Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Is this the worst ever era of American pop culture? That was the question recently asked by an Atlantic article about the sheer number of prequels, sequels, remakes, and expanding cinematic universes. Among the most notable recent examples in the world of film, Wicked, which reimagines the world of Oz.
The same creative stagnation can be seen in music. While earlier generations could produce distinct kinds of music, it's increasingly difficult to find meaningful stylistic differences today.
Some of the most popular songs aren't even composed by humans anymore, but generated by AI. Where has all the creativity gone?
Well, many explanations could be offered here, but one deserves particular attention. There's been a precipitous decline of the kind of education in America that awakens the imagination, especially the moral imagination, enabling students to think creatively and innovatively within a framework of what is enduring and true. In its place is an education oriented around expressive individualism, in which children are encouraged to follow their hearts and look inside rather than first know what is true, good, and beautiful. Classical Christian education is uniquely positioned to fill such a void. At its very best, the modern classical education movement seeks to recover what Dorothy Sayers described as the lost tools of learning.
Such an education, centered on great books, great ideas, and classical languages, aims not merely at information transfer, but at the formation of a virtuous mind, heart, and life. Students are trained in virtue, encouraged to emulate heroes, invited to explore and embrace visions of greatness. In the process, many develop a lifelong love of learning. The author Vegan Gurion offers a compelling account of this formative process in his book Tending the Heart of Virtue, How Classical Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination. In it, he explains how classic children's stories like Pinocchio, the Velveteen Rabbit, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe can shape a child's moral imagination.
Young readers are transported into worlds that are filled with wonder, surprise, and danger. And as they imagine themselves alongside heroes and heroines, the images and metaphors of the stories can linger and shape how they experience this world, which is also full of wonder, surprise, and danger if they know where to look. Children internalize concrete pictures of good, evil, love, and sacrifice by which they then can interpret their own lives. When this moral imagination is awakened, the author concludes, The virtues come alive with personal, existential, and social significance. C.S.
Lewis made a similar point in The Abolition of Man in an essay entitled Men Without Chest. After criticizing the dominant educational models of his day that failed to form human beings, he described how education should cultivate students with chests. The chest mediates between reason and appetite, enabling students to not only recognize what is noble and what is base, but also to discern between that which deserves their love and that which does not, and then to also choose rightly between them. That kind of moral formation reflects what makes us truly human. If popular culture is to experience a renewal of genuine creativity and innovation, classical Christian education may very well be the taproot.
Ironically, the renewal of innovation doesn't actually begin by encouraging innovation for its own sake or by being obsessed by what's trendy and new. Rather, it begins with an immersion in what is permanent and true and good. It will begin with curious hearts and minds. Minds that have been trained and cultivated to think imaginatively within a meaningful moral framework. As Russell Kirk once observed, the works that endure are not the ones rooted in nihilism.
They're the ones that appeal to enduring truths and therefore to posterity. If classical education is to be truly Christian, it has to be tied to the grand biblical story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Learning that is interpreted through a Christian worldview will affirm the dignity of human nature, but will also acknowledge its limits, clearly distinguishing between creator and creation. Within this rich moral universe, students can be inspired and equipped to imagine and to create in ways that honor what is true, just, pure, lovely, virtuous, and praiseworthy. Classical Christian education offers a compelling model for education in an age of cultural decadence, or even what Carl Truman is calling an age of desecration.
It's a vision that's anchored in Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. With formed moral imaginations, Christians Are equipped to not only resist cultural stagnation, but also to create culture anew as co-laborers with the one who even now is making all things new. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Andrew Carrico. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
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