Classical education movement
The classical education movement or renewal advocates for a return to a traditional European education based on the liberal arts, the Western canons of classical literature, the fine arts, and the history of Western civilization. It focuses on human formation and paideia with an early emphasis on music, gymnastics, recitation, imitation, and grammar. Multiple organizations support classical education in charter schools, in independent faith-based schools, and in home education. This movement has inspired several graduate programs and colleges as well as a new peer-reviewed journal, Principia: A Journal of Classical Education.
Renewal starting in 1979
The term classical education has been used in Western cultures for several centuries, with each era modifying the definition and adding its own selection of topics. By the end of the 18th century, in addition to the trivium and quadrivium of the Middle Ages, the definition of a classical education embraced study of literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, history, art, and languages. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the term classical education has been used to refer to a broad-based study of the liberal arts and sciences, in contrast to a practical or pre-professional program. The current renewal started with four schools founded in 1979 to 1982: Trivium School, Cair Paravel-Latin School, Trinity School at Greenlawn, and Logos School. Since the 1980s, according to Andrew Kern, the classical education movement has "swept" America.In a May 12, 2023 opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Cornel West and Jeremy Tate praised the boost given to the classical-education movement by Florida governor Ron DeSantis. On her May 4, 2023 episode of First Person, The New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviewed Jeremy Tate. Emma Green, writing for The New Yorker in April 2023, reports that what governor Ron DeSantis considers to be "a model for education nationwide" is an educational philosophy developed by Hillsdale College "as part of a larger movement to restore 'classical education'—a liberal-arts curriculum designed to cultivate wisdom and teach children to pursue the ancient ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness." Also in April 2023, Angel Adams Parham and Anika Prather wrote an article in The Washington Post entitled "As Black educators, we endorse classical studies" and argued that "rooted in the fullness of this history, classical education invites us and our students to learn from this rich crossroads and to enter into a millennia-long conversation about what it means to be human, the essence of freedom, how to live well and what constitutes a good society". This movement has also been mentioned in stories by Louis Markos in Christianity Today and Stanley Fish in The New York Times as well as by others in the Carolina Journal.
Several new organizations and publishers have emerged in support of the growing classical education movement, including Veritas Press, Classical Academic Press, Memoria Press, Canon Press, the Circe Institute, Association of Classical Christian Schools, Society for Classical Learning, the Institute for Classical Education, the Classic Learning Test, the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, and Classical Historian.
A number of informal groups and professional organizations have led the classical education movement in the past century. Within the secular classical movement, Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins set forth the "Great Books" of Western civilization as the center stage for a classical education curriculum in the 1930s. Some public schools have structured their curricula and pedagogy around the trivium and integrate the teaching of values into the mainstream classroom.
Theory of classical education
The classical education movement has borrowed terms used in educational history to name three phases of education.- "Primary education" teaches students how to learn.
- "Secondary education" then teaches a conceptual framework that can hold all human knowledge, fills in basic facts and practices of major fields of knowledge, and develops the fundamental skills of every major human activity.
- "Tertiary education" then prepares a person to pursue an educated profession such as law, theology, military strategy, medicine, or science.
Primary education – the trivium
Sayers connects her three stages with the three liberal language arts :'' grammar, logic, and rhetoric, respectively. While grammar, logic, and rhetoric are taught as subjects in classical schools, many schools also use these three arts as a paradigm for child development.
Logic and rhetoric were often taught in part by the Socratic method, in which the teacher raises questions and the class discusses them. By controlling the pace, the teacher can keep the class very lively, yet disciplined.
Grammar
consists of language skills such as reading and the mechanics of writing. An important goal of grammar is to acquire as many words and manage as many concepts as possible so as to be able to express and understand clearly concepts of varying degrees of complexity. Classical education traditionally included study of Latin and Greek to reinforce understanding of the workings of languages and allow students to read the classics of Western civilization untranslated.Logic
is the process of correct reasoning. The traditional text for teaching logic was Aristotle's Organon. In the modern renaissance of classical education, this logic stage refers to the junior high or middle school aged student, who developmentally is beginning to question ideas and authority, and truly enjoys a debate or an argument. Training in logic, both formal and informal, enables students to critically examine arguments and to analyze their own. The goal of the logic stage is to train the student's mind not only to grasp information, but to find the analytical connections between seemingly different facts/ideas, to find out why something is true, or why something else is false.Rhetoric
al debate and composition are taught to somewhat older students, who by this point in their education have the concepts and logic to criticize their own work and persuade others. According to Aristotle, "Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic", concerned with finding "all the available means of persuasion". Students learn to articulate answers to important questions in their own words, to try to persuade others with these facts, and to defend ideas against rebuttal. The student learns to reason correctly in the Logic stage so that they can now apply those skills to Rhetoric. Traditionally, students would read and emulate classical poets in learning how to present their arguments well.Secondary education – the quadrivium
Secondary education, classically the quadrivium or "four ways", consists of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Sometimes architecture is taught alongside these, often from the works of Vitruvius. History is taught to provide a context and show political and military development. The classic texts were from ancient authors such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Cicero, and Tacitus. Biographies were often assigned as well, with the classic example being Plutarch's Lives. Biographies help show how persons behave in their context, and the wide ranges of professions and options that exist. As more modern texts became available, these were often added to the curriculum.These are taught in a matrix of history, reviewing the natural development of each field for each phase of the trivium. That is, in a perfect classical education, the historical study is reviewed three times: first to learn the grammar, next time the logic, and finally the rhetoric, how to produce good, humanly useful and beautiful objects that satisfy the grammar and logic of the field. History is the unifying conceptual framework, because history is the study of everything that has occurred before the present.
Classical educators consider the Socratic method to be the best technique for teaching critical thinking. In-class discussion and critiques are essential for students to recognize and internalize critical thinking techniques. This method is widely used to teach both philosophy and law. It is currently rare in other contexts. Essentially, the teacher referees the students' discussions, asks leading questions, and may refer to facts, but never gives a conclusion until at least one student reaches that conclusion. The learning is most effective when the students compete strongly, even viciously in the argument, but always according to well-accepted rules of correct reasoning. That is, fallacies should not be allowed by the teacher.
By completing a project in each major field of human effort, the student can develop a personal preference for further education and professional training.
Tertiary education – the apprenticeship
Historically, tertiary education was usually an apprenticeship to a person with the desired profession. Most often, the understudy was called a "secretary" and had the duty of carrying on all the normal business of the "master." Philosophy and theology were both widely taught as tertiary subjects in universities, however.The early biographies of nobles show what is possibly the ultimate form of classical education: a tutor. One early, much-emulated classic example of this tutor system is that of Alexander the Great, who was tutored by Aristotle.