Classical Education in the USA

My first post on Ricochet was "Bring Back the Trivium!," an intro to the ancient curriculum--Grammar/Language, Dialectic/Logic, and Rhetoric. I really believe in this stuff--have ever since David Naugle had us read "The Lost Tools of Learning" by Dorothy Sayers in undergrad. Some people who talk about "classical education" are referring to great texts. Some are referring to great texts and the Trivium. Sometimes the Trivium is accompanied by the Quadrivium--Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music. There are probably some other uses of the term I don't understand.

There's a new scholarly journal published by Baylor University: Principia: A Journal of Classical Education. In the opening issue, Brian Williams writes that classical education "has become a significant presence in the educational landscape. Private schools, public charter schools, parochial schools, co-op schools, online schools, independent educators, and homeschool networks and curricula offer K–12 classical education to students across the United States, Canada, and, increasingly, the world."

This is good news.

I've taken a bit of a tour lately--very informal, not really thorough--of classical education in the USA. Any interest in what I've learned? Good, you're in luck! Here are some of the major players and things happenin'. (Expect some overlap in the categorizations below.)

The Universities

There are some great texts programs in the universities. Now, I wouldn't trust your average university further than I could throw it, and to some extent, that applies to the better ones. Still, these are the better ones, and you know what's weird? I think I actually trust a few of these.

The University of Dallas offers a solid great texts education. UD is Catholic.

Several Protestant programs are of note. Baylor University has an Honors College offering a solid great texts education. Likewise Biola University: the Torrey Honors College. The University of Northwestern--St. Paul has a new great books Honors College.

New College Franklin in Franklin, Tennessee, is a Reformation school. It does the Trivium (and the Quadrivium, too), but with biblical Greek instead of the usual Latin. There are also a lot of great texts.

New St. Andrews College in Idaho is a Protestant school with a rigorous program in languages and great texts. It was there before New College Franklin. You could probably call it the flagship college for the classical education movement in the USA.

St. John's College, with campuses--excuse me, campi--in Maryland and New Mexico--has a rigorous secular great texts program.

There are more than just great books programs out there. The great Hillsdale College (sort of a Christian school, with Baptist roots) has a classical liberal arts core for its undergrad degrees: Trivium and great texts, at some risk of oversimplification.

Hillsdale also has a whole Graduate School of Classical Education, offering a Master of Classical Education degree and a Master of Classical Education Leadership degree for folks who might want to help lead one of the many up-and-coming classical schools. UD has a grad program as well--an MA in Humanities with a concentration in classical education. Memoria College--generically Christian, I think--has an MA in great books.

The Association of Classical Christian Schools

Day schools in the ACCS are popping up all over the place. There are more in places like Texas and Florida than in places like Illinois and New York, but there are still a great many in blue states. Check this map. And check the bar chart here: more than 530 schools with a rapid growth rate.

These schools are heavy on the Trivium and heavy on the great texts. Good for them.

These guys are Protestants--66 books in the Bible; no Apocrypha/Deuterocanon.

Don't Leave Out the Catholics!

The Institute for Catholic Liberal Education is dedicated to "[r]enewing K-12 Catholic schools by reclaiming the Church’s educational tradition for growth in faith, wisdom, and virtue."

It's also dedicated to "[r]ecovering and adapting the classical tradition of liberal education as embraced and developed by the Church."

The Institute explains that, "For millennia, education was seen not as mere job training but as a search for wisdom and virtue. " It's against "secular progressive education and its industrialized methods." There's less direct emphasis on the Trivium and the great texts, although you can find some of that stuff looking over curricular materials here. Here you'll also find some of the direct foci, such as these “Five Essential Marks of Catholic Schools" from Archbishop J. Michael Miller:

1. Inspired by a Supernatural Vision 2. Founded on a Christian Anthropology 3. Animated by Communion and Community 4. Imbued with a Catholic Worldview 5. Sustained by Gospel Witness

How many of these classical schools are there? A Wikipedia article on classical education says there are "almost 200" of them. You can go to the Institute's map and count them yourself.

And see comment #10 below on the Chesterton Academy network!

Or the Eastern Orthodox!

If you go over to the Orthodox Wiki and do a simple Ctrl-F search for the word "classical," you'll find that there are five Eastern Orthodox schools in the USA that went so far as to have the word "classical" in their name.

Any number (actually most, I would think) of the 50-something other schools listed there may be classical as well. Click through to St. Constantine's in Houston, for example: classical!

Classical Commons

Classical Commons is . . .

. . . a digital platform connecting local K-12 schools to the essential resources needed for promoting classical, liberal arts education. The platform provides an ecosystem that includes people from K-12 schools, colleges & universities, homeschool groups, career placement offices, veterans’ associations, retirement organizations, etc.

Religious, non-religious; public, private; university, day school; homeschool, day school--everything, I guess.

Not a group of schools. Just a helpful network.

The Hillsdale Network

Hillsdale is doing even more to support classical education: There's a nationwide network of Hillsdale-affiliated classical schools.

Most of these are charter schools, and that means secular. A minority are Christian.

There are 25 schools in the Hillsdale network. There are 6 more working on joining, and at least 4 starting up.

Their priorities: "The Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office's mission is to promote the founding of classical schools, and excellence in their teaching and operations, so that American students may be educated in the liberal arts and sciences and receive instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue."

The Great Hearts Network

Great Hearts is mainly a network of classical charter (and therefore secular) schools in Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. Around 50 schools total, I believe. Two are online, and there are actually three private Christian schools. But mostly charter day schools.

These guys are into seeking wisdom! Here's a bit of their philosophy of education:

We believe that truth exists, and we must seek it relentlessly by disciplined study and good-willed conversation. Truth is never just 'my truth' and 'your truth'; truth itself is not subject to historical or personal conditioning or circumstances, though individuals and cultures are.

. . .

We believe that beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder, and that the classic forms and works of Western music, drama, and visual art should play the central role in forming aesthetic judgment.

. . .

Liberal education consists of cognitive, emotional, and moral education—thinking deeply, loving noble things, and living well together. We believe, with Plato, that the highest goal of education is to become good, intellectually and morally.

Other Charter Schools

A good many other charter schools are classical.

Founders Classical Academy is part of Responsive Education Solutions. There are 20-something different Founders schools in Texas, Arkansas, and Ohio. A curriculum with a good bit of Trivium and great texts. A priority for Founders schools: "Virtues, as well as principles in self-government and civility, are identified and clearly taught seamlessly through course content."

Valor Education has a network of five classical charter schools around Austin and San Antonio, Texas. Valor's curriculum seems more great texts-based than Trivium-based, but they do teach Latin!

I'm probably missing a lot. There may be other networks of classical charter schools. It looks to me like Houston Classical Charter School is not part of any network. How many other one-offs are there nationwide?

(And is Texas just blessed to have several charter school networks, or am I only seeing the ones in Texas because Texas is where I want to be? I'm not sure.)

Homeschooling

There's a lot here. I won't be thorough or systematic.

Various classical presses serve homeschooling families. They include Memoria Press, Veritas Press, Well-Trained Mind Press, and Classical Academic Press.

Memoria Academy is an online school offering classes in classical education. Online homeschooling resources are all over the place, like Classically Homeschooling and Homeschool Planet. (The three Memoriae--Press, Academy, and College--are connected.)

The homeschools often overlap with the day schools. The ACCS Statement of Faith acknowledges that all educational authority over a child is an extension of the authority of the child's father. Some schools integrate homeschooling with going to school. This is the model of the six schools managed by Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas.

I'm probably just scratching the surface. In 2024, Arcadia Education did this: "Market Analysis of U.S. Classical Education in Grades PK-12." Among other findings: 1,551 schools with an enrollment of 0.68 million.

Is Classical Education Really All That Good?

The short answer is--Yes, of course!

A longer answer might go like this:

Yes--because the Trivium works and the great books matter. History, philosophy, literature, and religion matter. The classical education movement is a good thing, and a better thing than (at least most) other educational things.

However, to some extent, just doing anything different from the old, corrupt public school system is good. Try something new, reset your brains, and stop doing all the old stupid stuff; free yourself from the bureaucracy! I think all of the following suggestions would be a net gain:

• Design a school around the Confucian philosophy of education in the Analects; study history, music, literature, and the rituals by which human beings show each other respect; have teachers and students discuss virtue and politics.
• Design a school around Immanuel Kant's philosophy of education.
• Design a school around the philosophy of education of John Dewey, but try to get him right this time. Pro tip: If the kids are bored, their energies aren't being directed into the activity of learning, and that means you're doing Dewey wrong.
• Design a school around the philosophy that people should wear neon-red shoes on Monday, neon-orange on Tuesday, and so on down to neon-blue on Friday.

I am 110% serious about Confucianism. I'm mostly serious about the Dewey, and I'm mostly serious about the shoes.

This leads to a sobering point: The classical education movement's success is partly due merely to its not sucking like the old system of education.

And that means that if we're not careful--if classical education doesn't do things right-- then more and more of the movement could slip into similar failures. We do things this way because that's how we do them. We trot out the old slogans and forget what they really mean. We forget the works we did at first. We begin with a vision of reformers and a plan of visionaries, and it succeeds, becoming the new establishment. Then we hand it off to bureaucrats to maintain it--and, of course, each new generation of bureaucrats tends to be worse than the last.

The solution to such worries, of course, is to be visionary in every generation. We're always doing something wrong, and we should try to find it. You have to rediscover the joy and wonder of things for yourself. Even if our parents and grandparents knew something, we have not necessarily learned it yet. We stand in the ways, but we must ask once again for the old paths, and then we have to walk in them again--only this time, we have to put our own feet where countless other feet have been.

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