Teach them how to learn, not what to learn.
That’s the key concept for classical education, which is enjoying a national resurgence, with Florida leading the way.
Classical education advocates hope their movement will expand from private religious and chartered learning institutions to struggling public schools.
Hope is high in the wake of an election year that saw the selection of pro-school choice candidates across the country, including President Donald Trump.
“During COVID, parents saw what their kids were learning, and there was general disappointment with the level of learning that was happening,” Colleen Hroncich, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom, told The Epoch Times.
“The public education model has had a monopoly [on learning], but it’s mediocre definitionally. They’re serving the middle students. They are trying to reach that average student that doesn’t exist.”
Standard U.S. public education is referred to as the traditional model, even though classical learning, also known as liberal arts education, predates the era of neighborhood schools, local districts, and state education departments by centuries, according to the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS).
Classical education can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and is rooted in Christianity and Western teachings, the ACCS notes. It promotes moral development and emphasizes older literature such as Aristotle and Shakespeare instead of contemporary texts.
Under the classical education model, three pillars of learning—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—are applied holistically to all subjects with the goal of obtaining wisdom, not just understanding, according to the Classical Academy school in Indianapolis.
The vast majority of states have adopted Common Core standards.
In a lesson about the War of 1812, students are first assigned to learn the facts (grammar) of that event, including names, dates, and places. Then, they apply what they’ve learned to answer questions about why the war started, how the war ended, and why it ended (logic).
“At the rhetoric stage, students would begin to integrate that grammar and logic, seeing where else in history or life we see similar patterns or outcomes, and what those might mean for our present every day life,” the Classical Academy notes.
The same topic in a traditional classroom might also involve memorizing the key facts of the War of 1812, followed by an in-class assignment completed on a laptop or tablet, either individually or in small groups. In that system, the emphasis is on demonstrating knowledge retained from the lesson specific to the topic but not necessarily how it relates to other events, past or present.
Alternative Learning Follows Pandemic
In the past four years alone, 250 classical schools collectively serving nearly 14,000 students have opened, according to an August report from The Heritage Foundation. A fifth of them are in Florida.That includes students in 1,024 Christian Evangelical schools, 308 Catholic schools, and 219 public charter schools.
Additionally, about 261,000 students were homeschooled using classical curricula.
Between 2017 and 2023, homeschooling under classical education instruction increased by 51 percent, followed by 7 percent in private religious schools and 4 percent in public schools, according to the report.
Arcadia forecasts an increase to 1.4 million students and 2,575 schools by 2035, including 119 new charter schools and 200 existing public schools that will adopt the classical curriculum.
“Many parents from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds are increasingly of like mind: Pre-K–12 education ought to prioritize a traditional focus on content, instill civic virtues and discourse in every student, and avoid an outsized emphasis on popular culture and politics,” the report stated.
Opposition From Public School Teachers
Teachers unions at the national and local levels have opposed school choice measures, especially taxpayer-funded voucher programs that fund private school tuition, because they could decrease enrollment-based funding.“These charter schools have become weapons of the right as they seek to destroy Democratically governed public schools while turning back the clock on education and social progress by a century,” the NPE report states.
“Charter schools took a sharp turn right and now serve a purpose never imagined by their early proponents. The only question that remains is whether moderate, progressive, liberal-minded voters and politicians recognize where the runaway charter movement is headed.”
Florida Leads the Way
Lindsay Hoyt, founder of the Cornerstone Classical Academy and executive director of both Jacksonville Classical academies in north Florida, said her schools are economically and racially diverse.About half of the students across the three public charter schools are eligible for free or reduced lunches, and around 40 percent are minorities or of mixed race.
The facilities are considered secular and, under federal law, don’t allow prayer or advocacy of any religion in classrooms.
Under Florida’s lottery system for school choice, students anywhere in the state are eligible to attend any of the three schools, even if they live far outside the Jacksonville area.
The curriculum includes Latin instruction from kindergarten through high school; handwriting and penmanship classes are mandatory; and phonics is used to teach reading, Hoyt said.
Phones are not allowed in the schools. Instruction is based on the text of original sources such as classic novels, the Declaration of Independence, and the periodic table.
Hoyt said the students enjoy old books, globes, and in-person conversations as a break from screens and videos.
They love to impress their parents with “did you know” conversation starters about what they learned in history, science, and math on any given day.
She shared in a November letter to parents that 10th-grade Cornerstone students had recently outperformed the national averages of upperclassmen across the local district, state, and country in the fall Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.
“They are relieved that they get to read from books and write from pencil to paper,” Hoyt told The Epoch Times.
“A lot of people misconstrue classical education for nerd schools. But we will be graduating Renaissance men and women. What we are teaching is rich and meaningful. This is how we save the country.”
Florida’s policies and legislation promoting universal school choice have allowed classical education to thrive in the Sunshine State.
In 2023, the state recognized the Classical Learning Test (CLT) as an alternative to the ACT or SATs for college admissions.
The CLT is also accepted for Florida’s highly competitive Bright Futures scholarship program, which covers tuition at state schools.
Students in classical learning schools can also earn dual-credit college courses.
Major Enrollment Spikes
David Goodwin, president of the Idaho-based ACCS, said the classical Christian education movement dates back to the 1940s, gained significant momentum in the 1990s, and by 2015 saw the implementation in schools in all 50 states.The ACCS has been involved with opening and accrediting about 200 new private schools since 2020, not including schools that worked with Catholic or other Protestant organizations or home-schooling co-ops.
“We’re trying to figure out how to meet the demand,” Goodwin told The Epoch Times.
While ancient Greeks who predated Jesus Christ invented classical education, the Christian version is constructed with divine ideals in every subject, Goodwin said.
For example, while learning Charles Dickens’s novel “David Copperfield,” a class would discuss the concept of poverty through the perspective of Christianity versus Marxism.
His math instruction is also more philosophical than the approach public school students follow, and involves understanding its roots as a language of the universe and developing a real-world way of looking at ratios and proportions instead of just drilling processes to get the correct answers.
“You’re taking apart some deep stuff,” he said.
Goodwin said there are also some Jewish classical schools, but those who attempted to incorporate Islam into this type of learning struggled because classical education is so deeply rooted in Western culture.
He believes that public charter schools teach a “hobbled form” of classical education but are still more effective than traditional schools’ instruction.
Classical Education Expected to Grow
Hroncich of the Cato Institute said she expects to see classical instruction grow in both the private and public charter sectors, especially in red states where school choice has strong support.The return to this approach to learning is well-intentioned and not meant to overhaul America’s public education system.
“When the government took on education, it crowded out a lot of these [classical] philosophies,” she said. “When people are changing schools, that should incentivize all schools to do better. People are on the same team in a different way.”
