One of the benefits of being at a classical Christian school is that we can connect our children with the great inheritance of Western Civilization. Though I do not usually like to include large quotes in a short update, I thought the following from Rodney Stark was worth sharing because it highlights the importance of what we are doing at Fortis Academy:
“Forty years ago the most important and popular freshman course at the best American colleges and universities was “Western Civilization.” It not only covered the general history of the West but also included historical surveys of art, music, literature, philosophy, and science. But this course has long since disappeared from most college catalogues on grounds that Western civilization is but one of many civilizations and it is ethnocentric and arrogant for us to study ours. It is widely claimed that to offer a course in “Western Civilization” is to become an apologist “for Western hegemony and oppression” (as the classicist Bruce Thornton aptly put it). Thus, Stanford dropped its widely admired “Western Civilization” course just months after the Reverend Jesse Jackson came on campus and led members of the Black Student Union in chants of “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go.” More recently, faculty at the University of Texas condemned “Western Civilization” courses as inherently right wing, and Yale even returned a $20 million contribution rather than reinstate the course. To the extent that this policy prevails, Americans will become increasingly ignorant of how the modern world came to be. Worse yet, they are in danger of being badly misled by a flood of absurd, politically correct fabrications, all of them popular on college campuses: That the Greeks copied their whole culture from black Egyptians. That European science originated in Islam. That Western affluence was stolen from non-Western societies. That Western modernity was really produced in China, and not so very long ago. The truth is that, although the West wisely adopted bits and pieces of technology from Asia, modernity is entirely the product of Western civilization.”[1]
Most of the blessings that we experience in modernity are the result of Christianity. There are many today such as Rodney Stark and Vishal Mangalwadi who write about this. Much of modern culture is robbing our children of knowing our history, a history that we can not only be proud about, but also which shows the incredible blessing Christianity has been to the world. It is an incredible privilege to be part of a school that is able to reconnect our children with their true heritage that is the direct result of what Jesus did on the cross.
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