After working in classical education for 20 years, I’ve found that the best way to define it is by experience, not theory or ideology. There are several nearly universal experiences that classical educators share, and these experiences can help characterize a somewhat amorphous educational movement.
One such experience regularly plays out between the shelves of the average bookstore. A customer stands before the “classics” shelf, opens a copy of Paradise Lost to the middle, reads a few stray lines, and thinks, “I wish I understood this kind of thing”—only to place the book on the shelf and choose something newer and more exciting.
Likewise, most of us have scanned around on a radio, come to an elegant piece by Beethoven and thought, “I wish I liked classical music,” then turned the station to something catchier and more contemporary.
The world is well-stocked with beautiful old things that require effort to understand and appreciate. Like coffee or wine, they are an acquired taste.
A classical school is a place for people who are willing to extend the effort and humility it takes to heed and love the books, music, paintings, and beliefs that have been handed down as cultural heirlooms across the centuries.
Once a scrappy movement relegated to musty, secondhand spaces, classical education is now a settled figure in the landscape of American education. Education leaders from the federal government and various state governments, universities, think tanks, and more recently convened at the “Battle for the American School” summit hosted by the Association of Classical Christian Schools just over a week ago in Washington, D.C. There, the assertion made recently by Forbes Magazine, that the classical education industry would exceed a $10 billion valuation by 2035, felt like an understatement.
The rise of classical education is far easier to grasp once you’ve seen the inside of a classical school. At The Ambrose School in Meridian, Idaho, where I work, students arrive in uniform every morning for rhetoric classes, Latin classes, logic classes, and literature classes that cover works like the Iliad, the Aeneid, Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God. Placards and posters featuring quotes from Dostoyevsky and Socrates line the halls and stand over prominent doorways. In choir, students learn challenging pieces from William Byrd, Palestrina, as well as modern composers who work in the classical tradition, like Arvo Pärt.
Nonetheless, The Ambrose School is still located on Earth, not Mars. We have basketball teams and soccer teams, fall and spring dances, and many high school students hold down evening and weekend jobs to fund class trips abroad. A good deal of school life is recognizable, common, and typically American. The school’s approach to education is distinctly classical, though.
While the curriculum at a classical school is old and difficult, the goal of a classical educator is not merely to make the curriculum understandable. There are plenty of people we understand whom we have no interest in imitating. Rather, a classical educator aims to inspire students to respect and love their cultural inheritance, and to imitate the virtues they see depicted in that inheritance. This isn’t something that a student can do on their own or via technology. Wikipedia and ChatGPT can give us facts, but they can’t inspire in our hearts the love of what’s good and right.
In addition to referencing universal experiences, I sometimes explain classical education with a quote from Walker Percy. “You can get all A’s and still flunk life.” If you believe this is true, you want a classical education.
The expression “flunk life” is blunt and unsentimental, which is true of classical education, as well. The idea that some people “flunk life” is painful, but that doesn’t mean it’s inappropriate or incorrect. In the same way you can flunk a class in school and still feel proud of yourself, you can flunk life and still feel proud of yourself. Like flunking a class, flunking life is an objective judgement that exists independently of our feelings.
What is more, classical educators set the bar for not flunking life relatively high. A classical educator wouldn’t say that a man begins flunking life if, and only if, he ends up in jail. Rather, a classical education is predicated on the belief that vices like arrogance, cowardice, lust, envy, and gluttony are the signs of flunking life regardless of what else that person does. Inasmuch as these vices crop up in a person's life, he is obligated to fight them with virtues like humility, courage, ambition, chastity, charity, and temperance.
The primary way we obtain these virtues is through the emulation of great men and women who have embodied them in the past. Their lives and works have been vetted by many generations and handed down as a cultural inheritance to us. Classical education is one of the best ways to receive that inheritance.
For this reason, a classical school is a lively, active place. It is not enough to think good thoughts and ask tough questions. We must live out the tough answers we’ve inherited to those questions—but as a classical educator, I can attest to the joy which comes from such spiritual labor.
Joshua Gibbs is the director of The Classical Teaching Institute at the Ambrose School in Boise, ID. He is also an author, teacher and consultant.