Toward A Definition of Classical Education

It has been almost 14 years since I first encountered the idea of classical education, primarily through the recorded lectures of George Grant (thank you Dr. Grant!), Douglas Wilson's book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning and Dorothy Sayers' essay The Lost Tools of Learning.  I found these ideas so compelling that I almost immediately became involved in the start up of a classical school (Coram Deo Academy) where I taught for nine years with a wonderful group of faculty and students.

Over the past few years I have read and listened to many critiques and corrections to the Dorothy Sayer's essay and for the most part they are constructive and show that the classical education movement is beginning to mature.  I can remember giving many talks on classical education as "three stages and a language" to use James Daniels' terminology.  Classical education WAS the grammar, logic, and rhetoric of each subject, a course in logic, a course in Rhetoric, and studies in the Latin language. My own personal study and experience has shown me both the great successes and some of the weaknesses to this approach.  I also have come to see that many of our schools and educational approaches don't really look like the schools and approaches of the past, the Ancient and Middle Ages particularly.

Again and again I find myself returning to David V. Hicks book Norms & Nobility.  He seems to get to the essence of classical education, though with humility, "the questions and concerns of the older writers were once the focus of education, an education we might rather loosely refer to as classical.  My purpose in writing this book is to offer a personal interpretation of classical education."

Hicks argues that "education at every level reflects our primary assumptions about the nature of man."  Classical education takes this question as its heart.  It is concerned with what Hicks calls the "Ideal Type".

"The Ideal Type was at once immutable yet ever in need of refinement.  It was the metaphorical incarnation of wisdom and truth, empowered by education to metamorphose the diligent student.  Both an elaborate dogma and a man, it defied comparison with any man, yet all men discovered themselves in it.  The Ideal Type embraced Gilgamesh's love for Enkidu and David's love for Jonathan, Odysseus risking his precarious safety to hurl gratuitous insults at the Cyclops, and Achilles deciding at the dawn of human history to die at the supreme moment of glory rather than to live through the long, wizening, connubial years.  What made these stories valuable was not their historical authenticity or experimental demonstrability, but their allegiance to a pattern of truth.  Whatever fit this pattern was retained and added to the education of future generations.  What fell outside this pattern was judged superfluous to the education of the young."

Classical education is therefore prescriptive and not descriptive of man.  Modern educational theories are descriptive of man - man's nature is a given, one only needs to look at the average man.  Modern education enables man to "get along in the world" and cope.  Classical education is education into the Ideal Type - by understanding and imitation.  It is education in humility, wisdom, and virtue.  Hicks states in the prologue "indeed, it is my intention in this book to ponder the difference between the man who was educated to believe himself to be a little lower than the angels and the man whose education permits him to ignore both angels and God, to avoid knowledge not of the five senses, and to presume mastery of nature but not over himself."  Self-mastery, virtue, wisdom, truth and humility in pursuit of the Ideal Type - toward a definition of classical education.