There are certain educational ideas that, once encountered, change the way you see education altogether. For me, the work of John Senior and the extraordinary Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas belongs firmly in that category.
The program, led by Senior alongside Dennis Quinn and Frank Nelick in the 1970s, took as its motto Nascantur in admiratione — “Let them be born in wonder.”
Few sentences capture so beautifully what I believe education ought to accomplish. You can find them resonated in our own motto In Admiratione Nati, in Sapientia Formati – “Born in wonder, formed in wisdom”
Before education becomes analysis, argument, examination and abstraction, there must be something to analyse. There must first be an encounter with reality. A child must have looked at the stars, heard beautiful poetry, wandered through woods, listened to great stories, sung songs, memorised verses, watched the seasons change and experienced the sheer strangeness and goodness of the world.
There must, in other words, be wonder.
This was one of the great insights behind the Integrated Humanities Program. Senior and his colleagues realised that many of the young people arriving at university were technically ready for higher education, but had missed something much more elementary. The imaginative and poetic foundations upon which intellectual life ought to be built had not been sufficiently cultivated.
Senior described it memorably:
“IHP was a [high] school occupying a college. We did the poetic work that was skipped.”
That phrase — the poetic work that was skipped — has stayed with me.
It identifies something that can so easily go wrong even within otherwise excellent education. We become so eager to lead children towards the Great Books that we forget to prepare them to love great books. We want them to discuss philosophy before they have wondered. We want them to analyse poetry before they have delighted in its sound. We want them to understand civilisation before they have fallen in love with the stories, songs, landscapes and traditions from which civilisation grows.
The IHP sought something different. Its students encountered Homer and Virgil, history told as narrative, poetry, music, memorisation and conversation. The aim was not merely the accumulation of information but the formation of the imagination and affections: helping students learn again how to see reality with delight and wonder.
This is what I love so deeply about Senior’s educational philosophy.
He understood that education is not simply the transfer of information from one mind to another. It is the cultivation of a human person.
And human beings do not live by propositions alone.
We are creatures who sing and remember, feast and mourn, tell stories, cultivate gardens, build homes, gaze at stars, make beautiful things and ask questions about eternity. An education worthy of the human person must therefore concern itself not only with what a student knows, but with what he notices, loves and desires.
The Soil of Christian Culture
This same conviction runs through Senior’s The Death of Christian Culture and The Restoration of Christian Culture.
These books can be uncomfortable reading because Senior refuses to treat the crisis of Christian civilisation as merely an intellectual problem. Christian culture cannot be restored simply by assembling the correct reading list or winning enough arguments.
Culture grows from a way of life.
It grows from worship, family, memory, beauty, manners, music, craftsmanship, festivals, stories and ordinary contact with the created world. The Restoration of Christian Culture moves from diagnosis toward precisely this question of how the cultural inheritance of classical and Christian civilisation might once again become something lived rather than merely studied.
That insight has profoundly influenced the way I think about classical education.
It is possible to give a child Homer, Augustine, Shakespeare and Aquinas and still miss something essential. The Great Books are the summit of an education, but mountains have foothills.
Children need fairy tales before philosophical treatises. They need poetry committed to memory before literary criticism. They need to recognise constellations, trees and birds. They need songs and stories, beautiful pictures, maps, gardens, churches, old buildings, celebrations and traditions.
They need what Senior called the poetic. They needed the context of the Good before the Great.
“the seeds (the Great Books) are good but the cultural soil has been depleted; the seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, adventures, which have developed in the thousand books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas, and the rest.”
Seniors Incomplete Reading List and some more of my musings on it can be found here: https://insearchofthefemininegenius.substack.com/p/1000-good-books?r=2ua2hs&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Education Begins in Love
Classical education is sometimes presented principally as rigour: difficult books, Latin grammar, formal logic and intellectual discipline. These things have their proper place, and I value them enormously.
But Senior reminds me that the beginning of education lies somewhere deeper.
It begins in love. We pay attention to the things we love. We desire to know the things that astonish us. Wonder awakens the question why?, and that question becomes the beginning of philosophy.
That is why Nascantur in admiratione has become such a beautiful educational ideal to me.
Because ultimately, the goal of a Christian classical education is not merely to produce children who have read impressive books.
It is to form people who are awake to reality.
The poetic work must not be skipped.