Loading the Spring

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Loading the Spring

by Travis Koch, Dean of Academics

Do you remember those little toy cars that you pull backward, winding the internal spring, so that when you let go the energy stored in the spring propels the car forward across the floor? Children love playing with these cars, but the mechanism doesn’t immediately make sense to them. Don’t you need to push it forward if you want it to go? Why do you have to pull it back first? I remember having to teach my kids that the car won’t go nearly as far if you just push it forward really hard; you need to press it down and pull it back to load the spring.

I find in these cars a helpful analogy for classical education. Rather than pushing students forward as fast as possible, we spend a lot of time pressing down, loading the spring, storing up energy that will translate into speed and distance when we let go. People often ask me how classically educated students compare with students in the same grade from other educational systems. Why do we spend time teaching Latin in 3rd grade, or logic in 7th grade, or rhetoric in 10th grade. Why all the grammar and Bible classes? Doesn’t that put us behind other schools? While it’s true that our classical curriculum doesn’t align with the modern alternative down the street, let’s not forget that this is by design. Like the wind-up car, we’re loading the spring, giving our students the tools and energy they need to go much further in the end.