My wife and I have found a “trick” that will often help our kids “find their play” during those long summer days at home: we make them clean up the playroom. It’s a strange phenomenon, but if the playroom is a disaster, our kids are less likely to wander in and find something to do. But if it’s picked up, suddenly they’re interested. The room is now mysterious—what could possibly be in those toy bins? 

To be clear: cleaning up the playroom isn’t a silver bullet, but there is a discernable pattern. 

I was struck by the fact that this same pattern of behavior corresponds with a principle we’ve long held at The Saint Constantine School. We’ve maintained strict guidelines about how a classroom should look, the kind of furniture, pictures, and arrangements we allow. This is partially an attempt to redress the cluttered spaces all too common in the contemporary classroom, where the walls are hung with a variety of posters no one uses, and the floors are strewn with ugly rugs.  

Our students have proven to us that a cluttered, poorly designed physical space is distracting and demoralizing.  

This is not an accident, and it points to one of the core tenants of classical Christian education: the belief that one of the defining qualities of a good life is the degree to which body and soul exist in harmony with each other. 

Despite the increasing temptation to live virtual, disembodied lives in our current cultural moment, the body remains an essential feature of our humanity. The Christian church and the witness of early Church Fathers and Mothers attest to this reality. 

In his homily, “On Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children,” St. John Chrysostom exhorts parents and educators to exercise their children in virtue. He compares the body to a "city" that guards the soul. This city consists of five gates which lead directly to the soul itself: sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste. Through each of these gates, a child acquires the habits and knowledge required for living virtuously. For Chrysostom, the formation of the soul begins with the body. 

A child who experiences an over-indulgence in material luxuries or who receives an education aimed at worldly success becomes the prey of vainglory—that “wild beast” who “swoop[s] on a healthy, tender, and defenseless body…fasten[s] her foul teeth in her victim and inject[s] poison and fill[s] it with noisome stench.” The result, Chrysostom warns, will be a generation of man-children besotted by an excessive love for bodily pleasures and wealth, and who willingly commit any kind of wrongdoing. 

Parents and teachers are the guardians of the city, and their primary responsibility is twofold: a) to establish and uphold the laws of the city, and b) to guard the gates, for “it is through these gates that thoughts are corrupted or rightly guided.” The goal is to dispose the child toward wisdom, to make them “philosophers” in the literal sense of the word—lovers of wisdom.  

Contrary to the cultural formation of his own time, St. Chrysostom exhorts parents and teachers to remember that “thou art raising a philosopher and athlete and citizen of Heaven.” This is accomplished through exposure to goodness, truth, and beauty, as well as the exercise of self-control and service to others. 

Chrysostom’s image of the “philosopher and athlete and citizen of Heaven” is the precise aim of a classical Christian education. It’s for this reason that we require students to work in a garden, take care of goats and chickens, participate in the arts, listen to beautiful music, engage in extended in-person discussions about great books, and serve their school community through our stewardship program.  

If we want to know what is good, true, and beautiful; if, like Dante at the end of Paradiso, we want to behold the face of God, then we must live lives worthy of that knowledge.  

Such a life begins here and now: with the earth under our feet, the stars above our heads, and our neighbor at our side.