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Rooted: Why Classical Education Needs Community

Rooted: Why Classical Education Needs Community

Last updated on: September 12, 2026 at 3:44 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Rooted: Why Classical Education Needs Community 2026-09-12T15:44:32-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Community Incarnates Classical Education

I sometimes read from my great-grandfather’s Bible. Lewis Dayton Reynolds (LDR) outlined his sermons in the book, which was small enough to fit in his saddlebag as he rode from church to church in West Virginia. My grandfather owned and read it, as did my father. Someday, my son will read from the same text and learn the Word.

Each generation added a few notes, and I had it carefully restitched so I could pass it on in usable condition. As a soul with a body, such things matter to humans. Touching the book is a small connection to my roots, and knowing that I will only “own” it for a short time reveals the future: I am a caretaker of this book.

As I read the Word using the family Testament, the good old book, I see: LDR’s notes, Papaw’s newspaper clipping holding the place, and Dad’s careful underlining. I am part of a fraternity. Sharing this with my children, I invite them into a community created long ago and a discussion that each generation has seen as having eternal significance.

This Bible Roots Me Properly In a Family

People have souls and bodies. When I smelled a rose on the green grass with Hope on the Isle of Skye, the beauty in the rose, the place, and in Hope brought joy to me: soul and body. Holding a physical book from my great-grandfather does the same: I can feel the quality of the paper, smell the dusty leather smell of old books, and my soul is lifted by reading the words of Life. The rustling pages are like church bells, and the leather’s odor is incense.

This book is an outer sign of the invisible community the ancestors created. I participate, nudge the traditions a bit, and pass on what I have received. When bad choices have confused me, these experiences are maps back to the real me.

Eidos:

This is the eighth in a series on classical education. To read part one, click here.

Things change. The Greek sage Heraclitus was right: you cannot step into the same river twice. The water is always changing, ever flowing. Yet there exists with the river, as Heraclitus knew, an idea of the river. The Little Sandy River has a spot where generations have been baptized, including me. That spot has shifted a bit as the river has shifted in her course, yet the sense of place remains. You can go to that river to pray just as Mom and Dad did. The river changes, the River endures. A man could be baptized in the Elk River just fine, but it would not be the same.

The Most Robust Academic Culture

One place where generations found enduring culture was the schoolhouse. Generations would go to the community building, root for the same football team as their grandparents. If blessed to go to college, families frequently picked the one where they had roots. My darling wife led me up the bell tower at Wheaton to announce our engagement, as generations had done and will do, at her alma mater. She introduced me to the most robust academic culture I had experienced to that moment.

My schooling had been rootless until I finally reached her alma mater as a visitor, then went on to the University of Rochester. This was my fault, not my undergraduate education’s. I was too intent on getting a diploma to get much education, though mentors and professors tried.

Every time I missed being part of a community, I failed my school. I was too intent on getting moving and unaware that I needed deeper roots that spread beyond my family or even my particular church.

In our broken world, family and local churches can be too centered on our personal experience. We risk being decent family members and churchmen but never good Samaritans.

A canonical community (classical) should foster good Samaritans.

Education Should Be Rooted in a Wholesome Community

Moving has reduced our ability to create such places. We are more mobile than any generation in human history. We can be alone more easily, and we have many more choices. Ties to “what our family did” or to alma mater are weaker, though rooting for a college football team still has some power to remind one of old school ties. Skills must be acquired, and diplomas are practical, but “to know self” and see God requires stronger stuff. A school is not a fundamental social category. We need families and the church. School can be a training ground for self-knowledge and the Godward path. Mistakes are less costly than those made in the family circle: you can sass your professor in ways you cannot treat your parent.

Learning facts or skills can be difficult. Each fact or skill can be used for its own sake without reference to the greater good. Certain kinds of educational experiences are hard to do in the context of family, church, or even a city. Medical education requires monastic, grueling discipline. Many students who wish to be nurses lose their calling amid the rigors of biochemistry or paying off debt incurred to get training. Without a strong community grounded in the past and serving the area, consistent with the values of family, church, we can get lost.

We come unmoored. Canonical education naturally helps with this problem. An enduring canon, reading the same texts across generations, ties the students to living and dead alums. Yet thinkers such as Albert Nock or Allen Bloom, classically educated, used their learning to create communities that isolated them from most people, even near their schools. Alma mater became isolated for scholars and others, with too little effort to change the situation.

Virtuous Community Needed

Sometimes we even boast of the separation of “town and gown”. Townies are stereotyped as servants at best and barbarians at worst. “Gownies” are sneered at as useless parasites on the community. Education often cleaves families and churches apart.

There must be a virtuous community to ground each one of us in classical education, or we will surely be lost.

A virtuous community is one that enables members to flourish and strengthens virtuous ties to family, church, and the broader community.

The prophet Amos should approve of a canonical school community.

The classical community should develop customs and habits that speak to community members: body and soul. If cultivated with care, the college or school can be a haven for the alum, yet one that sends the graduate or professor into the world to seek justice with mercy. The scientist will often have to work amid monastic isolation and rigor, but the larger community will help them by caring for the scientist’s whole self.

Eidos:

This is the eighth in a series on classical education. To read part one, click here.

Place

A canonical school should love the place where God has called them. They should work from the first day to name each tree, to cultivate natural beauty, and to make even the simplest building a lovely memory. This need not cost much money. Over the years, an old office building can develop charming nooks and eccentric folkways. Each class can leave an element or renew traditions for the years to come.

A school should endure and make beautiful where they are. This work must extend to the broader community. Make the canonical school learn from the failures of classical schools and not replicate the old Town and Gown division. This can be done by opening the campus to the community in appropriate ways and giving community members not in the school a role. Serving and being served in love breaks down divisions. As much as possible, the town should be proud of the college and feel part of it.

By sustaining the city or town that allows the college or school to exist, they offer the gift of place.

People

Only a great saint, and then only for a time, can have community with God and self. We are lonely without each other.

As a result, the flourishing of persons is essential to the community. If only leaders are joyful, then tyrants rule. If too many members fail to invest in the people around them or in the community, then the school becomes a mob.

Members of the community are never meant to be used, but the very reason actions are taken. A community exists to help humans flourish, not books in libraries, buildings, or any other stuff.

The community should invite as many people as possible to the great discussion. Just as the church does not limit membership, so resources permitting, the community should be open to “whosoever will.” Naturally, some tasks or skills are beyond the calling, competency, or capacity of some members. No good sports team will have me as a player. They can enfold me in other ways!

This is one place where creating liturgies for an area can provide a meaningful experience for all. Not all can block and tackle, but most of us can tailgate. To sing the school song in community at an event does not require my ability to star in the college opera.

Change the customs rarely so the generations recognize what has been.

The Supernatural Element

A sinner needs Christ. A church needs Christ. A family needs Christ.

A good community will need Christ. My father used to call this “being in the flow” of what Christ was doing or wished to be done. We can do good things in our own power by the grace of God, but when a school or college is “in the flow,” miracles can happen.

This cannot be purchased. No amount of time or research can bring manna to an educational wilderness. A party may be “fun,” but for it to be wholesome and generationally joyous: come Holy Spirit!

Old With Some Whim-wham

A canonical school will build a liturgy and change it as rarely as possible.

Ideally, even a new canonical school will feel old. How? We will join with older classical schools in a community of shared customs. We can make those customs fit our particular needs while still retaining ties to educators gone before us. We must be careful to cherish their virtues but not bring over their vices. A racist custom is not hallowed by time.

Many miss that some even very ancient customs are full of whimsy. The toasts and feasts are not all serious. This jollification is good for us. Laughing at our foibles or playing games together helps keep us humble.

Find some whim-wham: some whimsical piece of costuming or device. Wear a funny hat at certain times. Break a piñata. Hold a parade for the sake of killing some fictional monster. Do not let the spirit of Gradgrind close the circus of life that God has made.*

The school that laughs at itself will not easily fall for “consultants” or other flimflam men who so infect education. Flimflam men are serious: there is some trouble in River City that only they can cure. A little whim-wham will reveal the shallowness of the flimflam. A scholar can joke about his knowledge because of the depth he has in the field. The flimflam man cannot stray from his lines in jest lest he be exposed as the fraud he is.

Laughter is the best cure for fashionable educational flimflam. One should also avoid JimJam: cheap whim-wham. Jimjam is the party where someone bought cheap party favors or confused crudity with humor. Jimjam is a shortcut and can never produce the Gaudy Night that is full of joy, serious sentiment, and some larks with whimwham.

One way to help is to turn events, particularly graduation, into a celebration of God and alma mater. The graduates receive their reward: lifelong membership in the college or school. Gratitude is the key response.

Celebrate the alma mater, and the graduates will be celebrated as members of that community. Make sure that, from the very start of a college or school, there is a book they can sign or a wall where names are placed as each generation of teachers and graduates come and go. Call all to something greater than an isolated self.

I have been blessed to work with people and at places that have or were creating rich cultures. This is a great gift and helps me value this aspect all the more.

I will go home from the community here at College of Biblical Studies, greater than myself, better fit to read LDR’s Bible, and a better husband, father, and grandparent. The chapels and events here call me out of myself into a practice of Paradise.

*See Dickens’s in Hard Times.

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