The think tank Civitas has published a report into the advantages of a classical liberal education – popular with homeschooling families – and why a comeback could be good for the nation’s children.
A classical liberal education focuses not only on facts, assignments and passing tests, but on the entire person and cultural transmission, giving children a clearer idea of the history, culture and world they’re inheriting. It just isn’t liberal in the fashionable political sense of ‘woke’, but means the event of mental abilities needed to think independently.
Another focus is the traditional concept of the “Trivium” whereby students would gain a transparent understanding of grammar, logic and rhetoric and so, it’s argued, turn into adults who could think, write and speak clearly.
Having mastered the Trivium, students could then higher attack the “Quadrivium”, which covers arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. It is probably going that William Shakespeare himself learned the Trivium, and possibly the early stages of the Quadrivium.
In its report Civitas noted that modern education had been “eroded” by three major aspects, notably an excess of scientific materialism, the rejection of past authorities, and the availability of mass-education by the state.
The reports note that the aim of an education is not any longer deemed to be the production of fully formed human beings, with the capability to make right selections and to completely appreciate and contribute to society, but has been reduced to securing grades as a way to improve job prospects and earn more.
In a press release, Civitas argued, “It continues to be perfectly possible to go through school, including with flying colors, having never picked up a piece of classical literature, having never considered the character of truth, without the fundamentals of Western chronology, with not one line of poetry committed to memory. Modern education has turn into a gateway to riches but not our full humanity.”
Despite this, classical liberal education has made something of comeback in recent many years.
Toby Young is an advocate of each classical liberalism and the “Free Schools” begun under David Cameron’s premiership within the 2010s. He was heavily involved within the establishment of the Michaela Community School in London, headed by Katherine Birbalsingh.
The approach is increasingly popular with Christian homeschoolers in Britain and the USA, particularly those concerned in regards to the influence of secular ideologies on their children.
“The ancient world has much to supply us today in occupied with how we would best teach and encourage young people toward virtue, wisdom, and truth,” says the Society for Classical Learning website, a Christian organisation that supports and encourages classical education.
Jamie Burns, headteacher of St Anselm’s in Cardiff, said, “Whereas modern education seeks to take care of curricular relevance, classical education pushes against that and as a substitute says that the content our kids learn needs to be the perfect that has been thought and said – what’s often known as the ‘Great Conversation’.
“Classical Christian education teaches things because they’re true, good or beautiful, and never because they’re culturally relevant or fashionable.”
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