, because reasoning about the good presupposes the cultivation of right desires.³ Augustine wrote his Confessions not to deliver doctrine but to show how a soul is shaped, mis-shaped, and re-shaped by what it loves.⁴ When Quintilian set out the curriculum of the Institutio Oratoria, his goal was not the production of skilled rhetoricians but of the good man speaking well (vir bonus dicendi peritus).⁵

This is not a sentimental claim. It is a claim about what education actually does. Every act of teaching (what is read, what is praised, what is required, what is permitted, what is left out) forms the student in some direction. There is no neutral pedagogy. The only choice is whether the formation is undertaken deliberately, with a clear idea of what is worth striving for, or by default, drifting toward whatever the surrounding culture happens to be selling.

We believe the deliberate path is harder, older, and worth the work.

III. We Believe the Goal of Formation Is Freedom for Excellence, Not Freedom of Indifference

Servais Pinckaers, a Dominican moral theologian, drew a distinction that clarifies almost everything else we believe.⁶ Freedom of indifference is the modern idea: freedom as the bare power to choose either way, cut loose from any pull toward a real good. On this view, the more options a person has and the less constrained their will, the freer they are. Freedom for excellence is the older idea, running back through Aquinas to Aristotle: freedom as the developed capacity to act well (to play the violin truly, to write a true sentence, to love a friend rightly, to face death without falsehood). On this view, the trained pianist is more free at the keyboard than the beginner, not less; the formed conscience is more free in moral choice than the uninstructed one, not less.

We believe education is the patient cultivation of freedom for excellence. A child who has never been asked to sit with a difficult sentence, never been required to revise a careless paragraph, never been led through a real argument and made to articulate the strongest objection to his own first opinion, is not free in any meaningful sense. He is the prisoner of whatever he happens to feel that morning.

This is why our worksheets ask hard questions and expect real answers. It is why the math pages drill algorithmic fluency until it is second nature, and why the literature guides ask for narration before analysis. The forms come first because the forms make the freedom possible.

IV. We Believe the Question Is Settled the Old Way: By Argument, Not by Assertion

The medieval university gave us a method for thinking through hard questions, and it has not been surpassed. Peter Abelard called it Sic et Non (Yes and No).⁷ Thomas Aquinas perfected it in the structure of the Summa Theologiae: every question begins by stating the strongest case against the position the author will eventually defend. Videtur quod ("It would seem that…"). Three or four serious objections, each marshaling Aristotle, Augustine, Scripture, or experience, each given its full weight. Only then comes the sed contra, the respondeo, and the careful reply to each objection.⁸

The structure is not decoration. It is how the thinking actually happens. Aquinas understood that a teacher who has not articulated the strongest objection to her conclusion has not earned the conclusion. A student who has not heard the best version of the position she rejects has not really rejected anything; she has only been told what to think.

We believe this method is the spine of any education that takes its students seriously. It is the same method Phillips Exeter has practiced at the Harkness table for nearly a century, where students sit at an oval table and contend with the text and one another while the teacher mostly listens.⁹ It is the method of the St. John's College seminar, where Eva Brann and her colleagues have spent careers showing that the great books read each other if students are given the time and trust to let them.¹⁰ It is the method John Henry Newman defended in The Idea of a University when he insisted that liberal education forms a "philosophical habit of mind": the capacity "to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant."¹¹

This is what our study guides are designed to do. Not to deliver verdicts. To occasion the kind of conversation that earns them.

V. We Believe in the Wisdom of the Tradition We Have Received

Modernity has made a habit of treating tradition as the husk to be discarded, as if every age before our own were a long, embarrassing prelude to the moment we finally figured things out. We don't believe this. We believe what G. K. Chesterton called the democracy of the dead: tradition as "the extension of the franchise" to those who came before us. Refusing to consult them does not make us larger. It makes us smaller.¹²

The tradition we draw on is unembarrassed and concrete. We believe with Charlotte Mason that children are born persons, not blank slates, and that they deserve a feast of living ideas rather than the dry dust of textbook summary.¹³ We believe with Dorothy Sayers and Susan Wise Bauer that the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) names real stages of intellectual development, and that ignoring them produces students who can opine but cannot reason.¹⁴ We believe with Isabel Beck that vocabulary is the handle by which a child grasps a text, and that Tier 2 words (deliberate, contend, resolve) are the words a student needs to think with, not just to speak with.¹⁵ And we believe with Quintilian that imitatio (the patient copying and recasting of excellent prose) is how style is acquired. Nobody becomes a writer by being told to "find your voice." You become a writer by inhabiting voices worth imitating until your own shows up.¹⁶

These traditions are not in competition. The classical synthesis is catholic in the older sense (universal, gathering), and the families and teachers we serve have known it longer than we have. We are trying to hand them tools worthy of their work.

VI. We Believe the Strongest Objection Deserves the Floor

Section IV was about method. This section is about courage.

Allan Bloom, writing in 1987, made an observation that has only grown more urgent: there are two kinds of openness. There is the openness of indifference, which "lets us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don't want to be knowers," and there is the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude. The first openness, Bloom argued, is "a great closing" disguised as a great opening: a way of shutting down inquiry by treating every question as already answered, or as unanswerable.¹⁷

We believe the second openness is the one a child deserves. This means our materials do not pretend that hard questions have easy answers, and they do not pretend that the strongest objections to a given conclusion can be safely ignored or labeled as bad-faith. When we read Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth's pride must be allowed to be a real pride, not a virtue mislabeled. When we read the Iliad, Achilles's wrath must be allowed to be a real wrath, not a cautionary tale wrapped in a moral. When we read Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov's argument must be allowed to be a real argument, given its full weight, before Sonia's silent answer can have any meaning at all.

This is what Jonathan Rauch has called the Constitution of Knowledge: no claim becomes knowledge except by surviving challenge in an "open-ended, depersonalized, error-seeking" community of inquirers.¹⁸ A student who has been protected from the strongest objection has not been protected from error. She has only been protected from the one process by which her conclusions can become her own.

VII. We Believe the Question of Meaning Belongs at the Center

Anthony Kronman, the former dean of Yale Law School, wrote in Education's End that the modern university has been crushed between two millstones (the research ideal and the politics of recognition) and that the question which used to sit at the center of liberal education has fallen out: what is worth caring about? What is worth a human life?¹⁹ Roosevelt Montás, who directs Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum, makes the same case in Rescuing Socrates: the great books are not period furniture but a living conversation about the questions every person must eventually face.²⁰

We believe the people closest to children have an advantage here that institutions have largely lost. The family is the one human community in which the question of meaning cannot be deferred, and a good classroom comes closer to it than classrooms are usually given credit for. A parent cannot teach a child to read without, in the same breath, teaching her what is worth reading. A teacher cannot hand a novel to thirty students without answering, silently, the same question. Neither of them can teach a child to write without showing her what is worth writing about, or arithmetic without communicating, even by example, why precision matters and to what end.

Our worksheets and study guides are designed for this advantage, for kitchen tables and classrooms alike. They presuppose that an adult and a child are reading together, talking together, arguing together, and that the materials are servants of a conversation already happening in a particular home or a particular room. We are not trying to replace that conversation. We are trying to give it better fuel.

VIII. We Believe in the Body, the Place, and the Ordinary

IX. We Believe in the Dignity of the Person Closest to the Child

For a long time now, the presumed final authority on what and how children should learn has been the expert at a distance: the district office, the curriculum publisher, the consultant with the slide deck. We believe this presumption has done damage: to children, treated as raw material for institutional processing; to parents, taught to distrust their own judgment about their own children; and to teachers, handed scripts and pacing guides that leave no room for the students actually in front of them.

We are not anti-credential. Many of the people who use our materials are certified teachers, and one of us, Ashlyn, has spent years buried in the pedagogy research; everything we publish is vetted against the best of it we can find. But we believe the person who knows the child knows something no expert at a distance can: who this child is, what this child is ready for, what this child needs today rather than next week. The curriculum's job is to serve that knowledge, not to overrule it.

This is why our materials are designed to be flexible, narrated rather than scripted, and confident enough in the grown-up's judgment to leave room for it. A study guide that tells the adult exactly what to say is not respecting the adult; it is replacing her. We would rather offer a strong text, a serious question, and the trust to take the conversation where it needs to go.

X. We Believe This Is Worth Doing

The reason for any of this (the reason to build study guides chapter by chapter, to argue about the right vocabulary tier, to insist on the disputatio form, to trust the judgment of the person at the table, to point at Aquinas and Newman and Quintilian and Mason and Brann) is that we believe children deserve an education that takes seriously the question of what is worth striving for, and that the grown-ups teaching them deserve materials worthy of the work they are already doing.

We do not believe we have figured everything out. We are a small family business in Oklahoma, building the thing we wished existed when we started teaching our own children at the kitchen table, and we keep learning from the families and teachers who use what we make.

But we believe the question is the right question. We believe the tradition we are drawing on is the right tradition. We believe the method (patient, dialectical, formative, embodied) is the right method. And we believe the work of forming a child toward the good, the true, and the beautiful is among the most consequential work a person can do.

That is what we believe. That is what we are trying to make.