An Overview of Classical Education: Is It Right for Your Child?

Among decreasing satisfaction with the public school system, many families are resorting to less conventional ways of educating their children. This includes putting them in private schools or homeschooling them.

Among the more popular movements in education is classical education, which emphasizes literature, language studies, and history in a modern school framework.

What Is the Classical Method?

In Western culture, the term “classical education” has been used for several centuries. Each era has modified the definition slightly and added its own choice of topics.

Essentially, classical education uses a three-part process to train the mind in a consistent pattern where students are introduced to science and history in a planned repetition. Each subject is studied within the three stages of the trivium.

But it is more than just a pattern of learning. Classical education has a strong focus on language: it accomplishes learning through spoken and written words, rather than using images such as pictures, television, or videos.

The classical method believes that learning languages and learning images require different streams of thought. Learning through words requires harder work for the mind. For example, reading forces you to translate a symbol, or words on a page, into an idea. In contrast, watching images on TV or on videos lets the mind remain passive and relax.

Another important aspect of the classical method is that it believes all knowledge is interconnected. For example, when a student studies astronomy, it’s not in isolation; he also studies the history of scientific discovery. This in turn is also connected with the relationship of church to science, all the way to the complexities of medieval church history.

What Are the Three Stages of Classical Education?

Classical education works around a pattern called the trivium, which refers to the three lower divisions of the seven liberal arts. The trivium is made up of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

The three stages of classical education are:

First Phase: Grammar Stage

The early years of school are called the “grammar stage.” This doesn’t mean that the four years are all only about learning English. Instead, it refers to the time when the foundation for all other learning is laid, in the same way that grammar forms the foundation of language.

During the elementary school years, or about first to fourth grade, a child’s mind is very much like a sponge, willing to absorb all information. This is also the time when children can have fun memorizing things, so the classical method maximizes this for fact-learning.

The facts that a child memorizes at this stage include, but are not limited to, the following:

spelling and phonics rules
grammar rules
poems
foreign language vocabulary
history stories
literature
plants, animals, and human body descriptions
math facts

Second Phase: Logic Stage

Between around fifth grade and middle school, children become less interested in memorizing facts and instead start asking “Why?” This means that they are becoming interested in identifying cause and effect, which is why this stage is called the Logic Stage.

Although it generally begins in fifth grade, the Logic Stage is best for students who have developed the capacity for abstract thinking. This is when they start to learn algebra and logic, applying logic to all school subjects.

For example, for writing, applying logic means that the student starts to construct paragraphs and support a thesis. For reading, it includes analyzing texts, in addition to simply absorbing information. For history, he starts analyzing why a certain war was fought, more than simply learning the story. For science, he learns to apply the scientific method to whatever he’s learning.

Final Phase: Rhetoric Stage

In this final phase, which normally occurs in high school, the student starts to speak and write with originality and force. In the Rhetoric Stage, the student applies the logic rules he learned in the second phase to the foundations he absorbed during the grammar stage, and then expresses them in clear, elegant, and forceful language.

This is also the time when students start to specialize in areas of knowledge that appeal to them. For the student in the classical method, this is when the following things occur:

art camps
opportunities for college courses
travel to foreign countries
apprenticeships
other kinds of specialization experiences

What Are the Pros and Cons of a Classical Education?

As with just about any philosophy of education, a classical education has its advantages and disadvantages. Some of its benefits include:

It provides a solid foundation for children: Because it leverages on the younger students’ interest in memorization, it helps children have the information he needs to bring into the middle school years.
It produces logical thinkers strong in literacy: Because of its strong emphasis on language-learning and the path towards logical thinking, it helps produce individuals who have a strong grasp of language and analytical thinking.
It supports a child’s natural stages of development: The classical method was designed according to the natural stages that a child progresses through, making it less of a burden for the child.
It fosters a love for language learning: Because it makes students memorize words in foreign languages, the classical method helps interest children in learning other languages.

On the other hand, here are some potential drawbacks of a classical education:

It emphasizes memorization: Although this can be a strength, it can also be a weakness, since individuals who rely too much on memorization may lack in other critical thinking skills.
It can be rigid: The system itself follows a strict progression, and may not allow enough freedom for teachers and students to learn more about topics that interest them outside of the curriculum.

Alternative Methods of Education

If you feel like you like the emphasis on a lot of good quality literature, but would not want the rigorous memorization and training of a full classical education, you may want to try some alternatives, such as:

Charlotte Mason method: The British educational reformer’s philosophy emphasizes a lot of classic literature and masterpieces in art and music, minus the rote memorization that characterizes classical education;
Unit study method: By creating your own unit studies, you can also choose the best books as your spine and build your school lessons around these specific themes.

What Is the Purpose of a Classical Education?

A classical education aims to give students the moral framework and academic excellence needed to fight injustice in the modern world. It encourages them to pursue not just the “what” of ideas but also the “why,” “how,” and “who.” This helps young people develop their own analytical thinking to enrich the lives of others.

This article is intended as an overview. If you are interested to learn more, we encourage you to do more research, and from there decide if it can be a good fit for your family. If you are planning to homeschool, you can find many classical education curricula available online.

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