By: Dr. Sean A. Riley

Chief Strategy Officer of The Stony Brook School

Gaebelein Institute for the Integration of Faith & Learning

“We do indeed give the primacy to that spiritual truth revealed in the Bible and incarnate in Christ. That does not mean, however, that those aspects of truth discoverable by man in the realm of mathematics, chemistry, or geography are any whit less God’s truth than the truth as it is in Christ….But all the time there is the unity of all truth under God.”

Frank E. Gaebelein

Stony Brook has endeavored to demonstrate that serious Christian commitment was not only compatible with academic rigor but that the highest form of learning actually required faith as a unifying force.

The purpose of a school extends beyond the intellect to the will, to the heart and character of students. Gaebelein wrote in his inaugural address, “Education without character is worthless. Character is the well-spring of moral conduct. And character itself depends upon inspirational force. That inspirational force is found in religious experience, and that experience, in turn, is derived from the Christian gospel.” C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, later echoes Gaebelein, writing, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” The question then becomes, which values should schools instill? The values Stony Brook has been built on are those that are grounded in God’s character, modeled perfectly in Jesus, and made available to us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. 

In what follows, I discuss the deepest insights that have grounded the distinctively Stony Brook approach to academic and character formation throughout its history and show how they inform the school’s practice as it enters its second century.

What is Christian education? 

Christian education is only possible if all the educators and administrators are themselves Christians, committed to core Christian doctrines, modeling Christian character consistently and employing Christian practices in service of Christian aims. In this section, I will explore the doctrinal aspects of Christian education. In the next section, I will explore Christian character formation.

Stony Brook faculty have always been required to sign the Platform of Principles, which entails belief in the Christian meta-narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.

Second is the belief that human beings have a nature, a function, and an ultimate destination. To flourish, they must order their loves properly, worshipping God above all, loving their neighbors as themselves, caring for creation, and creatively stewarding physical assets in service of those aims. Education ought to promote flourishing, and to do that it must equip students with spiritual, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic virtues. 

Third is the belief that human beings, despite their many differences, are equal in the ways that matter most to God. Nearly all Christians affirm that humans possess an immaterial soul that is “made in God’s image,” and that that image gives them dignity and worth beyond human capacity to measure. Christian educators thus must be committed to treating all students with equal reverence as God’s image-bearers while also adapting their methods to the unique needs of individual students. They must help their students turn away from idolatry, hatred of their neighbor, and destruction of creation. They do this by knowing and loving their students and spurring them on to become the versions of themselves God intended when He created them. 

Fall

The Doctrine of the Fall simply states that while humans were created with an intellect capable of discovering truth and a will oriented towards union with God, humans have abused their God-given freedom and have turned away from God towards themselves and towards lesser goods. This improper reorientation of the heart is called sin, and sin has led to the destruction of the whole created order. As a result, the whole world, and all the individuals in it, are broken and in need of healing. In an educational context, this means that everyone in the institution will have a proneness towards idolatry and towards moral and intellectual vices. Some of the key manifestations of this in a competitive academic environment are intellectual pride, envy and jealousy, and sloth, though anger, greed, gluttony, and lust certainly play their part in diverting school communities and individuals away from their proper ends. Idolatrous ends will always threaten to derail a Christian school from its primary mission. 

Redemption 

The fact of the fall means that schools cannot accomplish their mission without redemption. Christians believe this comes by grace through faith in Christ. Human effort, including education, cannot by itself solve the problem, though secular educators are quick to make promises and implement trendy programs they claim will save finally save humanity. Christians hold that only God has the power to overcome the mess humans have made and that God invites those who have been transformed by grace to join in on the redemptive work. In that context, education can play an important role in not only impacting individual student lives but also healing a broken world. 

Restoration 

Is everything sad going to come untrue?

Towards the end of Tolkien’s The Return of the King, Sam asks Gandalf, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” Christians believe that the answer to that question is yes, and Christian educators believe the work we do in education co-creating and co-redeeming is thus meaningful and hopeful when aligned with God’s ultimate plan. To join in that restorative work, Christian schools must repudiate all worldly ends and definitions of success like wealth, fame, pleasure, power, and college admissions and embrace the Christian ends of union with God, love of truth, beauty, and goodness, growth in moral, intellectual, and aesthetic virtue, and redemptive leadership and innovation. Its curriculum should prioritize the study of the Scriptures and contemplation of “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable” (Phil. 4:8). The teachers should teach students “to be able to think in Christian categories” as T.S. Eliot put it. Students in a Christian school should learn how belief in creation, fall, redemption, and restoration impacts our understanding of the academic disciplines and how it should impact their character formation and sense of calling. The pedagogy of the school should also align with God’s restorative work, with teachers loving students and teaching them what to love. As David Brooks puts it in The Road to Character, “We don’t become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves. We don’t become what we know. Education is a process of love formation. When you go to a school, it should offer you new things to love.” Discipline should be restorative, classroom activities should inspire wonder and give students opportunities to exercise agency and make mistakes without fear of shame, and assignments and assessments should bless students by elevating their minds towards the things of God and stirring their hearts towards good works.

Christian Character Formation

How should Christian schools go about reorienting hearts and shaping character? First and crucially, a Christians school must recognize that its work is completely dependent upon the redeeming work of Christ. When the Christian school shifts from understanding its work as participating in God’s Kingdom work to seeing itself as the Messiah, pride takes root and the whole enterprise is doomed. Humility, self-sacrificial love, and receptivity to the promptings of the Holy Spirit are essential to Christian character formation. Christian schools should guard against vainglorious boasting when students put their faith in Christ or devote themselves to a life of ministry. 

Second, schools should ignite the moral imagination of their students through exposure to living, historical, and fictional exemplars of virtue. In many ways, the teacher is the curriculum. Lessons are often caught more than they are taught. Students will forget most of the facts and some of the skills taught by a teacher, but good teachers shape their students’ character for a lifetime by showing them a living exemplar of the good life. This is especially true in a boarding school context, where students and teachers live in community together and students get to see teachers not only as classroom instructors but as coaches, dorm parents, spouses, and parents. A Christian school must hire and train teachers who have the character they want their students to acquire. Their professional development programs should focus not only on curriculum and pedagogy but also on Christian character formation. James K.A. Smith, speaking at a Society for Classical Learning conference in 2013, said, “Teachers of virtue are not born; they are formed. They are not produced by a diploma or certificate or credential. They are shaped by immersion in practices that bend their loves and longings towards Christ in his coming Kingdom. In short, becoming a teacher of virtue takes practice.” A Christian school must therefore be more than a school for students. It must also be a school for the adults, a place where the teachers themselves participate in Christian community with one another and engage in Christian practices together.

“Teachers of virtue are not born; they are formed. They are not produced by a diploma or certificate or credential. They are shaped by immersion in practices that bend their loves and longings towards Christ in his coming Kingdom. In short, becoming a teacher of virtue takes practice.”

James K.A. Smith

Third, the Christian practices that shape the character of exemplary teachers, must also be implemented amongst the students. Historically, Christians have employed practices like prayer, meditation on and memorization of the Scriptures, worship, careful study, hospitality, and acts of service. These practices should inform the daily routines of a Christian school and be particularised to the specific school context. At Stony Brook, for example, students participate in dorm prayer, daily chores called ‘workjob,’ and focused study during study hours. They also go on service and missions trips. In the coming years, the school’s character formation program will be developed further through the implementation of daily character-building activities informed by empirical research into human flourishing. 

Fourth, practices are best taught in the context of intentional discipleship relationships. Stony Brook does this through its robust advisory and chapel programs as well as organically in the context of class, sports and activities, and dorm life. With a small teacher to student ratio, each student can be known, loved, and discipled effectively. More important, though, is the fact that every student-facing adult in the community is, when properly disposed, able to hear the promptings of the Holy Spirit to speak a word of love or truth in what Stony Brook teachers refer to as “the unguarded moment,” when students are most receptive to input from the adults, often outside of the classroom context. All advice, encouragement, and reproach should take place in the context of relationships, where the student receiving input knows that above all else she is understood and loved by the adult, even when the adult must challenge or discipline the student. 

Fifth, a strong character formation program will develop a shared vocabulary of the virtues and vices. At SBS, we have adopted the classical moral, intellectual, and theological virtues of love, faith, hope, wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance and the language of the capital vices: pride, vainglory, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. In seventh grade, our curriculum focuses on courage. In eighth, it turns towards temperance. Ninth graders learn about justice, tenth graders wisdom, eleventh graders love, and twelfth graders hope. Shared vocabulary provides everyone categories of thought that can be referenced when giving advice, making and evaluating decisions, and crafting policies. They also equip students for self-reflection and critical assessment of literary and historical figures and current events. 

Lastly, character formation must be responsive to new challenges as they arise in the culture at large and within the local school community. In every decade of its existence, Stony Brook has had to figure out how to apply the eternal truths in a changing temporal and social context. In the early decades of the school’s existence, students needed to face the Great Depression and the Great Wars. In the fifties through seventies, the school had to prepare students for a world marked by the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual revolution, and the Cold War. Today, students need help navigating gaming, social media, and access to unfiltered content on the internet, a global pandemic, and social unrest and polarization on many fronts. In each era, the school has had to hold onto its core identity while developing methods to meet students where they are and preparing them for the world they will enter after graduation. These methodological adaptations require great creativity and sensitivity, but the school’s steadfast commitment to Christ, to Biblical truth, and to Christian character formation give it an anchor that allow it to innovate on the periphery without losing its core identity.