Classical education is in a unique position to acknowledge in humility that every person is a sinner, and that some people and institutions in the West have been monstrously evil. Yet the Western heritage includes that which can never itself be complicit in evil: the true and the good, those inexhaustible resources that set us [...]
According to Dorothy Sayers, classical education is not as much an orthodox literary corpus as it is a mindset and a methodology. It is not merely the content of the Great Books, but the tools used in learning any book, which modern education has lost and needs to recover. In the ideal classical form, [...]
Today we are not inclined to ask who said something, but to ask to which identity group the person who said it belongs. This is profoundly opposed to the spirit of inquiry that classical education proposes to students—a spirit that seeks truth, beauty, and goodness. Though classical learning is gaining steam again in many parts [...]
In order to reap the full rewards of a classical education, schools should prize the classical languages as highly as they do the mathematical arts. The qualitative and the quantitative are essential aspects of human understanding, without which no one may be fully educated. Every rule has a story. Perhaps you have read an [...]
Academics who are interested in understanding the world in which we live, producing good citizens, and thinking beyond their own disciplinary cage should reconsider throwing all their eggs in the university basket and give serious attention to the possibility of taking up a post in an institution of classical learning. Prior to the pandemic, [...]
As states and localities battle over issues from how or even whether to re-open schools, all the way to defining the circumstances under which small children will be required to wear masks, a devolution of decision-making is certainly welcome. Hybrid homeschools can provide many more families with a way to both get past virus-related [...]
Schools now attempt to produce students who will contribute to the workforce and, really, nothing more. Students are now frequently viewed as tools for the end of GDP; this demeaning use of a person shows that a pragmatic notion of education entirely misses the mark. Birth to school. School to college. College to job. [...]
In the greatest of ironies, a recent issue of “Harvard Magazine” has condemned parents being at home with their children all day, even while the governments across America have now required it for the past several weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My efforts to recast homeschooling in a less-threatening light are rooted in [...]
Apologists for Greek and Latin have lately dwindled. Yet in the past several years there have been some notable attempts to save classical education from utter extinction—one of which is Tracy Lee Simmons’ “Climbing Parnassus.” Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin, by Tracy Lee Simmons (290 pages, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007) [...]
The Western canon as typically presented is increasingly unable to rally the enthusiasm even of devoted admirers of Western civilization, who recognize the commonly proffered canons as, at best, an impoverished rendition of Western culture and, at worst, a perpetuation of the very same cultural forces that are at the source of its decay. [...]
When most people imagine a classical school, they probably think of a K-12 institution with a compulsory Latin curriculum focusing on grammatical analysis and close translation, an integrated approach to humanities that takes inspiration from the Great Books programs developed over the last sixty years, and some compromise with the conventional STEM-orientation in science [...]
Our need for the classics is intense. Yet any defense of them in our time must come from a sense of their absolute necessity—not from a desire to inculcate “cultural literacy,” or to keep alive a pastime for an elite, but to preserve the full range of human sensibility. What is needed is to [...]
Clear, deep, and accurate thinking about reality, both natural and supernatural, is the essential skill the student must develop. However, without the help of dedicated and proficient teachers and a robust community of learning, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to acquire true knowledge of both self and creation. We may assert without [...]
Intended originally to transform a largely agrarian population into efficient industrial workers, the progressive system of education has had its day. In response, over the past forty years, there has been an explosion in homeschooling and classical schools, which propose a variety of ways of moving forward by retrieving the wisdom of the past. [...]