Classical Schools in America: A Movement of Hope

Summary of Classical Schools in America: A Movement of Hope

For full report go to: Classical Schools in America: A Movement of Hope | The Heritage Foundation

August 26, 2024

Rachel Alexander Cambre, PhD

Responding to parental demand for more options and input regarding their children’s education, lawmakers have created or expanded education choice programs in more than a dozen states over the past few years, restoring education freedom for rising numbers of American parents. But parents are not simply seeking education freedom: They are, in increasing numbers, seeking an education for freedom for their children—a classical liberal arts education that aims to form adults capable of understanding, exercising, and protecting their American rights and responsibilities. This report constitutes an inquiry into that model of education by surveying the growing number of classical liberal arts schools committed to it.

Key Takeaways

A classical liberal arts education broadens students’ horizons beyond the opinions and anxieties that dominate their own place and time.

By equipping students with the virtues necessary for self-learning, a classical education bears fruit not just for students, but for their neighbors as well.

Virtues imbued by a classical education are as emblematic of America’s intellectual tradition as they are essential for her future.

In his 1943 book Education for Freedom, Robert Maynard Hutchins, then-president of the University of Chicago, warned against modern schooling’s unnatural extension of adolescence. “It has often been asserted on very high authority that the American educational system prolongs adolescence far beyond the point at which young people in other countries are turned out of education to assume adult responsibilities,” Hutchins wrote, lamenting the ways in which this slows maturation.1

Robert Maynard Hutchins, Education for Freedom (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1943), p. 66.

Echoing his concerns across the pond but a few years later, British novelist Dorothy Sayers noted the stark contrast provided by the “remarkably early age at which the young men went up to the University in, let us say, Tudor times” against the “artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day.”2

Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning” (London, England: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1948), https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/sayers-lost/sayers-lost-00-h.html (accessed May 2, 2024).

In a day and age in which far fewer Americans are reaching the traditional markers of adulthood—work, marriage, and parenthood—Hutchins’s and Sayers’s complaints might sound quaint by comparison.3

Rachel Minkin et al., “Parents, Young Adult Children and the Transition to Adulthood,” Pew Research Center, January 25, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/01/25/parents-young-adult-children-and-the-transition-to-adulthood/ (accessed May 16, 2024); Nicholas Eberstadt, “Post-Pandemic Recovery for America’s Prime Age Labor Force: A Tale of Two Sexes,” American Enterprise Institute, AEIdeas, January 9, 2024, https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/post-pandemic-recovery-for-americas-prime-age-labor-force-a-tale-of-two-sexes/ (accessed May 16, 2024); Gaby Galvin, “U.S. Marriage Rate Drops to Record Low,” U.S. News and World Report, April 29, 2020, https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-04-29/us-marriage-rate-drops-to-record-low#:~:text=In%202018%2C%20the%20rate%20fell,on%20national%20marriage%20is%20available (accessed May 16, 2024); and National Center for Health Statistics, “U.S. Fertility Rate Drops to Another Historic Low,” April 25, 2024, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2024/20240525.htm#:~:text=The%20general%20fertility%20rate%20in,consistently%20decreased%20by%202%25%20annually (accessed May 16, 2024).

Add to that the tragic mental health epidemic engulfing today’s children and adolescents, with rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm skyrocketing, and the fate of American adulthood looks grim, indeed.4

Zach Rausch and Jonathan Haidt, “The Evidence,” The Anxious Generation, March 2, 2024, https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/the-evidence (accessed May 16, 2024).

Hutchins and Sayers, it turns out, were identifying the seed of a problem that is now full-grown. And that is that a society that fails to teach its youth the arts and virtues of self-government condemns them to perpetual childhood, thereby condemning itself to the “soft despotism” Alexis de Tocqueville feared democracy was vulnerable to. As Founding Father John Adams put it in a letter regarding the education of his own children, “If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.”5

“John Adams to Abigail Adams, October 29, 1775,” in Frank Shuffleton, ed., The Letters of John and Abigail Adams (Westvaco Corporation, 2001), p. 62.

American parents are recognizing the gravity of this crisis, however, and their response has been impressive. For the past four years, droves of American parents have withheld or withdrawn their children from the public school system—and state legislatures have noticed.6

National Center for Education Statistics, “Public School Fall 2022 Enrollment Counts Remain Below Fall 2019,” February 5, 2024, https://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/press_releases/2_05_2024.asp - :~:text=“Total public school enrollment is,continuously changing school enrollment landscape. (accessed May 1, 2024).

Responding to parental demand for more options and input when it comes to their children’s education, lawmakers created and expanded education choice programs in over a dozen states in 2023 alone, a trend that has continued into 2024.7

Jonathan Butcher and Jason Bedrick, “2023: The Year of Education Freedom,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 3788, September 11, 2023, https://www.heritage.org/education/report/2023-the-year-education-freedom, and Jason Bedrick, “Missouri, Nebraska Advance Education Freedom,” The Daily Signal, April 19, 2024, https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/19/missouri-nebraska-advance-education-freedom/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell (accessed May 1, 2024).

But parents are not simply seeking education freedom. They are, in increasing numbers, seeking an education for freedom for their children—a classical liberal arts education that aims to form adults capable of understanding, exercising, and protecting their American rights and responsibilities. This paper constitutes an inquiry into that model of education by surveying the growing number of classical liberal arts schools committed to it.

Methodology

There are now more than 1,000 such schools throughout the U.S., over 250 of which have opened since 2020.8

This study includes about 900 classical schools in the U.S., drawn from lists of affiliated schools published by classical school associations (cf. note 14). Hence, because it excludes, for the most part, classical schools that remain unaffiliated with those associations, it is not an exhaustive list. A recent estimate made by Arcadia Education puts the count of classical schools in the U.S. at 1,551. Arcadia Education, “Market Analysis of U.S. Classical Education in Grades PK–12,” February 22, 2024, https://arcadiaed.com/2024/02/market-analysis-of-u-s-classical-education-in-grades-pk-12/ (accessed May 1, 2024). Both this study and Arcadia’s identify over 250 classical schools that have opened since 2020.

Membership in two of the largest classical school associations—the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) and the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE)—has doubled and tripled, respectively, over the past 10 years.9

The ACCS reported 234 affiliated schools in 2013 and 502 in 2023. Association of Classical Christian Schools, “The Mission of the ACCS,” https://classicalchristian.org/the-mission-of-the-accs/ (accessed May 1, 2024). Elisabeth Sullivan, the executive director of the ICLE, told Aleteia that while 73 schools were associated with the ICLE in 2013, there are now 237 ICLE-affiliated schools. Tom Hoopes, “Growth in Classical Education a Sign of Hope, Say Teachers,”Aleteia, March 18, 2024, https://aleteia.org/2024/03/18/growth-in-classical-education-a-sign-of-great-hope-say-teachers/ (accessed May 1, 2024).

Nor does that growth appear to be slowing any time soon, according to a recent market analysis by the education consulting group Arcadia Education.10

Arcadia Education, “Market Analysis of U.S. Classical Education in Grades PK–12.”

Citing several signs of increasing demand, not least of which are the waitlists reported by many classical schools, Arcadia predicted that the current pace of new classical school growth—which it estimated to be almost 5 percent per annum—will likely continue through the next decade.11

Arcadia Education’s estimate “reflects school growth rates from the three largest umbrella organizations for Christian classical schools, the Association of Classical Christian Schools, the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, and the Society for Classical Learning,” and its “projection of classical schools and enrollment in 2035” estimates that “a total of 1.4 million students, or 2.4% of all students in K–12 education, could be enrolled in quality classical schools by 2035.” Ibid.

In light of the classical school movement’s impressive growth—a remarkable demonstration of education freedom in action—this paper offers a survey of various schools that make up the movement today. What are the educational methods that unite these independent schools, and why are they appealing to increasing numbers of parents? In what ways do classical schools differ from one another, and do the differences between them undermine that unity? In order to capture the spirit of this movement without overlooking the diversity within it, this paper draws from the mission statements, educational philosophies, curriculum outlines, and co-curricular offerings of 882 classical schools, as well as the education reformers they cite as guides.12

The hundreds of classical schools in this study cite dozens of contemporary education reformers as influences. In the spirit of the classical school movement, however, which champions a return “to the sources,” this paper largely draws from the earliest proponents of a modern return to classical liberal arts education whom schools cite, including Charlotte Mason, Dorothy Sayers, Robert Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler.

This method differs from that of most existing analyses of the classical school movement, which tend to focus on a handful of influential institutions or associations, rather than assess a comprehensive set of schools.13

Two essays in National Affairs, for example, give helpful insight into the history of the classical school movement by highlighting the foundational roles that Cair Paravel Latin School in Topeka, Kansas, the Trinity School at Greenlawn in South Bend, Indiana, the Logos School in Moscow, Idaho, and the Trivium School in Lancaster, Massachusetts—all influenced by Dorothy Sayers’s paper, “The Lost Tools of Learning”—and the associations that followed have played in the development of the movement. Ian Lindquist, “Classical Schools in Modern America,” National Affairs, Fall 2019, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/classical-schools-in-modern-america/ (accessed May 1, 2024), and Micah Meadowcraft, “Classical Education’s Aristocracy of Anyone,” National Affairs, Fall 2023, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/classical-educations-aristocracy-of-anyone (acessed May 1, 2024). Similarly, The New Yorker’s and Tablet magazine’s 2024 profiles of the movement focus on its current leadership, including that of the ACCS, the CiRCE Institute, the Classical Academic Press, the Classic Learning Test, and the growing charter school networks Great Hearts and Brilla. Emma Green, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?” The New Yorker, March 11, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/have-the-liberal-arts-gone-conservative (accessed May 1, 2024), and Maggie Phillips, “The Debates Over—and Within—‘Classical Education,’” Tablet, January 24, 2024, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/classical-education-debate (accessed May 1, 2024).

To arrive at the 882 schools included in this study, research began with lists of schools in the U.S. affiliated with the nine largest classical school associations:

The ACCS (accredited and full members);
The ICLE;
The Society for Classical Learning;
The Classical Latin Schools Association;
The Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education;
Great Hearts Academies;
The Chesterton Schools Network;
The CiRCE Institute; and
The Hillsdale College K–12 Office, which includes its Barney Charter School Initiative.14
These lists can be found as follows: Association of Classical Christian Schools, “Find Classical Christian Schools in Your Area,” https://classicalchristian.org/find-a-school/ (accessed May 1, 2024); Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, “View Schools by State,” https://my.catholicliberaleducation.org/map-of-schools/ (accessed May 1, 2024); Society for Classical Learning, “Find Christian Schools Near You,” https://www.societyforclassicallearning.org/find-christian-schools-near-you/ (accessed May 1, 2024); Classical Latin School Association, “Partner Schools,” https://classicallatin.org/partner-schools/ (accessed May 1, 2024); “Standard Schools,” https://classicallatin.org/standard-schools/ (accessed May 1, 2024); Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education, “Directory,” https://www.ccle.org/directory/ (accessed May 1, 2024); Great Hearts America, “Great Hearts Academies United States Map,” https://www.greatheartsamerica.org/academies/ (accessed May 1, 2024); Chesterton Schools Network, “Find a School,” https://chestertonschoolsnetwork.org/find-a-school/ (accessed July 1, 2024); CiRCE Institute, “School Database,” https://circeinstitute.org/school-database/ (accessed May 1, 2024); and Hillsdale College, “Hillsdale Classical Schools Across the Nation,” https://k12.hillsdale.edu/Schools/Affiliate-Classical-Schools/ (accessed May 1, 2024).

Among the schools affiliated with these organizations are those that were not initially founded as classical schools, but either have adopted or intend to adopt a classical curriculum. To avoid including the latter—those exploring but not yet actively offering a classical education—the study excluded from its final selection those that make little to no mention of providing a classical liberal arts education on their websites, as well as those that plan to open their doors in 2025 or later.15

This study also excluded the international schools affiliated with the above associations.

The 882 schools that remain, on the other hand, all explicitly profess to provide a classical liberal arts education on their school websites and demonstrate that commitment through their mission and vision statements, educational philosophies, curriculum maps, and, where possible, e-mail and phone correspondence with school administrators.

Study of these materials—and the education reformers they reflect—reveals three ideas that seem to animate the work of classical schools and unite them into a cohesive movement. First, classical schools understand education to entail passing down the wisdom of past generations. Second, in part because this intellectual tradition is so rich and complex, classical schools seek to prepare students for a life of learning, whether that continues at the university level or not, by equipping them with the habits and skills necessary to learn for themselves. And lastly, classical schools understand this preparation to require formation of character as much as intellect, for the moral and intellectual virtues, though “two in speech,” to borrow a phrase from Aristotle, are “naturally inseparable.”16

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, trans. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 23.

In short, classical schools equip students with the knowledge, wisdom, and virtue essential for appreciating, practicing, and preserving their American freedoms.

The Great Tradition

In his 1943 “Autobiography of an Uneducated Man,” Hutchins described his own school days as “a business of passing examinations and meeting requirements,” a business he succeeded in well enough to go on to study at Oberlin and Yale.17

Hutchins, Education for Freedom, p. 2.

Yet despite the prestige of his alma maters, Hutchins arrived at the end of his undergraduate education with “no understanding of science, mathematics, or philosophy,” nor much knowledge of literature.18

Ibid., p. 4.

“What is perhaps more important,” Hutchins wrote, “I had no idea what I was doing or why.”19

Ibid.

When, in law school, he stumbled upon the liberal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, as well as the great works of philosophy, history, literature, and law that have built Western civilization, he realized that the fragmented and test-driven schooling he had endured until then had been no education at all, a lesson that informed his later efforts to reform the undergraduate education at the University of Chicago.20

Ibid., pp. 7–14 and 65–79.

“To be free,” Hutchins concluded, “a man must understand the tradition in which he lives.”21

Ibid., p. 14.

Hutchins is not a name typically invoked in synopses of the modern classical school movement in America—a movement that did not begin in earnest until the 1980s—but at least a dozen schools cite his influence, and with good reason: Many classical schools’ founding stories echo Hutchins’s autobiography.22

While 12 of the 882 schools in this study cite Hutchins on their websites, 30 cite his friend and co-editor Mortimer Adler, who experienced a similar life-changing encounter with the liberal arts and great books.

A parent or group of parents catches a glimpse of the rich intellectual tradition that has shaped human history, and they feel awed—and robbed. To avoid depriving their own children of this intellectual inheritance, they start a school. And they ground its curriculum in the liberal arts and great books that have stood the test of time.

Liberal Arts. Hence, over 85 percent of the classical schools in this study teach some or all of the ancient and medieval liberal arts of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.23

See appendix. Out of the 882 schools in this study, 773, or 88 percent, offer instruction in the trivium and/or the quadrivium, and 784, or 89 percent, teach Latin and/or Greek as part of their core curriculum, according to website materials and e-mail correspondence with school administrators.

The first three—grammar, logic, and rhetoric, or the trivium—entail the study of language. Students learn not only the parts of language (including those of the classical languages of Latin and/or Greek), but also the principles of formal logic and rhetoric so that they may learn to reason, speak, and write well.24

Holy Family Classical School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, provides helpful definitions of the seven liberal arts on its website: Holy Family Classical School, “Classical Curriculum, Grades 1–12,” https://www.holyfamilyclassicalschool.org/classical-curriculum-grades-1-8 (accessed May 1, 2024).

This study of order and beauty in language in turn prepares them for the study of order and beauty in number through the arts of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music: the quadrivium.25

For further explanation of the quadrivium, see Jake Tawney, “Mathematics Is the Discipline That Bridges Heaven and Earth,” Benedictine College, April 24, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gWpZvTCEA (accessed May 1, 2024).

Education in these arts dates back to the time of Plato and Aristotle, but also formed the basis of the American grammar schools of the Founding era, which American historian Andrew H. Browning defines as “school[s] that taught Latin grammar through classical literature,” in addition to teaching arts like logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, and geometry.26

In Plato’s Meno, for example, he depicts Socrates teaching the art of geometry to Meno’s servant, and Aristotle’s Organon—his six works on logic—and Rhetoric offer instruction in the arts of logic and rhetoric no doubt taught at his Lyceum. Plato, Meno, George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns, trans. (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2004), pp. 18–24; Aristotle, “Organon” and “Rhetorica” in Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), pp. 1–212 and 1317–1452. Browning’s insightful book on the educational backgrounds of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 illustrates the prevalence of classical education at the time of the Founding, with most schools and tutors teaching the classical languages and liberal arts of logic, rhetoric, and geometry, notwithstanding divergent offerings in moral philosophy and political science. Andrew H. Browning, Schools for Statesmen: The Divergent Educations of the Constitution’s Framers (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2022), pp. 4, 186, 200, and 276.

Great Books. Classical schools—at least 80 percent of the schools in this study—revive this education in the liberal arts in large part through encounters with the “masterpieces of the liberal arts,” as 20th-century American philosopher Scott Buchanan, founder of the great books program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, described the classics, or the great books.27

Of the 882 schools in this study, 708, or 80 percent, teach the great books—sometimes referred to as “classical literature,” the “Western canon,” “primary texts,” or “original sources”—according to website materials and e-mail correspondence with school administrators. See appendix. See also St. John’s College, “The New Program at St. John’s College in Annapolis: Supplement to the Bulletin,” St. John’s College Digital Archives, https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/257 (accessed April 29, 2024).

In this, too, they resurrect not just a Western intellectual tradition, but a distinctly American one, reading the same classics that inspired many of the Founders.28

As Browning details, Framers like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton were well-versed in the Greek and Roman classics of Aristotle, Plutarch, and Cicero, not to mention early modern “classics” of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke. Browning, Schools for Statesmen, pp. 38, 44–45, 57–59, and 63–64. In this, they were representative of other Framers, as well as Founders not present at the Constitutional Convention, like Thomas Jefferson, who enjoyed reading Tacitus, Thucydides, Newton, and Euclid in his leisure. “Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 21, 1812,” in The Letters of John and Abigail Adams, pp. 113–115.

Classical schools teach these texts—ranging from Homer’s Odyssey, Euclid’s Elements, and Shakespeare’s plays to the Declaration of Independence—not simply because they have impacted the course of history, and therefore our own time, but because they transcend time. Indeed, the principles of geometry, as well as those of human nature investigated by Homer and Shakespeare, remain as true today as they did thousands of years ago. An education steeped in this intellectual tradition thus prepares students for the timeless pursuit of the transcendentals—truth, goodness, and beauty.

Religious Tradition. Classical schools manifest their commitment to transmitting the “wisdom of the ages” in other ways as well.29

The Saint Timothy School, “Come See the World,” https://www.thesainttimothyschool.org/ (accessed April 25, 2024).

While all teach the classical liberal arts, about 80 percent of the schools in this study also teach the religious intellectual traditions that have formed the West, and do so in ways that go beyond simply opening and closing the day with prayer.30

See appendix. Of the 882 schools in this study, 725, or 82 percent, are affiliated with religious traditions.

Christian classical schools, for instance, teach the Christian intellectual tradition, beginning with the text of the Bible, but also including writings of early Church Fathers like Ignatius of Antioch and Augustine of Hippo.31

See, for example, the curriculum map of Chrysostom Academy, an Orthodox Christian school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where Orthodox Christian studies include readings of St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch. Chrysostom Academy, “Upper School,” https://chrysostomacademy.org/academics/upper-school/ (accessed May 3, 2024).

Catholic liberal arts schools further incorporate the texts that pertain to the Catholic intellectual tradition, teaching Catholic novelists, doctors of the Church, and the papal encyclicals that constitute Catholic social teaching.32

The Lyceum, a Catholic classical school in South Euclid, Ohio, offers a good example of this incorporation. “Although the Bible, The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Summa Theologica form the backbone of The Lyceum Theology curriculum,” its website reads, “students will read supplemental texts from various fathers and doctors of the Church, but especially those of St [sic] Augustine and Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman.” The Lyceum, “Theology,” https://www.thelyceum.org/curriculum-theology.html (accessed May 3, 2024).

And as the first Jewish classical school prepares to open its doors this fall, it offers a model for what a distinctly Jewish classical education might look like, with plans to teach Hebrew, the Tanakh, and the texts of modern Zionism.33

Emet Classical Academy, “Academic Principles and Program,” https://emetclassicalacademy.org/academics/ (accessed April 25, 2024).

Local Tradition. Far from uniform, classical schools differ by commitment to particular religious denominations—or to religious neutrality—as well as by commitment to particular local traditions. Bonner Classical Academy, for example, a new classical school in northern Idaho, offers a robust program in the mechanical arts—from woodworking to circuitry—an homage to the living tradition of homesteading so prevalent in that region.34

Bonner Classical Academy, “Educational Principles,” https://bonnerclassicalacademy.com/academics/educational-principles/ (accessed April 26, 2024). The author is particularly grateful to Dr. Jessica Drexel, Executive Director and Head of School for Bonner Classical Academy, who took time for a phone call on March 22, 2024, to substantiate and expound upon the academy’s curriculum and understanding of the mechanical arts as part of the greater liberal arts tradition.

Similarly, Covenant Academy, a classical school northwest of Houston, partners with a nearby long-standing 10-acre farm, both to give students hands-on experience with agricultural projects and to “provide students with a connection to the experiences of local people in history,” the academy’s website reads.35

Covenant Academy, “Special Programs at Covenant Academy,” https://www.covenantcypress.org/special-programs/ (accessed April 26, 2024). The academy’s continued partnership with Kingsfield Farm was confirmed via e-mail correspondence with the school’s administration.

While these variations in curriculum distinguish classical schools from one another, they flow from a conviction the schools share: that education concerns passing down the intellectual and cultural traditions that undergird American communities today.

Parents as Educators. The pride of place that classical schools give to the family also flows from this conviction. Consistent with their parent-driven origins, classical schools tend to recognize parents as the primary educators of their children and therefore partners—rather than subordinates—to the school, with almost 70 percent of the schools in this study including explicit statements to that effect on their websites.36

See appendix. Out of the 882 schools in this study, 585, or 66 percent, indicate support for parents as partners to the school and/or the primary educators of their children, either through statements to that effect, by offering classical education opportunities for parents, or by requiring parental volunteering.

Nor are these statements all talk. Some schools encourage parental involvement by permitting parents to pay for a portion of tuition through hours volunteered at the school, while others invite parents to study the texts their children are reading by providing classical education programs for them or hosting parent reading groups.37

At Ann Arbor Orthodox Classical Academy in Michigan, for example, parents may invest 20 hours per trimester volunteering for the school in lieu of $1,000 per trimester in tuition dollars. Ann Arbor Classical Academy, “Admissions,” https://www.a2oca.org/admissions (accessed May 3, 2024). Ridgeview Classical Schools, a K–12 charter school in Fort Collins, Colorado, “strongly encourage[s] parents to be involved in their child’s educational journey by demonstrating the significance of reading, and discussing ideas. For that reason, [the school] organize[s] two Parent Book Groups on a weekly and monthly basis.” Ridgeview Classical Schools, “Parent Reading Groups,” https://ridgeviewclassical.org/parent-reading-groups (accessed August 5, 2024). Eastwood Christian School, a K–12 Christian classical school in Montgomery, Alabama, offers the “Eastwood Schola Program,” in order to “unite our students, parents, teachers, and friends around core tenets of classical Christian education,” and Trinity Classical Academy, a K–12 Christian classical school in Valencia, California, offers a similar program through its “TrinityU.” Eastwood Christian School, “Eastwood Schola Program 2023–24,” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tog_cs7VBLrR2P4n5TV90TEgjK7m8aI16UlsLJ4z-rA/edit (accessed May 3, 2024), and Trinity Classical Academy, “TrinityU,” https://www.trinityclassicalacademy.com/campus-life/events/trinity-u (accessed May 3, 2024).

And a growing number of classical schools—about 30 percent, currently—further embrace their partnerships with parents by implementing hybrid learning models, which combine in-class and at-home instruction.38

See appendix. Out of the 882 schools in this study, 273, or 31 percent, offer part-time or hybrid schedules, either as the default mode for the school or as an option for families desiring greater flexibility and time at home.

By both bringing the liberal arts into the home and leaving space in the school week for the education family life provides—whether through grandparents’ old stories or parents’ homemaking arts—classical schools make the Western tradition a family tradition.

The Art of Learning

The Western intellectual tradition in which classical schools anchor their curricula is vast, spanning thousands of years and almost every continent, and encompassing works of philosophy, history, mathematics, science, theology, poetry, economics, and law—not to mention music, architecture, and fine art. The questions these works raise, moreover, demand a lifetime of study, as do the arts they give expression to. For these reasons, classical schools presume not to complete a student’s education, but to prepare him to complete it for himself. Indeed, most schools’ mission and vision statements explicitly promise to equip students with the tools they need to become “lifelong learners,” prioritizing this end over the aims of college- or career-readiness.

In this, they echo the reformers that helped to inspire the classical school movement, who understood the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge through the classical liberal arts to take a lifetime. “Schooling is the preparatory phase,” Mortimer Adler, Hutchins’s friend, co-editor, and fellow professor at the University of Chicago, wrote in The Paideia Proposal, a text occasionally cited on classical school websites. “[I]t forms the habit of learning and provides the means for continuing to learn after all schooling is completed.”39

Mortimer J. Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1982), p. 10.

For “there is not one period of life, our school days, in which we sit down to regular meals of intellectual diet, but we must eat every day in order to live,” British educational reformer Charlotte Mason, another 20th-century influence on classical schools, explained in An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education.40

Charlotte M. Mason, An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd., 1925), pp. 324–325. Mason’s influence is cited by 48 of the school websites in this study.

Hence, as Sayers, whose famous 1947 essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” remains a leading source of inspiration for classical schools, concluded, “For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”41

Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Sayers remains by far the most consistent influence on the classical school movement, with 238 of the schools in this study citing her essay on their websites, and still others citing contemporary thinkers inspired by the essay, like Douglas Wilson or Christopher Perrin.

Attention and Memory. The “tools of learning” classical schools equip students with are not those typically found in modern classrooms—textbooks, projectors, or the ever-prevalent personal tablets. Rather, the tools classical schools focus on honing are the mental powers inherent to human nature that, like their physical counterparts, will enervate if usurped by external aids. Foremost among these capacities are those of attention and memory.42

See, for instance, Canongate Catholic High School’s identification of “attention” as one of its four educational pillars. Canongate Catholic High School, “Attention,” https://canongatecatholic.org/attention/ (accessed May 5, 2024).

Out of concern for the former, some classical schools cultivate a deliberately low-tech environment, reducing exposure to artificial stimulation in order to safeguard what Mason called children’s natural “power of concentration.”43

Mason, An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 15. Of the 882 schools in this study, 96, or 11 percent, indicate their commitment to limiting the use of screens in the classroom. See appendix.

For similar reasons, classical schools heed Mason’s warnings against the use of textbooks, preferring primary sources, since, in replacing firsthand accounts of history, science, and art with outlines and summaries, textbooks deprive students of the need to attend to the details themselves.44

Ibid., pp. 90–91, 218, 271–272, and 303. See also the ACCS’s explanation of the importance of original sources: Association of Classical Christian Schools, “Ad Fontes,” https://classicalchristian.org/what-is-ad-fontes/ (accessed May 3, 2024).

In addition to exercising students’ powers of attention through the reading of good books, teachers in turn prompt their exercise of memory by having them recall orally what they have read, either through Mason’s method of narration, in which students describe what they have read, or, more commonly, through recitation, which Sayers recommends.45

Ibid., pp. 15, 191, and 227, and Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning.”

Indeed, almost 60 percent of the classical schools in this study incorporate memory work into their curricula.46

See appendix. Of the 882 schools in this study, 502, or 57 percent, incorporate memory work into their curricula.

By teaching students to know by heart, or memorize, the important facts of history, geography, and literature they come across in books, classical schools not only strengthen students’ powers of attention and memory, but they also arm them with yet another piece of “intellectual equipment,” what American education reformer E. D. Hirsch dubbed “cultural literacy.”47

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), p. 30.

“Reading and writing are cumulative skills,” Hirsch, whom classical schools also cite as a resource, explained in his 1987 book Cultural Literacy; “the more we read[,] the more necessary knowledge we gain for further reading.”48

Ibid., pp. 27–28.

Reason. However vital the “core knowledge” Hirsch and Mason highlight may be, classical schools understand that facts are useless without a corresponding capacity to reason about them.49

Though Hirsch coined the term “core knowledge,” identifying 5,000 “essential names, phrases, dates, and concepts” every American should know and developing a curriculum based on that knowledge, Mason proposed a similar curriculum roughly 50 years earlier. “There is probably no better test of a liberal education than the number of names a person is able to use accurately and familiarly as the occasion requires.” Mason, An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 294.

Hence, just as they teach phonics, handwriting, and arithmetic so that students may learn how to read, write, add, and subtract, classical schools also teach classes on formal logic so that students may learn how to reason. While over 85 percent of the classical schools in this study express commitment to teaching the trivium, 65 percent further specify the dedication of particular courses to the formal teaching of logic, rather than solely approaching logic as a stage in the process of learning other subjects.50

See appendix.

Good Shepherd School, for example, a Catholic classical school in Purcellville, Virginia, describes its classes in formal logic as studies in the “art of the syllogism,” in which students learn “to draw valid conclusions from premises, to identify the premise of an argument, and to carefully find the point of disagreement should we differ from the conclusion.”51

Good Shepherd School, “Middle School,” https://www.goodshepherdschoolva.com/3rd-4th-grades (accessed May 9, 2024).

Just as students are expected to use their reading, writing, and arithmetic skills in the course of their other studies, so, too, are they expected to apply the principles of logic in all of their studies, whether translating Latin, interpreting a work of literature, evaluating an event of history, or proving a mathematical theorem.

It is these principles of logic, in fact, that anchor Socratic seminars at classical schools, in which “teachers guide and coach students in respectful debate, clear and logical argument, persuasive rhetoric, and careful questioning,” as St. Jerome Institute (SJI), a Catholic classical high school in Washington, DC, describes its seminars in humanities, art history, natural philosophy, and mathematics.52

St. Jerome Institute, “Curriculum,” https://stjeromeinstitute.org/curriculum/ (accessed May 3, 2024).

Inspired by the dialogues between Socrates and his interlocutors recorded in Plato’s writings, Socratic seminars typically focus on a central text (or work of art or mathematical concept, depending on the subject matter) that students then probe through discussion.53

See appendix. Of the 882 schools in this study, 434, or 49 percent, incorporate the Socratic method in their classrooms.

With the teacher’s guidance, students not only come to better understand the text or question at hand, but they also learn how to have an enriching conversation—how to identify clarifying questions, how to articulate ideas eloquently, and how to engage one another’s ideas, in turn, as Trinity Academy, a Christian classical school in Portland, Oregon, puts it.54

At Trinity Academy, “faculty members are conscious of training students in the arts of responsible conversation: the value of a good question, how to respond to one another’s ideas, and how to investigate a topic together.” Trinity Academy, “Unlocking Truth Through Socratic Discussion,” https://www.trinityacademyportland.org/humanities (accessed May 3, 2024).

By instructing students in the art of conversation, classical schools equip them with yet another tool for lifelong learning, teaching them how to learn with and from one another, both face-to-face and text-to-text. For through seminar discussions of seminal texts, students encounter fruitful disagreements not just between themselves, but between the great thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition, who often disagreed with one another pointedly, offering competing arguments for what it means to live well. Nevertheless, in doing so, great texts demonstrate a shared concern for truth, goodness, and beauty, as well as a shared faith in human beings’ capacity to reason together about the world around them. Indeed, among the many names this intellectual tradition goes by—the “great books,” the “history of ideas,” the “best which has been thought and said”—the one most fittingly used by classical schools is that of Hutchins and Adler, who called it “the great conversation.”55

The great books movement, which both Hutchins and Adler were instrumental in leading in America, can be traced to the work of the 19th-century English poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold, who gave the great books their well-known definition of “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1869), p. viii, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4212/pg4212-images.html (accessed April 29, 2024). While Hutchins and Adler titled their series of texts embodying this tradition Great Books of the Western World, they titled their introduction to the series The Great Conversation. Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), https://ia801408.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.150395/2015.150395.Great-Books-Of-The-Western-World-The-Great-Conversation.pdf (accessed April 30, 2024).

Character Formation

As an intellectual endeavor, conversation demands the exercise of intellectual skills—the capacities for attention, memory, reasoning, and rhetoric that classical schools seek to cultivate through their teaching methods. But it also demands the exercise of moral virtue. Listening to another’s comments, for example, requires the humility to recognize that one does not know everything, as well as the moderation of one’s desires to speak instead. Sharing one’s own thoughts or questions, on the other hand, might require courage, should they contradict or raise doubts about the opinions of one’s peers. Recognizing a close connection between the virtue of one’s character and the success of one’s pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, then, classical schools seek to form students’ hearts and souls as much as they form their minds.

Decorum. For most schools, this formation takes place through the curriculum itself, as students discover examples of virtue (and vice) in the books they read, from C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. But many supplement this formation by upholding high standards of decorum. Nearly all classical schools, for instance, require uniforms, with many explaining on their websites that they do so in order to instill a sense of dignity, modesty, and propriety among students.56

“The purpose of the school uniform is to foster a sense of unity, to provide consistently attractive and neat appearance for all students, to avoid peer pressure in matters of dress, and to use attire as a means of uplifting the values of truth, goodness, and beauty in our community.” The Oaks: A Classical Christian Academy, “Uniforms,” https://theoakscca.org/ordering-uniforms/ (accessed May 5, 2024). See also The Ecclesial Schools Initiative, “Uniform Guidelines,” https://www.esischools.org/uniforms (accessed May 3, 2024); Beacon Hill Classical Academy, “Uniforms,” https://www.beaconhillclassical.org/k-12-uniforms.html (accessed May 3, 2024); and Auburn Classical Academy, “Dress Code,” https://www.auburnclassicalacademy.com/parents/dress-code/ (accessed May 3, 2024).

Some classical schools go further in this regard, explicitly teaching standards of etiquette, both within the core curriculum and as stand-alone courses.57

See appendix. Of the 882 schools in this study, 55, or 6 percent, offer etiquette classes.

At Pacifica Christian High School in Newport Beach, California, for example, seminars include instruction in “basic table manners, including the importance of looking people in the eye, addressing people by name, employing attentive body language, and listening completely before responding to a person’s comments.”58

Pacifica Christian High School, “We Sit In Circles,” https://www.pacificaoc.org/academics/we-sit-in-circles/ (accessed May 3, 2024).

But at Westminster Academy, a K–12 classical school in Memphis, Tennessee, “protocol” is taught as its own course, in which students learn skills ranging from how to make an introduction to how to make a toast.59

Westminster Academy, “Protocol,” https://www.wamemphis.com/student-life/protocol.cfm (accessed May 3, 2024).

Far from breeding snobs, classes like these teach students to consider others before themselves, observing principles of etiquette not as a matter of virtue-signaling, but as a matter of serving their fellow man.60

“Proper etiquette is not just knowing the accepted way of behaving in a formal setting, but also exploring how to behave with deep respect for one’s fellow man, woman, and child who are made in the image of God.” Gulf Coast Classical Academy, “Etiquette Club,” https://www.gulfcoastclassicalacademy.org/etiquette-club (accessed May 5, 2024). See also Delaware Valley Classical School, “Etiquette Training,” https://www.delawarevalleyclassicalschool.org/etiquette-training/ (accessed May 4, 2024).

Common Arts. For the same reason, some classical schools have also begun supplementing their liberal arts curricula with instruction in the common arts, which encompass the practical skills that meet basic human needs, such as gardening, navigation, plumbing, cooking, and sewing.61

Classical educator Christopher Hall defines the common arts as “the skills that provide for basic human needs through the creation of artifacts or the provision of services.” Christopher Hall, Common Arts Education: Renewing the Classical Tradition of Training the Hands, Head, and Heart (Camp Hill, PA: Classical Academic Press, 2021), p. 31. Of the 882 schools in this study, 69, or 8 percent, teach the common arts. See appendix.

At The Stonehaven School in Marietta, Georgia, for example, upper-level students take responsibility for “hands-on stewardship of the land,” from composting to canning harvested produce.62

The Stonehaven School, “Nature Studies/Farm & Garden,” https://stonehavenschool.org/academics/nature-studies (accessed May 5, 2024).

A mandatory sequence in industrial arts at Thales Academy, on the other hand, teaches students how to woodwork and fix machinery, while St. Jerome Institute’s “practicum” teaches basic engine maintenance.63

Thales Academy, “Luddy Institute of Technology,” https://www.thalesacademy.org/academics/high-school?code=lit (accessed May 5, 2024), and St. Jerome Institute, “Student Life,” https://stjeromeinstitute.org/student-life/ (accessed May 5, 2024).

Education in these arts cultivates virtues of industry, thrift, and self-reliance in students, but, as with etiquette education, it also ultimately enables them “to be of greater service to others,” as SJI puts it, whether at home, on campus, or in the greater community.64

St. Jerome Institute, “Student Life.” See also St. Dunstan’s Academy, a classical boys’ boarding school planned for Waynesboro, Virginia, where students will learn and practice the common arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, and carpentry by helping to maintain the campus. St. Dunstan’s Academy, “Farming & Work,” https://stdunstansacademy.org/farming-work/ (accessed May 5, 2024).

Community. House systems further facilitate this character formation by “challeng[ing] students to hold one another accountable in the pursuit of a virtuous life,” as Saint Agnes School, a K–12 Catholic classical school in St. Paul, Minnesota, describes.65

Saint Agnes School, “House & Advisory System,” https://www.saintagnesschool.org/student-life/house-advisory-system (accessed May 5, 2024).

Inspired by a British boarding school tradition, house systems sort all students into “houses,” or communities that encompass members from all upper grade levels, so as to foster friendship and mentorship across differences in age, ability, and interests. At the roughly 240 classical schools that have them, student-led houses meet and compete throughout the year in categories ranging from academics and athletics to hospitality, common arts projects, and community service.66

See appendix. Of the 882 schools in this study, 241, or 27 percent, have house systems. At two classical Christian schools in Kentucky, for instance—Highlands Latin School in Louisville and Lexington Latin School in Lexington—houses compete in “academics, athletics, community service, and spirit.” Highlands Latin School, “The House System,” https://hls.org/housesystem/ (accessed May 5, 2024); Lexington Latin School, “House System,” https://www.lexingtonlatinschool.com/house-system.html (accessed May 5, 2024). At the aforementioned Bonner Classical Academy, houses take turns each quarter hosting a house dinner, during which they display the table manners learned in etiquette class, according to Dr. Jessica Drexel, and at St. John Paul the Great High School in Denver, Colorado, houses compete in common arts challenges that involve woodworking, sewing, and cooking. St. John Paul the Great High School, “Spotlight: Formation Friday,” https://www.jpthegreatdenver.org/around-campus/formationfriday (accessed May 5, 2024).

As a result, students learn that they are their “brother’s keeper,” responsible not only for their own pursuit of virtue, but for one another’s as well.

A Reason for Hope

In 2019, University of Notre Dame sociologists conducted a study of 24- to 42-year-old alumni from a range of K–12 educational institutions—public schools, secular private schools, religious private schools, homeschools, and classical Christian schools—comparing traits such as college- and career-readiness, independence of thought, and involvement in local communities.67

David Goodwin and David Sikkink, Good Soil: A Comparative Study of ACCS Alumni Life Outcomes, The Classical Difference, January 27, 2020, https://classicaldifference.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-Classical-Difference-Good-Soil-7-outcomes-full-research-report-Draft-3-28-2020.pdf (accessed May 17, 2024).

In order to isolate the effects of schooling from factors like family income, religion, frequency of family church attendance, and parents’ marital status, researchers calibrated the data through a regression analysis.68

Ibid., p. 9.

Even so, the classical graduates stood out, and not just in their achievements. Classical school alumni professed healthier outlooks on life than their non-classical counterparts, indicating remarkably greater gratitude for their lives, direction and resilience in their sufferings, trust in their fellow citizens, and confidence in dealing with life’s problems.69

Ibid., pp. 21–22.

The grit and hope that classical school alumni harbor reflects the liberal character of the education they have received. By inviting students to join mankind’s greatest thinkers in pondering life’s deepest questions, a classical liberal arts education broadens students’ horizons beyond the opinions and anxieties that dominate their own place and time. And by equipping them with the virtues necessary to learn for themselves, it prepares them to continue their education, bearing fruit not just for themselves, but for their neighbors as well.

These virtues are as emblematic of America’s intellectual tradition as they are essential for her future. America’s Founding rests, after all, on the hope that human beings are capable of self-rule—of rising above their passions and infirmities and living well. As historian Wilfred McClay puts it, “nothing about America better defines its distinctive character than the ubiquity of hope, a sense that the way things are initially given to us cannot be the final word about them, that we can never settle for that.”70

Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), p. xiv.

Classical schools not only understand this character, but impart it to their students. And in doing so, they give this land hope.

Rachel Alexander Cambre, PhD, is a Visiting Fellow in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies and the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Azin ClearySeptember 22, 2024