It is not hard to talk about education at CSW. It is hard not to talk about education at CSW. Our mission is to educate our students, our children, not just as a school but as parents. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that we would discuss education—discuss it thoroughly and discuss it often.
Defining education is a tricky thing in today’s culture and climate. Current trends and government think tanks have championed the idea of education as skill-assessment and assessment alone. Classical School of Wichita refuses to see education in those terms. In our discussions of education we use loaded language. We use words like wisdom, virtue, tradition, character, truth, enculturation, goodness, discipleship, and beauty. These words have a myriad of meanings, so we discuss them at length. While all of these words are important, they ring of a past culture currently in ruins. Enculturation is the one that I want to mention at the moment.
According to the dictionary, enculturation is “the gradual acquisition of the characteristics and norms of a culture or group by a person, another culture, etc.”
I would not argue that definition but I would take it a bit further. For CSW enculturation is the instilling of loves—the love of learning, the love of wonder, the love of grace, and the love of Christ. We strive to bring our students into a love of all things true, good and beautiful. Not only a love for them but a desire to seek after them, ever questing for them, because we know that the things that are sincerely good, undeniably beautiful and absolutely true are those things that originate in our Savior and Creator. Truth, Goodness and Beauty are hallmarks of Him. His culture is the only one of which we should truly want to be a part.
~ M. Wade Ortego