Report On Classical Education

One of the few fronts in the culture wars that Christians are winning is in the crucial sphere of education. While public schools devolve into indoctrination camps and mainstream educational approaches crater children’s test scores, Christian homeschoolers and Christian schools are outperforming their secularist peers.

A major factor in that success is the different educational approach that many of these homeschoolers and Christian schools are following: namely, Classical Christian education, which brings back the classical liberal arts, studies the Great Books, transmits children’s cultural heritage, teaches reasoning, and develops language and mathematical skills, all in the context of Biblical knowledge and a Christian worldview. (For research demonstrating the superiority of classical Christian education, see this.)

Now the Heritage Foundation has published a report on the movement by researcher Rachel Alexander Cambre entitled Classical Schools in America: A Movement of Hope. Here is its summary:

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.

The researchers studied 882 K-12 classical schools drawn from the nine largest associations of classical schools. I was happy to see that the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education (CCLE), with which I am involved, was one of them. (Can it really be that we are the 5th largest?) Here are the organizations, which include both religious and non-religious institutions:

- The ACCS (Association of Classical Christian Schools, consisting of Reformed and evangelical schools );
- The ICLE (Institute for Catholic Liberal Education);
- The Society for Classical Learning;
- The Classical Latin Schools Association;
- The Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education;
- Great Hearts Academies (a group of public charter schools);
- The Chesterton Schools Network;
- The CiRCE Institute; and
- The Hillsdale College K–12 Office, which includes its Barney Charter School Initiative.

The Heritage research surveyed what all of these schools have in common. They found “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.”

The report goes on to break down these observations to detail what and how these schools teach. Here is a sample, explaining what is meant by “liberal arts”–that is to day, the classical liberal arts, as opposed to the way today’s progressive universities construe the term, as “humanities” in the service of political “liberalism”:

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. 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. 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. 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.

The report goes on with sections on “Great Books,” “Religious Tradition,” “Local Tradition,” “Parents as Educators,” “The Art of Learning,” and “Character Formation.”

I’m proud of the twenty-one Lutheran schools that were included in the study:

- Zion, Nampa ID
- St Paul, Hamel
- Redeemer, Fort Wayne
- Advent Lutheran, Zionsville, IN
- Concordia Academy Wichita, Wichita KS
- Faith Lutheran School, Derby KS
- Wittenberg Academy, Chatfield, MN
- Mount Olive, Billings MT
- Immanuel Evangelical, Alliance, NE
- Immanuel, Roswell, NM
- Faith, Plano TX
- Grace, Brenham TX
- Memorial, Houston TX
- Our Savior Houston TX
- Concordia Learning Center & Elementary, Riverton UT
- Immanuel, Alexandria VA
- Hope Lutheran Classical, Idaho Falls, ID
- Martin Luther Grammar School Sheridan WY
- Mount Hope, Casper WY
- Trinity, Cheyenne, WY
- Trinity, Riverton WY