Discover Our Classical Christian Academy

About

About Trinitas Academy

Trinity Classical Academy Online was founded in 2023, but has roots much earlier. When her children were younger, Nicole Whitacre organized a classically-oriented cottage school for her kids, her nieces, and a nephew. The online component was added in 2021, when students from around the country began joining in to Nicole’s literature classes and Steve’s worldview class. Today, Trinitas Classical Academy Online serves students in many locales, helping them to enjoy learning about God’s world and his Word.

Steve Whitacre is a pastor at Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville, Greek professor at the Sovereign Grace Pastors College, and the President of Trinity College of Louisville. Steve graduated from the Sovereign Grace Pastors College in 1999, and married Nicole in 2000, eventually relocating with their four children to the charming hamlet of Pewee Valley, Kentucky. He is nearing completion of a PhD through the University of Aberdeen. In his spare time, Steve enjoys time with his family, reading, and learning the cello.

Nicole Whitacre is a wife, mother, homemaker, teacher, and author. She and her husband, Steve, and their four grown children make their happy home in Pewee Valley, Kentucky. Nicole is the founder and head teacher of Trinitas Classical Academy and a guest lecturer at Trinity College of Louisville. She is the co-author of several books, including Girl Talk, True Beauty, True Feelings, and True Life, and the author of True Happiness, forthcoming from Crossway Books.

Join Our Community of Lifelong Learners Today!

Who We Are

Our Beliefs and Mission

We adhere to the Sovereign Grace Churches Statement of Faith and families from other denominations are warmly invited to join us.

Classical Christian Education

By Steve Whitacre

The purpose of a true education is to ignite in the hearts of young people delight in the gifts and the ways of the Lord. This is in contrast with an exclusively pragmatic approach to education that is so common today.

In Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times, there is a particularly unlikable educator named Professor Gradgrind. Typical of Dickens, his name tells you a lot about his character. Professor Gradgrind goes about demanding of his students: “Facts! What I want are facts.”

This is a view of learning that pictures the academic task as though all that is necessary for a proper education is to stock the shelves of students’ minds with the requisite spelling and times tables and dates then they’ll be equipped to go out into the world. But we want to go beyond facts.

Here at Trinitas Classical Academy, we strive to equip students with knowledge so that they can develop wisdom to live well. In other words, we are laboring to teach students facts as a means to open their eyes to the glories that are revealed in God’s creation and join you in helping them to flourish in the world in the fear of the Lord.

As C. S. Lewis once said,”The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” We are irrigating the deserts of students’ hearts so that as they discover the order and beauty of music and history, mathematics and grammar, they will be drawn to the Savior who gave us these and a thousand other means by which we might better know him.

We are teaching our students the grammatical skills to recognize that when we refer to a “classical Christian education,” the order of those three words are important. Education is the head noun, that’s the thing we’re talking about. Classical and Christian are adjectives describing the kind of education.

Christian is the proximate adjective and classical is the remote adjective, meaning that the education we are striving for is Christian first. We desire to build a foundation in Christian truth that enables a coherent Christian worldview which in turn births wise and virtuous Christian living. And it is classical because it is rooted in a time-tested tradition of the pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

That is what makes what we are trying to do here a distinctively Christian, particularly classical education. Psalm 111:2 says,”Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them.” All God’s works are great and worthy to be praised. And those who delight in them, study them. Note the order: Those who delight in the ways of the Lord study the ways of the Lord.

A Christian philosopher named Francis Schaeffer is famous for having said—among other things—that “All truth is God’s truth.” If that is accurate, and we believe it is, then to be truly educated, to be truly wise for life in this world, to truly virtuous in heart and mind and word and deed, is to see the world from a Christian worldview. Our hope and desire is that students will come to faith in Christ so that they can be truly educated.