Most organizations, institutions, universities, or corporations that enjoy any kind of longevity are founded on a set of principles or ideals. Often these are wrapped up in a mission statement. The older an institution becomes, the more likely this institution is to stray, deviate, or “drift” from these foundational ideals. Perhaps those folks who established the ideals are no longer around. Perhaps sound, thoughtful explanations for “why we do it this way” slowly become replaced with legalistic statements of “this is just how it’s done, this is how it’s always been done.” Perhaps the “why” was never really communicated in the first place. Perhaps new players in the institution question the soundness of the original ideals. Perhaps the mission of the institution must change because the original ideals were not timeless in nature and thus have become anachronical. Perhaps the culture changes and so a slight deviation from the original ideals is deemed necessary in order to “remain relevant,” or “remain sustainable.” Whatever the reason, this potentiality and tendency to “deviate from original intent” is a well known characteristic of just about anything in which human beings are involved, the first example of which of course occurred with the first human beings to inhabit the Earth.

Our country was founded on ideals (or at least principles), and one entire branch of our government exists for the explicit purpose of making sure that we maintain the integrity of those principles in practice. But even parts of our constitution have been called into question or brought up for more “relevant interpretation” in recent years.

My question is this: specific to classical Christian education, what are the ideals that must be held to? Or does holding to a set of ideals threaten sustainability? To what extent must we “flex” with the culture in order to “remain relevant for our market”?

I have heard the goal stated as a “healthy tension between ideals and practicality.” And any school who subscribes to both Christian and classical ideals – both of which are quickly becoming “outdated” in the West, particularly in the metropolitan centers of America where the focus on education is largely utilitarian – is going to find its leaders having this discussion of ideals versus practicality.

So should we (and by “we,” now, I mean classical, Christian schools) set as our target some compromise between “theory and practice,” between “an idealistic picture of education and a form of education that is actually sustainable and marketable”? Compromise can be a very good thing. But is it good in this sense? Can a white-knuckled “in the clouds” clinging to ideals morph into self-righteousness and legalism and in the end decrease the actual effectiveness of your mission? Or are there some ideals that must be clung to, regardless of how well they test with the focus groups?

I don’t necessarily intend to answer these questions here, at least not directly. For one thing, I don’t think we can actually begin to answer them until we define what the ideals are.

But let’s say for a moment that we do define some ideals for a school that are not only timeless but also biblically and pedagogically sound. Do we still aim for compromise?

Some may argue that this question can only be answered in practice, that there is not one answer that is universally applicable.

But I’m not totally sure.

There is certainly a time for those of us who are idealists to get our heads out of the clouds and get practical about certain things. But is there a time to cling to ideals in practice? Is this last phrase an oxymoron?

Let’s consider a couple of idealists and see how it worked out for them. (And to be clear, I am not using “idealism” in the philosophical sense, but rather talking about people who had and held to certain high and noble ideals. Note the previous emphasis – I am also NOT talking about people like Hitler whose corrupted, evil ideals did much violence to humanity.)

The obvious first example is Jesus himself. Not only did he live the “ideal” life (a life as it was originally intended: without sin), but he exhorted sinners around him to do the same. “Be perfect, therefore, as your father in heaven is perfect.” “Go and sin no more.” “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” (I wonder how many folks in the crowd that day wished he had said, “Okay, if you’ve only sinned ten times today, you get to throw three stones. Those of you who have been extra good and sinned less than five times today can throw six.”)

Did Jesus fail to be relevant to the culture? Well, what those first century Jews really wanted was a political king, a conquering savior. Washing feet and dining with tax collectors – well, that wasn’t really what they had in mind. Turns out it didn’t end too well for Jesus (well, in the short run, that is).

Upon his triumphant resurrection, however, Jesus’ disciples finally “got it.” This “ideal” that Jesus represented, it was worth pursuing, even though it would require a counter-culturalism like the world had never seen before. In fact, this ideal was worth dying for. And die they all did; for most, of course, not by natural causes.

The story then continues with Paul, and thanks to his clinging to an ideal even after having been boiled in oil, beaten, and imprisoned, we have the God-inspired wisdom of the epistles.

The biblical examples are perhaps obvious but I think worth repeating. Our familiarity with scripture can sometimes lull us into thinking that these stories themselves are simply allegories for a set of ideals, instead of the accounts of real men and women who were murdered for their refusal to deviate from something they believed down to the deepest depths of their souls.

There are of course many others in history who clung to ideals and suffered for their convictions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi come to mind, to name a few.

If we make the ideal our target, we will naturally fall short, because we are human. But won’t we get much closer to the ideal than if we make compromise our target?

Further, as regards our Christian faith specifically (personal or corporate), only by aiming at an ideal do we see our true and absolute need for a Savior, our need for God’s daily grace and provision. If we aim at compromise, we just may fool ourselves into thinking that this Christian thing is something we can manage (and define the parameters for) on our own. And if culture drives our compromise, won’t our target constantly drift as culture changes and pulls our compromise further from the ideal?

But ideals are risky. What’s the ultimate risk of holding to an ideal? The examples above would suggest death. And maybe we are not talking about personal death now, but perhaps the death of your institution. What does this mean for a classical Christian school. Well, Andrew Kern has said, “A school that isn’t willing to die is not a school worth living.”

So I will ask again, this time more pointedly: for a classical Christian school, what are those ideals that are worth dying for?

Do we stand firm and embrace “much versus many” in everything we do? Do we in practice hold as our priority the formation of our students’ souls over the filling of their minds? Do we maintain a skepticism towards technology even when iPads would make those backpacks a lot lighter? This list could go and on and we haven’t even scratched the proverbial surface.

Let me leave you with one last story of an institution that embraced an ideal. This example may seem out of place within the context of classical and Christian education, but I think there may be something to learn nevertheless. The institution is ExxonMobil.

Before the merger with Mobil Oil, when Exxon was just Exxon, the company suffered international embarrassment in 1989 when its oil tanker Valdez ran aground and spilled hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil into Prince William Sound. This event catalyzed a movement within the company from top down to not only make safety a higher priority, but to establish safety as a defining and driving ideal of the company.

Fast forward 14 years later. I was in the second year of my young career as a neophyte mechanical engineer working for an engineering, procurement, and construction company based in Houston, Texas. After spending a year in “the office,” my supervisor decided it was time for me to “get my feet wet in the field,” so he assigned me to the field engineering team of one of our construction projects in the ExxonMobil Baytown, Texas refinery. (Talk about going from theory to practice, by the way. All the engineering graduate classes in the world could not have prepared me for the “real engineering” that goes on in real-time during onsite construction of complex refinery systems. I’ll never forget taking my brand new shiny white hard hat and scraping it along the asphalt in the parking lot in order to give myself the appearance of a more “seasoned” engineer; my plan failed miserably.)

Before I could even enter the refinery, I had to sit through an entire 8 hour day of training, which included videos, classes, and tests. I remember thinking how much a waste of my time it was – I likened it to being at the DMV.

Upon getting settled in my construction trailer office and then making my way out for a guided tour of the job site, I couldn’t believe how many “safety people” were walking around or just standing around watching what was going on. These were people who were paid solely to enforce safety procedures and perform audits of safety practices.

And boy were the safety procedures and practices numerous! An entire crew had to write up what was called a Job Hazard Analysis before starting ANY work, even if their work only consisted of painting a handrail. It was very clear that a seemingly disproportionate amount of time and money was being spent on “safety.”

But surely all these safety protocols are like speed limits, I thought. Surely when the work really has to get done, these people don’t really follow all these procedures to a T. I mean, that just wouldn’t be practical. That would slow everything down. That would cost too much money.

But they did. Always. Without question. And they were serious about it, too. Nothing about safety was taken lightly.

And then there were all the safety meetings. These were meetings at the beginning of each week, or sometimes in the middle of the week or maybe even on some random day, and everyone on the job site had to attend. We’re talking hundreds of hourly employees, just sitting, sometimes for over an hour, listening to someone talk about tripping hazards. And boy were those meetings serious.

Really? I thought. ExxonMobil is all about maximizing profit. Look at all the money going out the window right now!

The first month I was on the job, a 40 year veteran of ExxonMobil, one of their best and most respected combustion engineers and an all around swell guy, stuck his head in a vessel just to look on the inside (the vessel was out of service), but he did so without a permit. The next morning he was cleaning out his office. Fired. On the spot. No questions asked. I couldn’t believe it. Not only was I just getting to really like this guy, but he was my client contact for much of my field engineering work. He was the brain of the operation. And he had served the company faithfully for over 40 years! It made no sense to fire him just for looking into a vessel.

But for ExxonMobil safety had become a nonnegotiable ideal, and no one was exempt from the expectations attached to that ideal. No one.

A few months later, our company was doing some maintenance inside the prime money-making unit of the refinery: the Cat-Cracking Unit, the unit that makes gasoline. This unit produced enough gasoline every day to earn the company $2.5 million in profit. Every day. The maintenance we were contracted to perform required that this unit be shut down for an entire month. You can do the math, but needless to say we were working literally around the clock (two shifts per day), seven days a week to complete our work and bring this unit back on line as soon as possible. Every morning at 6:00 a.m. the lead ExxonMobil project manager would storm into our construction trailer, throw his clipboard or kick a trashcan, and remind us that we were costing him $2.5 million a day. It was a stressful project on a tight budget with an impossibly short schedule that we were daily asked to make improvements on.

Then one day a construction hand accidentally kicked a hammer, which then fell off the level he was standing on and landed on the level beneath him. The hammer didn’t come close to hitting anyone. It was an honest mistake. No harm, no foul, right?

What followed was an all-hands-on-deck safety meeting that lasted the entire afternoon, at the end of which the ExxonMobil refinery owner told us all to go home for three days. “Things were just getting too sloppy,” he said, “and we’re headed towards a serious safety accident if this continues.”

I couldn’t believe it. We were getting yelled at every morning to work faster, spend less money, improve the schedule, and now this guy is telling us all to go home for three days? That’s six shifts worth of work lost and $7.5 million down the drain! But he didn’t even blink an eye when he told us to go home, and no one flinched at his decision.

About a year later we were installing a huge multi-million-dollar piece of equipment (think the size of a 3-story bank), which required a very precise and tenuous lift with the biggest crane you’ve ever seen up and over an existing multi-million-dollar in-service unit. The most senior rigging engineer from our company was on site to oversee the lift, as the stakes were obviously extremely high. A piece of equipment this large is typically lifted with guide ropes tied at each corner, so that men on the ground can hold the ropes and keep the equipment from rotating as it is lifted. However, in this case, the guide ropes had to be released for the apex of the lift as the piece of equipment passed over its highest obstruction. Well, one of the guide ropes became snagged on a corner of the existing unit, and our rigging engineer quickly – instinctly – stood up on a handrail to loose the snag. By doing so he saved the lift. He was a hero.

Then he was promptly removed from the job site and his access to the refinery was permanently revoked. Just like that. It didn’t matter that he acted out of instinct. It didn’t matter that he did the right, practical thing in saving the lift and potentially sparing millions of dollars in damage. He had stood on a handrail, and standing on a handrail was one of the cardinal sins in the book of ExxonMobil safety. I’ll never forget, as soon as his foot hit that handrail, the engineer behind me said, “Well, he’s gone.”

These are just a couple of the crazy “zero tolerance” type stories. Suffice to say, safety at ExxonMobil was a culture, and either you became a part of that culture, or you were given the boot. Two years into my assignment in the refinery, I found that I no longer questioned any of the safety protocols. I never caught myself thinking, “This is such a waste of time, why are we doing this?” What’s more, half the time I didn’t even consciously think about all the safety rules, I was just following them by instinct. In fact, I became hyper sensitive to anything that didn’t feel or look “safe.” At any job site I entered, without even thinking about it, I would automatically scan the area for safety hazards. Even today, 6 years into teaching and 8 years out of the refinery, I still find myself finding things unsafe with even a DOT crew patching a hole on a side street. ExxonMobil had successfully inculcated within me its safety ideal.

Today ExxonMobil is the world’s most valuable company. They are also one of the safest, despite the inherent high risks in much of their operations. One could certainly make the argument that safety simply increases their bottom line in this age of rampant litigation. But whatever the motivation, they embraced an ideal and it became part of who they are. They embraced this ideal even when it cost them big, even when it clashed with practicality.

I wonder what conversations were had in the board room in the early 1990s when this safety initiative was first born. Was anyone called crazy? Impractical?

Let’s chew on this for a while. I could continue, but – on a practical note – it’s past my bedtime.