The most consequential differences are often the least obvious.
The most consequential differences are often the least obvious.
T he new school year is well underway, and a record number of students are now enrolled in classical schools across America. Between 2019 and 2024, the number of classical schools — which train students in the liberal arts and traditional tools of grammar, logic, and rhetoric — grew from 1,287 schools to 1,551. That number has almost certainly risen further, with new schools opening nationwide this year and educating at least 677,000 students and counting.
For parents looking for an education that prizes creativity, cultural literacy, and independent thought over standardized-test-driven instruction, this is very good news. Yet the recent proliferation of classical schools also presents a problem: Schools that share the name “classical” embody very different kinds of education, and the most consequential differences are often the least obvious.
I lead a university that’s enrolling more and more graduates of classical schools from across the country. We see firsthand the results of these different types of education, and candidly, some of it isn’t pretty. So I have some practical advice for parents who want to discern whether their children’s classical school deserves their hype — to say nothing of their tuition money.
As a general rule, classical schools teach what are commonly referred to as the “great books” or “classics” of Western thought and letters. Against this common backdrop, parents tend to focus on institutional distinctions when deciding which classical school best suits their child. Is the school public or private? Confessional or non-confessional? Full-time or hybrid?
These are important considerations, but they are secondary, if not altogether peripheral, to the most fundamental question parents should ask of any school: What do its teachers — the people entrusted with their child’s intellectual and moral progress — think education is for?
A good classical school will tackle this question head-on in its statement of mission or philosophy of education. Unfortunately, whether and how that philosophy shows up in its classrooms is not something that can be learned from a website or brochure. I do not mean to suggest that a parent must therefore investigate the culture of those classrooms firsthand. A simple question will do. Ask the teachers what they do when the great books of the Western tradition disagree.
What, for instance, do they expect students to learn by comparing Homer’s Achilles, who chooses a short life crowned by immortal glory, to Virgil’s Aeneas, who sacrifices personal desire for the future glory of Rome? How do they expect such comparisons to fare in light of Augustine’s claim that no earthly good can be the ultimate object of human love? The ancients and moderns that appear in classical education offer intense and competing answers — answers that must be questioned assiduously.
This intellectual searching matters because the books that form the warp and woof of a classical education hold different views of the goods about which human beings must learn to judge: virtue and happiness, justice and freedom, political authority, God and man. To ensure that the knowledge afforded by classical learning is not made an end in itself, teachers must do more than simply acquaint students with competing visions of reality. They must teach the intellectual habits necessary for distinguishing true and false, noble and ignoble, better and worse.
If a classical school doesn’t lean into the disagreement, as it were, students will be short-changed on life’s biggest questions. Their teachers will impart the faulty belief that one cannot rationally discern the “best” terms by which to live our lives, but only chose them arbitrarily. A classical school that advertises itself as a custodian of the Western tradition will then have produced, with Homer and Augustine and all the rest of it, what the most secular of public schools produce through cruder means: a young person who believes that nothing of consequence can be settled or known, but who can cite Thrasymachus and Montaigne to defend that dangerous view. That’s the kind of student that even the most rigorous classical school risks cultivating today — one who knows much, but understands little.
My advice to parents, then, is to fret over a school’s network affiliations, religious identity, and instructional model only after asking its teachers: Do you expect your students, at 17, to have grown in wisdom under your instruction?
Listen closely to the answer. A teacher who understands this purpose of a classical education will be able to say how to move students past interpretation of rival positions to judging between them: what makes one position better than another, and how to follow an argument wherever it leads. A teacher who stops at just exposing students to “big ideas” or “critical thinking” does not teach the student how to arrive at the truth nor how to defend it and fails to fulfill the ultimate goal of classical education.
So, send your child somewhere else — to a true classical school that molds the mind, shapes the heart, and ennobles the soul. The danger of classical schools that fail this task isn’t that your child will learn too little. It is that he may learn so much that he can no longer recognize how little he knows. Knowledge mistaken for wisdom is harder to correct than ignorance: The student who knows that he does not know may still seek wisdom. The student who believes he already has it has no reason to keep searching for a life of meaning and greatness — the kind of life that is drawing so many families to classical schools in the first place.