For we who have kept an eye on education over the last few decades—or even over just the last decade—we can see a few patterns begin to crop up. It seems that there are a number of different educational styles or pedagogical fads that have arisen and then fallen away and then arisen again. This, of course, is a bad thing. It’s not desirable to make the education of our children an ever-shifting experiment; we don’t want trends, we want true. And this is precisely why the Chesterton Academy of John Paul II offers a classical education: it is a well-tested and clearly successful program that has been utilized, modified, and developed even since the education of St. Augustine of Hippo (and, in fact, is far older than even he).
So what, then, is classical education? Classical education is a chronologically synchronous education which, following the trivium, aims to develop the student in their ability to be a critical thinker such that they can enter into their cultural heritage, and thereby better understand their own lineage. In other words, we read a lot of the great books in order and study the history, philosophy, and theology that would have been going on at the same time those books were written. When we talk about the trivium we mean grammar, logic, and rhetoric classes (grammar meaning that we refine how a student can express themselves in a written way, logic meaning that we study the science of human thought and refine the way in which the student can think and contemplate, and rhetoric being the refinement of the way in which we speak). And lastly, we must consider what we mean by ‘cultural heritage’.
As Americans, we find ourselves in a strange place—we are philosophically, historically, and artistically descended from (broadly) Europe and Rome and Greece, but we also find that we have historical lineage from dozens of other places. The great work of our teaching, then, must be to unify the scope of our study such that we can follow the major threads which lead us to the world stage upon which we currently find ourselves, but also refine our study to those most influential thinkers and writers that have plotted out the course that we might follow it.