Published almost twenty years ago, Douglas Wilson’s Case for Classical Christian Education is a call for parents and educators to do more than just teach kids how to read or to do math and science. Instead, parents and teachers need to educate children’s minds, hearts, and imaginations.

Both homeschooling parents and Christians seeking to build schools will find a lot of guidance from this book. Wilson explains the benefits of an education that is both distinctively classical and distinctively Christian and what such an education might look like. He also draws on years of educating and pastoring to talk about how parents and teachers can manage schools well and train their children’s hearts.

Education is not just preparing kids for the job market, but should be about instilling discipline, character, and love for God and the world He has made.

Thirty years ago, Doug Wilson wrote Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning so that Christian parents could stop wringing their hands at the deterioration of American education and actually do something to resist it.

That resistance begins with getting our children out of public secular schools, but it doesn’t end there. We must also give our kids a thoroughly biblical education with the lordship of Jesus Christ at the center. The best structure for that education, Wilson argues, is the classical structure.

And so the classical Christian education movement in America was born. Since the publication of this book, hundreds of classical Christian schools have been started (both nationally and internationally), and hundreds of thousands of homeschooling families have turned to classical Christian education as well.

Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning , originally published by Crossway in 1991, has been republished by Canon Press.