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The Imago Vision: Past, Present, and Future ...
"As a stream can rise no higher than its source,
so it is probable that no educational effort can rise
above the whole scheme of thought which gives it birth."
~ Charlotte Mason ~
In the fall of 1979 I was newly returned from working with L'Abri in Switzerland. I was in the process of moving to Massachusetts to be near the L'Abri just starting in Southborough when I was invited to dinner with the Crightons in Bolton. In the course of the conversation about my desire to find a teaching job in the area, John Crighton said to me, "Why don't you start your own school?" I laughed; it was a preposterous idea, but the seed that grew into Imago had been planted.
Joodi, who had also been working at L'Abri, moved to this area as well, and after a lot of talking and more urging from another family whom she knew from college days, we decided that we would give it a try. It seemed to us that the first thing to do was to formulate our philosophy of education. We thought we needed to be very clear in our own minds about the purpose of education from a Christian perspective. What would the distinctives of our school be? We began to read and talk and read some more and talk some more, mostly books and articles were given to us by John Crighton, and our ideas began to take shape.
Some of the key ideas which went into our philosphy came from our time at L'Abri. Francis Schaeffer spoke often of Christ as the Lord of all of life. We wanted our school to be a place where the kind of Christianity displayed and talked about was a Christianity that related to every area of life so that children would see from the earliest years that this was not just a religion for one day a week and one small corner of life. We talked much to those who came to L'Abri about Christianity being the truth about reality. It was important to look for the truth and not to be afraid of questions because if Christianity is not the truth then it's not worth believing in. We wanted to start a school where children could be free to ask questions, where they would learn to ask good questions, and where they would also learn something about discerning the truth.
We decided that the first question to be addressed in formulating a philosophy of education is who are we, who is the child or person to be educated. All ideas about education and its purpose proceed from a certain view of people. If man is basically a social animal, then education should socialize him. If he is basically a stimulus-response mechanism, then education will condition him to have the correct responses. If man is basically an economic animal, then education should train him to earn a living. But, if we take seriously the biblical teaching on who we are as creatures made in God's image, then education should help us to become what God created us to be, primarily thinkers, choosers, and creators. We are reasoning creatures made to know Truth, we are moral cratures made to choose Goodness, we are aesthetic creatures, doers, creators made to appreciate and create Beauty. From this line of thought came the name we chose for the school, Imago. We are Imago Dei, made in the image of God, and this truth is the foundation upon which our philosophy of education is constructed.
We came to believe in a fairly narrow definition of what schooling should accomplish in contrast to the modern idea that the school should be the locus for socialization, for psycological help, for vocational training, and countless other things. We came to believe that the primary focus of education should be academic, training the mind and equipping students to use their minds well. One of the most significant things we had read was an essay by Dorothy Sayers called "The Lost Tools of Learning", in which she describes what has been lost by replacing the medieval curriculum and methodology for teaching young people with modern education. Sayers' ideas about the benefits of the medieval scheme of education known as the trivium which taught the "art of learning" rather that a "smattering of subjects" made a lot of sense to us and came to be the organizing principle for our setting of academic goals. Briefly, the trivium sees education as happening in three stages, which Sayers saw as corresponding to three stages of development in a child's growth to maturity. The first stage, called the grammar stage, is the learning of facts, the bits and pieces of any given subject. Memorization plays a large part here, and thus young children fit well with the grammar stage of learning. The second stage is the logic stage during which one begins to understand how the bits and pieces fit together, how the facts relate to each other. Children in the intermediate years learn to reason and to connect ideas and draw conclusions. Discussion and debate are effective methods for learning at this stage. The third stage of the trivium is the rhetoric stage; this is when one learns to take all that one has learned in the first two stages and apply it to working out a problem or defending a line of reasoning. One learns in this stage to express what one knows beautifully and persuasively.
In 1980 we officially formed The Imago School and made the decision to devote ourselves to the grammar and early logic stages of education. We were heavy on philosophy and very light on practical experience with real children. But we dived in with thirteen children our first year, then twenty-one, then thirty and began to work out this philosphy in practice. It certainly didn't come together all at once, and we made mistakes along the way, but I think I can say after eighteen years now that the ideas we began with are still the ideas we hold to and that these ideas have proven to be true to who children are and to how they learn. Our philosophy has kept us on course in spite of our weaknesses, failings, and mistakes.
For the first ten years or so we took each year as it came; we did little or no long-term planning as the work for each year consumed all our time and energy. I think that we assumed that this school which had come out of our heads into the real world would not outlive us. Then five or six years ago came a major shift in our thinking. For me it came most forcefully in the form of a statement by a good friend who supports us financially and lives far away from here. He said, "Do you want to know why I support a school hundreds of miles away that can't benefit my own children?. It's because you're teaching the next Francis Schaeffer!" What a zinger! Of course, who knows if this is the case or not, but it was an unforgettable line that gave me the beginnings of a larger vision for a school that maybe should outlive Joodi and me. There were others, parents of Imago alumni, who at the same time were telling us that Imago had to go on into the future. And so began the attempts at strategic planning, vision statements, the listing of all the hard questions about how to preserve the original vision and at the same time set about putting policies in place that would enable the school to go on after we stepped aside. For a while it seemed as if it were all questions and no answers.
We hadn't been at this for too long when we discovered the Association of Classical and Christian Schools , a group who had also founded a school based on Dorothy Sayers' essay and who had formed an association for like-minded people and schools. Through conferences and contacts with these folks we became confimed in what we were already doing with first through eighth graders, but they also challenged us to think about "finishing what we had begun", that is, adding the rhetoric stage and expanding into the upper grades.
Our choice to stop at eighth grade had never been a philosophical one. We just knew that we had our hands full with what we were trying to do, and we believed strongly that nothing should get in the way of our having the time to be sure that Imago was becoming and continuing as the kind of school we had envisioned in 1980. We always said we would welcome someone else who shared our vision coming along to begin a similar effort for the upper grades.
Well, the "someone else" has come along in the form of a task force of people, many of whom are connected with Imago, who have a strong desire to see a classical high school started. Initially this task force worked independent of the Imago board and even considered beginning a separate institution. However, in the fall of 1998 a proposal was made by the task force to the Imago board to expand the school into the upper grades. It seemed that the ground had been prepared, and we said, "Yes." I could see no good reason not to and many reasons to go forward. God has brought us this far and our leading seems to be to take the next step and to complete what we've begun by adding the third stage of the trivium to what we are already doing.
