Lauren Fritz teaches Dialectic Logic, Rhetoric Apologetics, Church History and Theology. She holds a BA in Philosophy and Religion from Covenant College.
Lauren attended Berean Academy, a Classical Christian school in Tampa, during her high school years. After graduating from Covenant College, she spent two years at Berean Academy teaching upper school humanities classes including history, philosophy, Bible, and Greek. This past year, she taught classes for home schoolers privately and through the Cambridge Study Center in Lakeland in addition to pursuing her MDiv from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.
During Geneva’s recent Open House event, Ms. Fritz shared with attendees her journey into and through Classical education and the profound impact it has had on her life. She left a deep impression on her listeners as she encouraged us in our educational decisions for our children. Her talk is transcribed below:
The Gift of a Classical Christian Education
Speech for Geneva Academy’s Open House
Spring 2012
Good evening. My name is Lauren Fritz, and I began teaching Rhetoric level Bible classes and Logic 2 here at Geneva at the beginning of this year. While this is my first year at Geneva, it is not my first year being a part of a classical Christian community. I went to a classical Christian school in Tampa during my high school years and then went back and taught there for two years after I graduated from college. In many ways, the community that I was a part of there was very similar to the Geneva community. So similar, in fact, that it still surprises me to realize that Geneva is, in some ways, a “cross-cultural” experience for me! Even some of the faces sitting in this room are familiar to me from my high school experience. Geneva’s headmaster, Mr. Cali, taught me many subjects, including several history, Bible, and rhetoric classes, and Ms. Pyle was my science teacher who was responsible for organizing many memorable field trips.
My family moved down to Tampa from Pennsylvania right before I started ninth grade. Part of the reason for the move was that my parents wanted to send my brother and me to Berean Academy, a classical Christian school in Tampa. At first, I was not at all on board with this idea. I had been home-schooled in middle school and loved it. I loved the flexibility and independence of being able to learn at my own pace, and I did not want to give that up at all. But, my parents decided that it would be best for me to go to Berean, even though I was not on board with the plan.
It has been ten and a half years since they first made that decision for me, and I can now say wholeheartedly that I am grateful to them for the choice that they made. One of the best gifts that they have ever given me was making it possible for me to go to Berean. Being a part of a classical, Christian learning community has had a deep impact on who I am as a person and on the way I learn, interact with ideas, and build relationships. I would like to take a few minutes this evening to share with you a little bit about the ways in which being part of a classical, Christian community has shaped me through the years.
The first way in which my education impacted me was that it taught me about the communal aspects of learning. Classical Christian schools place a large emphasis on the community learning environment, and that altered my understanding of what school is all about.
My teachers were passionate about the subjects they taught and desired to infect us with the same excitement they felt when they looked at the stars, thought about Teddy Roosevelt, or read poems by Wordsworth. They thought of us more as disciples than students and were concerned with mentoring us, not just filling our heads with facts. I still remember Mr. Cali explaining this to my class one day. He said that he was “calling us to a higher standard,” pushing us to join him on a higher plane of maturity as we strove to become godly young men and women. This desire to mentor us was also evident in the fact that our teachers showed us that they cared about our growth in all areas of life, not just academics, and were always willing to help us think through problems we might be facing with our families or friends.
Through the atmosphere created by my teachers, the stage was set for the students to also contribute to one another’s learning process. We learned to push each other to think more deeply, more clearly, and more practically about our ideas. And as we were friends outside of the classroom, we pushed each other to take those lessons beyond the walls of the school campus and apply them to our lives. Many of these relationships that I developed with both my teachers and peers were strong ones that are still very important to me to this day. And the lessons I learned about what a Christian learning community looks like have taught me how to strive for deep and meaningful relationships since high school.
I was also very blessed by the second facet of my high school experience, a classical education. Those of you here tonight have just seen some of the many great things that the students learn at the grammar stage through songs, chants, and history days. I was not in a classical school for either the grammar or logic stage, and I see that there are places in which my education could have been much stronger had I had a classical foundation. But I am so thankful that as I was only able to be in a classical Christian school for one of the three stages that God let it be the rhetoric stage. In many ways, this stage is the most important, because it is where all the pieces of the foundation which were laid in the first two stages start coming together in a beautiful way. Having learned the facts in the grammar stage and how to reason in the dialectic stage, the rhetoric stage teaches students how to interact with ideas and express their own thoughts and opinions about the world.
One of the first ways in which I saw myself being pulled into the rhetoric stage was in how my classmates and I started seeing more and more that all subjects are integrated. Threads of conversation kept coming out across the disciplines, and a discussion about the nature of justice in Bible class would appear again in a discussion about the period of Reconstruction in American history. And we also began to see how other aspects of our lives also dealt with these same ideas—movies we watched, songs we listened to, political events, and interactions with our siblings also dealt with themes like justice. We were starting to see our education not as one of distinct subject areas, but one where teachers were helping us become familiar with different aspects of the one Great Conversation that has been going on throughout history. We learned to take part in this conversation as we learned to interact with those who had different perspectives and share our own thoughts about the big questions of life.
Finally, my education impacted me because it was profoundly Christian. For classical Christian schools, a Christian education means more than having a Bible class or verses to memorize. A Christian education means that all truth is God’s truth, and God has something to say about every single subject that we study. This truth is the reason why all subjects are integrated in a classical Christian education—both math and history are related to each other because they are both different aspects of God’s world. As rhetoric students learning in this environment, we learned to take seriously how God’s word informs our perspective on different ideas. As I sought to have an informed opinion about the nature of justice, I learned to continually submit my answer to God’s Lordship and make sure that my thoughts were informed by his Word.
Through this Christian and classical community which I was blessed to be a part of, I was profoundly changed. One of the first occasions in which I began to really see this change in myself was in our Great Ideas class, which was very similar to Geneva’s Capstone class. We took this course throughout out junior and senior years. It was a survey in which we thought through various ideas that the greatest thinkers have wrestled with throughout history, and in some sense are the ideas about which every person thinks. I remember being intimidated by the idea of this class before we began. I had not read much of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or Marx and wasn’t even sure I would be able to understand them. But to my surprise, I found out through the course of the year, with help from our teacher, I could not only understand what these brilliant men were saying, but I had opinions about whether I thought their ideas were right or wrong on the subject of politics, the nature of the soul, and how we gain knowledge.
One day, when we were reviewing a unit, our teacher came in with a stack of books that we had just read excerpts from. He placed these on his right side, and he placed his Bible on his left side. And as we began talking that day, I took a good look at that stack of books. Those men and their ideas used to intimidate me. But now I understood at least some of their ideas, and I saw how what they proposed has greatly influenced the world in which I grew up in. And I realized then, even though I have nowhere near the IQ of Aristotle, I was still able to interact with him. Because of my classical education, I could understand the ideas he presented. Because of my Christian education, I could join in the conversation with him and know that I had something to say because I stood firmly rooted in the Word of God. And because of the learning community that I was a part of, I had gained practice interacting with these ideas on a regular basis.
Because of the classical Christian education I received, I have had instilled within me the passion to be a lifelong learner. I gained many tools in high school that still serve me well as I continue to learn, build relationships, and analyze and participate in culture. It is for these reasons and so many more that I say my education at a classical Christian school was one of the greatest blessings my parents ever gave me.
I know that many of you here tonight are parents who are thinking through which schooling option would be best for your children. I would urge you to pray and consider whether a classical Christian education at Geneva might be a way in which you could bless your children. They too could be blessed in the way that I was: to be equipped to interact with ideas that have shaped culture, to be firmly rooted in Scripture, and to have instilled within them a passionate love of God’s world and his truth. And maybe, one day, like me, they will stand before you and thank you for the decision you make now, and tell you that learning in a classical Christian community was one of the greatest blessings you could have ever given them.
