There aren’t as many classical schools in the state of Arkansas as there are in other states. The largest private school, Little Rock Christian Academy, doesn’t call itself classical at all. It has 1,660 students from preschool to twelfth grade. This is a solid increase of 260 students since 2017, Head of School Justin Smith tells me, putting the building at full capacity. Applications may go up, but the academy can’t fit any more kids inside. The competitive admissions enable the school selectively to admit those who are wholly “mission-aligned,” Dr. Smith explains.
The mission is Christian all the way; Smith calls it a “discipleship school.” He was recruited to Little Rock from Houston in 2017 with the promise, “Come visit us and you’ll see God’s fingerprints all over the place.” College prep, AP courses, athletic teams, music, arts, and thirty clubs—all the trappings of a top suburban public high school in an upper-income area, but the first goal remains firm: to produce “disciples of Jesus.” The Academics page on the website states, “Biblical Worldview (BWV) is the foundational perspective from which all subjects are taught and applied at LRCA.” Many graduates go on to the University of Arkansas or to Baylor, but in recent years more and more of them are choosing Christian liberal arts colleges.
Tuition maxes out at $14,000 in eleventh and twelfth grades, and the school has no debt. Capital projects aren’t initiated until the money is there. The annual retention rate for teachers at the school is 95 percent. That’s an extraordinary number given that, according to a recent report, each year in the United States 16 percent of teachers leave their jobs and quit the profession entirely. Most of those who leave cite an unpleasant work environment, not pay, as the primary cause. That fits what’s happening here, for while Little Rock Christian can’t quite match the salaries of public school teachers because of a new state law that guarantees starting teachers a salary of $50,000, the school has little trouble recruiting people to run classrooms. (It should be said that this law also contains provisions demonstrating that Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Arkansas Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva strongly support private schools, including Christian ones. It provides for “Education Freedom Accounts” for parents who pull their kids from poor-performing schools and need help with private school tuition. It also flatly rejects the identity politics of so many public schools. If only more states would follow the lead of Arkansas.)
Each department of the school is reviewed every five years, which is where the classical vision enters the curriculum. When the school opened in 1977, it had no classical ambitions, but Dr. Smith says he and the staff have found more and more to emulate in the classical model (I encountered Smith at a meeting hosted by the Classic Learning Test). To him, it’s the postmodern influence that must be stopped, the relativism that turns young heads away from the eternal. Little Rock Christian teaches the arts so that kids can “recognize that God has created something beautiful, and they can place themselves in his world,” he tells me. Students must be told with confidence, against all the sordid and transient messages of the world, that “there is objective truth, there is right and wrong, there is beauty.” The website speaks of “the often competing, confusing voices of our pluralistic society” and how blithely we are always told to celebrate difference, not unity.
Not at Little Rock. The academy's leadership affirms “the Bible as God’s Holy Word,” with no qualifications or exceptions. What Little Rock Academy shows is that classical Christian education can thrive alongside an “achievement” orientation. College readiness and “success” are not contrary to Christian doctrine and ethics, as long as the teachers get the priorities right. When I started teaching English at Emory University in the 1990s, some of the best “close readers” in classes on poetry were kids who had done intense Bible study in high school. They knew how to break down a good metaphor.
Now that Little Rock Christian can’t expand any further, it’s time for another school just like it to open.
Mark Bauerlein is a contributing editor at First Things.
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Image by perpetual.fostering licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
