Why bother with a passionate pursuit of the qualities traditionally called Goodness, Truth, and Beauty? Why place our hope in them when darkness swirls around us, forceful enough to consume everything in its path?

To take the question down to my everyday life, I fret about which Renaissance portrait to assign for the masters’ students I’m teaching this semester. I drive around town trying to find the not necessary, but desired celery root that brings life to my potato soup. How can any of this make sense when of people in Afghanistan are experiencing horrors we cannot fathom?

This is an eternal question. If you think the answer fits within 1200 words, please think again. What I can assert, though, is that today’s horrors leave us no option but to return with renewed conviction to the real forces that uphold us, for they have sustained all that is redemptive in this world.

The first force is prayer. Yes, many scoff at this idea. Others who do not scoff debate what the word means. Those who practice prayer have no need for explanatory sentences.

The second force is a commitment to what we in Western Culture call The Three Transcendentals: qualities or ideals known as Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Despite their popular misuse, these terms are not idle fantasies. Nor are they verbiage for greeting cards or relics of a sentimentalized past.

Goodness, Truth, and Beauty are tornadic forces that account for everything that has value in this world. It is they who, most days at least, shape our resolutions to try harder, or simply try again. It is they who open our grown-up eyes to the quick flight of the hummingbird or the remnant of a rainbow. It is they who advise our actions when we lose sight of the road before us.

Pessimists, secularist, and persons enchanted with their own worldly mind get a chuckle out of statements like these. Such chuckles expand easily into ridicule or worse. But that response is nothing new. Doubt or derision changes nothing about Beauty, or Truth, or Goodness.

Like you, I need to be reminded of these facts often. The need for reminders, encouragement, support, and inspiration constitutes the very best factor in our human connections. It is the main factor that draws us together in this movement of educational renewal.

Who actually benefits from this movement? The children, of course: they absolutely are the primary beneficiaries, whether they sit at desks in a brick-and-mortar classroom or at the dining-room table in a homeschool. But it is the teachers, tutors, parents, and even administrators who are most ready to soak up the power of this movement.

Let me tell you a story. (If you’ve read it before, you’re done with today’s essay.) Back in 2008, when Hank and I began exploring the idea of creating Discovering Music, we did our boots-on-the-ground research. An ever-increasing number of terrific homeschoolers at SMU had made me aware that something exciting was happening out there. They also first suggested that I create a music and arts course for secondary students who otherwise would search in vain for such material.

Fashioning the course would be easy, I reasoned. The obvious model would be a tweaked version of the traditional texts and repertoire that constitute the music history courses freshmen music majors take (or always have taken until hit with the recent ideological dismantling of our conservatories and schools of music).

But the real question was not about content or format. It was about the level of commitment those taking or directing such a potential course would have. Without ascertaining that, I had no desire to proceed.

So off Hank and I went to a conference held at the Astrodome in Houston. The Astrodome itself may have been in decline, but the energies inside the exhibit hall were on fire. I nearly fell over upon finding rows of offerings from Memoria Press, for example (Latin, Greek, Logic, and Rhetoric) as well as serious courses in literature, history, mathematics, and science. I heard Andrew Pudewa speak for the first time, as well as Jim Weiss—two persons who reaffirmed cherished principles about learning that rarely echo within academe. I discovered Bonnie Simon’s superb series Maestro Classics. In short, I was charmed, thrilled, and revved up.

But where did I fit? Carol, the music history professor whose target audience had hitherto been undergrads, graduate students, and preconcert audiences? How did all of that translate into this new realm of education?

Later that afternoon while in the restroom, I overheard two women engaged in an animated conversation about American history (one had a baby on her back and the other lulled a toddler in a stroller). Apparently they also had children in the upper-elementary or middle school range.

With a passion I rarely heard from my university colleagues, these moms were debating approaches to teaching the period known as the Jacksonian Years. One mom lamented how her son, previously enamored of the era of the American Revolution, had lost interest once the constitution was set and the century turned. The other mom had experienced the opposite reaction from her son. Only now, as he began studying the early decades of the 19th century, did he catch fire with American history.

For six or so minutes I kept adjusting my makeup as I eavesdropped on these women. They traded ideas and asked each other questions about the material itself and the best pedagogical approaches. I suspect neither of them had a university teaching degree. What they had—far more valuable—was curiosity, passion, commitment, and the maturity which adulthood, and parenthood in particular, brings to a person.

This conversation astounded me then, and it still does. I relive this joy, every time I hear similar conversations at homeschool conventions or similar conferences held by organizations like the CiRCE Institute, the Association of Classical Christian Schools, or the Great Heart Schools. If I find myself feeling glum, I remind myself that, every day, armies of parents and tutors are enrolling in programs and apprenticeships that offer the rooted, grounded education they never got in the public schools. Their goal may be to teach children better, but they are driven by a personal thirst for the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty absent in the educational processes that shaped them.

That, in a nutshell, is why we at Professor Carol are still here. It is what inspires us, regardless of our own insufficiencies or failures. It is what I try to remember, whenever the darkness of this world seems about to succeed.

And if I forget the vision that has led us to this point, I have only to look into your and your children’s faces, read your kind comments, and remember the priceless conversations I have overheard in elevators, on escalators, and, yes, in the restrooms. For they clearly instruct me to pick up whatever corner of the banner wants to droop, and to charge forward.