Our aim at Cedar Classical Academy is to cultivate intellectual and moral virtue in our students, teaching them to discover goodness, truth, and beauty in every discipline as a reflection of God. To this end, our curriculum is carefully selected and our teachers are models of virtue and genuine faith. So, what does it matter what our building looks like? Why make school beautiful? Winston Churchill, when considering how to rebuild the House of Commons Chamber after its destruction during the Blitz, advocated his position saying, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” The classrooms and hallways we inhabit should reflect the goodness, truth, and beauty we teach.
In his book Making School Beautiful: Restoring the Harmony of Place, John Skillen seeks to equip classical Christian academies to bring the design of the school building into harmony with its purpose. “From the architecture of the buildings, to the decoration of rooms, to the design of the campus, we want these spaces to become places that are in harmony with each other and with the mission and curriculum of the school…” (Skillen, 1). We want to shape our building in such a way that it reflects our mission and trains our students toward rightly ordered loves. We want our classrooms to assist in cultivating our students’ affections and training their aesthetic. We want the design of our school to foster and promote mastery of subject matter and growth in character.
Harmony is synonymous with order, fittingness, and balance. It is a matter of proportion, where many parts make a cohesive whole. In designing our school, we want to consider how the different parts of the school fit together harmoniously with our mission and curriculum. Skillen instructs us to consider the fittingness of the decoration and furniture to each room, the fittingness of each room to the building as a whole, and the fittingness of our building to the surrounding campus. Skillen says, “Thoughtful, careful design of rooms, of buildings, and of a campus, plays a role in fostering in our students their love of neighbor and their love of learning and desire for God” (Skillen, 15).
Take, for example, our Great Hall. We are blessed to have a large, central gathering space in our building to convene as a whole school. Opening ceremony is held here in the colder months, and it provides us a place to start each school day in unity, lifting our voices in praise to the Lord. The same elements of our opening ceremony—hymn singing, a patriotic recitation, and prayer—could be conducted within each grade level homeroom for each individual and isolated class to begin the day, but I contend that it matters that we gather with all students, staff, and parents to begin each day together in community, reinforcing the unity we share in the mission.
At this stage in our school’s growth, six years old and still building out our grades to K-12, we have not yet had the opportunity to develop our building’s architecture or campus design fully. However, with the purchase of our first building we have had the privilege to renovate and prioritize interior decoration. We have built new classroom walls, painted classrooms, hallways, and bathrooms, and expanded the artwork we have on display. It is our aim that as we continue to grow as a school, we continue to make building improvements that directly benefit each student in pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty.
When you enter through our school’s front doors, you are met with Raphael’s Saint George and the Dragon. In this excellent depiction of a familiar story, we see that Saint George has slain the dragon. This reminds us of our assurance that Christ is the ultimate dragon slayer, having defeated Satan, sin, and death on our behalf. Our school motto is sic semper draconibus meaning thus always to dragons. As our students grow in intellectual and moral virtue, we desire for them to slay dragons, subduing evil in their own hearts and in the world around them. As our students pass this painting in the hallway, we pray they would be reminded of these truths and encouraged to put to death the things of the flesh (Romans 8:13) and press on toward the prize (Philippians 3:14).
We fill our walls with art that draws our hearts outward and upward, to captivate our students’ imaginations and to cultivate a sense of wonder in them. Take a walk through our hallways and classrooms and the artwork you see reflects what students are studying in theology and history or what they are reading in literature. The artwork displays virtue. We see forgiveness in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son; we see heroism, duty, and honor in Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii; we see Rembrandt’s Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, leaning heavily on God’s Word which is our firm foundation.
At Cedar Classical Academy we aim to shape character, to shape souls. So why do we invest in shaping our building? Why do we think about the color we paint the walls? Why do we think about the type of artwork we display? Why fill our classrooms and hallways with beautiful things? Our buildings shape us. Let us be shaped by goodness, truth, and beauty.