The Green Hills
“And every day there were what we called ‘the Green Hills’; that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursery windows. They were not very far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing—sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.” — C. S. Lewis Over the summer my family and I went to Yellowstone for a long weekend. I, being the typical dad, was bracing myself that the stories of long lines, hot days, and lots of bugs would be what we would remember more than glories of God’s creation. This is what I like to call the “Disneyland effect.” The idea of a Disneyland vacation often (always?) does not live up to expectations. “What? I need to pay $200 to stand in line to have the privilege of spending another $200 to have this experience that will last for five minutes? Great.”Thankfully, God subverted my expectations. We had an incredible trip. We got to drink up amazing scenes over and over again throughout the weekend. Old Faithful, bison running by our car, and even a grizzly bear fishing in a river stole the show. The weather was great, the lines were minimal, and there weren’t any bugs. Every day around the dinner table we were blown away by what God had given to us for that day’s adventure.When we were packing up to leave, we all looked at each other and said, “We don’t want to go!” There was this mixture of joy for all the memories we had made and a sadness that we had to leave when we wanted to see more. Within a few days after we got home, we were already longing to go back.This, in a small way, is what Lewis means by the German word sehnsucht. It refers to joy that hurts. It mingles nostalgia and longing for places we have or have not been with deep joy. The kind of joy that is connected to senses and memories. The smell of a well oiled baseball glove, the taste of Grandma’s lasagna, or the singing of the Doxology can all bring a sweeping feeling of sehnsucht. These experiences mark all of our lives. They become stories we tell to our kids and the experiences we want them to have. Yet, such moments of sehnsucht cannot be bottled or packaged. They happen to us when we least expect it. They move like the wind.Lewis felt such longing joy intensely from a young age. He longed to go to Castlereagh Hills and pick the blue flowers. The blue flower became for Lewis the symbol of this feeling of sehnsucht. And while sehnsucht cannot be captured to do man’s bidding, Lewis believed that certain things were more likely to invite such joy in. In particular, Lewis believed stories could do it. A great story that made you breathe the air of what it was like to be there had the power to move the reader in such a way. The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and many of the other great books of the Western Civ Tradition did this in Lewis’ mind. Dante’s Divine Comedy, which caused one to breathe the air of the Medieval Cosmos was particularly powerful.Yet, of course, the greatest of these for Lewis was Scripture. In the story of the gospel, we begin to see that the feeling of sehnsucht can cause us to long for a place we have never been. This feeling of longing joy is the most powerful of all. Oh how badly does the Christian want to experience the joy of the New Heaven and New Earth? How painful is our longing to behold the glory in the face of Jesus Christ? How desperately do we want King Jesus to put all of the evil, sin, and rebellion to an end? These longings, as Paul says in Romans, come in groans too great for words.My hope and prayer is that your child at Ambrose will experience sehnsucht. I cannot promise it will happen, but we do believe we are placing your child in a spot where it is likely. In fact, our job as administration is to protect the road to the Castlereagh Hills such that teachers can bring students to pick the blue flowers. For such experiences have the power to change the soul of the student forever.
Ambrose named to top 25 schools in nation by CLT
Ambrose students are scoring in the top 25 of over 1,200 schools utilizing the Classic Learning Test. CLT recently announced their first high school rankings. Below is the announcement from the CLT: Since 2016, more than 30,000 students from over 1,200 schools have taken the Classic Learning Test (CLT, CLT10, or CLT8). Typical CLT test takers are well above average academically and they come from some of the best high schools in the nation. After nearly four years of gathering data and growing our base, the CLT is proud to release our first school rankings. Many different ways exist to rank schools: graduation rates, student satisfaction surveys, size of endowment, elite college acceptance rates, etc. Our ranking is an attempt to directly measure education quality. Given the CLT’s level of rigor, high performance on the CLT serves as a strong indicator of excellence in a secondary school. While these rankings are national in scope, the CLT will release rankings at the city, regional, and state levels in 2020 to help parents who are searching for schools of excellence in their own community. See the full list of the top 25 schools based on median CLT score.
Geronimo, Amen! Watch it here
Did you ever wonder how the classical Christian education movement got started and why? Watch Geronimo Amen, parts 1 & 2.
BaseCamp LIVE: Anxiety Free Learning and Living
Modern education is an education in anxiety. Teaching has largely become a technical trade designed to instill efficiently in students a volume of information so that students will prove their knowledge using quantifiable testing data. And most school days are made up of rapid fire classes of often disconnected subjects. Most students today end up with fully loaded afternoons of rushing to practices or music lessons concluding with a full night of homework. Check lists and economic pressures have made what was once an enjoyable experience of “joyful discovery” into a frantic process of cramming, testing and all too often, forgetting. Is it possible to regain more of a contemplative life and educational experience in the midst of a modern world? Yes! Chris Perrin shares how. LISTEN NOW Chris Perrin has been a part of the classical education movement since 1996: first as a headmaster (and Latin teacher) of a classical Christian school in Pennsylvania and then as a publisher, author, and consultant with Classical Academic Press. Mr. Perrin also serves as Vice Chair of the Society for Classical Learning , an organization dedicated to promoting and supporting classical Christian education in the U.S. and abroad. Director of the Alcuin Fellowship, Chris leads a fellowship of educators committed to the renewal of classical education by means of writing, publishing, training and hosting educator retreats. LISTEN TO MORE! Go to the BaseCamp LIVE website to see all the episodes.
BaseCamp: “Real World” Ready – Will My Kids Be Prepared? March 7 @ 7pm
Few parents or grandparents at Ambrose grew up being classically Christian educated and are often left wondering if this unique form of education is the best for their child beyond early grammar school. What good is Latin when we need to learn Spanish or Chinese in today’s world? Why study “old dead white guys” when the world is becoming increasingly diverse and even suspicious of these old patriarch writers and thinkers? Is science education suffering at the cost of “esoteric” ancient Greek writings? Why work so hard when other schools make earning an “A” so much easier? Will Ambrose kids be able to keep their faith if they haven’t been exposed to more secular challenges until college? Should Christians even be reading pagan literature? Isn’t the Bible enough? Come hear answers to these and other questions at our next BaseCamp Forum . Tuesday, March 7th in our school library @ 7:00 pm. Join Davies Owens, David Goodwin (Former Head of School and ACCS president) and our special guest, 9th grade teacher and parent Joe Gerber. Joe is a former social worker with a unique perspective on education style and how it impacts lives. Joe has taught in both the grammar and upper schools at Ambrose. This BaseCamp will also be live streamed on the Ambrose Facebook page. PLEASE RSVP! To ensure we have enough seating, please let us know if you are coming. We will also be offering childcare. Tell us in your RSVP if you will be using the childcare services. $5 per hour for first child/$2 for each additional. RSVP FOR BASECAMP 3/7
