Classical education from time immemorial worked with brain development so that education was paced to the student’s brain development. Classical education teaches a student how to learn and how to think, whereas progressive education teaches a student what to learn and what to think.
So how is modern progressive education doing? According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States is doing poorly. Dig into their website and you will find the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We spend more per capita on education than any other nation in the world — except Luxembourg — but we get less.
There are many factors at play, but the widely held consensus is that our school graduates are experiencing diminishing returns from their education at a time when the interconnectedness of the world renders them less able to compete for merit-based jobs that require the skill of critical thinking.
The single most important factor is curriculum. America started leaving classical education behind 80-plus years ago and replaced it with progressive education. It was thought that this shift more readily fit an industrial age. But does your child fit into an industrial model? And isn’t that ignoring the way our American workplace has changed more recently? Concurrent with the industrial model is the growth of bureaucracy. It happens in all industries (education is not immune). Our outcomes have been diminishing ever since.
Classical educators say the best education for one is the best education for all. Unless all students have access to an excellent education, we all are pulled down to a lowest common level. Such is not productive for the future of a democratic republic. A democratic republic requires an educated people, or we will fall to our demise. If public schools practiced classical education with fidelity, the number of private schools would shrink overnight.
Twenty-plus years ago, I asked an economist and futurist what he thought of education, to which he replied it belongs to the learning worker. He was saying that knowledge workers (you and me) will be replaced in the very near future by learning workers. Learning workers can manage the constant change of the workplace because they know how to learn. So where do we get learning workers? They are educated in a classical program because such a program teaches a student how to learn, not what to learn, and how to think, not what to think. Bingo!
Classical education works with brain development so that learning is age-appropriate, sequential and interconnected. When students are in their early years (age 4 or 5 through 10 or 11) they readily focus on the grammar of any subject because they are concrete learners. Concrete learning is the first stage of brain development. Knowing the grammar of any subject is the necessary foundation for the next stages of learning. Remember when we had grammar schools?
When a student moves from their grammar school years into middle school years (age 12 or so) and students’ brains move from concrete learning into conceptual learning and challenging everything becomes normative for the student, accordingly education should then lean into the dialectic process, or what is called logic. When your child wants to argue with you, we should require them to offer a reasonable argument, not just a lot of feelings. Feelings are important, but this is the age when their brain is moving into a new mode of learning and then reason, or logic (the dialectic process), needs to be honored so that the student learns how to think. This is developing mental habits that serve the student well throughout life.
In high school years when the average student is consumed with “self-expression,” that is when education should lean into the arts of rhetoric (which are understood as verbal expression, physical art, athletics, music, advanced manufacturing and other modes of expression).
In such a classical approach, the art of teaching through the K-12 years realizes that learning is cumulative, sequential and interrelated.
Classical education is focused on developing the skill of critical thinking alongside the formation of virtue that defines each student’s soul in a manner that is unique to them and offers the outcome that shows a student how to learn and how to think. To those students belongs the future!
So education has recently been problematic, and education could be the solution.
More schools are emerging that are classical. Check them out please.
The Rev. Marty McCarthy lives in Charlotte.
