By 2035, the classical education model is expected to serve 1.4 million students across 2,575 schools, both public and private, secular and nonsecular.
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 for 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 or 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.
By contrast, in a traditional public education setting subjects are compartmentalized, and students engage in structured, syllabus-led courses and project-based activities with the goal of developing foundational skills through the accumulation of facts and information, according to information noted on the official Common Core website.
The vast majority of states have adopted Common Core standards.
The Classical Academy provides an example of the trivium concept on its website:
