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Education and Religion
Classical Education Must Teach Us to Make the Fries

Classical Education Must Teach Us to Make the Fries

Last updated on: October 30, 2026 at 5:54 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Classical Education Must Teach Us to Make the Fries 2026-10-30T17:54:29-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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To Eat Fries, Someone Must Make Fries

To Discuss and Do: Make Fries

Discussing tasty fries and the longing to eat them begins in me. No amount of dialectics can make a crispy fry or give it just the right amount of salt. No discussion is so heated that it can keep the fries from growing cold, thus becoming lard sticks. The discussion needs the fry cook, or there will be no fries.

Eidos:

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

This is obvious. Sometimes I have forgotten this lesson. When we go on a date, Hope doesn’t just want to talk about being in love. Hope wishes me to do loving acts. Sadly for my profession, doing philosophy has never birthed a child. We cannot build a bridge only by theorizing about bridges, or have a band concert by sitting on the front porch discussing one.

The advocate for classical education might respond:

Looking at and knowing about a thing or idea is very important. The work of particular skills is learned elsewhere and is secondary.

This is true as far as it goes.

We must not forget the limits of what even a canonical school is doing in school and undergraduate college: we are preparing in a particular manner for life in the city and in God. This is no small task, and we should not be distracted from the main job.

This work has practical consequences.

At the very least, this education enables me to know what I want, what I should want, and how to have my desires met in God’s way. How can I serve others if I do not know what they wish to have? My desire to feed the poor, my hope that they too will like tasty fries, has never made a single fry or helped me know what my neighbor wishes.

Education helps. Reflection on the words of Jesus tells me that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and so disciplines my desire for fries: may all the world that wishes for a fry have a fry. This is schoolwork. We help students understand that we need fry cooks, help them discern whether they have a calling to cookery, and send them out to find a master chef.

Nobody has eaten anything yet. We need competent doers. Someone must know how to make the fries and make the fries. For that, more than school is needed, and we must always impress that on ourselves and those associated with us.

The educator has much to teach in conversation with each other, God, and the cosmos: virtue, mathematics, reading, writing, and music. Many corollary disciplines, such as the sciences, spring from these discussions. There is so much to learn! I have never been to a school or college that did not try to impress on students how little each of us knows compared to all there is to know. We are not God, and so even cumulatively cannot know all there is to know. Some things are surely too difficult for us, as a pocket calculator showed me, and AI machines are showing mathematicians.

And yet there is a tendency in those teaching canonically (classically) to put off learning the particular skills of a discipline. We rightly value introducing everyone to making music, theater, experiments, and games.

But:

Discussion of great texts cannot replace learning the methodology of a discipline. Just as learning the history of science is not doing science, so too is discussing philosophical texts not doing philosophy. At the end of the kindergarten-through-undergraduate experience, a good canonical school will have prepared a student to gain those particular skills, helped identify the best place and means to acquire them, and perhaps begun to lay the framework for those skills.

Introduce Methods (at Least Briefly)

This is a difficult balance. We want people to be able to think well in general and to give them the general tools needed to live a good life. Too often, certain people have not been exposed to “science” because they are “arts” people. Even very early on, some American schools allow hyper-specialization, whereby the time a young person graduates from college, they do not know much or think very well, yet they are very good at doing something.

Any canonical school must reject this limited education. Not everyone can become a true singer, mastering the vocal arts, but all should sing. Not everyone will do excellent scientific research or engineer a building. Yet, all educated people should understand generally how such research or building gets done by trying it out a bit as amateurs. Experience says that most classical schools try to get this right.

We are sometimes foolishly, or at least inexplicably, proud of never creating pathways for those who sense their calling early or who can and should begin to learn the disciplines. Without allowing only the theater kids to act, we must begin to recognize the calling of a theater kid. In many colleges, this is the job of the major. In a canonical school, this is the role of the graduate school or workplace training*, yet by senior year, a canonical school without majors must have enabled a young adult to begin this mastery education after leaving the canonical school.*

We cannot send bright, educated people out of school with no sense of their particular role in the city of God or basic competency to master the arts of filling that role. This is not exhausted by the term “job” and will not always be wage-earning. Canonical schools must have a student prepared for the apprenticeship that is learning to do.

Sometimes this will involve advising particular students to leave the canonical school to join a college with a major. The time comes when a community recognizes a person’s calling and that they are generally educated! This does not take the same amount of time for everyone. There is, somewhere, a rare freshman who should begin intensive training in cookery, having already become generally educated with a virtuous soul.

Naturally, every canonical school will introduce methods to everyone.

The music class will show what can be done by some and how it would be achieved over decades of work. Though every school has to limit offerings, technology allows anyone to see what doing the real deal would look like. Many of us wish to do what comes easily or naturally, and this is often evidence of a calling. The wisdom of centuries has slowed down this specialization to at least allow the cultivation of the arts of living well. We need literate engineers and philosophers who value engineers.

A man should be able to read a poem, write one for his family, appreciate music, do some math, and do justice with mercy in the city and the City to come. Some will also be able to make fries. Plato proposes a definition of justice as each person doing what they are called to do and are competent to do. While not a full definition, this does capture part of what a just society would be. Every man will be able to sit under his own vine . . . one he has planted. . . whatever the “vine” might be in his own life.

Generally Educated (Know the Limits)

Generally, a man should be educated, but a general education is not sufficient.

The good news is that the sixteen years of more formal education Americans often receive is not designed to be the end of education.

A man should keep reading and gaining specialized skills to the end of his days. We will be as happy as we can be in the Paradise of good, and a good use of our time here before those good days is to increase our capacity for Godly pleasure. This is why gaining some facility in the work of historians, philosophers, engineers, craftsmen, or other specific disciplines is not just good in this life but for the life to come. We change as our minds and bodies grow, both older and wiser.

Most of all, we must know what we do not know. I know many facts about history, yet I am not a trained historian. I must respect the craft. I have opinions about art without being an artist. I must honor the work an artist does. I have wishes for my house, but carpentry and plumbing skills elude me. I must honor the knowledge of carpenters and plumbers. Humble before how little I know and how few things I can do, I seek to live near a community of scholars and workers who can fill the gaps for me as I labor to help them in the few areas I have mastered.

In the Paradise of God, all men will be brothers and gather before the throne: some will make the fries, and we will get to eat them. Others will praise God in the fries, and we can sing their songs! A few will know how to make the little treat, the simple gift, beautiful. All will do as they are able in perfect justice. When we have been there ten thousand years, I hope to draw a cat better, study a star, and perhaps even make some tasty prize for the feast of knowing and doing that will never end.

Whatever good there is in fries in this life will be saved and not forgotten. If they should be made, someone will make them. Imagine the results. Now, recall how trivial the example is: stuff is not the goal, but persons and Person. Our love of fries will remain, but as an entry point to something greater. Our fry-cook skill is a training ground for the deeper art: we can be and will be artisans of loving each other and God.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill to men.

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About John Mark N. Reynolds

John Mark Reynolds is the Vice President of Advancement and Strategic Leadership at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston. As an educational entrepreneur, he was the founding president of The Saint Constantine Schools and College and the founding director of the Torrey Honors College at Biola University. As provost at Houston Christian University, he oversaw the formation of the apologetics and media programs. He is also a philosopher and joyous curmudgeon. He lives with his wife, the Fairest Flower in Christendom, his two granddaughters, daughter, son-in-law, and brother in the jolly Saint Theodora House. You can read more about the author here.

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