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The Classical Schools Movement: By: Dr. Gene Edward Veith
Dr. Gene Edward Veith is a professor of Humanities and Dean of Arts and Sciences at Concordia University in Wisconsin. Here he gives a general background on classical education and cites three examples of their use in primary and secondary schools.
Everyone agrees on the need for educational reform, but most proposals to re-invent America’s schools center on means, not ends. Maybe uniforms or single sex classes would help, some are saying. Others think technology (more computers and VCRs) is the answer and Goals 2000 is on the wish list of state and federal bureaucracies.
The debates over public education vs. private school, teacher certification and the Choice program are valuable; however, in many respects they neglect a more fundamental issue of educational philosophy.
Are more parents, teachers, television, or the culture to blame for the problems in education? Perhaps we should look instead at our theory of education. An intellectual system that downplays objective knowledge is unlikely to be very effective in teaching history or science. Teachers who do not believe in the objective values can hardly be expected to be tough graders, much less be able to discipline the students in their classrooms. Those who believe that the true purpose of education is to cultivate children’s self-esteem or to build their political consciousness can hardly be blamed for having them spend their class time sitting in a circle sharing their feelings rather than reading, writing, and studying arithmetic.
Twentieth-century educational theory has increasingly favored the subjective over the objective, process over content, and group identity over individual achievement. The legacy of John Dewey’s “progressive” educational theories has been exaggerated far past what Dewey himself would have accepted. That theory, stretched to its breaking point, is now clearly failing. A new concept of education is needed.
Fortunately, one is at hand. Working independently of each other, a number of educators have been engaged in recovering and updating the approach to education that has given Western Civilization the Athenian Democracy, the Roman Republic, the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. In church schools, private academies, and inner-city classrooms, among homeschoolers and in virtual classrooms on the internet, a new version of classical education has taken shape. Though it has emerged out of the innovations of private schools, its principles are just as applicable in public schools. And although the new classical education is being pioneered in primary schools-often by educators who do not explicitly call themselves classicists - there are signs that it is on the verge of rediscovery in the nation’s universities, the source of our educational malaise.
The new classical education movement is not a nostalgic return to the past; rather, it is a paradigm suited to the particular needs of the 21st century. It is not an emphasis on the humanities at the expense of the sciences; rather, the intellectual disciplines it cultivates may be our nation’s best hope for retaining our scientific leadership. It is not an elitist highbrow finishing school for the privileged classes; rather, its most dramatic results can be found in the way it can elevate the poor and disadvantaged. It is not merely going back to the basics; rather, the new classicism, while cultivating basic knowledge, also emphasizes logical thinking and personal creativity. The classical education movement promises to be a catalyst not only for educational reform but for educational renaissance.
The current educational crisis has provoked a resurgence of private schools. Recognizing that religious and parochial schools tend to do a better job of educating children at a lower cost, many educational reformers are advocating free-market approaches to education. The Choice program, first introduced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, would give state funded vouchers to parents, allowing them to select the school that is best for their children, whether public or private. Theoretically, the schools that are most effective at educating children would succeed, while ineffective schools would close down. The free market would encourage innovation and quality in education, just as it does in the business world. Such proposals hold great promise - as long as government money does not co-opt private schools by making them wards of the state. But they beg the question of how a school, public or private, should educate a child and what the purpose of that education should be.
A 1994 study of reading ability among high school seniors showed that in the public schools only 32 percent were “proficient” readers, while 31 percent could not read at the “basic” level. In the private schools, nearly half were proficient, while 16 percent could hardly read at all. In other words, private schools produce 18 percent more good readers and 15 percent fewer illiterates than public schools. Half of private school seniors can read well, while only one third of public school seniors can. The glass may be half full, but it is also half empty. How is it that half of the seniors in a private school still are not proficient readers?
Though private schools perform much better than public schools, they often rely on the same educational philosophy. Most private schools, even those with a strong religious identity, use the same curriculum, the same teacher training, and the same pedagogical techniques as public schools. Religious instruction is added, and usually classroom discipline is stricter. In addition, private religious schools have a conceptual basis for truth, values, and discipline sadly lacking in aggressively secular public schools. Yet their students’ knowledge and skills may still be less than they should be. American children with private education do score higher on standardized tests than those in public schools but they still lag behind other countries.
A number of private schools - already strengthened by free-market innovations, a commitment to educational change, and a religious worldview-have turned to a classical understanding of teaching and learning. This approach provides a sophisticated, comprehensive education for a free human being.
Classical education can best be summed up in the concept of the Liberal Arts. The term derives from the Latin libera, meaning freedom. For the Greeks and Romans, a liberal education was necessary for a human being to be free. Vocational training, by contrast, was reserved for slaves. Free citizens required an education that enlarged the mind, cultivated civic virtue, and developed the full human potential.
As they were systematized in the Middle Ages, there were seven “arts” that comprised a liberal education. They were suited to the various stages of intellectual development, and engaged all of the human faculties. The Seven Liberal Arts consisted of two parts: the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric; and the quadrivium of mathematics, music, astronomy and geometry. Once these “arts” of learning were mastered, the student was equipped for the study of the sciences: natural science, moral science (including history, politics, and law), and the theological science (the study of religion and first principles). After this regimen, a student would study for a profession.
While such a curriculum is impressive, it is obviously from another time and place. Contemporary subjects, such as literature, art and psychology -much less computer science and driver’s ed - are nowhere mentioned. Obviously, an education today would have to be quite different from that of ancient Rome or the Middle Ages. But the genius of the liberal arts is that they can encompass all subjects, including the most contemporary. The trivium and quadrivium are not so much discrete subjects as they are modes of learning.
The trivium is one of those concise, yet comprehensive paradigms classical thought is famed for. But it applies to more than just language. The fact is, every subject has its grammar, logic and rhetoric. To be educated in any discipline, one must know its basic facts (grammar); be able to think deeply about the subject (logic); and be able to act on that knowledge in a personal original, and independent way (rhetoric).
Put another way, every subject requires knowledge (grammar), understanding (logic), and creativity (rhetoric). The classical trivium in fact anticipates the finding of contemporary educational psychology, which enumerates four “Higher Order Thinking Skills”:
(1) Data Accumulation (grammar)
(2) Analysis (logic)
(3) Decision-making (logic and rhetoric)
(4) Communication (rhetoric)
The trivium is valuable not simply because it is “classical”; rather, it is classic because it offers what seems to be a comprehensive, universal paradigm for learning.
Just as every academic discipline requires the “higher order thinking skills”, every discipline requires mastery of its trivium. Mathematics involves learning to add and multiply, then “thought” problems, then real-world applications. Music and the visual arts require mastery of notes and materials, grasping of aesthetic issues, and ultimately creative expression. To be a computer scientist, one must learn the grammar of operating systems, comprehend the logic of the technology, and then, and only then, write original, effective programs. Every field - business, psychology, literature, engineering, even driver’s ed - has its trivium.
This liberal paradigm still survives in America’s professional schools, which for the most part retain their world-class status. In Medical School, students first get a crash course in gross anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology, cramming their minds with enormous amounts of factual information. This is the grammar stage of medicine. Then they go on rounds with an experienced physician, who peppers them with questions, following the dialectical methodology that characterizes the logic state. Here they listen, observe, and talk through the process of making a diagnosis and devising a course of treatment. They are learning how to think like doctors. Then comes the internship, where med students, under intense pressure, must make their own diagnoses and medical decisions. This is the crucible of rhetoric, in which they must apply what they have learned in original ways on their own.
Law school also follows the trivium, forcing its students to memorize reams of legal “trivia”, then subjecting them to question-and-answer grilling, the classical “Socratic” method of dialectical teaching, then throwing them into mock trials to perform on their own. Conservatories, seminaries, and business schools, with their case studies and simulations, are structured in similar ways, following, though often unwittingly, the classical liberal arts tradition.
Today’s educational reforms often grasp at part of the trivium, but fail to integrate them. The “back to the basics” movement correctly sees the importance of grammar. But some “back to basics” curricula never advance to higher-level thinking (logic) or to developing individual creativity (rhetoric). Other educational reformers stress the need to “teach kids how to think”. They develop “critical thinking” curricula, an acknowledgement of the need for logic. Mere thinking, though, is not enough, since one must first have something to think about (grammar) and then be able to present one’s ideas in a coherent, persuasive way and to use them in real-world situations (rhetoric). In practice today, “critical thinking” too often means nothing more than applied skepticism, tearing down traditional values and authorities with no attention to either formal logic or common sense, much less the factual grounding of the grammar stage.
Whatever their flaws, the “back to the basics” movement and the “critical thinking” movement do testify to what is missing in contemporary educations. Today’s schools emphasize “rhetoric” at the expense of grammar and logic. Students are now constantly encouraged to “share their feelings”, “be creative”, “form their own opinions”, and “draw on their own experiences”. Students often end up sharing their ignorance, tossing around unsupported opinions, with no one the wiser.
In the ancient world the next phase of a liberal arts education was the quadrivium: mathematics, music, astronomy, and geometry. These were four kinds of learning that embodied the idea that education should be comprehensive, engaging all of the faculties of the mind. A fully educated person should be well versed in mathematics, science, music, literature and art. Only then should one specialize.
The fragmentation of knowledge, which creates narrow specialists who are functional illiterates in other areas, is recognized as a major liability in American higher education. When students receive training for a highly specific job they are equipped for nothing else when that particular job becomes glutted or obsolete. Moreover, the Greeks would say that such an education creates a slave mentality, making the learner an obedient worker utterly dependent upon his masters and incapable of self-government. Free human beings, on the other hand, so that their full potential will be developed, require a liberal education.
Such a formidable, holistic, all-encompassing educational theory is surely one of the great inventions of Western thought. The way it was applied varied, from the informal dialogues of the Athenian Academy and the one-on-one instruction conducted by the slave-pedagogues of Rome, to the scholastic hierarchies of the medieval university, the less formal humanistic tutorials of the Renaissance, and the rigorous home schooling and academics of the Enlightenment. Though its details varied greatly from era to era, this was the kind of education received by Alexander and Archimedes, Dante and Aquinas, Rabelais and John Calvin, Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. Can classical education be adapted to the needs and culture of the 21st century?
If classical educational philosophy is correct, there can be no complete education apart from the trivium of knowledge, understanding and creativity. Good teachers who convey the material, help their students understand it and stimulate them to think for themselves are thus classicists whether they know it or not. Many elite preparatory schools (some of which have the word “Latin” in their names) and many Catholic parochial schools continue the liberal arts tradition. Today, however, new schools are being formed that directly follow the classical education model with impressive results.
The trailblazer most responsible for the upsurge in distinctly classical schools is Douglas Wilson, a Protestant minister in Moscow, Idaho. He read an article entitled “The Lost Tools of Learning” by the English author and scholar Dorothy L. Sayers. Sayers made the case that classical education was not only comprehensive but developmental, offering different kinds of learning suited to different stages of a child’s development. Wilson resolved to start a Christian school on Sayers’ principles. Logos School opened in 1980.
Wilson refined his practical approach to a classical curriculum and pedagogy as his school grew. Ten years later he wrote a book on the subject entitled Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1991). Soon individuals and churches across the country were interested in staring similar schools. In 1993, Wilson began a summer conference to train teachers in the classical concepts. The new schools organized to form the Association of Classical and Christian Schools (ACCS). Currently, the ACCS has 26 member schools, with dozens more in the process of getting started. Wilson projects that within a few years, the association may well include over a hundred schools. His model has also inspired other non-affiliated schools, homeschoolers, and organizations to adopt their own versions of a Christian education organized around the trivium.
For ACCS schools, the primary grades, ages 5-11, are the times when a child is best suited to learn at the level of grammar. Just as very young children are best at learning foreign languages, the acquisition of basic knowledge - learning how to make letters and sound out words, memorizing the multiplication table, and hearing the culture’s patriotic and biblical stories - is the province of what even today are often called “grammar schools”.
The middle school or junior high grades, ages 12-14, are often a frustrating time for parents, as their children start to talk back, question authority, and act “smart”. The impertinence and rebellion of early adolescence is, however, a sign that their minds are ready for the next phase of learning, the questioning and probing of reality that is logic.
During the high school years, ages 15-18, teenagers become both self-absorbed and anxious to reach out to their peers. Feelings, issues of identity, and romantic idealisms come to the fore. High school adolescents yearn to be understood. This is the age for self-expression - the time to introduce the practice of rhetoric.
The ACCS approach thus requires a different pedagogy for each age grouping. With supreme wisdom, it takes the “difficult” characteristics of youth and channels them into learning.
While ACCS students take the normal courses offered by the public schools-English, math, social sciences, chemistry, and the like - the difference is in how they are taught. They also take some distinctive courses such as Latin, formal logic, rhetoric and theology, which retains its old status as the “Queen of the Sciences,” integrating all truth and values.
Is there quantitative evidence of the effectiveness of the ACCS approach? Since the ACCS schools are so new and since most of its students have entered at different levels from other schools, it is difficult as yet to find hard evidence. But Logos School, Douglas Wilson’s prototype and thus the oldest of the ACCS schools, has been in existence for 15 years and so has a number of students who have been through the entire program.
By all available measurements, the ACCS program is an astonishing success. On standardized achievement tests, three out of four Logos students consistently score in the top 25 percent. A recent class of seniors had a composite-that is, an average - SAT score in the 96th percentile, meaning that the entire class ranked in the top four percent in the nation.
A visitor to the school can tell the difference in an instant. Young children demonstrate prodigious feats of memory, junior high kids analyze arguments by means of symbolic logic, and older teenagers are thoughtful and eloquent. The standards are high-the beginning rhetoric class uses textbooks by Aristotle and Cicero - and students are meeting them.
As a college English professor, I find it an odd experience to sit in on classes at Logos school, read student papers, and talk to them informally. These are high school students? They seem far more accomplished than most college students, even graduates. While college seniors sometimes have to do one senior paper, these high school students do two, and with more rigorous standards. (Logos seniors write one 30-page research project for a friendly audience, the next semester they must write another one, this time defending it orally before a panel of faculty members who play the role of a hostile audience.) College freshman composition students can hardly be made to write a thesis sentence, but here are high school students who are employing the exordium and narration with style and grace, with well supported arguments (thanks to their junior high logic) and with nary a comma out of place (thanks to their grammar). The level of discourse, the depth of thinking, and what can only be described as a richness of character set the Logos seniors apart. Such are the benefits of a classical education.
The ACCS approach is by no means the only version of classical education. As with many ideas whose time has come, classical education is being discovered by a number of educators working separately from each other.
The Paideia Project (named for the Greek word for instruction, discipline and nurture) is the brainchild of the philosopher Mortimer Adler and other conservative intellectuals who met in 1979 to develop a program to bring a liberal education to primary and secondary grades, particularly in the public schools. In 1982, a book outlining the concept, The Paideia Prosposal, was published and the group’s curriculum, reading programs, teacher training, and study aids were made available. The first schools to adopt the Paideia program were located in Chicago and Atlanta, and today some 30 school districts throughout the country have adopted its principles.
Grounded in a commitment to democratic ideals and to the study of the “Great Books” of Western Civilization, the Paideia curriculum breaks down education - in ways roughly parallel to the trivium - into three kinds: the acquisition of organized knowledge, the development of the skills of learning (the arts of thinking), and the enlargement of understanding, insight, and aesthetic appreciation.
In addition, Paideia recognizes three corresponding modes of teaching: didactic, coaching, and Socratic. The didactic method involves lectures and textbooks and is most closely related to the acquisition of knowledge. Coaching calls for discipline, drilling, and practice and is most closely related to the development of intellectual skills. The Socratic method uses questioning and discussion. Students and teachers develop arguments by drawing on their ideas and experiences. This is most closely related to the enlargement of understanding.
Besides its use of the great books, the hallmark of the Paideia approach is its teaching technique. The fundamental information of the major branches of learning (language, literature, and fine arts; mathematics and natural sciences; and history, geography, and social studies) is conveyed didactically. The development of learning skills - such as reading, writing, calculation, problem solving, and the like - requires coaching. Here teachers interact personally with students, correcting faults, directing their practice, and helping them perform tasks. Finally, the highest level of education, enlarging understanding and insight, is achieved by having the students interact with works of art - literature, drama, the visual arts, and music. It is taught by Socratic dialectic. The teacher asks probing questions, which lead to discussion that forces students nor merely to share their feelings but to think objectively and to articulate and defend their ideas.
The Paideia curriculum has broadened the horizons of thousands of children, including poverty-stricken children of the inner city, who are often written off as ineducable. The tacit assumption of much contemporary education - following the hypotheses of social determinists like Marx and Skinner - is that since disadvantaged children are wholly shaped by their environment and culture, not much can be done with
them until politics changes society. Classical education - with its emphasis on freedom, virtue and achievement - has a much higher view of human beings, and give children the tools to improve their condition by developing their potential, elevating their experiences, and inspiring them to greatness. Thus it is little wonder that the most dramatic success stories of inner city education almost invariably exhibit the marks of classical education.
Marva Collins is an African-American woman who administers a school in inner city Chicago. Although she does not explicitly refer to the trivium or to classical philosophy, her work at Westside Preparatory School shows classicism at it most exhilarating and most inspiring.
Westside offers a liberal education; Collins knows that mere vocational training cannot inspire or lift up her students out of the often miserable conditions that surround them. Her students are in particular need of an education that will help them be free.
Like Douglas Wilson, Collins emphasizes mastery of basic knowledge - from reading by phonics and memorizing the multiplication tables to perfecting standard English. As in ACCS schools, her students go on to study reasoning and the art of effective self-expression. Like Mortimer Adler, Collins uses coaching and Socratic questioning. Also like Adler, she teaches the great books, especially Shakespeare. Like all classical educators, she insists on high standards and hard work. In addition, she has high ideals about the value of education and, above all, the value of her students.
Classical education has both universality and a flexibility that has made it relevant to cultures as diverse as ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy and colonial America. Today it is adapting itself to the new technologies and social realities of America. Thousands of homeschoolers are using classical curricula - as designed by companies such as Trivium Pursuit and Covenant Home Curriculum - and many are exercising their classicism in cyberspace, plugging in to numerous classical education sites on the World Wide Web and making use of Fritz Hinrichs’ classical tutorials on the internet.
In universities, the reigning intellectual nihilism and educational bedlam are being challenged by a cadre of scholars who are urging, in effect, a return to the classical pursuit of truth. Interestingly, something similar is happening in other fields, as a number of artists, architects, designers, and writers are seeking to go beyond the dead-ends of modern art and post-modern chaos, and are rediscovering classical aesthetics. These are signs of an idea whose time has come. Again.
Whenever western culture has stagnated, it has always renewed itself by rediscovering classicism, specifically classical education. The Dark Ages after the fall of Rome were brightened by the universities of the High Middle Ages. The exhaustion and decay of late medieval Europe blossomed with the new creativity and energy sparked by the classicism of the Renaissance. The political tyranny of the 18th century was countered not so much by the Enlightenment’s skeptical empiricists but by its neoclassicists, such as Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and America’s Founders. As we stand in the rubble of the late 20th century surely the time is right for another Renaissance. |
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