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With millions of students leaving traditional public schools since the beginning of the pandemic, classical education providers are attempting to step into the breach with not only a content-rich model, but also a worldview extending deep into the foundations of (another phrase that gets used frequently) Western civilization.
The cynical take on classical education is that it’s a marketing ploy to attract parents who have grown disgruntled with American public education. Many contend that there is some truth to this. As the classical “brand” gains nationwide recognition, many schools are leaning into it that have never leaned into it before, even if they’re not even that classical.
It’s hard to argue that students spend 12 years and graduate without any serious core knowledge. They don’t know the great books and the classics, but they also don’t have any vocational skills. You almost want to say, “Do one of these things!”
BRILLIANCE ON A HOG
In 1947, Dorothy Sayers, a motorcycle-riding Anglican crime writer, delivered a paper at Oxford titled “The Lost Tools of Learning.” She bemoaned the state of education.
“Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves?”
She argued that young people do not know how to think because they’ve never been taught. They may have been introduced to subjects, but not what learning means.
In the face of this contemporary problem, Sayers proposed an ancient solution: the revival of a medieval teaching format called the trivium, which divided learning into three stages—grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. The first stage is about mastering basic skills and facts; the second teaches students to argue and think critically. By the third stage, they can express themselves in essays and oration. This model of education, cultivated by Renaissance thinkers and the Catholic Church alike, was standard among European élites for centuries.
BRAND CENTRAL
A charter school network in the South Bronx has based its entire brand on a classical education curriculum. So I called and spoke with a representative. And I’ll tell you this: After speaking with her, I see why parents are flocking to the school.
I was told the first thing you notice when walking into the middle-school classrooms at Brilla, a charter school network in the South Bronx, is the sense of calm. No phones are out. The students are quiet—not in the beaten-down way of those under authoritarian rule but in the way of those who seem genuinely interested in their work.
After studying great painters like Matisse, sixth graders participate in a multiday art project. Seventh graders prepare to debate whether parents should be punished for the crimes of their minor children. Another group of sixth graders, each holding a violin or a cello, read out notes from sheet music. A teacher cues them to play the lines pizzicato, and they pluck their strings in unison out of notes from sheet music. Just wow!
A CHANGE OF DIRECTION
Brilla is part of the classical education movement, a fast-growing effort to fundamentally reorient schooling in America. Classical schools offer a traditional liberal arts education, often focusing on the Western canon and the study of citizenship.
The classical approach, which prioritizes some teaching methods that have existed for more than two thousand years, is radically different from that of public schools, where what kids learn—and how they learn it—varies wildly by district, school, and even classroom.
In many public schools, kids learn to read by guessing words using context clues, rather than by decoding the sounds of letters. In most classical schools, phonics reign, and students learn grammar by diagramming sentences.
OUCH!
Some public schools have moved away from techniques like memorization, which education scholars call “rote learning” or “drill and kill”—the thing that kills a child’s desire to learn. In contrast, classical schools prize memory work, asking students to internalize math formulas and recite poems.
Religious institutions and expensive prep schools have historically promoted classical education. More recently, powerful investors have seen its potential for cultivating academic excellence in underserved populations: the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies, has put millions of dollars into classical schools and networks.
AND THE ANSWER IS…
So when the bell rings at the end of the school day, the same questions loom: Is it worth it, and does it work?
The true benefits of classical education are witnessed over time, including the success of a child embracing adulthood with confidence and a strong career ahead. But then you can say, isn’t that what school is supposed to be about anyway?
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder/CEO of the non-profit The Student Success Project. He can be reached by email at ritchie@studentsuccessproject.org and on Facebook as The Student Success Project.
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