July | Issue XV

Dear TCA Families,

As the new school year approaches I write with great excitement. Soon we will be together for the first time. And we will do so by coming together within the context of the mission, which is the foundation of a thriving, healthy civilization. Every society's flourishing depends entirely on true education and the forming of the minds and hearts of young men and women in the superior things. Cultivating great-souled men and women is the noble work of a properly ordered school. 

For our part, we believe that education and the family are intrinsically linked to each other. It has always been the belief in the West that true education is the sculpting of the human soul in moral and intellectual virtue. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle says that our disordered pursuit of pleasure or shrinking in the face of pain keeps us from pursuing moral excellence in our human activity. In order to increase in virtue, we must be "trained in some way from infancy to feel joy and grief at the right things."  He goes on to say, "true education is precisely this." Every human being is free, and their human happiness depends on the rightly ordered training of that freedom. There is no happiness apart from the cultivation of a virtuous soul. 

The mark of virtue according to Aristotle is to choose our human activity at "the right times, on the right grounds, towards the right people, for the right motive, and in the right way...that is to the best degree." The primary goal of any school should be a rigorous education. It is the fundamental purpose for which TCA exists. But a rigorous intellectual life requires a rigorous moral life. A good student has the virtue of humility: he understands that he does not know all that there is to know, and he seeks the truth without pride or discouragement when it is difficult. A good student has the virtue of eutrapalia (wittiness/sense of humor). He does not see the classroom as a proving ground for his comedy routine. The point is that to excel intellectually demands moral virtue. Without attention to our responsibility in the classroom, to our true friendship with peers, and to the industry in work outside of the classroom, true wisdom is nearly impossible to attain. 

The unity and peace of any civilization depend on individual men cultivating excellence in their own soul and guiding others to the same. Aristotle says that "the true statesmen is thought of as a man who has taken special pains to study the subject (moral goodness) for he wants to make his fellow citizens good and law abiding citizens." Our school culture depends on administrators, teachers, and families aiming at the cultivation of the best habits for their own good and for the common good of the school. The founders all agreed on this point. John Adams once said:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

As we enter the new school year I remind you that this is the heart of the mission. Everything that we do, all of the decisions we make, spring from our desire to do the right thing for ourselves primarily for the good of each student in the context of the common good of the whole school. I look forward to working together with you to build a community focused on and striving for moral and academic excellence in all things!



Pax et Bonum

Mr. Garcia

Greetings and felicitations, TCA families!

When I was in fourth grade, I saved and bought a box set of The Chronicles of Narnia at a Scholastic Book Fair. For many years now, I have read and re-read that box set. I have even taught it several times, both at high school and university. I love the immense peace of it, like a balm. I love my little tattered set with its taped up box, its individual book covers faded, their yellowed pages, stained with dirt and grimy fingerprints, later by coffee rings and pen markings. I adore the unmatched description of a walk through and return to Eden. And I enjoyed it all the more because I came to realize what Lewis was really on about: he had written his book as the famed poet Horace argued, “To instruct and delight.” This, too, is what a school does: Math can each discipline, science curiosity, history value, literature beauty, art meaning, music hope, and so on.

So it is then that school is not simply learning facts and figures, of counting time until one moves to the next grade. Virtue matters. It is the important thing. It is how we become the best versions of ourselves and, by extension, guide those around us, even outside these hallowed halls, to do the same. The mission of Tulsa Classical Academy, and my mission as its Dean of Students, is to aid in the process of inspiring a love of learning, to direct the participation in and ownership of the educational experience, and to cultivate the quality of character, all so our scholars can have the opportunity to live lives of significance. As a philosophy professor of mine once said, “Ordinary things need the extraordinary to make their full assent to the truth.” It is in this way that our best efforts aim not only at seeing who the scholars are but also who they can become.

I look forward to serving our community towards this noble end.

Dr. Reese