This Pentecost, as the Church recalls the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles in the upper room, my thoughts wander homeward. My daughter has just turned four, and with that milestone has come a delightful torrent of ‘why’. It is wonderful to hear them drop all day, every day, sometimes in a frenzy – those relentless, probing questions that signal a young mind stirring to life and seeking order in the world around her. As one of the first in my circle of friends to enter parenthood, I have found few ready-made guides to help me walk reverently beside my child through every sacred step of her miraculous transformation. Instead, I’ve steadily realised that the formation of this small person rests first and foremost with me, her parent, as a vocation illuminated by the same Spirit who empowered the first teachers of the faith.

The Church, naturally, has long affirmed this. Parents are the primary educators, the family the ‘domestic church’ where faith, virtue and the habits of mind are first received (Catechism 2221–2231; Gravissimum Educationis). At Pentecost we may see the pattern particularly clearly. Truth is proclaimed in living relationship, in languages each could understand, not through distant decrees. The Apostles embodied their mission. So too today, Catholic parents are invited to transmit the living Word – the Logos – in the idiom of their children’s lives.

Education, at its best, has always been more than the transmission of skills. It has sought to form persons through a shared inheritance of knowledge and habits of thought, drawing on the wisdom of the trivium and quadrivium, the humanist vision of paideia, and the Christian understanding of learning as participation in a conversation across time. Speech itself, the ‘the mirror of the spirit’, is relational and incarnational, aimed at truth, beauty and the common good. A lack of appetite for knowledge, in this view, points ultimately to a lack of love: for the good, for others and for the God who orders all things.

That older understanding once found everyday expression in practices now less common. Bible reading, for generations of ordinary people, served as a doorway into the humanities – into language, narrative and moral imagination. Its secular counterpart, the university reading group, has too often faded from view, though happily not everywhere. At the Oxford-based Canterbury Institute, for instance, such groups continue to sustain genuine community and the patient forging of thought. Small circles, serious conversation, joy in the shared pursuit. The Apostles might recognise something familiar in that fellowship.

Published last year, the Civitas report Renewing Classical Liberal Education invites us to consider how these older ideals might nourish our present moment. It acknowledges the genuine gains of recent reforms in strengthening core subjects in England. At the same time, it notes areas where humane formation has thinned. For example, pupils encounter fewer sustained pages of literature and a lighter touch on the chronological sweep of history. Too many schools retreat from classical languages in many settings. By contrast, some independent classical schools invite children into deeper immersion – Homer, Virgil, Dante and more – thousands of pages woven together, drawing them into the great conversation that has shaped the West. This is far from being elitism in action; rather, the difference lies in fidelity to the ancient task of cultivating free persons capable of wisdom, delight and prudent judgement.

Classical liberal education, understood thus, far from being a new form of nostalgia, is the result of a patient work, which seeks to order our affections, as the ancients and the Christians who followed them understood it. It forms what C S Lewis called the ‘chest’ (The Abolition of Man, 1943), in other words the seat of trained sentiment without which virtue grows fragile. Grounded in wonder at creation, sharpened by dialectic, enriched by beauty, it prepares minds to receive the gifts of the Spirit: wisdom, understanding and counsel. In an age often marked by fragmentation, it offers coherence; where utility can dominate, it recalls that we are made for more.

As parents, we need not be scholars or experts. We simply begin where we are. In our home, that has meant reading together, talking about stories, modelling curiosity, perhaps also playing music or singing together, and guarding time for the transmission of what matters in the sanctuary of our home. Some families may wish to supplement school with selections from the Great Books or the lives of the saints. Others choose home education, making the household itself the primary school of virtue. The Civitas report highlights these green shoots and encourages policies that honour parental choice while supporting a richer common curriculum.

At Pentecost, the upper room was not a formal academy but a family at prayer, waiting in trust. Our homes can also become something like it: places where the Spirit finds willing instruments in mothers and fathers who, however imperfectly, open the scriptures, share the stories that have formed them and teach their children to love what is true. The challenges to the mind are real, yet so is the remedy – handed on one conversation, one book, one prayer at a time. In this domestic labour, under the guidance of the same Spirit who filled the Apostles, we participate in the renewal not only of our children but of a culture capable of receiving the Gospel afresh.