Classical Education’s Popularity Problem

The Wrath Of The Seas (1886) by Ivan Aivazovsky

The classical, Christian education brand has become big business in the last few years. Between 2019 and 2023 alone, 264 new classical schools opened their doors in the United States. The number of podcasts, blogs, journals and curricula by classical organizations has grown exponentially. It seems like half the Christian colleges I know have started M.A. programs devoted to training teachers how to instruct classically.

Explosive growth like this suggests that our schools are bearing fruit that even their detractors can no longer ignore. This should be celebrated, as should the new opportunities to make classical education available to our churches and communities. At the same time, leaders and educators should keep a weather eye on the horizon. The astonishing spread of classical schools—like all rapid growth—comes with new dangers. I’m not talking here about attacks from outside (those will undoubtedly continue to increase), but rather the temptation leaders will face to sacrifice what is rigorous and counter-cultural about classical education for the sake of avoiding criticisms of their schools, and benefiting from the movement’s popularity. In short, there will be a temptation to give up precisely those distinctives that make this form of Christian education classical. 

In what follows I’ll discuss the background and nature of this temptation, provide a paradigm for understanding what a truly classical, Christian education is. I’ll conclude with three concrete questions that I hope can help guide us — teachers, administrators, leaders, parents and students— in discerning between the authentically classical parts of our movement and the accretions that claim the label but lack its substance.

The Mainstreaming of Classical Education

Although it’s difficult to date exactly when classical education began to emerge triumphantly into the national consciousness, the 2019 Christianity Today essay seems to have signaled the beginning of a new phase. 

Since then, high-profile publications have regularly published op-eds about the movement. Some have been positive; most have attacked it and portrayed it as a stalking horse for a right-wing conspiracy. It’s worth noting, however, that these authors’ very hyperventilations clearly imply that the wider educational establishment thinks classical schools are effective. Gone are the days when the phrase “classical school” conjured up images of church basement start-ups and dog-eared editions of Saxon math. Some particularly prosperous classical schools have even built edifices whose aesthetics compare favorably with our nation’s prep schools.

The face of classical education, then, is irrevocably changing. Change, as we in the classical world know particularly well, is a double-edged sword. Some of this change is welcome, of course, bringing a sense of legitimacy to classical schools, the proliferation of curricula companies, conferences, and training programs, as well as a growing openness to classical education from families and churches. We’re all grateful it’s become less of an uphill battle to convince most people that classical education isn’t malevolent and elitist.

The Shoals of Popularity

But, as Josh Gibbs has repeatedly argued, this situation, advantageous for classical schools in many respects, comes with its own dangers that must be carefully navigated - dangers all the more insidious for the fact that they’re dangers that attend popularity.

I opened this article by talking about all the new schools springing up and claiming to be “classical.” Although many have become new beachheads for the renewal movement, some seem to be about as classical as Dorothy Sayers’ trivium-as-stages - which is to say, not classical at all. Similarly, a number of the new MA programs starting at universities platform “classical” scholars who are not recognized authorities in the wider movement and seem to be strangers to its cultural mission.

These examples suggest that there’s a real and growing danger of classical schools “watering down,” “commoditizing” or “cheapening” their message as the movement spreads. Notice, however, that all these descriptions imply that the “product” is essentially the same in form and function; the only real difference being that it’s mass-produced, ill-made and ineffective. My concerns go deeper: that the classical movement could subtly embrace a very different character—a different set of ends—altogether. These ends would, of course, dress themselves meticulously in classical language and metaphors, but would in fact embody the spirit of our age, thereby corrupting the movement over time, Trojan Horse style. If Aristotle has taught us correctly that “the nature of a thing is its end,” what we are talking about here is the effective de-classicization of our movement. For all these reasons it’s clearly all-important that we understand what classical education is so we can guard against it becoming something it is not.

Classical Education and its Counterfeits

C.S. Lewis’ famous essay “On Reading Old Books” can help us here. The essay is well-known in the classical world, and, as you likely recall, Lewis’ argument is that old, pre-modern books, through immersing us in the best of what was written down in the past—the “classics”—keep the “sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds,” correcting our uniquely modern blindnesses, and righting the errors to which we’re most prone. The proper attitude towards the classics is receptive, humbly seeking their corrective wisdom.

These “classics” and the cultural spirit they embody, I humbly submit, are the heart of “classical,” Christian education. They are what makes it meaningfully classical. And it is precisely the ways they challenge our modern blind spots that will come under attack as the movement grows in popularity, prominence and affluence. The current zeitgeist has no problem tolerating belief in Jesus as long as his followers don’t ask inconvenient questions about nature. It will not tolerate Christian or even classical notions of human nature, male-female differences, happiness, virtue and national identity. Yet it is preeminently in these areas that the classics have so much to teach us. This is why anyone who wants mainstream respectability in this negative world increasingly finds it impossible to defend the classics in any substantive way.

If what I’ve argued here is correct, if classical education is essentially about handing down a culture that challenges the spirit of our age, we can expect the siren-song to come from those who covet mainstream respectability and therefore wish to accommodate the zeitgeist. 

For the discerning observer, there are already signs that this is happening in the classical, Christian world. Well-meaning voices have tried passing off “equity and inclusion” criteria for selecting canonical works as a mere “assortment of voices,” perfectly compatible with the Western tradition. A member of the Classic Learning Test’s (CLT) author bank committee admitted the organization used what amounts to DEI standards for determining which authors’ works to include in their tests. This is troubling not only for the future of the CLT—and its laudable goal of dethroning the College Board’s stranglehold on testing—but for how it will influence the curricula publishers' design and schools utilize.

These temptations have also surfaced in debates about the relationship between classical education and the “culture war.” Of course, schools co-opted by any kind of merely political agenda are, and should be, deplored. But there’s an equal and opposite danger of denying that classical schools have any bearing on our cultural struggles. Nevertheless, behind the scenes in certain classical circles, David Goodwin’s book Battle for the American Mind was greeted with something not unlike contempt (though this was often masked by concerns about the book’s combative view of education). Many who responded this way hold to some version of the argument that classical education uses  “truth, beauty and goodness” to form souls, and that this intellectual and spiritual work has little to do with American cultural or political divisions. There are many problems with this view, but the main one I’m concerned with here is how it guts classical education of its cultural core, makes it a neutral abstraction, and deprives it of whatever is truly “classical” about it. What is this tradition after all if not a certain way of living and thinking—a culture, a “paidea”—handed down from one generation to another over the ages?

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

Of course, those who wish to make peace with the spirit of our age will hardly admit—or perhaps even consciously realize—that they’re undermining the classical movement. The move will be trussed up in spurious, sometimes sincere, arguments that “the classical tradition” doesn’t mean what we thought it meant. “There’s actually classical precedent for sex and race quotas in canonical lists,” “we’ll reach more people with the truth this way,” etc. Other arguments will contend that classical education must remain “winsome,” a “big tent,” a movement that’s “the heritage of everyone, not just conservatives.” While these statements are of course true (the beauty of Homer is certainly not just for conservatives or people of European ancestry), they’re also telling. They emphasize the classics in a way that affirms rather than challenges our modern prejudices. They are, in short, an example of disordered love.

There will unfortunately have to be battles to police the borders of “the classical tradition;” these battles won’t be “nice.” However, they must be fought, charitably, lest the tradition—and the schools based on it—lose its distinctiveness and its power to chasten and transform us.

I’d like to conclude with a few practical questions that I hope will be helpful to you—whether you’re a teacher, school leader, parent, or student—as you seek to winnow through all the classical resources available to you. You can use these questions as guides to assist you in identifying which schools, curricula, articles, etc. are truly classical. May these prove helpful to you as you labor in the classical, Christian movement God in his providence has blessed so richly:

Does it defend studying Western civilization because it's the civilization we Americans have inherited (and which we have a duty to preserve), or because it includes women and minorities?

Studying Western civilization is preeminently a question of “piety” - of reverence and due respect for those who came before us and handed down their way of life to us. This is not to say that we should deny the importance of women and minorities included in Western civilization. It’s simply a question about emphasis. If the school or individual or resource in question feels the need to justify teaching Western civilization more as an exercise in inclusion than in piety, it’s a strong suggestion that they—perhaps unconsciously—view “classical” education as a way of propping up the zeitgeist rather than challenging it.

Does the school justify studying the liberal arts because they make for better test scores that will lead to better college applications and higher status? Or does it stress that they are the ways that human beings learn to bring their mind into harmony with the world God has made?

For millennia, the Christian tradition has understood the liberal arts as “ways” by which the mind ascends towards apprehending truth and conforming the soul to reality. It may well be the case that one side-effect of a virtuous mind is better performance on tests, college applications and the job market. But if the latter is emphasized more than the former it suggests that the school or resource is more attuned to helping people pursue worldly success and status than virtue.

Does the school believe that education ought to teach students "how to think, not what to think," or that it ought to teach them virtue?

If Christian education is aimed at conforming the mind to the created order, then it follows that it cannot be neutral about what conclusions its students reach. Certainly, it seeks to form students who “think for themselves” - that is, students who don’t simply swallow talking points but reflect on them and discern whether they’re well-founded and logical or not. However, it does this with certain ends in mind: that students come to full knowledge of what is objectively true in the natural, moral and theological worlds. It unapologetically forms students’ affections for what is good, true and beautiful. Classical, Christian educators must reject any  “neutral world” assumptions that would argue otherwise. They are inconsistent with an education whose preeminent end is the glory of God and the formation of virtue.