Models of Classical Education
Classical education has wandered a long and winding journey. On this page we explore models of classical education, both historical and contemporary. So doing, we hope to approach the heart of classical education.
Please note that this page is a work in progress. It is, in fact, part of a major, long-term research project on the history of classical education, beginning with the outline below. We hope you will find it both informative and helpful to you as you think about and enact classical education in your setting.
We also hope you will feel free to respond to what you find on this page.
The Birth of Classical Education
Education in Ancient Greece
Classical education began in the classical world, namely ancient Greece. It would not be too much to argue that it was birthed by Homer in his Iliad and Odyssey as the Greeks (Hellenes) all considered him their teacher. He set standards of taste and applied a naturalism to his writing that has influenced, literally, every single western writer to this day.
Greek philosophy arose on the western coast of Asia minor when a few brilliant thinkers tried to come up with an explanation for the universe that made more sense than their gods, whom they rejected. It is here, especially in Miletus, that we see the birth of a conflict between philosophy and pagan religion that has continued (and must continue) to this day.
The philosophers were looking for some other unifying principle that could uphold and sustain the universe. Their multiplicity of gods and forces only begged further questions about where the world came from. The philosophers knew there had to be one single principle that had sufficient explanatory power to make sense of everything. Among other things, they called this unifying principle “the Logos.”
They tested a number of different logoi (plural for logos), including water, fire, number, change, and being itself.
This quest for a unifying principle of life and being is at the heart of classical thought and classical education. Because of it, classical education is logocentric.
When the Persians conquered the Greeks of Asia Minor, the philosophers fled to their protectors, Athens. When they did so, a new chapter began, perhaps the most important, in philosophical (which is to say, educational) history.
The primary means of philosophy entering Athens seems to have been in the lectures of the Sophists. I’ll add more on this as soon as I can. You can read more by ordering our free E-book (it’s in the upper left hand corner beneath of banner)on education in ancient Greece.
Pre-Sophistic and the rise of naturalism
Sophistic and the rise of rhetoric
Protagoras
“Man is the measure of all things”
Gorgias
“there is no truth.
If there is, you can’t know it.
If you can know it, you can’t communicate it.”
Socrates’ response: rhetoric is the assistant to the soul-healing art of dialectic
Phaedrus
Post-sophist and the rise of philosophy
Isocrates
Great books as sources of wisdom and virtue
Platonic
The ladder of knowledge: from the material to the “forms”
Learning to see
Aristotelian
The Organon: “The tools (instruments) of learning”
Physics: The sciences of nature
Ethics and Politics: The sciences of virtue
Metaphysics: The sciences of first causes; theology
Education in Ancient Rome
Classical education came to Rome gradually, beginning around the early 2nd century BC. Greek teachers came to Rome and introduced the teaching of rhetoric as a formal study. What seems to have conquered the Romans, however, was Greek literature, especially Homer.
Roman classical education differed from Greek in a number of ways. The Romans were eminently practical people, builders instead of contemplators. While Greek thought and education lifted the Romans to a new refinement, it would be difficult to claim that the Romans ever matched Greek artistic insight. It is not unlike a comparison between the French and the English, or even the French and the Americans.
But the Romans were master imitators and codifiers. They preserved the Greek texts that became the foundation of the Great Books tradition. They developed handbooks on Grammar and Logic. And they developed political theory beyond what the Greeks had achieved, especially with Cicero’s profound contribution of the idea of “natural law.”
The Romans justified their conquest of the world in two essential ways. First, they argued that every battle they fought was defensive. Second, they came to believe that they were the civilizers of the barbarian world. To them, this meant spreading classical education wherever they conquered. Instead of executing the children of local kings and chieftans, the Romans would send them back to Rome, where they would be classically educated. Later, they would return to their homelands and apply the principles of their learning to their local situations. Thus did Homer conquer the Mediterranean.
But later, when the Empire lost its glorious ideals, the schools still clung to the classical vision. During the decadent 4th century, Martianus Capella wrote his “Marriage of Philology and Mercury” in which he presented an allegory of the seven liberal arts as bridesmaids. It is a decidedly inartistic work, but a very useful handbook.
Cicero
Humanitatis: The humane curriculum
On the Best Kind of Orator (De Optimo Genere Oratorum)
Quintilian
The Institutes
Seven Liberal Arts
Capella: The Marriage of Philology and Mercury
Boethius:
The Trivium: three paths to wisdom
The quadrivium: four maths to wisdom
Education in Medieval Europe
The Church Fathers and Classical Education
The East: St. Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers
The West: St. Justin, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine
Opposition: Tertullian
The School of Odessa
Byzantine education
Western ascent from darkness
The west long held to a notion of progress that probably derived its impetus from the fact that during the early “Middle Ages” it really was an intellectual and cultural backwater, primitive in every way, and governed, for the most part, by organized gangs.
Between the early 5th century and the 9th, there is little western Europe can boast about except for its tenacity and courage. It certainly wasn’t civilized.
Education was almost entirely monastic and that clerical until the coming of Charlemagne, himself a semi-civilized king of the Franks. What scholars lived in his time he drew together at his court at Aix La Chappele and began the Carolingian Renaissance, a major ascent in the condition of western European civilization.
The place of the Natural Sciences in medieval thought
Roger Bacon
Albertus Magnus
St. Thomas Aquinas
Scholasticism
Nominalism and the Great Misdirection
William of Occam (Okham)
From universal to particular
From quality to quantity
The Renaissance
Bacon and Empiricism
By the 16th century, western Europe had made so much progress from the dark ages of Pre-Carolingian chaos that they had begun to believe that progress was inevitable. They gained the confidence to put the past behind them and strike out in wholly new directions.
At least, that is the optimistic, naive way to put it. They believed they were making more than a piecemeal break with medieval thought. They wanted a complete break, including with things that are permanent.
This unfortunate mindset led them to increasingly deny the existence of permanent and universal realities, and to focus on the changing and the particular.
In fact, the difference between barbarians and civilized people was never a matter of technical knowledge and power. It was grace, respect, and a willingness to discuss differences of opinion in a public forum instead of behind a sword or bomb. It always has been and always will be the case that barbarians can dress very well and use technology even better.
Empiricism is the worship of technical knowledge and power. It is a barbaric philosophy that drew western Europe away from the principles of their rise at the very moment when they most needed to discover what it meant to be civilized.
It was not a clean cut by any means, and the principles of civilization as laid down in the works of the great classical and Christian minds continued to redirect the leaders to higher ideals.
But the shift to a utilitarian mode of living had been made, and its consequences continue to play out today. Machiavelli and Hobbes reduced humans to greedy, self-seeking beasts and built cynical political systems on these beliefs (systems that dominate politics and business to this day).
Copernicus, Kepler, and finally Newton reduced the cosmos to a watch, a mechanism that simply
When Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power,” he established a new priority for the seeker of knowledge. Prior to this any philosopher would have known that knowledge gives power to its possessor. But they would not have regarded power as reason enough to gain power. With Bacon knowledge and power are made equal.
It would be unjust to call Bacon a Utilitarian, but there can be no doubt that he put the western mind on the path that led to this philosophy of judging what is right and wrong or true and false by what works.
Bacon, building on the Nominalism of Occam, steers the attention of the thinker further from the essences of things and therefore from the appropriate way of relating to them, and nearer to the use of things, regardless of propriety and nature.
This philosophy found its educational fullness in the teachings of Pragmatism, especially in the works of John Dewey.
Descartes and Rationalism
Renee Descartes was the father of rationalism and is often described as the father of modern philosophy. He is famous for having resolved to begin with doubt, that is, to put the authority of his own reason above every other authority.
Having begun with doubt, his goal was to attain belief. His tool was a rationalized sort of reason.
So doing, he reduced to reason to a tool to find certainty, whereas ancient philosophers had regarded it as a ruler to bring harmony.
It could not bear the burden Descartes had placed on it.
In a letter to Father Mersenne in 1638, Rene Descartes commented on the work of his great contemporary Galileo Galilee:
“I find in general that he philosophizes much better than the average, in that he abandons as completely as he can the errors of the Schools, and attempts to examine physical matters by the methods of mathematics. In this I am in entire agreement with him, and I believe that there is absolutely no other way of discovering the truth. But it seems to me that… he has merely sought reasons for certain particular effects, without having considered the first causes of nature.”
Ralph Eaton, assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard University in 1926, remarks, “Descartes is searching for the first causes of nature; Galileo is content to inquire into the reasons for certain particular effects. Both are seeking to examine physical matters by the methods of mathematics.”
This makes for a fine summary of the goals of the Enlightenment and the so-called “Age of Reason” and how they sought to reach them.
For Descartes, rationalism. For Bacon, empiricism. For Galileo, science. For all, mathematics, and more particularly the measurement of experience. As Eaton expressed it, “Far more important than their difference of temperament, is their agreement on the method of science,–that scientific truth is to be obtained only by the use of mathematics in the examination of nature.”
The greatness of this achievement cannot be exaggerated. However, the turn from quality to quantity, from nature to properties, from essence to accidence, and from faith to doubt brought with it a great deal more than just a scientific revolution.
Bacon provided a Novum Organon a new tool of learning to replace the Organon of Aristotle that had undervalued mathematics and, supposedly, observation, as keys to knowledge. He provided a vision of a New Atlantis, a vision of progress rooted in The Advancement of Learning, and that an advance in a new direction.
Unfortunately, the shift in epistemology (theory of what and how we know) led to a fragmenting of the European soul. At the very time when schooling started to be available to the general public, its purpose was redirected in many places from virtue to power.
Luther
The gift of the liberal arts
England under Henry VIII and Elizabeth
Erasmus and the codification of grammar
Renaissance at St. Paul’s
Sidney, Spencer, and the fulfillment of the Erasmian project under Elizabeth
Education to be an aristocrat/servant to the state
the education of the Christian Prince
Modern
Effects of the Renaissance and Enlightenment
Imperial/classical
England
France
the rise of bureaucracy
Darwinism and education
Dewey: proves there are no “genera” or kinds of things.
Thus: things have no essence or nature, and knowledge is constructed by experience, not discovered in reality
Darwinian education takes over the Christian school
Secularism
French
German
Sources and causes of decline
false roots
secularization
Pragmatism
In the January, 1878 edition of Popular Science magazine, Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of Pragmatism, argued that “the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action” and “the final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition”.
This is often true, but thinking for itself also is content sometimes with truth. Or if truth always leads to the “exercise of volition” then action always leads to further quests for truth, and it is not possible for us to determine which is “final.”
Peirce has placed knowing truth beneath acting on it. That is the essence of Pragmatism.
Here are a few more quotations from that important article for you to reflect on while I figure out whether they meet the purpose of this article:
“I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself.”
“The ideas of truth and falsehood, in their full development, appertain exclusively to the experiential method of settling opinion.”
“When the method of authority prevailed, the truth meant little more than the Catholic faith.”
“With all scientific research. Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion.”
“It is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough.”
“Metaphysics is a subject much more curious than useful, the knowledge of which, like that of a sunken reef, serves chiefly to enable us to keep clear of it“
Some people take Peirce’s words to mean that ideas like truth and justice are “semantic nonsense,” to quote John Taylor Gatto (SCL conference speech 2009). While I don’t think this article can be made to say that, Pragmatism does deny the a prior knowledge of truth and justice, which is another way of saying that it denies that the law of God is written on our hearts.
This philosophy, which permeated American political and business thought with little resistance, was a tremendously freeing doctrine. At least, it was to those who wanted to make decisions without the restraints of truth and justice.
Here you see the foundation of contemporary leadership.
It is around this time, the late 19th century, that the liberal arts seem to become about general learning rather than intellectual disciplines.
The Management Revolution
The Great Fragmentation
“Omnibus” replaces the classical curriculum
Graduate schools lead to the growth and spread of the elective system
The Great Castration
Man as “conditioned reflex” and “adapting drives”
The Darwinian Revival and Education
Excessive claims of the prophets of neuroscience
Those crazy mixed up 60′s
Dorothy Sayers and the call to the trivium
Douglas Wilson and the ACCS
Susan Wise-Bauer
Home Schoolers and Christian classical education
Charlotte Mason and classical education
Hutchins, Adler, and the Great Books tradition
Classical education for the disadvantaged
David Hicks
Traditional Liturgical Churches and Christian Classical Education
Christian classical colleges
Classical colleges
What does the future hold?
The Dorothy Sayers Model
Perhaps the most well-known grass roots renewal of classical education was spearheaded by Dorothy Sayers famous essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, an address presented to the Oxford Union in the 1940′s. National Review owns the copyright to this essay and has published it in their journal every year for something approaching 50 years.
In this essay, Ms. Sayers argues that English schools spent too much time teaching subjects and too little time teaching students how to think. Her solution was to apply the medieval Trivium to the stages of a child’s development and thus teach students according to their natures.
Over the years a few schools were started patterning themselves on Sayers’ essay. Then, in 1992, Crossways Books published Douglas Wilson’s book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning and a movement was born. Like the work of Francis of Assissi, Martin Luther, and John Wesley before him (though not yet on quite so great a scale), Wilson’s book met a need and lit a fire that must have astonished its author.
In 1993, the Association of Classical and Christian Schools was formed and held its first conference in Moscow, Idaho. Some 60 people attended, including CiRCE founder Andrew Kern. Since then, the conference has grown to over 900 attendees as it continues to meet annually. In 2010, there are over 220 ACCS member schools.
Also following the program of Dorothy Sayers is another astonishing publication success, The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise-Bauer, an application of the Sayers’ approach to the trivium to home school.
The heart of Ms. Sayers’ approach to the trivium is the idea that the three arts of the trivium correspond to three stages of development in a child’s life:
- Grammar, during which children up to about fifth grade are capable of learning lots of knowledge and should experience things with their senses;
- Logic, during which children’s argumentative nature’s come to life so they should be taught how to argue correctly;
- Rhetoric, during which the high school aged student is able to master a subject and express his ideas effectively so they should be taught to communicate effectively on the matters taught.
To read the sayers essay, click HERE.
