The classical education movement or renewal advocates for a return to a traditional education based on the liberal arts (including the natural sciences), the canons of classical literature, the fine arts, and the history of civilization. It focuses on human formation and paideia with an early emphasis on music, gymnastics, recitation, imitation, and grammar. Multiple organizations support classical education in charter schools, in independent faith-based schools, and in home education. This movement has inspired several graduate programs and colleges as well as a new peer-reviewed journal, Principia: A Journal of Classical Education.
Recent history
The term classical education has been used in Western cultures for several centuries, with each era modifying the definition and adding its own selection of topics. By the end of the 18th century, in addition to the trivium and quadrivium of the Middle Ages, the definition of a classical education embraced study of literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, history, art, and languages. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the term classical education has been used to refer to a broad-based study of the liberal arts and sciences, in contrast to a practical or pre-professional program. In a May 12, 2023 opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Cornel West and Jeremy Tate (founder of the Classic Learning Test) praised the boost given to the classical-education movement by Florida governor Ron DeSantis. On her May 4, 2023 episode of First Person, The New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviewed Jeremy Tate. Emma Green, writing for The New Yorker in April 2023, reports that what governor Ron DeSantis considers to be "a model for education nationwide" is an educational philosophy developed by Hillsdale College "as part of a larger movement to restore 'classical education'—a liberal-arts curriculum designed to cultivate wisdom and teach children to pursue the ancient ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness." Also in April 2023, Angel Adams Parham (sociology professor and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia) and Anika Prather (director of high-quality curriculum and instruction at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy) wrote an article in The Washington Post entitled "As Black educators, we endorse classical studies" and argued that "rooted in the fullness of this history, classical education invites us and our students to learn from this rich crossroads and to enter into a millennia-long conversation about what it means to be human, the essence of freedom, how to live well and what constitutes a good society". This movement has also been mentioned in stories by Louis Markos in Christianity Today (2019) and Stanley Fish in The New York Times (2010) as well as by others in the Carolina Journal.
Several new organizations and publishers have emerged in support of the growing classical education movement, including Veritas Press, Classical Academic Press (cofounded by Christopher Perrin), Memoria Press, Canon Press, the Circe Institute, Association of Classical Christian Schools, Society for Classical Learning, the Institute for Classical Education, the Classic Learning Test, and the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education.
A number of informal groups and professional organizations have led the classical education movement in the past century. Within the secular classical movement, Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins set forth the "Great Books" of Western civilization as the center stage for a classical education curriculum in the 1930s. Some public schools (primarily charters) have structured their curricula and pedagogy around the trivium and integrate the teaching of values (sometimes called "character education") into the mainstream classroom.
Theory of classical education
The classical education movement has borrowed terms used in educational history to name three phases of education.
"Primary education" teaches students how to learn. "Secondary education" then teaches a conceptual framework that can hold all human knowledge (history), fills in basic facts and practices of major fields of knowledge, and develops the fundamental skills of every major human activity. "Tertiary education" then prepares a person to pursue an educated profession such as law, theology, military strategy, medicine, or science.