Introducing "The Bell Tower"
Mark Twain is credited with challenging parents not to let schooling get in the way of their children’s education. Of course, for many people, education and schooling are synonymous. School is the primary institution of education, they think. But this was not Twain’s vision of education. For him education is the daily, lifelong pursuit of learning, the discovery and contemplation of truth. Certainly, school is meant to be a place where this end is intentionally pursued, but school can just as easily become a barrier to a true and vibrant education as it can be a conduit for one. Many of us remember dreading going to school and we looked forward to the time when we would be free from the burden of having to go. This is what happens when schooling gets in the way of a good education. As schools grew over the last century, from local small-town schoolhouses to mammoth institutions, they required standardization and bureaucratic administrative oversight (words that kill the joy of learning just in reading them). No doubt many of the teachers were excellent, but the institution itself became one in which the joyful pursuit of learning and contemplation, imagination and discovery was hard to cultivate. They felt more like factories than schoolhouses.
The old schoolhouses appeared, in their very architectural design, to be a melding together of churches and homes. That is, they were the third leg of a social stool that would undergird and support the growth and maturing of children into adults, each supporting and reinforcing the other. But, inner city and suburban life made this small cooperative work virtually impossible, and the schools took on a very different look and ethos with their sprawling buildings and their industrial feel. The curriculum was divided among “subjects,” the study of which was for the most part siloed into distinct periods. In the middle and high school years, bells marked the end of periods and students shuffled off from one subject of study to the next. This system of schooling made it difficult for students to see the cohesiveness of truth across the curriculum and as such, a fractured vision of truth was inculcated, even if unintentionally.
At Chapel Field we long to return to the model of the schoolhouse, a place where the teaching of the family household and of the local church is reinforced and cultivated. We seek to be a hub of genuine education where students develop a true love for learning, giving them a steady diet of good, true, and beautiful things to study, contemplate, and discuss. We do our best to make Chapel Field a place filled with joy, laughter, and singing, one where students are excited to pursue wisdom. In order to fulfill this beautiful vision, it is vital that we establish a genuine partnership with the parents of our students and with the broader Chapel Field community.
Hence, we introduce this blog, which we are calling, “The Bell Tower,” as a reminder of the schoolhouses of the past. As the old school bell towers used to do, this blog will summon our school community to learn. It will offer articles from our staff and others and provide resources to our parents and to all lovers of classical Christian education. It will serve to promote a spirit of learning and provide a perpetual window into the life of Chapel Field. As we say among our faculty, we seek to be a “college of learners.” That is a group of friends who read together (co-legere) in the pursuit of wisdom. May we, as the greater Chapel Field community, be a grand college of learners.
Bill Spanjer serves as Head of Schools and Chairman of the Biblical Studies Department at Chapel Field.
