Welcome to Stonehaven! What an honor it is to serve this community as our inaugural Lower School Principal. As both a Stonehaven parent and a school administrator, I am deeply passionate about the classical Christian education that we provide here at The Stonehaven School.

We live, after all, in what Carl Trueman calls a “strange new world.” As parents, we are all acutely aware that new technologies and changing social mores mean that our children are growing up in a very different age from what we knew from our own childhoods. Now, more than ever, our children need a safe haven, a place where they can ground their identity and their purpose on the one true cornerstone, Jesus Christ. Now, more than ever, we need The Stonehaven School, which exists “to glorify God by cultivating truth, goodness, and beauty in students through a distinctly Christ-centered classical education.”

Indeed, I believe that schools like Stonehaven are uniquely equipped to help our children respond to the pressures and demands of this present cultural moment. To help orient you to the Stonehaven Lower School, I would like to highlight just three important characteristics of our classical Christian approach to education that enable our school to help our children overcome and thrive in this “strange new world.”

First, our approach to education is catechetical; that is, we are in the business of spiritual formation, of “soulcraft.” The goal of a Stonehaven education is not college admissions or vocational training, but rather the formation of young people of faith and virtue who may grow up to be, as in the words of St. Paul, “blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom [they] shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life” (Phil 2:15-16). At Stonehaven, we believe that every aspect of our children's education must be intentionally grounded in and integrated with biblical truth. For our Lower School students, this catechesis takes place throughout the day, every day, from singing at Morning Meeting to Scripture memorization to exploring the wonders of God's creation in Nature Studies to even our emphasis on obedience to godly authority as expressed through our Lower School forms and habits.

Second, we are unapologetically conservative, in the sense that we reject what C.S. Lewis identifies as the modern ill of “chronological snobbery.” While our Christian faith transcends any one political party or ideology, we nevertheless proceed from a posture towards the world that aims to retain, hold up, and preserve the traditional values and virtues of our Christian faith that have undergirded Western civilization for much of the last two thousand years. As part of what the Apostles Creed calls the “communion of saints,” we are deeply connected, in Christ, to our forebears in the faith, and to the revealed truth that has guided the Church for two thousand years. While much of modern education wants to sweep away traditional values and start with a new set based on ever-changing progressive ideology, Stonehaven will continue to unapologetically stand for a biblical understanding of the sanctity of human life, marriage, gender, and sexuality.

Third, we go about our work courageously; our confidence in Jesus Christ as King over all the earth allows us to move through these even these confusing and challenging times with courage. At Stonehaven, we will not operate from a posture of fear or hostility towards the world, but rather will, as our shout-out has it, “choose joy.” This courage allows us to pursue what is true, good, and beautiful even when it is out of step with the received wisdom all around us. As Lewis says, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.” We aim to instill the virtue of courage in the hearts and minds of our students, and my prayer is that they see courage modeled for them in their teachers, administrators, and parents, who refuse to let what is expedient or popular get in the way of our mission.

Together, these three ideas-catechesis, conservation, and courage-work together to help our children glorify God by cultivating truth, goodness, and beauty. Catechesis grounds everything we do in faith and virtue formation. Conservation of traditional values and virtues connects us to the time-tested ideas of Western civilization more generally and our forebears in the Christian Church of centuries past more specifically. Courage enables us to remember, as Paul taught Timothy, that “God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” (2 Tim 1:7).

May we partner together to form the souls of children who are growing in their knowledge and love of the Lord, rooted in the Great Tradition of our Faith, and equipped to confidently and courageously serve the Lord in this strange new world!

In Christ,
Kyle R. Hughes, Ph.D.

To learn more about Dr. Hughes' vision for classical Christian education, pick up a copy of his book Teaching for Spiritual Formation.