Enrichment and Creativity
The integrated Orthodox classical curriculum is by appearances very regimented, leaving little room for personal creativity on the part of the student. In fact, the integrated curriculum rejoices in personal creativity. Students are not robots; they are persons. Education is not a stamping or extrusion process resulting in one uniform product; education is a process by which persons, created in Gods image, are challenged to become like God ad infinitum. The focused integrated curriculum, like a competitive athletic program (or, like iconographic canons), allows the students creativity to blossom always in the proper direction.
Creativity is particularly evident in the exercises of writing, speaking, and the manual arts (instrumental music, painting, sculpting, weaving, sewing, casting metal, etc.). Organized, grammatically-correct writing and oral presentation exercises are a staple of the integrated curriculum, in which the student learns to express each individual subject in relation to and in terms of the other subjects. With such writing and speaking, the student learns to make the subject matter part of his own God-given experience for the glory of God.
Further enrichment in the integrated curriculum involves the manual arts, using the whole person to manipulate earthly things for godly ends, whether the object produced is utilitarian, like a rug or a basket, or the object is intended to please the eye or convey divine meaning to life, as with a painting or sculpture. In the integrated curriculum, there is first development of the inner person in purity of heart and mind. Then the educational process provides avenues for expression beyond the person, always directed toward God in the service of others. The integrated curriculum guards against a cacophony of individuals and strives to foster a communion of persons writing, speaking, working in harmony according to Gods will and pleasure.
A Grand Design
Integrated means complete, and no course of study is complete unless it achieves salvation the deliverance of men, women, and all of creation from futility, evil, and death in the restoration to life. This salvation has been accomplished in the resurrection of Christ Jesus from the dead. This salvation was always the plan of God, to which God directed and persuaded all people from the beginning. To perceive salvation as the goal of history is the aim of education, for in this perception, if truly taken to heart, is the transformation of life toward union with God. Apart from God there is literally no-thing.
There are no guarantees in education, only opportunities. The most well-constructed integrated curriculum does not assure success for anyone, either student or teacher. Yet the integrated curriculum centered in salvation history begins and ends in the Garden of God, in paradise, in the bosom of the Church. In this fertile ground, fruit is inevitable if we the tillers of the ground are not slack, and humbly seek guidance and help from God Almighty.
We should thank God that He has given opportunity to grow in salvation and for ourselves to become part of that history of the Saints, unto ages of ages.
