In March of 2024, The Free Press intern and program Fellow Julia Steinburg investigated a curious resurgence in classical education. As Steinburg discovered through her careful interviews, classical education creates intellectual agility, reduces technological dependance, and immunizes the mind against indoctrination and deception.
As public universities place growing importance on political correctness, classical schools have become one of few remaining places where students are taught to think for themselves. Ongoing antisemitism at elite public universities has only underscored the importance of independent thought.
Steinburg notes the impressive rates of growth in classical education programs over the past several years. While this information may come as no surprise to New Guard Press readers, the highlights are worth mentioning.
Aided by the pandemic’s effects on school closures, the number of classical schools rose by 4.8% per year from 2019-2023. Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant charter schools have all seen steady increases in enrollment, and Steinburg mentions a few that are especially noteworthy. Great Hearts Academies grew by almost 10,000 students in the past five years. Additionally, South Bronx Charter Schools has grown its network to four locations and boasts a waiting list of 7,000. And in the tiny town of Kenai, Alaska, the classical school there has mushroomed to 42 students from its starting class of nine in 2019.
While pleased at the challenge to educational orthodoxy, Steinburg has questions. She isn’t sure that a curriculum of mostly white authors won’t lead to racism or transphobia.
It’s worth noting that Christian opposition to transgenderism is rooted in 2,000 years of orthodoxy rather than ignorant prejudice against progressive morality.
However, classical education does not encourage students to hold unexamined prejudices. Rather, adherence to the Socratic tradition forces students to discover contradiction and bigotry in themselves first, before locating it in others. And the goal is to produce not just an intellectual individual but one that will be an active participant in culture, family, and society.
“We want to produce morally flourishing and happy individuals that will be great fathers, husbands, wives, and great friends,” said Dan Scoggins, co-founder of Great Hearts Academies.
Classical education prevents students from becoming dependent on mind-numbing technological shortcuts such as generative AI or even internet searching. Other than the notable exception of medicine, the vast majority of technological inventions are labor-saving devices. Labor-saving devices are incredibly beneficial in reducing time spent on onerous or repetitive tasks, freeing up time for more meaningful and leisurely activities. But what happens when automated tools/mechanical aids are unleashed upon the learning process itself?
Chat GPT and related inventions are the main focus here, but even innovations as benign as computers may pose a threat to the brain’s process of information retention. It was only a generation ago, after all, that computers existed only as massive number crunching machines and not the infinite information repositories they are today. To create engagement and reduce learning loss, students at Chesterton write out all their papers by hand “unless they’re super long.” While it can be a grueling process, this method has improved some students’ learning dramatically. Writing by hand is one of the most effective routes to retained learning.
By broadening the range of ideas encountered in the classroom, classical education also protects young minds from extremist ideologies. Steinburg quotes W. Martin Bloomer, a classicist at Notre Dame, who contends that a classical education gives “not just skills of language or interpretation but a habit of sympathy.”
This “habit of sympathy” was the strength of the old empiricist approach to history, journalism, and other disciplines. The empirical quest for absolutely true narratives backed by unshakable data points ultimately proved flawed, forever stunted by the subjectivity of personal experience. However, the commitment to facts, evenhandedness, and positional neutrality which academics of that day adhered to was not a useless or malicious endeavor. On the contrary, empirical historians and journalists forced themselves to listen to both sides of the story, and having listened, to report both sides fairly and evenly. While modern professionals criticize this approach as “false equivalence,” this exercise created a professional class of listeners who made war upon their own prejudices on a daily basis.
Ironically, the progressive academics who laid waste to empiricism in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism sowed the very seeds of racism and bigotry they feared in their own students. Two generations later, the harvest has come due, and the results have been disastrous. Steinburg’s quotation of Rabbi Abe Unger, the head of school at the Emet Classical Academy in Manhattan, puts this point starkly:
“Students who reacted in that sort of antihuman way to October 7, supporting random shootings and kidnappings and killings, they really can’t see nuance. They don’t have the skills to read history. They don’t have the skills to parse out a slogan. They don’t have the skills to parse out a slaughter.”
Morality without truth is merely a tool for tyrants, thieves, and terrorists. When students at America’s most respected universities choose to support genocide and ethnic cleansing rather than examine their own beliefs, something has gone very wrong. And it’s no mystery what that something is. A post-colonial worldview married to postmodern ethics results in the embrace of any and all tactics to remove the supposed oppressor — even if that means killing infants and using helpless civilians as PR pawns and human shields.
Classical education, in contrast, imbues students with the love of truth and compassion. Although it could become indoctrination by some on the right in displays of unthinking and arrogant nationalism, classical education properly taught removes indoctrination and replaces it with curiosity and moral conviction.
And that’s the most liberating thing of all.
