Classical Education and Philosphy

What Is Classical Education?

We study the “best which has been thought and said in human history."

While some schools say that they are teaching their students “how to think,” we aspire to go beyond this by teaching our students what to love.

We have many things we think students ought to know, not simply a set of skills we want them to acquire.

We teach through questions and treat all subjects as languages.

Because words are the fundamental building block of all human thought, we order our education to fit that. We talk about teaching in every course as making students better “readers” within that subject. As they become better readers, students grow in their ability to understand how parts of problems and texts fit together in order to make meaning of the whole. This leads us to focus on a “confederation” of the disciplines in how we structure course and graduation requirements – meaning that we seek to show alignment across subjects.

We elevate virtues rather than values.

We aspire for our students to be prepared to live lives of liberty, but we have a specific view of what liberty entails.

We de-emphasize technology on campus.

This may seem like a luddite idiosyncrasy, but it corresponds to our wider conviction that a curriculum should not be constantly trying to adapt to external forces. It takes thirteen years’ worth of close, uninhibited (by screens) attention even to start wrapping one’s mind around the best of what has been thought and said in human history. There is a war for our attention, and we think the greatest books of our civilization deserve it the most.

“A nation is best unified by being taught in childhood the best in its moral and intellectual heritage.” - E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

Classical education attends to a young person’s heart and mind by leading them toward moral and intellectual virtue. It offers students the accumulated wisdom of the “best which has been thought and said,” and liberates them to learn what is true, do what is good, and love what is beautiful. By teaching students to cultivate virtue, classical education leads them toward lives of freedom and moral responsibility. Students learn to govern themselves and acknowledge their duty to their families, their city, and their country.

Academically, a classical education encompasses:

A curriculum that is content-rich, balanced, and inter-connected across the four core disciplines of math, science, literature, and history
Explicit instruction in phonics and grammar
An approach to instruction that acknowledges objective standards of correctness, logic, beauty, weightiness, and truth
A well-educated and articulate faculty who care deeply for their students and teach through excellent questions
A school culture of moral virtue, decorum, respect, discipline, and studiousness among both students and faculty
A three-phased conception of the trajectory of an education – known traditionally at the trivium – that consists of a progression from grammar through logic to rhetoric within each subject
A study of order in the natural world built fundamentally upon the four sciences of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music
A belief that math and sciences are more than job preparation and give students a language for understanding the order of the universe
A love of great books and a belief that stories and conversations about them change us as human beings
An ultimate aim of preparing students for lives of human flourishing