What Do We Mean By Classical Education
Different writers in the homeschool community mean different things by the word classical, and that presents a problem for readers trying to decide what to do in their families. The first dictionary meaning of the word is that it refers to ancient Greek and Roman literature.
Classical education in its main sense, then, should refer to education based on the ancient literature of Greece and Rome. Mortimer Adler, a leading educator, tried to revive that education in modern times. He added more books to the ancient ones and formed his list of fifty Great Books that everyone should study in order to learn the great ideas of Western civilization. In the 1930s, Adler and Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago tried to make those books the core of university education.
Moving on from those content and method issues, let’s look at the wider philosophy and worldview issues. Is classical biblical? Whole books seem written for defending the view that it is biblical. After a book or chapter announces that it will explain why we need classical education, it argues on page after page for why we need Christian education.
The next dictionary meaning refers to the first significant period of anything. For instance, classical Marxism refers back to the teachings of Marx himself as differentiated from what people later make of those teachings. Mott Media uses the term in this sense to label the McGuffey readers and other books of that period the “classical curriculum” of American education.
Another meaning of classical is a recognized, excellent, and long-lived standard in any art. Using this sense, writers call Robinson Crusoe and Heidi classics. They add other, newer books that may become classics in time because of meeting their standard of excellence. Some writers label them living books or real books, whether ancient or modern. Different companies, then, call their selected books by different labels, but they are all, similarly, good books.
I saw an ad for a course on Classical Calculators. (I made that up to avoid naming the book I really saw, which is an even greater enigma.) Does this study the abacus of ancient Rome, which was a sand-covered wax tablet, or does it study modern electronic calculators? This illustrates how the word classical becomes attached to almost anything, presumably to help it sell.
So when you read an ad about classical education, what exactly does it refer to? It could be any of the above. Viewed in this way, you can use writings you like from Plato on down, and from Plato on back, without worrying about whether your schooling fits into this or that current faddish label. A good and flexible label, if you need one, is that you are tutoring. With that label, you can follow children’s interests or your interests, any curriculum with or without parent help, independent reading, or group reading with discussion. All kinds of content and methods fit under the tutoring label.
Back to classical education, we so far have looked only at content that curriculum companies pull into that label and have not looked at methods. Before examining methods, let’s take a quick look at where we sit in the history of the classical movement.
Ancient Greeks, of course, did not know they were starting any such movement. They taught Homer and other poets by what we call the whole language approach, studying the writings of the best users of the language. In Plato and Aristotle times they had no grammar as we know it, so teachers did not chop up language into nouns and predicate nominatives and such. Children studied it whole. The Greeks called that grammar, and that word has led to vast and damaging misunderstandings in our times. After whole language beginnings, the Greeks proceeded to advanced skills in the language arts. They learned to write and think and speak, and called all that language learning the trivium—grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. After the trivium, came the higher education of the quadrivium—geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and acoustics (theory of music).
Romans picked up much of the Greek system, adding their own literature and language. By then, the rudiments of grammar had been invented, and the Romans picked that up in spades, and added to it. When they analyzed how something was written in the literature, they made a “law” and required students to write by their law. (Where their literature did not always follow the laws, our modern publishers “corrected.”)
After the Protestant reformation, Puritans and others in England were fomenting political and social reformations also, and that involved reforming education. English Puritans fiercely attacked both the content and the methods of the classical education then used in the “grammar” schools and universities. They condemned the tyranny and stupidity of teaching grammar as a way to learn language. Their writers sound like some voices today, pointing out that children naturally learn language and its grammar as they learn to speak. Teachers must build on that knowledge and not bore children with deadly tedious grammar as the route to language. The Puritans also condemned the use of pagan literature and philosophy. Again, they sound like many voices today. The Puritans condemned Aristotelian logic that could not produce new knowledge. It could state what they already knew or thought they knew, but since Francis Bacon and his non-Aristotelian way of thinking, the schools should go beyond the old logic. In a thorough study, you would find still more aspects of classical education that the Puritans opposed.
Well, the schools did branch out into the sciences and other practical subjects. In America following Adler, discussion groups on his Great Books were wildly popular in the 1950s, but by the ‘60s they faded to almost nothing. The lists of books began changing, too. In order to teach “great ideas of Western civilization,” some lists update to include current ideas such as civil rights or environment, and they include little or no Bible. The residue of all that effort in America is three Catholic universities claiming to be classical, scattered schools using the “core” idea in various amounts, and a few Protestant schools including a major in classical literature.
That’s the way it was until a cloudburst erupted in the homeschool movement. A Google search of classical education shows that this phenomenon exists almost wholly within home education, and only sparsely elsewhere. Early homeschool adherents of classicism claim to have begun with a Dorothy Sayers essay originally written in 1947. Sayers was an expert on Middle Ages literature and a good writer, and part of her essay was reprinted in a homeschool magazine decades later. The cloudburst began from there. That answers when, who, and what, but I cannot figure out why. Why did so many people jump onto that article and work hard to bring in their various versions of what they call classical education?
Sayers invented a system that was neither Greek nor Adlerian, but she imported the Greek word grammar. The Greeks had used it to name the language subject they taught first, by the study of Homer and other poets in what we call a whole language manner. Sayers proposed changing that meaning of the word grammar, and she applied it two ways. First, it referred to a psychological stage of children’s growth, a “grammar” stage, and second, it referred to the structure of a subject, its “grammar,” that children should learn while in their grammar stage of development.
When leading educators tackle structure, they find it difficult to specify and to agree on exactly what it is. How do we outline the content of a subject or draw its boundaries? What are the boundaries of sociology, for instance? Where does sociology end and economics start? What is English? Or language? Will you include thinking? It becomes obvious that even if we could clarify the structure of a subject, it is for experts and not for young beginners. But in the Sayers invention, the structure consists of facts—not concepts, not understandings, but lowlevel facts. So children should begin with bare facts instead of meaningful stories.
Their method for learning facts is memorizing by much repetition. Do not bother to understand that 3 cookies plus 2 cookies make 5 cookies, enough for the whole family, but just memorize 3 + 2 = 5. Do not read about who fought a war or why, but just memorize its name and date. Do not write good sentences, which children already can speak, but chant and memorize “I know, you know, he knows”—in Latin. Facts, facts, and memorizing. This memorizing is supposed to fit the so-called grammar stage of children’s development, which stage is not supported by either educational or psychological research.
The word classical on a curriculum may or may not mean it uses the Sayers invention, and may or may not mean it fully uses any system implied by the dictionary definitions of classical. This labeling business is in a murky state just now.
Moving on from those content and method issues, let’s look at the wider philosophy and worldview issues. Is classical biblical? Whole books seem written for defending the view that it is biblical. After a book or chapter announces that it will explain why we need classical education, it argues on page after page for why we need Christian education. It uses the word Christian repeatedly and drops in the word classical once or twice. The reader evidently is supposed to assume that classical and Christian are the same thing, or at least a close match. Other writings fill a lot of space trying to defend the view that they are the same. Some voices are not persuaded by those writings; they say no, classical is not Christian.
The future will tell whether the classical movement grows or fades, and while the debate continues, the best position is to take care before attaching yourself fully to any popular or advertised label. Do not hurriedly dive into anything without good understanding and conviction—at least hope—that the system is right for you. You can investigate by dabbling a bit. Read some Homer if you want, while holding on to any mix of books, curriculums, and methods that already are working for your children.
The Bible is the most classic of all classical books, containing the greatest of all great ideas throughout civilizations. Keep it as the core of your home education.
Whole language became anathema to some education critics, I think largely because of superficial understanding. For a discussion of this topic, see chapter 12 in The Language Wars by Ruth Beechick (Mott Media 1995).
©2009 Homeschooling Today magazine, Nehemiah Four, LLC