Should K-12 education be rigorous? What comes to your mind when you think of “rigor”—dusty books, lists of names to memorize, and an exacting school marm holding a ruler? Or is it a responsive class of students who are engaging in a lively conversation with the teacher?
Controversy or Emphasis?
Early last year, I heard an argument that classical schools should replace the word “rigor” with the word “vigor.” Similarly, Christopher Perrin from Classical Academic Press has argued for “vigor” or “ardor” over the word “rigor,” since rigor is often distorted into “hard for hardness’s sake,” and has argued elsewhere that a student’s activity should be balanced between rigor and slow contemplation. In recent years, the idea of scholé, or “restful learning,” has become more widespread. Because of the questions these ideas raise, everyday classical educators are asking: Should our schools be “rigorous”?
“What do you read, my lord?” “Words, Words, Words” -William Shakespeare
This argument about the word “rigor” is more a matter of emphasis than controversy. The question is: Does this word suggest the right things? I appreciate this debate because it has clarified why words offend different people. In conversation with parents, prospective parents, donors, and prospective donors, I am regularly asked questions about specific words in our mission statement or surrounding documents: Why rigor, why western, why liberal, why virtue, why self-governing? Usually people ask these questions out of curiosity, but often they ask about a specific word because they have a preferred word in mind. In my experience, this preference for a new word stems from a negative connotation with the old. But what does rigor actually mean?
The word rigor comes through Middle English from the Latin rigere, meaning stiffness. Surely we do not want that. Many parents understandably fear the idea of committing their children, whether 5 or 15, to an education that is exhausting, extreme, severe, strict, stiff, full of busywork, or boring. As Jason Modar from Regents Academy writes (referencing Deuteronomy 14:21), “[A] classical Christian classroom exists to nourish the souls of students with virtue and godliness, not boil them to death in the milk of massive reading lists, hours of nightly homework, and undue emphasis on grades.” Let us all agree that a stiff education, or an education that cultivates stiffness, is not the goal. Full stop.
However, the original word rigere does not tell the whole story. The derivative word rigor also means the quality of being thorough or accurate, or conditions that are demanding or difficult. In our own mission statement, a “rigorous course of study” means a set and sequential curriculum which builds on itself over 13 years and which is thorough but not exhaustive, difficult but not impossible, and demanding but not discouraging.

Education Should Require Exertion
What should K-12 education “demand” from students? In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis says that “the task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” K-12 education is not crowd control or jungle removal. If it were, it could happen without the student’s participation or even against the student’s will. Instead, education is like growing lush vineyards in desert land. To be an irrigated desert, the student has to change at the heart level. To effect this heart-level change, education requires participation and effort from the student. If the school claims to be classical and Christian, no student should expect to show up and get educated without participating in that work.
In John Milton Gregory’s classic book The Seven Laws of Teaching, two out of seven of the laws actually have to do with the learner. John Milton Gregory’s Law of the Learner says: The learner must attend with interest to the fact or truth to be learned. His Law of the Learning Process says: The learner must reproduce in his own mind the truth to be acquired. We all know this, but that does not make the process easy. Staying up late, arriving at school unprepared, failing to complete the prerequisite work, and watching someone else solve math problems is not the same thing as learning mathematics. To expect stellar academic results from a student who does this actually minimizes and demeans the student’s importance to his own education process.
A student must pay attention, with interest, to the fact or truth that the teacher is trying to impart, and then exert himself to reproduce it in his own mind. Why is it tiring to sit and think? Because learning is hard work. Reproducing a way of thinking in your own mind is hard work. There are a lot of important components to this work, including good sleep habits, taking notes, nurturing excitement about the topic, asking questions, answering questions, anticipating the next step in the process, wondering how it all works, trying to solve the problem independently, applying the new knowledge through homework problems later, and showing work.
The teacher paves the way for all this exertion in the same way that an athletic trainer guides an athlete through his training. The trainer applies his knowledge to help the athlete avoid injury by incrementally increasing the weight or distance in keeping with the athlete’s growing abilities. In the same way, the teacher helps the student work hard through repetition and review, by preparing ahead of time to skillfully digest and package complex ideas for the class’s skill level, by asking tailored questions, by keeping the student’s interest, by varying the type of lesson or delivery, by catching the student’s imagination with good stories, by engaging the student with singing and movement, by inviting every student to actively think through the question, by encouraging discussion, by creating meaningful homework assignments, and through a myriad other hallmarks of good teaching.
Appropriate Types of Exertion
Listing everything required of students for the sake of their own learning would require another essay, but for now consider just two: attention and contemplation.
Attention
The baseline for all K-12 students is attention. To learn a lesson, a student must attend to it. Even a 5-year-old who joins Cedar Classical Academy is expected, through training and practice, to actively listen. No human does this naturally, so no teacher expects it on Day 1. Instead, little by little, her teacher trains her to listen with her whole body: eyes trained on the teacher, voice quiet, hands and feet under control, mind alert.
Many of the parents that we meet in the admissions process chafe at the expectation that a child will sit still. “I don’t want Suzy to sit still for seven hours a day” is a common refrain. We agree! Children struggle to have self control when they have not received sufficient outdoor play time leading up to formal schooling, when they have never been asked to sit through a church service, and especially when they have received too much screen time, because their muscles and gross motor skills are underdeveloped. A steady diet of unintentionally sedentary activity makes a child’s large muscles weak and restless, which in turn makes the fine muscles of her hand weak and restless. At Cedar Classical, throughout the school day we intentionally alternate gross and fine motor movement with sitting attentively. Sitting attentively is not punishment. It is an extraordinarily active and difficult skill to learn, and a real prize once it is learned. So, in the first three years of school (which are by no means sedentary!—just sit in on a class sometime), a child needs significant training and retraining in the physical skills necessary for the habit of attention. As the student grows, she learns to listen attentively in even more active ways. She listens in preparation to answer questions, takes notes, raises her hand to disagree or ask a question, responds to her classmates’ comments, and brings her own ideas to bear on the lesson.
Contemplation
To acquire a new truth, John Milton Gregory says, a student must reproduce it in his own mind. Students should participate in the learning itself, whether by memorizing the tune of the morning hymn through the repetition of singing it, or later by reciting the sounds that each letter makes, or later still by chanting the endings to Latin verbs, or later still by writing an essay in response to an important idea. Students should participate in the learning itself by asking and answering questions, by solving problems, by finding answers in the text, or by reading the chapter in the literature book before discussing it.
A few years ago, a friend surprised me with an offhand comment that her son spent so much time writing about an idea that he never even got a chance to think deeply about it. On the contrary, the purpose of writing assignments is precisely to give students time to think deeply—perhaps teachers should call them “Thinking Assignments.” In Mortimer Adler’s 1940 book How to Read a Book, he argues that the reader, or listener, or learner has obligations to what he reads, hears, or learns. The reader’s obligations are to first apply the habits necessary to understand, then to understand (no small task!), and then to “talk back”—either to suspend judgment, to disagree, or to agree.
Adler goes further, likening reading Great Books to performing pull-ups. He says that Great Books are, by nature, over the heads of the reader, so the reader needs to learn good habits of reading and thinking in order to pull himself up to the book’s level. Thinking deeply is hard work. And just as no human naturally sits still, no human naturally thinks deeply; this latter skill needs cultivation as much as the former.
In Josef Pieper’s 1948 book Leisure, the Basis of Culture, he observes that civilizations cannot develop intellectually unless their citizens have leisure. If subsistence farmers must use every hour of daylight to survive, they have no remaining time to create art and music. Only civilizations that have time to spare can afford to spend it building culture. Thus, Pieper ties together the rest of leisure with the work of contemplation. Learning is a luxury possible only when a person does not have to use those same hours for work, yet learning itself requires significant exertion. Rigor and rest are not opposed. They are both intrinsic to education.

Participation Is What Makes Education Rigorous
Whether we call classical education “rigorous,” “ardent,” or “vigorous,” what we mean is that the student must exert himself to gain the knowledge and wisdom that the teacher is trying to impart. The student’s work can be fun, it should feel like discovery, it will involve slow contemplation, and it certainly does not require that the teacher assign every single problem in the workbook. At the same time, every day that a student shows up to his classical Christian school, he has duties to fulfill—duties like obedience, attention, interest, wonder, memory.
Because the student is an essential part of his own education, his education should require his participation. This participation should be physical, intellectual, and spiritual, just as the student is body, mind, and soul. It should fit the student’s age and capacity. It should grow as the student grows, but at no point in a K-12 education should a student be permitted to passively coast. This is what distinguishes education from childcare.
For all these reasons, I would argue that rigor does not belong on the chopping block. Like many other words, it simply requires explanation. If dusty old books and an angry teacher are what come to mind, we have different definitions of rigor. Classical education should continuously challenge students the same way that physical training helps athletes get stronger and faster. Students should daily participate physically, intellectually, and emotionally in their own education. Such a standard is thorough, demanding, and difficult, but “let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.”