Classical Education in Schools?

 

A movement is afoot to return a classical curricula to U.S. schools. With fifty years as a teacher and administrator, I’m for it—with some reservations. 

Classical education is built around the liberal arts—language and literature, natural sciences, formal sciences (logic, math, statistics), history, social sciences (civics, economics, psychology, human geography, sociology), and fine arts. They’re called liberal arts because they liberate students (from Latin liberalis—“worthy of a free person”—and ars—“structured practice”). In democracies, that freedom is the foundation of citizenship. 

Vartan Gregorian, esteemed late president of the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation, called liberal education the “soul of democracy” because it prepares students to “appreciate the differences between earning a living and actually living; to cultivate more than a passing familiarity with ethics, history, science, and culture; and to perceive the tragic chasm between the world as it is and the world as it could and ought to be.”    

Classical education typically begins in the early grades, teaching reading through phonics and valuing memorization of multiplication tables, poetry, and the like. A century ago, most Americans learned in these ways, but then, so-called “progressive education” swept the land replacing phonics with learning to read (or not) by context and claiming memorization was mere drill. Too, industrialization needed trained workers, so basic skills and learning for earning replaced rigorous liberal arts and sciences except for the minority of college-bound.   

By high school, classical education involves reading and discussing what some of history’s most influential thinkers had to say about truth, beauty, virtue, and citizenship: How can we find what is true? How do we define what is beautiful? How can we be a good person? How best to govern ourselves? Plato (pictured) favored philosopher-kings; 22 centuries later, America’s founders opted for democracy. Students who read and discuss Plato and Jefferson and Madison (and others between) will have a deeper understanding of the meaning of citizenship. 

Classical education is reviving most notably in charter schools with religious affiliations attracted by the long influence of Christianity on literature and the arts. Secular investors are attracted by their potential as models of excellence for public schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies have invested millions in classical schools. Schools in most European countries and many exclusive private schools in America have never lost their focus on the classics.

A weakness of traditional classical education is the narrow focus on European civilization brought to the Americas through conquest and immigration. We’ve been taught that our cultural heritage is from Plato, the Caesars, popes, Luther, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven—a long list of dead white men who shaped our world. 

And they did, but ours is only part of the world, and as our population becomes more diverse, it’s time to make the classic contributions of other cultures part of ours. Searching for truths? Read Confucius. Beauty? Examine India’s Taj Mahal. Innovations in the sciences? Moslems invented the hospital with separate wards for different ailments and gave us algebra and chemistry terms such as alcohol. Modern music? The roots of jazz and rock were in the many empires of Sub-Saharan Africa. Great literature? A Japanese woman wrote the world’s first novel a thousand years ago. 

Another classical weakness is the near absence of non-males in the heritage of many cultures, an effect of the traditional view that woman’s role is in the home and not as leaders or agents of change. That is changing, and a classical curricula needs to reflect that.

Taught well, the liberal arts favor no ethnicity or ideology or faith. They liberate students to choose from all that civilization has to offer. That is freedom.