By Martin Cothran, Director of the Classical Latin Schools Association
It is not easy to define classical education, which is one reason you seem to get a different answer depending on whom you ask. Classical education is a system of learning that, like all systems of learning, has two aspects to it: The first has to do with content, and the second with skills.
Classical education first has certain ideas it attempts to teach. Every kind of education, classical or otherwise, purports to inculcate a certain body of knowledge. Traditionally this has been done through the content disciplines of literature, history, philosophy, and the natural sciences. We can group all of these under the rubric of scientific knowledge. The first three are the human or “moral” sciences and the last one is the study of nature in particular.
These studies constitute the what of education—the knowledge we expect students to have acquired. This first aspect of education is (to steal a phrase from the great literary critic Matthew Arnold) the study of the best that has been thought and said.
In addition to the sciences, there are the arts. While the sciences attempt to teach knowledge, the arts attempt to teach skills. If the sciences are the what of education, the arts are the how.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic are the first and most basic of the arts. They are the skills we need to have mastered in order to learn everything else. After that there are all those arts which we remember from our own schooling, such as grammar and composition, as well as the mathematical arts such as algebra, geometry, and calculus. These linguistic and mathematical skills are what we mean when we talk about the “liberal arts.”
All systems of education have this distinction between the what and the how, though not all the advocates of these systems are able to articulate it this way. It was what the founders of our nation’s schools meant when they engraved “arts and sciences” on the stones of the first buildings they built.
Classical education’s goal remains what it always was until the end of the nineteenth century: to pass on our culture to the next generation, and in the process to inculcate wisdom and virtue in our students.
In order to do this we must resist other educational agendas. If our goal becomes to make better workers or more ideologically enlightened citizens, the balance among and within the arts and sciences will be destroyed. History and literature will be demoted in importance and narrow technical concerns will distort the curriculum.
We already see these things happening, and the result has been a decline in academic achievement and a rise in cultural illiteracy.
Classical education is not just one more system of education among many. It is, foundationally, authentic education.
