by Seth Holler, Ph.D., English Department Chair

A key part of the definition of education at ECS, according to our school’s mission statement, is the pursuit of the “vision and practice of excellence.” But what, exactly, does excellence mean? In the ancient world — the civilization into which our Lord was born, and in which He planted the mustard seed of the kingdom of God — excellence was spelled a-r-e-t-e (in Greek) and v-i-r-t-u-s (in Latin). In other words, virtue is a decent synonym for excellence.

But we can do better than synonyms. Virtue and excellence are shorthand expressions for the idea of fulfilling one’s purpose. An excellent or virtuous knife fulfills its purpose by cutting its object, but not the hand that wields it. An excellent or virtuous apple tree produces good fruit, not thorns or bare branches. An excellent or virtuous poem delights the ear and instructs the mind. Once we know the purpose of a thing, we can estimate that thing’s quality or adequacy; we can judge how well it exemplifies its nature, reaches its goal, fulfills its destiny.

Education, then, aims at human excellence, which means human virtue, which means the fulfillment of human purpose. But what is our purpose? One familiar and inspiring Christian answer to that question comes from the first page of the 17th-century Westminster Shorter Catechism:

Question 1. What is the chief end of man?

Answer. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

By the standard of the Westminster theologians, an excellent or virtuous person glorifies and enjoys the Triune God. To fail to worship the Lord is to miss one’s destiny, the point of human life. The primary vocation of every human person is not to marry and have kids, or to serve the community, or to evangelize the world, or to build up a decent retirement fund, or to be remembered after death, but to seek the glory of God, both in public and in private. If we neglect our Maker or refuse to worship Him, then we fail as human beings, that is, we fail at being human.

The supremacy of the glory of God does not evaporate when the teacher steps into the classroom. On the contrary, the Christian teacher’s first duty is to live out the Christian faith in the presence of his students, modeling an adult’s delight in and submission to the Lord. You can’t give what you don’t have, so if we want our students to follow the Lord, then we must follow Him, too. Once we are on the road of discipleship, we can plausibly invite our students to join us, for the pilgrimage of faith is a lifelong journey, always looking forward to the “city with foundations” (Heb 11:10, Rev 21:2). The love of neighbor — including students, some of our littlest neighbors — always comes in the context of the love of God.

The Christian teacher’s second duty is to relate his daily work to the first, to integrate and subordinate ordinary classroom activities into the love and glory of God. How does the English Department tackle this challenge?

Virtue and Literature

A full answer to that question involves classroom culture and discipline, instructional goals and pedagogy, formal and informal assessment, but the easiest part to explain is our curriculum: the books we read, discuss and write about. The ECS “Portrait of a Graduate” states that the soul of an ECS graduate will have the following twelve virtues: temperance, courage, justice and prudence; faith, hope and love; understanding, knowledge and wisdom; humility and art. In our English classes, middle and high school students study works of literature that focus on the first seven of these virtues, also known as moral and theological virtues, or the virtues of character.

• In Grade 6, English class is keyed to the virtue of courage or fortitude: the willingness, when obliged, to face danger and endure pain.

• In Grade 7, English students are called to a life of temperance or self-control, which means resisting the siren call of excessive pleasure.

• In Grade 8, the theme is justice, or rendering to each his due.

• Freshman year is dedicated to wisdom in the sense of prudence: good decision-making.

• Sophomore year turns to the Christian virtue of faith, which means both “believing” and “believing in” God, i.e., taking God at his Word and pledging allegiance to Him.

• Junior year is based on the virtue of hope, which means preferring eternity to time, the New Creation to the old, heaven to earth, Christ to Adam.

• The virtue of senior year is “the greatest of these,” charity or love, which is less a feeling than a willed abandonment to God, and a consequent willingness to sacrifice oneself for the good of one’s neighbor, relying on the power of the Spirit to help us imitate the Lord Jesus.

Teachers cannot make students virtuous against their will, but we can certainly call them to an “excellent” life. (For more on the virtues of character, see C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Book Three.)

What do books and poems have to do with the state of one’s soul? The answer lies in what literature is, what it does, and how it operates. Good literature is a glorious thing, a noble and gratuitous activity, one of the high points of civilization. Good stories well told are like incantations: they sink deep into the soul, going through but beyond the mind and senses into the heart. This almost magical power makes fiction, along with its “cousins” among the narrative arts (poetry, drama, film, music) positively dangerous, for the stories we read and remember and contemplate may be true or false, straight or crooked. For better or for worse, for our reformation or our deformation, stories penetrate and permeate the soul.

On the following page, you'll find an overview of the major works our middle and high school students will study in the 2025-2026 academic year. Grade six is included as a foundational and transitional year. To illustrate how our teachers connect each book to moral virtue, the first two titles in each list are briefly described. Be advised: some of these works take a “front door” approach to virtue, presenting its full or partial presence (for instance, Christian’s growth in faith throughout Pilgrim’s Progress); others take a “back door” approach, showing the absence of the virtue, the gaping hole where it ought to be, and the terrible consequences of that absence (for instance, Macbeth’s short-sighted ambitions and final despair).

In conclusion, reading does not automatically make us better people; in fact, nothing automatically makes us better people. Reading can make us worse, especially when the books are great and true. Much is expected where much is given. The only way to grow in courage, self-control, and the rest of the virtues of character is by practice, which must always be rooted in grace and prayer. But teachers remember that young people often imitate others, even when those “others” happen to be imaginary. To become brave, it is not enough to read a book about a brave child, such as Shasta in C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy. We must also act bravely. But by honoring Shasta precisely for learning bravery — in the flight from his wicked pseudo-father, through the lonely night among the tombs, in the terrible daytime ride across the desert, in the very face of the Lion — we invite our students (and remind ourselves) to imitate him in daily life.

 

A Curriculum Cultivating Character

Grade Six: Courage

• Gillian Cross and Neil Packer, The Odyssey. A retelling of the oldest and best of adventure stories, condensed into  accessible prose and strikingly, sometimes grotesquely illustrated. Penelope and Telemachus, no less than the hero, must summon all their wit, patience, and bravery to effect a joyful family reunion.

• William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. ECS students’ first Shakespearean tragedy has a straightforward plot, but surprisingly ambiguous characters. As a story of political intrigue and war, it is rife with opportunities to discuss courage and its counterfeits.

• C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

• Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place

Grade Seven: Temperance

• (Standard) Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time. A work of fantasy about the struggle for self-mastery, contrasted with a totalitarian simulacrum of obedience; or (Honors) J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit  William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. The tragedy of “star-crossed love” has an astonishing power to make us sympathize with desire, even while revealing its dangers.

• S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders

• Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (trans. Massotty)

Grade Eight: Justice

• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. A child’s account of justice and its corruption in a small town.

• William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The happy twin of Romeo and Juliet, a playful, romping comedy of romance and universal reconciliation.

• William Golding, The Lord of the Flies

• (Honors) J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Grade Nine: Prudence

• Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Fitzgerald). The wandering Odysseus faces countless obstacles and temptations on his journey home, not least what he finds when he gets there.

• William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing. A comedy about friendship, marriage, self-deception, and misapprehension.

• Arthur Miller, The Crucible

• Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (trans. Clarke)

• (Honors) Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (trans. Fagles)

Grade Ten: Faith

• (Standard) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (trans. Armitage). An exquisite medieval treatment of honesty, of faith in the sense of “fidelity”; or (Honors) Beowulf. The oldest epic poem in English reimagines the pagan past through the lens of the Christian faith.

  (Standard) John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress; or (Honors) Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country

· (Standard) Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel; or (Honors) Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

• William Shakespeare, Hamlet. “Words, words, words” on murder and betrayal, marriage and betrothal, suspicions and confirmations, madness and reason, cowardice and resignation to providence.

Grade Eleven: Hope

• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A great American myth of freedom.

• William Shakespeare, Macbeth. If you're ever invited to “look into the seeds of time” and spy your future, walk away quickly; ignorance is better than illicit knowledge.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• Carroll (ed.), 101 Great American Poems

• (AP) Lopate (ed.), The Art of the Personal Essay

Grade Twelve: Charity

• (Standard) Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (trans. Walsh). Five crucial truths about suffering and the character of God.

• (Standard) Dante Alighieri, Inferno and Purgatorio (trans. Palma). The first two-thirds of Europe’s greatest epic poem, centering on the nature of sin, the irony of justice, the generosity of grace and the surprise of glory.

• (AP) William Shakespeare, The Tempest and Coriolanus

• (AP) Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene I

• (AP) Augustine, Confessions (trans. Chadwick)