When Colleges Go Remedial, Hillcrest Goes Deeper
An article published last year in The Harvard Crimson came across my desk recently. It highlighted how Harvard had to introduce a remedial math course for their students. Even at elite institutions, incoming college students are showing gaps in what used to be assumed foundational skills and colleges feel compelled to build extra support structures into their curricula to help students catch up.
What that piece doesn’t really get at, but what matters so deeply in Christian education is our work is about forming minds to think with depth, clarity, and purpose long before students arrive in a calculus lecture hall or a college classroom. In classical Christian education, we focus on the roots of learning rather than just the surface of skills. We say and pray often, “Lord help us to teach these students how to think, how to learn and how to understand what is good, true and beautiful.”
At the heart of Classical Christian Education is the conviction that thinking well flows out of knowing well: knowing God, knowing truth, knowing how to connect truths across disciplines. We don’t start with test prep or remedial drills; we start with building habits of attention, reasoning, interpretation, and articulation. A student who has been trained to ask why and how isn’t just prepared for algebra or Shakespeare, they’re prepared to wrestle honestly with the world around them.
That’s why, at Hillcrest, we stress (beyond just being a play on words) that we are a Christian Classical school. Firstly, calling what we do “Christian” means Christ shapes our understanding of every part of learning, not just a Bible class here or there. Calling it “Classical” means we trust in the time-tested rhythms of grammar, logic, and rhetoric: first learn the building blocks, then think with them, then express them well. This order matters because thinking well is the very soil in which character and wisdom grow.
The Gospel gives us the why. We teach students to think not to make high test scores, but to discern truth from falsehood, to love what is good, to serve with wisdom and courage. Math becomes a discipline that trains the mind toward precision, structure, perseverance. Reading well means grappling with meaning, context, nuance. These practices form better thinkers not because they make college easier, but because they form people who can see creation rightly and reflect the Creator in how they engage the world.
So when others scramble to patch gaps, Hillcrest’s purposeful choice and identity to be a Christian Classical school helps us form thinkers from the beginning. That means strong content, deep engagement, disciplined habits, and the Gospel that shapes both the mind and the heart.
