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What is Classical Education?

Classical education has grown so much in the last twenty years that when Dr. Gene Edward Veith and Andrew Kern turned in the second edition of their book, Classical Education, the editors changed the subtitle to The Movement Sweeping America.

But classical education is also ancient. Its origins are in the classical world of Greece and Rome, but its roots lie still further back in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The story of classical education is a long, strange trip through the centuries.

At the CiRCE Institute, we are committed to the mission of understanding classical education in its essence. We want to discover what is common to all classical educators so that we can better understand classical education itself.

We believe there a few common and controlling ideas that set classical education apart.

First, classical educators have a high view of humanity. 

To the Greeks, mankind possessed a divine spark. To the Christian and Jew, he is the Divine Image. 

One way or another, classical schools and educators are committed to cultivating wisdom and virtue in their students. While classical education honors and even equips for vocational education (which is more accurately described as training) that is not what classical education is.

Second, classical educators are logocentric. In a word, that means they believe that the world makes sense and that the sense it makes is knowable. They base their approach to education on discovering that sense. 

Another way to say this is that classical educators believe in and pursue a logos, or a unifying principle, for all knowledge and action.

In essence, then, classical education is the logo-centric quest for the ideals of wisdom and virtue.

By contrast, the conventional educator either denies or doesn’t respond to the idea that the world makes sense. They shirk the burden of developing a curriculum, system, pedagogy, or mode of assessment that help make the sense knowable. They become obsessed with the practical and useful instead. 

Classical education is the only practical approach because it is not pragmatic. 

Third, classical educators take responsibility for the western tradition: to receive it, to assess it, to preserve it, and to hand it on to the next generation. 

Fourth, classical educators teach in light of the three foregoing elements, leading to an emphasis on language (the trivium), mathematics (the quadrivium), and modes of teaching, governance, and assessment that support the rich goals of a classical education.

Everything you will find on this site is our best effort to apply the four elements of classical education through our research and in our services to the classical renewal.  

Other common features of classical education include:

  • the use of classical books and art,
  • a general preference for great art, music, and literature,
  • an integrated curriculum,
  • and idea-focused teaching.

Read More about Classical Education:

Dean Wysocki, head of the Honors College at Belmont Abbey, developed this small college-within-a-college with high aims, confident in God’s revelation and man’s ability to discover truth and contemplate universal questions. The students who have completed the program affirm this assertion, frequently graduating with less stubborn confidence in unjustified opinions and greater confidence in their ability to hold uncertainty and seek truth without presumption. Of course, this bleeds into class discussions and personal relationships, where they are slower to speak and quicker to listen, humbly allowing the possibility that they may be wrong. 

In speaking with Dr. Wysocki, I saw clearly that he sought truth, growth, and fruition for himself and all of the students in the program. When discussing his goals for the program, both in creating it and envisioning the future, he consistently mentioned the students’ happiness and spiritual growth – the development of the whole person. While our conversation ranged from describing fun campus activities to the spiritual lives of the professors to excellent texts in the curriculum, it always returned to these fundamental principles of happiness and fruition. Clearly, he designed the program to honor both the Tradition and the contemporary child. 

Dr. Wysocki opened the program at Belmont Abbey in 2018 after ten years teaching at the College in the Political Science department. He lives nearby with his wife and five kids, which advantageously allows him to host dinners for his co-workers and students or even invite students on fishing trips. 

Many elements make the program unique: the inclusion of monks and monastic patterns, coherence within the curriculum, emphasis on the students’ happiness and fruition, and degrees to which the program can be done. All these compose the crux of the program’s beauty: offering a Catholic Classical Liberal Arts education within an intimate context. 

Originally founded by monks, Belmont Abbey College has evolved around a monastery, blending the rigorous academic expectations of a Classical Liberal Arts education, the meditative spiritual life of a monastery, and the intimacy of a small, active community. The Catholic roots spread into the classrooms as well, where students discuss fundamental questions of faith and spirituality while reading great works of literature and philosophy. Despite this deep religious devotion, about half the students are not Catholic. Dr. Wysocki enjoys this and notes that the students all benefit from a wide array of viewpoints, for multiple views aid discussion and help all to better see truth. He also notes that the great books read and discussed in the program ask universal questions that every age and individual must ponder, regardless of religious affiliation. 

Dr. Wysocki says education aims to help the students attain true happiness, noting that few can correctly identify what truly leads to happiness and how they might attain it themselves. For this reason, the curriculum and activities outside the classroom foster greater understanding of the world, God, and the self. They also intentionally incorporate contemplation of the True, Good, and Beautiful both inside and outside the classroom. Sometimes they even go to Charlotte to see performances like the symphony, ballet, or Shakespeare as a class. Wysocki notes this contemplation of truly human and excellent things in community also leads to friendship, one of the most important elements for education. He hopes that in college, the students can grow in virtue and friendship, leading toward a more truly fulfilled and “happy” life. 

The texts within the curriculum focus as intentionally on the fruition of the human soul as the relationships and spiritual elements of the program. Should a student choose to complete the entire Great Books program, they will read widely within the Classical Tradition and encounter a broad array of ideas within a unified whole; all the books engage in the same discussion of human happiness and fulfillment. Dr. Wysocki mentions intentionally choosing the texts for the way they engage with each other and with the primary concerns of college students. 

Visit Belmont Abbey College’s Website here.

Why the Persuasive Essay?

When you start teaching The Lost Tools of Writing you notice early that almost all of level one is devoted to teaching the persuasive essay. You might think this rather odd—even boring. After all, aren’t students much more interested in writing stories and exploring their own ideas than they are in writing about irrelevant things like whether the Roman senate should have assassinated Julius Caesar or whether Scout should have crawled under her neighbor’s fence?

Well, maybe. But writing isn’t that simple. When you teach a child to write, you aren’t trying to get him excited; you are trying to help him write well. Excitement follows. Writing is a skill, and a stunningly complex skill at that. Nobody has yet plumbed the depths of what makes a person a good writer or even a good teacher of writing.

But we have discovered one thing over the centuries: many students are intimidated by writing, and those that aren’t should be. Both groups, the fearful and the fearless, need to learn something fundamental about writing: when you write, what matters first is the point you are trying to make, not how you or your audience feel about it.

In fact, the ultimate point of writing is the same as the first: when you write, what matters first and last is the idea you are trying to reveal.

In the Christian classical tradition, we call this idea the logos, which is Greek for “word” or “idea” or “message.” Thus we read in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Logos” and in Revelation 1:17, we read, “I am the first and the last.”

When you write, you, the Image of God the Creator, have a logos to reveal.

When you write more sophisticated things (like a poem or a novel) you drop hints about your logos so the reader has to search it out, which makes reading novels and poems an adventure.

But when you begin to learn how to write, more basic skills need your attention. First of all, you need to learn how to identify and express your logos clearly and vividly. In a persua­sive essay, it sits on stage, so to speak, dressed in the black and white garments of a simple proposition. You call it the thesis statement.

Thus by writing the persuasive essay, not only will your student practice writing the basic document that he will need to succeed in college or to make his point at work. Not only will he develop habits that will help him make decisions, read hard books, and communicate with friends and foes. Not only will he learn skills that transfer to debate, public speaking, law, medicine, or ministry.

More primary than all of these (and laying the foundation for them), he develops the habit of identifying clearly what his point is.

Imagine what that could do for dinner table conversations!