What's The Point of School? [Listen to Our New Podcast to Find Out!]

Season 1

May 14, 2022

Your child spends about 1,200 hours in school every year.

Hours in classrooms, schoolyards, gyms, and cafeterias. Fretting over exams, grades, projects. Poring over volumes of books. Hours spent on the school bus, or driving across town together, waiting in drop off and pickup lines.

Hours spent with teachers and classmates who will - by their instruction and by their relationships - be instrumental in shaping your child into the person they are to become.

All of this and more...for what?

To get into a good college? Get a good job? A lucrative career that will provide a comfortable, successful lifestyle?

While those goals can be a worthwhile aim, let me challenge you to think beyond them.

Your child is more than their career. Certainly more than their grades, their college, their field of study. Your child's place in this world is divinely ordained by the God who created them in His image, and prepared good works for them before time began. The God who calls them to LIFE ABUNDANT.

If you're going to invest thousands of hours and countless units of mental, emotional, and spiritual energy of your child's life in school, don't you want to know that school is preparing them not just to work well, but to LIVE well?

Cultivate: A Veritas Academy Podcast

Our mission at Veritas Academy is to cultivate loving, serving, thinking students through classical Christian education. We're thrilled to offer a new way that we are partnering with parents and friends to cultivate those good things in the lives of this generation of students.

Cultivate is a new Veritas Academy podcast that invites you into thoughtful conversations with Veritas leaders, faculty, and friends to help equip your family to live abundantly in Christ.

Our pilot episode opens up this discussion by laying out the foundation that answers the question posed in this blog post's title: What is the point of school?

In this first episode, we'll introduce you to the biblical concept of the Greek word paideia. In the podcast, Veritas Head of School Ty Fischer and Dean of Students Graham Dennis describe paideia as "the aim to, as much as possible, mature people into the excellence of the fullness of their humanity."

While this word has roots in the pagan Greek world, when applied in a Christian worldview it is an accurate description of the way that a school can cultivate a child into a young adult who flourishes in the calling that God has placed on their lives...that is, "in the excellence of the fullness of the humanity" that God has granted them.

"It's an interesting question. Do we want happy children? If we mean something like the momentary happiness you get from candy, then why are we studying? Latin and calculus don't always make kids happy in that sense of the word. What we're aiming at is joy. And the interesting thing about joy is that it can be attained even in the midst of struggle, difficulty and sorrow...It has to be something that's cultivated through character formation."
- Graham Dennis, Veritas Academy Dean of Students, Cultivate Podcast: What is the Point of School?

Listen in to the podcast to find out more about the different paideias presented to parents and kids today, how an education can (and should) help train your child to have "rightly-ordered loves" (find out what that means!), and what that looks like in everyday life at a classical Christian school like Veritas Academy.

And, if you like what you hear (we hope you do!), subscribe so you can be part of the rest of the enthralling conversations that are coming over the next few months!