“Frodo was now safe in the Last Homely House east of the Sea. That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, ‘a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all’. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness.”
-The Fellowship of the Ring, by J. R. R. Tolkien
Providence Classical School is situated in sunny Chandler, AZ, an East-valley suburb of the greater Phoenix area. The weather there is beautifully moderate for about eight months of the year and is something akin to living on the surface of the sun during the other four. The school had been organized some sixteen years prior by a few families who had homeschooled their children together in a kind of cooperative and, as that group grew, it eventually became a full-scale school. Providence hosts Kindergarten through 12th grade, all under one roof, and boasts 273 students in total. The school is small by public school standards but larger than many other private Christian schools of its kind. It is growing steadily each year as more people learn about it from their friends and family.
Amid the myriad of schools throughout the U.S. few are quite so peculiar as this one. If you were to visit and roam its hallways you might see, and hear, a wide variety of strange things.
Traveling down the western wing of the school, for instance, you might think you’ve unwittingly traveled through a wardrobe into Narnia or, perhaps, that you have stumbled into one of Aesop’s fables or, again, you might find yourself accosted by children looking like they just got off the Mayflower. The grammar school at Providence loves to enter the world of literature and history in as many ways as possible. They not only read great books but they act them out, they put on “living wax museums”, they build dioramas of scenes from the stories they read, and they often have costume contests and special feasts celebrating with, and as, the characters of those stories. You will, of course, also overhear them doing recitations of grammar rules, math facts, and timelines of historical events, but these will not resound in your ears like the droning of robots. No, these will come to your ears in joyful song and with children’s laughter. These children delight in learning, they love their teachers and their friends, and they hate being sick and missing school for fear they will miss out on learning something new.
If you go down the east wing of the school, on the other hand, you will find that it contains the students who are in the Logic and Rhetoric schools. Some other strange sounds might meet your ears here. Whereas in many schools around the country the talk in the hallways is about “the big game last night” at Providence you’d be just as likely, indeed far more likely, to hear students in a lively discussion about the metaphor of Plato’s cave in book 10 of Republic or about the ethics of Machiavelli’s advice to The Prince. You might overhear students reading a Latin or Greek text and perhaps reciting a poem in either of those languages. You will hear some students practicing their ceremonial or forensic speeches for Rhetoric class while others are going over all the valid moods and figures of categorical syllogisms. You will also notice that aesthetics matter here. The halls and rooms are filled with reproductions of great art from the masters. The works of Rembrandt, Carvaggio, Monet, and many others can be seen, dwelt upon, and loved here. The students all take classes with Mr. Cole, where they learn to draw, paint, and sculpt. Beauty is demonstrated to be objective and real. not merely “in the eye of the beholder”, and students are taught the value of representational art as opposed to the now en vogue Modern and Postmodern deconstructionism. And, oh, the music you may hear from their choir! Well, there is no describing that, you’ll just have to go listen sometime. Wow.
As strange as this school is, with its classes, and its students, the teachers here are surely even stranger. None of the teachers at Providence have a teaching degree. Not one. What they do have is a deep and committed love for their disciplines and subject-area expertise. The highschool science teacher, Mr. Evans, has a master's degree in chemistry and had worked for a local pharmaceuticals lab for several years before he started at Providence. Mrs. Cody earned a bachelor’s degree in performing arts and was busy in theater productions (both acting and directing) in New York for over a decade before she came to teach drama here. Many of the teachers have advanced degrees in their area of interest and a couple of them even have a Ph.D. (while others, like Mr. Matthews, are still plugging away after one). The teachers work at this small school, often for less money than they could get elsewhere, because they believe there is more good to be done here than can be done in the state universities. They work here because Providence is a place that cherishes what is true, good, and beautiful.
In many schools the relationship between student and teacher is antagonistic, with faculty lounge conversations consisting of complaints about students, and with student bathrooms full of curses and fist shaking toward the teachers. This is just where Providence stands apart. The teachers love what they teach and they love the young people they are teaching. The faculty is too entranced with the love of learning for it not to be contagious and catching among the students. Why would two teachers waste time complaining about students when they could be debating the merits of scholasticism or disputing over whether Petrarch or Shaekespeare wrote the better sonnet? Why would students malign their teachers when it is so obvious to them that their teachers really love them, and that they love what they are teaching, and that every student should love it along with them? The occasional rebel student may slip in here or there but they don’t last long. Such students typically find that resistance is futile and they fall in love with the truth, goodness, and beauty dripping from every square inch of the school.
But I digress…we have a murder case on our hands.