Bringing classical education to more Kentucky schools

This week I was privileged to attend the National Classical Education Symposium in Phoenix, Arizona. The symposium is a convening of the Institute for Classical Education, an organization rooted in the Great Hearts network of charter schools based in Arizona and Texas, but representing a wide array of educators interested in promoting classical education. The Symposium is part professional development for classical educators and part networking opportunity to strengthen the nation-wide movement to create more, and better, classical schools. (Video of every general session at the Symposium is available on the Institute's Facebook page).

Classical education is a language-rich approach to curriculum that emphasizes history, science, art, and great literature as the foundation of learning and expects students to develop a well-trained mind adept at logic and rhetoric and capable of participating in the Great Conversation of ideas that has shaped and driven the development of Western civilization.  It represents the best of what is sometimes conceived as a "liberal arts" education, though that term has become so watered down as to be nearly meaningless, and classical education does not shy away from mathematics and hard sciences but rather provides a strong foundation for advanced studies in all disciplines.  Above all classical education understands that education should primarily be about the acquisition of virtue, and only secondarily about vocational preparation.

I have come to believe strongly that a key weakness in most American schools is far too little attention to curriculum. Classical learning, which emerged in Greek and Roman antiquity and was systematized in the Middle Ages, fills this gap in a comprehensive way. The classical curriculum is organized around the Trivium, the three, stair-stepping realms of grammar (content knowledge), dialectic (logic), and rhetoric (communication). Under this approach, students should be immersed in rich, content-specific curriculum in the early grades, and by middle school start to engage in learning experiences that tap into and apply critical thinking and problem solving, and by high school pursue authentic, real world tasks that ask them to communicate and collaborate with others in a variety of ways that demonstrate real independence (see my classical education reading list here).

According to Symposium organizers, roughly a half million American students are now being educated with classical curricula, including around 100,000 students in private schools, 100,000 students in charter schools, and somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 students in homeschooling environments.

In Kentucky I'm familiar with several homeschooling families who use classical curriculum (many participate in the Classical Conversations community), and several private classical schools scattered throughout the state. My chief concern as an educator and policy maker is how we make the richness of classical learning available to far more students, including in traditional public schools and public charter school environments. While classical education does intersect in many ways with the Judeo-Christian dimensions of Western civilization, Great Hearts Academies, the Barney charter schools initiative associated with Hillsdale College, and other charter experiments in classical learning demonstrate that this kind of education is also appropriate and much-needed in a tuition-free, secular school setting as well.

The task ahead of us in Kentucky, and I believe nation-wide for the classical school movement, is how we provide this method to far more students of all ethnic, income, and ability backgrounds. Classical curriculum doesn't appear to have made even a tiny dent in the world of traditional public schools (although we learned of some promising new experiments, which I hope to write about another time). From the networking taking place at the symposium, however, I'm hoping we can start to connect people eager to take classical schools to the next level in this regard. And such work will inevitably be done in close collaboration with families and educators at the local level. Curricular decisions cannot be dictated from the state-level, as in my role as a member of the Kentucky Board of Education. But perhaps we can foster a policy environment that encourages such innovations in local schools and places a stronger emphasis on curricular reform as the key to school improvement and closing achievement gaps.

Inevitably, though, the only way to make classical learning available to more students is to give more families the ability to choose their child's school. Far too few families in Kentucky, as in many other states, are able to choose the school that is the best fit for their child and their family's aspirations for their children. This is an injustice that disproportionately affects low-income families. When schools maintain a monopoly on educational delivery, they are forced to try to be all things to all students, an impossibility that simply pushes schools to acquiesce to whatever methods they believe will suit the majority of families. Majoritarianism is not democracy, and one size does not fit all, especially when it comes to learning.

Kentucky adopted its first charter school law in 2017; now, two years later, we still don't have a policy mechanism by which education dollars can follow students to a charter when they are no longer being educated by their assigned school. Thus, we still have no charter schools in Kentucky, and untold numbers of students are still being denied the kinds of learning opportunities classical education might provide. Likewise, we need to implement scholarship tax credits so more families can access the classical schools that already exist here. Innovations in learning like those represented by classical education cannot occur until more families have more school choices.

Above all we need to encourage far more discussion among educators about how we can re-emphasize the importance of curriculum, and especially the strengths of a rich, knowledge-based curriculum, which is thoroughly appropriate and necessary for developing the kinds of critical thinking and highly-touted "21st century skills" students need to be economically successful as well as personally fulfilled in the modern world.

Likewise, student literacy is essential to the language-heavy learning required by a classical curriculum. Kentucky Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis has been urging a statewide conversation about how we can get far more students reading proficiently by the end of third grade. As Dan Willingham pointed out in his opening keynote address to the Symposium, these goals of reading proficiency and content knowledge are not just compatible but absolutely interdependent. Students often don't read well precisely because they lack sufficient content knowledge. Helping educators understand this linkage, and committing to both universal literacy by fourth grade and a content-rich curriculum in the early grades will set a firm foundation for the growth of classical learning in Kentucky and elsewhere.

These are some of the key challenges and linchpins upon which the growth of classical education in Kentucky will depend. I'm eager to continue these discussions with my fellow educators, parents, and policy makers and excited about what the future holds. 

Usual disclaimer: Views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of anyone affiliated with Western Kentucky University (where I am professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I am a member and chair of the Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Committee).

Related links:

• The false choices of "What School Could Be"
• Yes, kids need to know about the American Revolution
• If caring is king, content is queen
• Why Knowledge Matters: The Most Important Education Book of 2016
• Why Knowledge Matters, Part II
• Seven Myths About Education
• What if everything you knew about education was wrong?
• A classical education reading list
• A School Choice Primer, Parts I, II, and III
• Kentucky charter school basics
• Charter schools and the profit question
• Why the education establishment feels so threatened by school choice