Amid growing claims that schools indoctrinate students, ‘classical education’—which teaches kids to think critically and master old books—is making a comeback.
What’s old is new again. These academies should pay Randi Weingarten and the teachers unions a marketing fee. Years of school closures, masking, and politicized instruction have destroyed public schools. Parents with means will vote with their wallets, but disadvantaged kids will remain trapped under the soft bigotry of low expectations and incompetent teachers. All in the name of equity and progress!
School Choice is key! But also: note the Barney Classical Charter School initiative of Hillsdale, which has been highly successful in underserved areas.
they are trying to open one near me but in Pa the school board of the district any charter will be located in must approve it. The school board has voted it down twice, calling this classical curriculum regressive, right wing, racist and natiomalistic. While their students read contemporary “graphic novels” centered entirely on race and oppression.
So sad. Basically ignorant. Where in PA are you? Opening a charter school is very difficult and time consuming. That’s why we went with opening a private Classical
School - it’s very hard to do, but we intend to succeed!
SE Pa. That will probably be next step if they can’t get it approved. They just collected 1500 signatures to appeal to the State Charter Appeals Board. Gov Wolf in 2022 sidestepped legislature to enact a host of new charter regulations that make it very difficult for charters to open in Pa. Gov Shapiro campaigned with promise of expanding school choice but reneged on it and line item vetoed funding for “lifeline” scholarships reserved for poor students in failing school districts. Our current legislature is working on enacting more onerous restrictions on charters and cutting further the amount of funding to charters. Pa is moving in the opposite direction as rest of country with regards to school choice. https://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/2022/03/22/governor-wolf-charter-schools/
My grandchildren attend Great Hearts Academy, and it is free! Arizona has an excellent charter school system where their education tax dollars follow them. It is equitable for all!
I live in Arizona, too, and I don't mind my tax dollars following the child to private school--if the school is one of these type of operations. (Not religious; I don't want my money promoting religion, even my own.) Our public education system should be classical, because educating children to deconstruct arguments and question statements from "authorities" will keep them from being fleeced as adults by the cultists and grifters who prey on Americans without mercy.
I also get concerned about public schools getting saddled with the student population with learning, physical and emotional disabilities and issues, that these quasi-private-but-funded-with-all-our-tax-dollars "academies" are cherry picking themselves out of having to serve. So of course the test scores and measured "success" factors are going to favor academies that are serving a mostly self-selected "1%" of the public school district's population and not serving the population that is of course going to reflect in the comparative public school's numbers. And that the end result will just be a drain of a minority of students who have access to quality education while a vast majority are being dis-serviced. I fail to see how that makes the nation stronger as a whole, versus rescuing a few from a system we've all about given up any investment into making successful it seems. And yes, that does mean doing something more than inventing more ways to *segregate* from the public system, versus how about "radically" going into the public systems (including teacher education) and wrestling it back from the ideologues and bureaucracies that are producing failures, stop ceding the public schools and institutions to outer-left wing progressives as a start? And by making that sort of "take back" effective, stop also ceding that to right wing nut-cases that use their positions to wage unpopular culture war wedge issues versus attempting to actually work within the communities and schools they are trying to serve in meaningful ways to make meaningful changes (i.e. more "let's teach math better using proven pedagogy" and a lot less of "let's go on a LGBTQ themed snipe hunt of library books to vanquish" - a concern that might have more validity if we had evidence that more students were actually *gasp* reading books in the first place, and from the school library to boot, and maybe if we could get schools to practice these "old ways" of education by reading and literally writing then we can worry about the "scandalous" contents of the library!)
Why can't we provide for "excellent" public school system instead, looking at Finland for an example, one of (if not "the") top rated internationally public school systems, which is *all* public.
And yes, I understand that schools cannot correct completely widespread community and social and family dysfunction that produces students that are not "equitable" at the starting gate with the basic foundations for learning. But we should be able to create a school system that can at least attempt to correct for some of that, in targeted ways as needed - schools that provide a disciplined space and literally meaning "safe spaces" for learning and social development to happen even if the external factors are up against the wall.
I’m very sympathetic to your POV. But the horse has left the barn in terms of progressive rot in the school system. Trying the win back the current system and salvage something out of it seems like a Sisyphean task. It seems more plausible to start a parallel system as these schools are doing. And perhaps compete for students with the incumbent public system.
I agree with the potential problem of selection bias and of skimming the already good students while leaving the difficult ones for the old system. That may become a real problem when these 2 networks approach size parity. But that doesn’t seem to be a substantial problem as it currently stands (2% of student population nation-wide).
I'll make one further bet, since Smarticat raised the trope of book banning: I'd wager quite a sum that in their pursuit of excellence, these new classics academies have no shelf space for "Gender Queer" or any of the other pseudo-comics that the left fights so desperately to preserve. Why, you might ask? Because instead of comic books with blowjob illustrations, these schools are emphasizing works that are deemed "classics" because they've stood the test of time - and I don't think "Gender Queer" will ever earn the classic moniker, except maybe the "classic" category on a porn site.
I haven't read Gender Queer, so I have no clue as to whether it's a great book with a horrifying title or Porn Illustrated. But kids desperately need reading options beyond Chaucer and Finnegans Wake, because the former makes the mind scream with boredom and the latter is as unapproachable as a swamp of plutonium gators.
I'm not making a brief for or against GQ. Only saying that school libraries, even in the Classic system, needs sports, detective, romance, comic books, and other fun diversionary reading to keep the kids interested in the written word.
I'm not hyping putting "Gender Queer" in school libraries, but I am questioning whether that's the best sort of priority one should have as a "reformer" into the current school system, and the hill to die on over. Most school librarians would be thrilled if kids were coming into the library and reading and checking out the books there regardless of the topic - I really don't think the problem of kids reading "queer porn" in the school library to the extent it is there at all is really the first priority problem that should be tackled - insisting on effective reading and math education and a fully rounded curriculum that includes arts, music and physical education and a lot less "social-emotional education" seems like a much more worthy place to start, and a position that is a lot less likely to lead to getting voted in the next election for "overreach". And even if the concern is over "age appropriate content" in the school library, there's ways to go about this that are less... red flag waving and confrontational for sure. Those kinds of movements built around partisan culture wars and heat burn bright but fast - Moms 4 Liberty for example, has had a pretty poor track record since its initial "celebrity" in 2021-2022.
And that's what I mean about getting serious reform out of the hands of partisan/culture warriors, if at all possible. You lose about 50% of your support and audience the instant "education reform" becomes associated with either a Fox News narrative or a "woke" issue.
I believe it would be easier than we think to wrest the public school system from the hands of both left- and right-wing lunatics, because most of the voting public wants good and sane educations for their lil' ones. A state simply needs to do it. But that takes a governor and legislature willing to tell all the Culture Warriors to eat shit and die because we're making public schools good, interesting, and fun again--and putting enough tax money into the system to do it. States can force unions to negotiate on only wages and benefits and not how the system teaches kids. States can change funding from local property taxes to statewide income taxes if they choose. States can do just about anything they want to make their public school system shine.
It just takes political will, something is short supply in these Rageholic days.
I definitely agree about unions. Any union is there to protect workers’ rights, safety, working conditions etc. I’m ok with that. But unions should never dictate how a job gets done properly. No one looks to a steelworkers union for how to design a bridge that doesn’t fall down. Just as a teachers union should have no say into what goes into a curriculum. Here’s the curriculum…now go teach it. And if you don’t like it, find another career.
Agree with all of this, the administrative strangle and curriculum decision making is definitely something that can be reformed. The educational schools themselves is another - states can require that teachers are not only degreed/certified but that the educational schools are prioritizing training teachers into proven and effective pedagogy and instruction for a qualified degree/certification in that state, and pay teachers commensurate with being professionals to attract more professionals into the field (another Finland seems to do right, teaching is a high status profession in Finland, not a punching bag like it is here)...
Well, we seem to agree that a 2% solution isn't moving the needle much at all in any direction. Articles like this that promote these tiny classical academies without discussion on how to scale as a "solution" are not really talking "solutions" overall. It's an option that very few are going to be able to take advantage of, even if they want to in this form. Real education reform talk has to involve how to fix the system for the 98% is what I'm saying.
We can be better than Finland. We just don't want to be better than Finland.
There is no legitimate reason we cannot have the best public school system in the world. One so good that private schools would disappear because every child would kill to attend the public and every parent would empty his or her wallet to fund it. All it takes is political vision and courage, and these days, that's in such short supply it's made us brain-dead.
God knows we have enough money in this country to do schools right. We just don't have the will, because we refuse to tell the Culture Warriors on the right and the left to fuck off and die, we're making public school mandatory for every child and we're investing so much energy and money into doing schools right that no one will miss the privates.
I would note that on the way to becoming the international leader in educational outcomes Finland actually did outlaw private schools ;) Turns out if you ensure that everyone at every income and class level has a stake in the public school system being excellent, the money and "will" gets a lot easier to find...
Agree with this completely. When the Precious of the well to do have to attend their local public school, Daddums and Mommykins will move heaven and earth to ensure that school is safe, well-staffed and -managed, and funded to the max. If their kids have no skin in the game, then the movers and shakers consider public ed to be a dumping ground for The Other, to be shortchanged as much as possible. Public ed requires constant pressure from The Elite to not backslide, and because of that, everybody in society benefits.
The problem is that America has become a nation of "I got mine, fuck you," and that spills over into so many other problems.
There are no legitimate reasons I agree, but the school industrial complex is too ingrained. I do not believe it is possible. You have the unions and all of their minions making money off of the books and study programs they change every year just to sell the districts more stuff. It is terrible. All of it funded by our money which is infuriating.
I'm in a Phoenix suburb and would be thrilled if my grandson could attend Great Hearts Academy or another classical school when he's old enough. (He's only two years old now.) I'm afraid of what kind of indoctrination he may get in a regular public school.
You may be thinking of Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, who has voiced her opposition to school choice. Fortunately, the AZ school choice law was passed before she took office.
If our public school system was classical like these, I'd argue against school choice, too--public money should fund only public institutions. But since public schools aren't this way, I'm willing to let my tax dollars follow the child to a classic private.
Public money is the people's money. If they would rather their taxes go to a private school over a public, why should we stop them? I would argue that public schools may not be something the government should be involved in to begin with.
Public money has to be spent Constitutionally, so I'd argue that states can let tax money go with the child to a private school, but not to a religious private school. Otherwise, sure, tie the money to the child wherever the child ends up.
If you wanted to eliminate the public school system entirely in favor of all privates, I'd be OK with that provided the privates be required to take any child. Privates now don't have to educate special ed kids or anybody else they don't feel like educating. That would need to change because every child in America needs schooling.
There is nothing in the US Constitution forcing children into public schools. Nothing. The laws pertaining to this were all enacted by psychotic control freaks, the re-gressives in the Democrat teacher’s unions.
Paying for Math instruction in a religious school isn't "establishing" religion. There are a number of recent SCOTUS decisions and an explicit statement from Chief Justice Roberts summing the principle up as the illegality of discriminating against religion by denying funds for secular purposes because of the religious identity of the recipient.
In many places charter schools are required to take any applicant. Furthermore, Federal money is regularly spent supporting students at clearly religious universities, so the precedent has already been set.
No public money should be used to pay for education. But parents should still decide where the kids go. They shouldn't be forced to be indoctrinated in whatever the fad of the week is
Are you suggesting that parents pay the entire cost of educating their children by themselves? That's unaffordable to most parents, meaning their kids will not be educated, which is very bad for society.
Exactly, let's be clear even the "cheapest" "fly by night" strip mall "charter school" "open today closed by tomorrow" (as the sort Betsy DeVos enabled in her tenure as Michigan's education "tzar") would operate on the "per individual family" ability to pay for. I'm unsure if that's worse than nothing but you get the point.
There's simply no way that that even the most basic expectations of a public school (e.g. a classroom with under 100 students in it with any sort of classroom material not pulled for free from Wikipedia) would be able to operate and employ a staff based on the funding that even a suburban "middle class" family could afford on their own.
This site has leaned way too far to the right sometimes in the commentariat it attracts, there's no real "solutions" here as to how we could operationalize a "classic" education premise (or at least some version of it) onto a public school system when you have one commenter who thinks the public school system is being run for the benefit of ancient Biblical demons on one hand, and another that thinks you'll educate a nation a of millions into a nation of prosperity based on the average family's out of pocket ability to pay for - and that there will magically arrive a market not even willing, but simply, able to service based on that funding.
Beautiful schools! I just toured one last week and was blown away by the senior seminars taking place-- one class "Socratically" discussing Milton's Paradise Lost and the other Karl Marx. The student's books were opened, highlighted, and the margins written in. The teacher would ask one question and the students would freely discuss. Don't let anyone tell you classical education is closed minded.
And the teachers unions in Nebraska are fighting a tax credit, a mere $25 million, that could help low income kids go to other than public schools. SMH It is obvious the ones who need such an education are the teachers union leaders.
Da prezident uv da teachiz yooyun? Why do we allow common fools who can't even speak English to fill the heads of our children with their foolish rubbish?
MIZZY--I'M BORROWING YOUR COMMENTS BOX. THANK YOU!!
Establishment media and manufactured lowest common denominator electronic click bait hysteria is a kind of dark world emotional shadow land sewage. As intended it pollutes, manipulates and poisons everything it touches. In human terms it is a lie of leviathan proportion. A weaponized assault on human moral reason. Depression, emotional anomie, anxiety, a rising suicide rate, addiction and societal/cultural collapse are planned outcomes.
By the middle of this century the possession of classic literature and books will be illegal. Except of course for wealthy cartel connected collectors who will display them to commissariat members at elite cocktail parties as curiosities. Journalistic reports on the political correction, editing and/or removal of American literature by fascist ideologues has already appeared across SUBSTACK. Who remembers the brave librarians who attempted to stand against surveillance state operatives seeking access to the reading histories of free citizens? More recently the violation of what was for myself once a personal sanctuary, the school library. Is all this established threat or fact? If the DEI at the publishing house says a book doesn't get printed and distributed it doesn't. Then there is the algorithm. If it judges a book as dangerous it doesn't exist. If it says you don't exist, never existed, you didn't. If the new DNC/CCP/EU/CCP Davos fascism will destroy lives and careers at the drop of a hat what is a book?
The masters of the electronic age and the billionaire surveillance bureaucracy they serve depends upon illiteracy. Emotional, spiritual, historic and intellectual illiteracy. Psyche split and numbed, one foot in a futureless penury and the other in a sterile cyber land that promises everything and delivers nothing American youth stands prisoner to the hypnotic cathode ray butchery of the bot and the only fans whore. "..everything means everything and nothing means anything.." To rescue American youth we must first rescue ourselves.
Be the thing most scorned and feared by the new tyranny: An American.
"You know I remember a time when things were a lot more fun around here. Back when good was good and evil was evil...Before things got so...fuzzy." --- Don Henley/THE GARDEN OF ALLAH
won’t apply to people who struggle to give their children a decent education towards a ticket in life. And better their children’s life. I’ve lived mine through experiences and voice the struggles I’ve endured. For G-D’s sake we don’t need anymore lectures! Be the solution not a part of the problem.
Interesting post... so dystopian. But yes, I can imagine the likes of Kamala Harris getting all high dudgeon about books such as "Huckleberry Finn." And acting as if she's the smart one.
That was a nice answer. However empty catchy social propoganda won’t, it only enriches the so-called leaders, leaving everyone else holding an EMPTY BAG OF NOTHING! Pure anarchy! Been there, didn’t learn this out of fancy textbooks.
A classical charter school is trying to open near me but in Pa, charter schools must get permission from the school district they are competing with to open. The school board has voted NO twice, with their DEI director calling this kind of education right wing and racist.
Great article. It made my day!! I pray that “classical education” continues to make a comeback and more and more parents have the chance to get their kids this education.
I graduated high school in 1965 - St. Joseph’s Preparatory High School, known as The Prep. I studied Latin for 4 years, Greek for 3 years, English and Math for 4 years. 1,500 eighth graders from all over the Philadelphia area took an entrance exam and needed their teacher’s recommendation to apply. Only 250 or so were admitted and even fewer graduated. Standards were rigorous, the competition for grades was intense but friendly, and we learned to think critically (without the term being bandied about) from Jesuit priests and scholastics who are among the most educated in the world themselves. No chaos as found in local city high schools was tolerated and none was evident. It was a bit heavy on the religious part for my current taste, but I didn’t have that problem with The Prep at the time. That education taught me how to analyze, to understand and to solve problems. It gave me a vocabulary and taught me how to write. It gave me perspective and a foundation that grounds me while forming opinions. Invaluable! All thanks to The Prep and its old fashioned way of actually teaching, not indoctrinating young minds.
I will always be grateful to the good Sisters, now in Heaven, who taught me so well in elementary school in the 50s. Everything that I have today, I owe to the education that they provided to me. Great women
Mine too, but PE was not a joke. PE grade based on , at that time, Marine Corps Fitness test: pushup, pullup, sit-up, run. After 12 years of Catholic schooling, four years of a public university a rest period.
I had ONE chance to choose anything. I chose the classics over the traditional curriculum. It wasn’t called an elective, a concept I only discovered in college. In truth, any curriculum would have served me well.
I had the same kind of education in communst Romania, exactly around the same time. Zero electives, incidentally, and a heavy dose of Latin. Alas, no Greek but we studied five languages. Religion was replaced with Marxist indoctrination (another kind of religion) but nobody paid any attention or believed a single word of it, so it had no effect. The end result was very similar to that reported by Rob.
Sent our kids to The Prep. When we lived in Boston, our oldest attended BC High, same as The Prep. The Jesuits understand educating boys. In addition to learning to think, the kids were educated to understand the value of community and personal responsibility.
I graduated from a Jesuit college prep school in Chicago in the late 60's. During my four years of high school, I took the following mandatory classes: 2 years of Latin, 2 years of French (should have taken Spanish). Biology, Physics, Analytic Geometry plus all of the requisite RRR courses. College was a great party (while I stayed), but I didn't learn anything at that Big 10 college that I hadn't already been taught in high school. Times have really changed.
While I understand the limitations in visiting a school local to the reporter, it would have been nice to highlight how this curriculum works out for a working class population able to attend one of the charter schools listed. Otherwise, I demand the Free Press cover the fight for school choice nationwide so us working class stiffs can help bridge the financial gap of these $20-36K/year Ivy League prep institutions.
TFP repeat after me: Not everyone who reads the Free Press TGIFs in Vale. Not everyone who reads the Free Press vacations in Bora Bora. Not everyone who reads the Free Press can afford $20 cocktails.
I agree with your general premise, but not all of these schools We charge tuition. We have a classical.academy sponsored by Hillsdale in our area and it is a charter school.
Tuition is free. Unfortunately they don't yet have a high school and there is now a huge wait list and lottery to get in. The bigger issue is that there aren't enough schools like this to meet the demand. Also , the main stream media try to undermine them.
Exactly. Which is why I said it's shameful they didn't highlight one of the charter schools, though we are on the same page generally. We need more school choice discussions here and less $20K/yr Silicon Valley Stanford prep bullshit. However, if they do profile classical education schools, in these out-of-our-pricetag institutions, I want to know what the parents of the students think about school choice.
In Nebraska they passed a law that gave our public schools and extra $300 million this year building to a $1.6 billion dollar pot for the future. Along with that came a $25 million tax credit for donating to a fund to help the lower income kids go to other schools. Caps on how much one can donate and income caps on the families who can use it are in place. However, the left and teachers unions have stated a petition to over turn the law. Maybe the teachers union leaders need to go back to school to learn what their real mission is. As for the leftist, all they are doing is bringing generations of our children down to their stupidity level.
Precisely . And then they need to be dissolved and made illegal. Teacher’s Unions damage the children and are only promoting toxic ‘hate’ indoctrination and raising money for lunatic Democrat politicians. Randi Weingarten should be imprisoned for what she did to school children during the Covid crisis.
Alan. I agree with the sentiment. It turns out that most of the schools mentioned in the article are public charter schools which are free to students. This includes 6 of the 8 schools mentioned in "The schools riding the classical ed wave include:" section. In fact, I hate to admit that among the local charters in my area includes Founders Classical which is a local charter school which many believe is currently doing a better job academically than the Christian classical where I teach (but not for long as we are working diligently to improve!!). Here in Central Texas we've seen the number of kids in these schools go from 1-2k in 2010 to well over 10k now across both 15+ schools and homeschool groups.
Those schools are the last place to look. They are Harvard or Princeton at the local level. Woke “hate” factories with endless indoctrination of bad ideas.
Some children are more suited to vocational/ technical instruction. Mike Rowe should establish a network of high quality schools to do this.
This is so beautiful and heart warming. I am encouraged. I was on the board of governors for a classical academy and both my daughters had access to this curriculum. It set them on a path of loving beauty truth and goodness that continues to this day.
It seems that "progressive" education was just retrograde garbage all along...
Well, there is now a generation of union educated morons perfectly primed to vote for whichever monkey offers them free stuff.
Hopefully these schools will teach their students a healthy dose of disdain for their erstwhile "peers" in the diversity, equity and inclusion concentration camps that are America's public schools...
The "classical" education is what we should expect as the standard in a free and civilized society. The question to ask is "what happened to our country" that expectations are so low.
It is not only great for students but also for teachers. I absolutely loved the discussions I had with my students. It was challenging, respectful, reasoned, engaging, really I just can’t say enough about how wonderful it was. If you don’t have a classical school in your town just start one. We started one by being a cooperative for a few years then expanded to become a school over the course of a few years. There are also many classical opportunities for homeschoolers as well.
Few people outside the Education Establishment realize how terrible our local K12 school district monopolies can be for teachers, as well as students. These districts can corrupt the experience for everyone.
RSL. Also, check out both the Society for Classical Learning and Association of Classical Christian Schools. They have great resources for starting a school. Both are Christian, but their start up, governance and pedagogy resources are quite good and relevant to any school. The Hillsdale program & resources are also excellent. The advice to contact other founders in your area is also good. Finally, I would suggest that if you do find a local classical school, supporting that school may be both the easiest and best way to move forward, because it focuses your resources/time and because starting a school is very serious work. Hope that helps. Hayden
Just a note: Inly the original Hillsdale K-12 schoo is mentioned here, but Hillsdale has an incredible network of Classical K-12 Public Charter schools across the country as well as a few affiliated (Member) Private Christian Classical Academies. And their membership continues to grow. Hillsdale does not financially benefit from their member schools and instead provides free curriculum, classical training for teachers, Head of school training and support, as well as Board training and support.
As President of a start-up Hillsdale Member Classical Christian Academy outside of Pittsburgh named Penn Woods Classical Academy, I can say Hillsdale has provided exceptional guidance and support! We are extremely grateful for all that Hillsdale has provided us to make our dream a reality.
Aside from the K-12 Initiative of Hillsdale College, the Society for Classical Learning, led by Eric Cook, and the Circe Institute, led by Andrew Kern, are important organizations to follow!!!!
I went to a wretched comprehensive in the UK 1969-1976, but I was still taught Latin, Shakespeare, the Brontes and Hardy. Having that grounding I went on learning, discovering Homer, Dante, Milton, Dickens, Trollope, Smollett and Gaskell for myself. And that wasn't even my field of work. A proper education gives you the tools, and the desire, to keep on learning. These kids will have a huge advantage.
Wow -- teaching the students how to think rather than telling them exactly what they should be thinking. What a concept!
It kind of reminds me of the old saying -- "give a man (or in this case, a student) a fish and he eats today; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime".
I love classical schools and the classical education for so, so many reasons. The uniforms eliminate having to choose what to wear every day, eliminate the distinction between the 'rich' kids and the scholarship kids, separates what is done at school to what is done after school, and demonstrates that one is not a brand nor does the external define and identify. The deep exploration of the ideas, the historic events, and cultural movements which shaped Western Society will at least give young burgeoning citizen-humans a scaffolding to observe and interpret their lives and their world, whether to they ultimately accept or advance or reject Modern Times. The banishment of phones and Chrome books in favor of reading physical books, in my opinion, will lead to burnishing concentration, taking notes with pencil and paper will enhance learning, and hand written in class exams in a Blue Book will eliminate the shadow of AI. Public schools have become chaotic and disruptive, teachers are stretched to the limit, the curriculum is no longer about expecting hard work and rewarding excellence, the libraries are political battle grounds, and there is more focus on mental health and 'right thinking' about identity than about the mental and more development of our youth.
Not to be overly critical but one of my pet peeves was violated in paragraph two of this article. When writing about classic education, which purportedly avoids political correctness, please avoid terms like BCE. Its BC! BCE and its counterpart, CE, snuck into our lexicon so that non-Christians wouldn't be offended. It is PC on its face and counter to the article's point.
Woohoo! Learning to think instead of what to think. I especially want to be a fly on the wall in on the class studying diverse social contract philosophers like Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes (what about Montesquieu!)
I am in the process of classically educating my kids, one of whom is graduating this year. I attended public schools and received a mediocre education myself. I have been educating myself along with them and reading like crazy all these years. It’s been an amazing and wonderful journey for our family and I wouldn’t trade it.
There are a lot of wonderful resources online for parents to learn about the Classics - or indeed learn along with their children. It's never too late to enjoy ancient wisdom...
I suspect, that they, like I, didn't know that. If it weren't for this article, I wouldn't have known that there was such a thing as a Classical Education, which, I suspect, is different than learning about the Classics.
It's a good reminder for us in the Classical World that our outreach needs to go further! We work hard to show folks the relevance of the classics in the here and now - it's a saddening that so many don't know that these works which can be so inspiring are at their fingertips.
I've read some of those works: Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Plato, Aristotle, and others whose names escape me, but I think that is different than a Classical Education, which seems to be about learning, writing, reasoning, clear thinking, etc. Just to read them on one's own, without the benefit of a teacher, is much like reading an interesting novel. Some insight is gained but much is lost and not understood.
It's true - there is a difference between just reading on your own and being encouraged to really engage with the texts - discuss them, write about them, formulate specific ideas about them. It can be done solo (as many in history can attest to) though of course it's much harder! I like that we have such a community at Classical Wisdom, because it allows us to talk about specific works or general ideas and everything in between together...
What’s old is new again. These academies should pay Randi Weingarten and the teachers unions a marketing fee. Years of school closures, masking, and politicized instruction have destroyed public schools. Parents with means will vote with their wallets, but disadvantaged kids will remain trapped under the soft bigotry of low expectations and incompetent teachers. All in the name of equity and progress!
School Choice is key! But also: note the Barney Classical Charter School initiative of Hillsdale, which has been highly successful in underserved areas.
they are trying to open one near me but in Pa the school board of the district any charter will be located in must approve it. The school board has voted it down twice, calling this classical curriculum regressive, right wing, racist and natiomalistic. While their students read contemporary “graphic novels” centered entirely on race and oppression.
So sad. Basically ignorant. Where in PA are you? Opening a charter school is very difficult and time consuming. That’s why we went with opening a private Classical
School - it’s very hard to do, but we intend to succeed!
SE Pa. That will probably be next step if they can’t get it approved. They just collected 1500 signatures to appeal to the State Charter Appeals Board. Gov Wolf in 2022 sidestepped legislature to enact a host of new charter regulations that make it very difficult for charters to open in Pa. Gov Shapiro campaigned with promise of expanding school choice but reneged on it and line item vetoed funding for “lifeline” scholarships reserved for poor students in failing school districts. Our current legislature is working on enacting more onerous restrictions on charters and cutting further the amount of funding to charters. Pa is moving in the opposite direction as rest of country with regards to school choice. https://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/2022/03/22/governor-wolf-charter-schools/
The teacher's union in PA is diabolical. Power is never given, it must be taken. Vote these enemies of freedom out.
My grandchildren attend Great Hearts Academy, and it is free! Arizona has an excellent charter school system where their education tax dollars follow them. It is equitable for all!
I live in Arizona, too, and I don't mind my tax dollars following the child to private school--if the school is one of these type of operations. (Not religious; I don't want my money promoting religion, even my own.) Our public education system should be classical, because educating children to deconstruct arguments and question statements from "authorities" will keep them from being fleeced as adults by the cultists and grifters who prey on Americans without mercy.
I also get concerned about public schools getting saddled with the student population with learning, physical and emotional disabilities and issues, that these quasi-private-but-funded-with-all-our-tax-dollars "academies" are cherry picking themselves out of having to serve. So of course the test scores and measured "success" factors are going to favor academies that are serving a mostly self-selected "1%" of the public school district's population and not serving the population that is of course going to reflect in the comparative public school's numbers. And that the end result will just be a drain of a minority of students who have access to quality education while a vast majority are being dis-serviced. I fail to see how that makes the nation stronger as a whole, versus rescuing a few from a system we've all about given up any investment into making successful it seems. And yes, that does mean doing something more than inventing more ways to *segregate* from the public system, versus how about "radically" going into the public systems (including teacher education) and wrestling it back from the ideologues and bureaucracies that are producing failures, stop ceding the public schools and institutions to outer-left wing progressives as a start? And by making that sort of "take back" effective, stop also ceding that to right wing nut-cases that use their positions to wage unpopular culture war wedge issues versus attempting to actually work within the communities and schools they are trying to serve in meaningful ways to make meaningful changes (i.e. more "let's teach math better using proven pedagogy" and a lot less of "let's go on a LGBTQ themed snipe hunt of library books to vanquish" - a concern that might have more validity if we had evidence that more students were actually *gasp* reading books in the first place, and from the school library to boot, and maybe if we could get schools to practice these "old ways" of education by reading and literally writing then we can worry about the "scandalous" contents of the library!)
Why can't we provide for "excellent" public school system instead, looking at Finland for an example, one of (if not "the") top rated internationally public school systems, which is *all* public.
And yes, I understand that schools cannot correct completely widespread community and social and family dysfunction that produces students that are not "equitable" at the starting gate with the basic foundations for learning. But we should be able to create a school system that can at least attempt to correct for some of that, in targeted ways as needed - schools that provide a disciplined space and literally meaning "safe spaces" for learning and social development to happen even if the external factors are up against the wall.
I’m very sympathetic to your POV. But the horse has left the barn in terms of progressive rot in the school system. Trying the win back the current system and salvage something out of it seems like a Sisyphean task. It seems more plausible to start a parallel system as these schools are doing. And perhaps compete for students with the incumbent public system.
I agree with the potential problem of selection bias and of skimming the already good students while leaving the difficult ones for the old system. That may become a real problem when these 2 networks approach size parity. But that doesn’t seem to be a substantial problem as it currently stands (2% of student population nation-wide).
I'll make one further bet, since Smarticat raised the trope of book banning: I'd wager quite a sum that in their pursuit of excellence, these new classics academies have no shelf space for "Gender Queer" or any of the other pseudo-comics that the left fights so desperately to preserve. Why, you might ask? Because instead of comic books with blowjob illustrations, these schools are emphasizing works that are deemed "classics" because they've stood the test of time - and I don't think "Gender Queer" will ever earn the classic moniker, except maybe the "classic" category on a porn site.
I haven't read Gender Queer, so I have no clue as to whether it's a great book with a horrifying title or Porn Illustrated. But kids desperately need reading options beyond Chaucer and Finnegans Wake, because the former makes the mind scream with boredom and the latter is as unapproachable as a swamp of plutonium gators.
I'm not making a brief for or against GQ. Only saying that school libraries, even in the Classic system, needs sports, detective, romance, comic books, and other fun diversionary reading to keep the kids interested in the written word.
I'm not hyping putting "Gender Queer" in school libraries, but I am questioning whether that's the best sort of priority one should have as a "reformer" into the current school system, and the hill to die on over. Most school librarians would be thrilled if kids were coming into the library and reading and checking out the books there regardless of the topic - I really don't think the problem of kids reading "queer porn" in the school library to the extent it is there at all is really the first priority problem that should be tackled - insisting on effective reading and math education and a fully rounded curriculum that includes arts, music and physical education and a lot less "social-emotional education" seems like a much more worthy place to start, and a position that is a lot less likely to lead to getting voted in the next election for "overreach". And even if the concern is over "age appropriate content" in the school library, there's ways to go about this that are less... red flag waving and confrontational for sure. Those kinds of movements built around partisan culture wars and heat burn bright but fast - Moms 4 Liberty for example, has had a pretty poor track record since its initial "celebrity" in 2021-2022.
And that's what I mean about getting serious reform out of the hands of partisan/culture warriors, if at all possible. You lose about 50% of your support and audience the instant "education reform" becomes associated with either a Fox News narrative or a "woke" issue.
I believe it would be easier than we think to wrest the public school system from the hands of both left- and right-wing lunatics, because most of the voting public wants good and sane educations for their lil' ones. A state simply needs to do it. But that takes a governor and legislature willing to tell all the Culture Warriors to eat shit and die because we're making public schools good, interesting, and fun again--and putting enough tax money into the system to do it. States can force unions to negotiate on only wages and benefits and not how the system teaches kids. States can change funding from local property taxes to statewide income taxes if they choose. States can do just about anything they want to make their public school system shine.
It just takes political will, something is short supply in these Rageholic days.
I definitely agree about unions. Any union is there to protect workers’ rights, safety, working conditions etc. I’m ok with that. But unions should never dictate how a job gets done properly. No one looks to a steelworkers union for how to design a bridge that doesn’t fall down. Just as a teachers union should have no say into what goes into a curriculum. Here’s the curriculum…now go teach it. And if you don’t like it, find another career.
Agree with all of this, the administrative strangle and curriculum decision making is definitely something that can be reformed. The educational schools themselves is another - states can require that teachers are not only degreed/certified but that the educational schools are prioritizing training teachers into proven and effective pedagogy and instruction for a qualified degree/certification in that state, and pay teachers commensurate with being professionals to attract more professionals into the field (another Finland seems to do right, teaching is a high status profession in Finland, not a punching bag like it is here)...
Well, we seem to agree that a 2% solution isn't moving the needle much at all in any direction. Articles like this that promote these tiny classical academies without discussion on how to scale as a "solution" are not really talking "solutions" overall. It's an option that very few are going to be able to take advantage of, even if they want to in this form. Real education reform talk has to involve how to fix the system for the 98% is what I'm saying.
We can be better than Finland. We just don't want to be better than Finland.
There is no legitimate reason we cannot have the best public school system in the world. One so good that private schools would disappear because every child would kill to attend the public and every parent would empty his or her wallet to fund it. All it takes is political vision and courage, and these days, that's in such short supply it's made us brain-dead.
God knows we have enough money in this country to do schools right. We just don't have the will, because we refuse to tell the Culture Warriors on the right and the left to fuck off and die, we're making public school mandatory for every child and we're investing so much energy and money into doing schools right that no one will miss the privates.
100%.
I would note that on the way to becoming the international leader in educational outcomes Finland actually did outlaw private schools ;) Turns out if you ensure that everyone at every income and class level has a stake in the public school system being excellent, the money and "will" gets a lot easier to find...
Agree with this completely. When the Precious of the well to do have to attend their local public school, Daddums and Mommykins will move heaven and earth to ensure that school is safe, well-staffed and -managed, and funded to the max. If their kids have no skin in the game, then the movers and shakers consider public ed to be a dumping ground for The Other, to be shortchanged as much as possible. Public ed requires constant pressure from The Elite to not backslide, and because of that, everybody in society benefits.
The problem is that America has become a nation of "I got mine, fuck you," and that spills over into so many other problems.
There are no legitimate reasons I agree, but the school industrial complex is too ingrained. I do not believe it is possible. You have the unions and all of their minions making money off of the books and study programs they change every year just to sell the districts more stuff. It is terrible. All of it funded by our money which is infuriating.
I'm in a Phoenix suburb and would be thrilled if my grandson could attend Great Hearts Academy or another classical school when he's old enough. (He's only two years old now.) I'm afraid of what kind of indoctrination he may get in a regular public school.
For now. I feel like I keep seeing articles about some AZ politician who is against any kind of school choice.
You may be thinking of Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, who has voiced her opposition to school choice. Fortunately, the AZ school choice law was passed before she took office.
Well, I hope she doesn't try to find a way to undo them. I don't trust any of our politicians not to mess with thing, even if the voters want it.
If our public school system was classical like these, I'd argue against school choice, too--public money should fund only public institutions. But since public schools aren't this way, I'm willing to let my tax dollars follow the child to a classic private.
Public money is the people's money. If they would rather their taxes go to a private school over a public, why should we stop them? I would argue that public schools may not be something the government should be involved in to begin with.
Public money has to be spent Constitutionally, so I'd argue that states can let tax money go with the child to a private school, but not to a religious private school. Otherwise, sure, tie the money to the child wherever the child ends up.
If you wanted to eliminate the public school system entirely in favor of all privates, I'd be OK with that provided the privates be required to take any child. Privates now don't have to educate special ed kids or anybody else they don't feel like educating. That would need to change because every child in America needs schooling.
There is nothing in the US Constitution forcing children into public schools. Nothing. The laws pertaining to this were all enacted by psychotic control freaks, the re-gressives in the Democrat teacher’s unions.
Paying for Math instruction in a religious school isn't "establishing" religion. There are a number of recent SCOTUS decisions and an explicit statement from Chief Justice Roberts summing the principle up as the illegality of discriminating against religion by denying funds for secular purposes because of the religious identity of the recipient.
In many places charter schools are required to take any applicant. Furthermore, Federal money is regularly spent supporting students at clearly religious universities, so the precedent has already been set.
No public money should be used to pay for education. But parents should still decide where the kids go. They shouldn't be forced to be indoctrinated in whatever the fad of the week is
Are you suggesting that parents pay the entire cost of educating their children by themselves? That's unaffordable to most parents, meaning their kids will not be educated, which is very bad for society.
Exactly, let's be clear even the "cheapest" "fly by night" strip mall "charter school" "open today closed by tomorrow" (as the sort Betsy DeVos enabled in her tenure as Michigan's education "tzar") would operate on the "per individual family" ability to pay for. I'm unsure if that's worse than nothing but you get the point.
There's simply no way that that even the most basic expectations of a public school (e.g. a classroom with under 100 students in it with any sort of classroom material not pulled for free from Wikipedia) would be able to operate and employ a staff based on the funding that even a suburban "middle class" family could afford on their own.
This site has leaned way too far to the right sometimes in the commentariat it attracts, there's no real "solutions" here as to how we could operationalize a "classic" education premise (or at least some version of it) onto a public school system when you have one commenter who thinks the public school system is being run for the benefit of ancient Biblical demons on one hand, and another that thinks you'll educate a nation a of millions into a nation of prosperity based on the average family's out of pocket ability to pay for - and that there will magically arrive a market not even willing, but simply, able to service based on that funding.
Beautiful schools! I just toured one last week and was blown away by the senior seminars taking place-- one class "Socratically" discussing Milton's Paradise Lost and the other Karl Marx. The student's books were opened, highlighted, and the margins written in. The teacher would ask one question and the students would freely discuss. Don't let anyone tell you classical education is closed minded.
And the teachers unions in Nebraska are fighting a tax credit, a mere $25 million, that could help low income kids go to other than public schools. SMH It is obvious the ones who need such an education are the teachers union leaders.
Da prezident uv da teachiz yooyun? Why do we allow common fools who can't even speak English to fill the heads of our children with their foolish rubbish?
The likes of AOC, BUSH, SANDERS, TLAIB while padding their own wallets are the empty vessel progressive thinkers.
ZERO CONCERN AND CONSEQUENCES FOR YOUNG KIDS WHO NEED IT!
Kids need STRINGENT boundaries to move and grow through RULES.
I’ve been a coach for 40 years! Raised a family of my own, very proactive with our grandchildren as well!
MIZZY--I'M BORROWING YOUR COMMENTS BOX. THANK YOU!!
Establishment media and manufactured lowest common denominator electronic click bait hysteria is a kind of dark world emotional shadow land sewage. As intended it pollutes, manipulates and poisons everything it touches. In human terms it is a lie of leviathan proportion. A weaponized assault on human moral reason. Depression, emotional anomie, anxiety, a rising suicide rate, addiction and societal/cultural collapse are planned outcomes.
By the middle of this century the possession of classic literature and books will be illegal. Except of course for wealthy cartel connected collectors who will display them to commissariat members at elite cocktail parties as curiosities. Journalistic reports on the political correction, editing and/or removal of American literature by fascist ideologues has already appeared across SUBSTACK. Who remembers the brave librarians who attempted to stand against surveillance state operatives seeking access to the reading histories of free citizens? More recently the violation of what was for myself once a personal sanctuary, the school library. Is all this established threat or fact? If the DEI at the publishing house says a book doesn't get printed and distributed it doesn't. Then there is the algorithm. If it judges a book as dangerous it doesn't exist. If it says you don't exist, never existed, you didn't. If the new DNC/CCP/EU/CCP Davos fascism will destroy lives and careers at the drop of a hat what is a book?
The masters of the electronic age and the billionaire surveillance bureaucracy they serve depends upon illiteracy. Emotional, spiritual, historic and intellectual illiteracy. Psyche split and numbed, one foot in a futureless penury and the other in a sterile cyber land that promises everything and delivers nothing American youth stands prisoner to the hypnotic cathode ray butchery of the bot and the only fans whore. "..everything means everything and nothing means anything.." To rescue American youth we must first rescue ourselves.
Be the thing most scorned and feared by the new tyranny: An American.
"You know I remember a time when things were a lot more fun around here. Back when good was good and evil was evil...Before things got so...fuzzy." --- Don Henley/THE GARDEN OF ALLAH
Exactly my point!
Don Henley I won’t read!
Lifted out of a book, just like current academia.
Elitist Word salads it
won’t apply to people who struggle to give their children a decent education towards a ticket in life. And better their children’s life. I’ve lived mine through experiences and voice the struggles I’ve endured. For G-D’s sake we don’t need anymore lectures! Be the solution not a part of the problem.
Interesting post... so dystopian. But yes, I can imagine the likes of Kamala Harris getting all high dudgeon about books such as "Huckleberry Finn." And acting as if she's the smart one.
Empty vessel thinking transcends party.
That was a nice answer. However empty catchy social propoganda won’t, it only enriches the so-called leaders, leaving everyone else holding an EMPTY BAG OF NOTHING! Pure anarchy! Been there, didn’t learn this out of fancy textbooks.
There are, in fact, some classical eductation focused schools that do not charge parents.
Have you checked Ian Rowe’s? Seems not🙄
A classical charter school is trying to open near me but in Pa, charter schools must get permission from the school district they are competing with to open. The school board has voted NO twice, with their DEI director calling this kind of education right wing and racist.
Great article. It made my day!! I pray that “classical education” continues to make a comeback and more and more parents have the chance to get their kids this education.
I graduated high school in 1965 - St. Joseph’s Preparatory High School, known as The Prep. I studied Latin for 4 years, Greek for 3 years, English and Math for 4 years. 1,500 eighth graders from all over the Philadelphia area took an entrance exam and needed their teacher’s recommendation to apply. Only 250 or so were admitted and even fewer graduated. Standards were rigorous, the competition for grades was intense but friendly, and we learned to think critically (without the term being bandied about) from Jesuit priests and scholastics who are among the most educated in the world themselves. No chaos as found in local city high schools was tolerated and none was evident. It was a bit heavy on the religious part for my current taste, but I didn’t have that problem with The Prep at the time. That education taught me how to analyze, to understand and to solve problems. It gave me a vocabulary and taught me how to write. It gave me perspective and a foundation that grounds me while forming opinions. Invaluable! All thanks to The Prep and its old fashioned way of actually teaching, not indoctrinating young minds.
Thanks, I have a similar story. God bless the nuns.
We didn’t have a lot of electives, and PE was a joke, but Latin, history, and literature were amazing.
I will always be grateful to the good Sisters, now in Heaven, who taught me so well in elementary school in the 50s. Everything that I have today, I owe to the education that they provided to me. Great women
Mine too, but PE was not a joke. PE grade based on , at that time, Marine Corps Fitness test: pushup, pullup, sit-up, run. After 12 years of Catholic schooling, four years of a public university a rest period.
I had ONE chance to choose anything. I chose the classics over the traditional curriculum. It wasn’t called an elective, a concept I only discovered in college. In truth, any curriculum would have served me well.
I had the same kind of education in communst Romania, exactly around the same time. Zero electives, incidentally, and a heavy dose of Latin. Alas, no Greek but we studied five languages. Religion was replaced with Marxist indoctrination (another kind of religion) but nobody paid any attention or believed a single word of it, so it had no effect. The end result was very similar to that reported by Rob.
How interesting. Please feel free to comment on anything else that went on in Romania in future articles. Thank you.
Oh well... I hate to do a promo here, but you can check out my memoir on Substack at
https://open.substack.com/pub/gabriellanyi/p/cheating-memory?r=2bg6o2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I post one chapter every weekend.
Subscribed.
Thank you. I hope you enjoy.
Very interesting. I haven't heard many good things about communist Romania. I'm glad that has now changed.
Sent our kids to The Prep. When we lived in Boston, our oldest attended BC High, same as The Prep. The Jesuits understand educating boys. In addition to learning to think, the kids were educated to understand the value of community and personal responsibility.
Typical Catholic college preparatory high school education in the 60s.
I graduated from a Jesuit college prep school in Chicago in the late 60's. During my four years of high school, I took the following mandatory classes: 2 years of Latin, 2 years of French (should have taken Spanish). Biology, Physics, Analytic Geometry plus all of the requisite RRR courses. College was a great party (while I stayed), but I didn't learn anything at that Big 10 college that I hadn't already been taught in high school. Times have really changed.
Hey fellow prep grad! My husband graduated from the prep in 1988 and got a fantastic education - then fordham and the same
My kids attended circa 2015. It is still the same.
Glad to hear that.
While I understand the limitations in visiting a school local to the reporter, it would have been nice to highlight how this curriculum works out for a working class population able to attend one of the charter schools listed. Otherwise, I demand the Free Press cover the fight for school choice nationwide so us working class stiffs can help bridge the financial gap of these $20-36K/year Ivy League prep institutions.
TFP repeat after me: Not everyone who reads the Free Press TGIFs in Vale. Not everyone who reads the Free Press vacations in Bora Bora. Not everyone who reads the Free Press can afford $20 cocktails.
I agree with your general premise, but not all of these schools We charge tuition. We have a classical.academy sponsored by Hillsdale in our area and it is a charter school.
Tuition is free. Unfortunately they don't yet have a high school and there is now a huge wait list and lottery to get in. The bigger issue is that there aren't enough schools like this to meet the demand. Also , the main stream media try to undermine them.
Not.all charge tuition is what I meant to type
Exactly. Which is why I said it's shameful they didn't highlight one of the charter schools, though we are on the same page generally. We need more school choice discussions here and less $20K/yr Silicon Valley Stanford prep bullshit. However, if they do profile classical education schools, in these out-of-our-pricetag institutions, I want to know what the parents of the students think about school choice.
In Nebraska they passed a law that gave our public schools and extra $300 million this year building to a $1.6 billion dollar pot for the future. Along with that came a $25 million tax credit for donating to a fund to help the lower income kids go to other schools. Caps on how much one can donate and income caps on the families who can use it are in place. However, the left and teachers unions have stated a petition to over turn the law. Maybe the teachers union leaders need to go back to school to learn what their real mission is. As for the leftist, all they are doing is bringing generations of our children down to their stupidity level.
maybe teachers unions need to go to re-education camp!!!
Precisely . And then they need to be dissolved and made illegal. Teacher’s Unions damage the children and are only promoting toxic ‘hate’ indoctrination and raising money for lunatic Democrat politicians. Randi Weingarten should be imprisoned for what she did to school children during the Covid crisis.
Keep fighting, Dan!
The teacher's unions will fight for the students as soon as the students start voting in the teacher's union elections.
Alan. I agree with the sentiment. It turns out that most of the schools mentioned in the article are public charter schools which are free to students. This includes 6 of the 8 schools mentioned in "The schools riding the classical ed wave include:" section. In fact, I hate to admit that among the local charters in my area includes Founders Classical which is a local charter school which many believe is currently doing a better job academically than the Christian classical where I teach (but not for long as we are working diligently to improve!!). Here in Central Texas we've seen the number of kids in these schools go from 1-2k in 2010 to well over 10k now across both 15+ schools and homeschool groups.
Amen my friend!!, but you forgot lives in a midtown co-op with 24 hour security and valet parking.
Check Ian Rowe in NYC
Yeah. I actually googled the Bronx school mentioned in the article to see if it was the charter schools Ian runs (ran?).
He still has “Founder Vertex Academies” on his bio in X
Those schools are the last place to look. They are Harvard or Princeton at the local level. Woke “hate” factories with endless indoctrination of bad ideas.
Some children are more suited to vocational/ technical instruction. Mike Rowe should establish a network of high quality schools to do this.
This is so beautiful and heart warming. I am encouraged. I was on the board of governors for a classical academy and both my daughters had access to this curriculum. It set them on a path of loving beauty truth and goodness that continues to this day.
It seems that "progressive" education was just retrograde garbage all along...
Well, there is now a generation of union educated morons perfectly primed to vote for whichever monkey offers them free stuff.
Hopefully these schools will teach their students a healthy dose of disdain for their erstwhile "peers" in the diversity, equity and inclusion concentration camps that are America's public schools...
Write these institutions into your wills.
Great idea!
The "classical" education is what we should expect as the standard in a free and civilized society. The question to ask is "what happened to our country" that expectations are so low.
What happened was Woodrow Wilson and the re-gressives, hell bent on destroying our beloved US Constitution.
It is not only great for students but also for teachers. I absolutely loved the discussions I had with my students. It was challenging, respectful, reasoned, engaging, really I just can’t say enough about how wonderful it was. If you don’t have a classical school in your town just start one. We started one by being a cooperative for a few years then expanded to become a school over the course of a few years. There are also many classical opportunities for homeschoolers as well.
Few people outside the Education Establishment realize how terrible our local K12 school district monopolies can be for teachers, as well as students. These districts can corrupt the experience for everyone.
As someone with Multiple teachers in the family, I can tell you their Number 1 complaint is with the government bureaucracy.
I didn't encounter the classical method of homeschooling until after I'd nearly finished up with homeschooling, but it's an excellent method.
Where can we find information on how to successfully start a classical school or charter school?
Contact Hillsdale College. They have a program to do just that.
Thank you
RSL. Also, check out both the Society for Classical Learning and Association of Classical Christian Schools. They have great resources for starting a school. Both are Christian, but their start up, governance and pedagogy resources are quite good and relevant to any school. The Hillsdale program & resources are also excellent. The advice to contact other founders in your area is also good. Finally, I would suggest that if you do find a local classical school, supporting that school may be both the easiest and best way to move forward, because it focuses your resources/time and because starting a school is very serious work. Hope that helps. Hayden
Hayden — Thanks! Very helpful. We live in a rural community with dismal test scores and, of course, good graduation rates that belie major problems.
You can contact another classical school in your state and ask, we found other schools very helpful.
Thank you, too!
Just a note: Inly the original Hillsdale K-12 schoo is mentioned here, but Hillsdale has an incredible network of Classical K-12 Public Charter schools across the country as well as a few affiliated (Member) Private Christian Classical Academies. And their membership continues to grow. Hillsdale does not financially benefit from their member schools and instead provides free curriculum, classical training for teachers, Head of school training and support, as well as Board training and support.
As President of a start-up Hillsdale Member Classical Christian Academy outside of Pittsburgh named Penn Woods Classical Academy, I can say Hillsdale has provided exceptional guidance and support! We are extremely grateful for all that Hillsdale has provided us to make our dream a reality.
Aside from the K-12 Initiative of Hillsdale College, the Society for Classical Learning, led by Eric Cook, and the Circe Institute, led by Andrew Kern, are important organizations to follow!!!!
I went to a wretched comprehensive in the UK 1969-1976, but I was still taught Latin, Shakespeare, the Brontes and Hardy. Having that grounding I went on learning, discovering Homer, Dante, Milton, Dickens, Trollope, Smollett and Gaskell for myself. And that wasn't even my field of work. A proper education gives you the tools, and the desire, to keep on learning. These kids will have a huge advantage.
Wow -- teaching the students how to think rather than telling them exactly what they should be thinking. What a concept!
It kind of reminds me of the old saying -- "give a man (or in this case, a student) a fish and he eats today; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime".
I love classical schools and the classical education for so, so many reasons. The uniforms eliminate having to choose what to wear every day, eliminate the distinction between the 'rich' kids and the scholarship kids, separates what is done at school to what is done after school, and demonstrates that one is not a brand nor does the external define and identify. The deep exploration of the ideas, the historic events, and cultural movements which shaped Western Society will at least give young burgeoning citizen-humans a scaffolding to observe and interpret their lives and their world, whether to they ultimately accept or advance or reject Modern Times. The banishment of phones and Chrome books in favor of reading physical books, in my opinion, will lead to burnishing concentration, taking notes with pencil and paper will enhance learning, and hand written in class exams in a Blue Book will eliminate the shadow of AI. Public schools have become chaotic and disruptive, teachers are stretched to the limit, the curriculum is no longer about expecting hard work and rewarding excellence, the libraries are political battle grounds, and there is more focus on mental health and 'right thinking' about identity than about the mental and more development of our youth.
I mean, 'mental and moral' development. I'm a product of public schools:)
Not to be overly critical but one of my pet peeves was violated in paragraph two of this article. When writing about classic education, which purportedly avoids political correctness, please avoid terms like BCE. Its BC! BCE and its counterpart, CE, snuck into our lexicon so that non-Christians wouldn't be offended. It is PC on its face and counter to the article's point.
Woohoo! Learning to think instead of what to think. I especially want to be a fly on the wall in on the class studying diverse social contract philosophers like Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes (what about Montesquieu!)
What wonderful institutions! And how much more effective they would be if this type of education started at home.
That requires classically educated parents.
I am in the process of classically educating my kids, one of whom is graduating this year. I attended public schools and received a mediocre education myself. I have been educating myself along with them and reading like crazy all these years. It’s been an amazing and wonderful journey for our family and I wouldn’t trade it.
There are a lot of wonderful resources online for parents to learn about the Classics - or indeed learn along with their children. It's never too late to enjoy ancient wisdom...
I suspect, that they, like I, didn't know that. If it weren't for this article, I wouldn't have known that there was such a thing as a Classical Education, which, I suspect, is different than learning about the Classics.
It's a good reminder for us in the Classical World that our outreach needs to go further! We work hard to show folks the relevance of the classics in the here and now - it's a saddening that so many don't know that these works which can be so inspiring are at their fingertips.
I've read some of those works: Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Plato, Aristotle, and others whose names escape me, but I think that is different than a Classical Education, which seems to be about learning, writing, reasoning, clear thinking, etc. Just to read them on one's own, without the benefit of a teacher, is much like reading an interesting novel. Some insight is gained but much is lost and not understood.
It's true - there is a difference between just reading on your own and being encouraged to really engage with the texts - discuss them, write about them, formulate specific ideas about them. It can be done solo (as many in history can attest to) though of course it's much harder! I like that we have such a community at Classical Wisdom, because it allows us to talk about specific works or general ideas and everything in between together...
Yes!!!! Not enough people make that point.