Inside the New Wave of Old-School Education
Amid growing claims that schools indoctrinate students, ‘classical education’—which teaches kids to think critically and master old books—is making a comeback.
The Free Press: March 24, 2024 9:21 AM
MENLO PARK, CA — On a rainy evening last January, a group of girls in long, pleated skirts and boys in jackets and ties were sitting around a mahogany table in an old house discussing Homer’s The Iliad.
It was parents’ night at Chesterton Academy of St. James, a private school in Silicon Valley, the fertile crescent of innovation. And even though the ninth- and tenth-graders were working through a text that dates to the eighth century BCE, the lesson felt—as Big Tech likes to say—disruptive.
Lily Ahern, 15, was talking about Priam, the father of the slain Trojan warrior Hector, who asks the Greeks to return his son’s body so he can be properly buried. Her teacher, a bespectacled man with a trim beard and wire-rim glasses, peppered Lily with questions: What did she make of Priam’s request? Was the Greek response morally defensible?
Every time Lily replied, her teacher pressed her to cite some passage from the text to support her argument. The whole back and forth—the sharing of premises and conclusions and points and counterpoints—seemed straight out of a Platonic dialogue. It was all so thoughtful, so measured, so wide-ranging. Students were free to argue anything (about the text, at least) as long as it was well reasoned. And as a 21-year-old who was taught what to think—not how to think—at my supposedly top-tier private school in Los Angeles, it felt liberating.
Lily was being trained in what parents and educators across the country are calling “classical education”—teaching kids to think critically and master old books, which are often written by a lot of dead white males. (In the past, this used to be called just “education.”)