I appreciated Emma Green’s tour de force piece on Classical Education in the New Yorker last week. It is incredibly well researched, and I think it is the best analysis of the movement that I’ve seen from someone outside of it.
As a semi-insider, I have additional reflections based on my family’s experience with Classical Education that will hopefully run sometime soon. For the moment, however, I want to note an important larger question that Green’s piece raises. This question concerns more than just Classical Education; really, it includes two connected questions: first, what is (objectively speaking) the best possible education that a child can get in America today? And second, who has access to such an education?
It is very difficult to agree on curriculum: just what SHOULD America’s kids be learning (or not)? What books should they be reading (or not)? This is where the partisan debates come into play so prominently. Just think, on a related note, of the public library wars. I am convinced that agreement is impossible on these issues, when extremely diverse values and assumptions about the world motivate different people who feel strongly about the topic.
It may, however, be easier to come to an agreement about some of the key skills that kids should be learning, even if HOW they should be learning them is also under intense debate. So, for instance, just about everyone would probably agree that the best education (whatever it looks like) will give kids an excellent foundation in math and sciences. It will also teach them to read and write well. At a minimum, we can probably agree on these foundational skills that will equip students to succeed in college or in a technical trade, even if most people (statistically) do not agree with my view that the study of ancient languages is a superb strategy for teaching a child essential analytical skills–not to mention, grammar and work ethic, among many other benefits.
And yet, increasingly more schools, public and some private, are feeling squeezed and underfunded. Administrators are cutting corners and encouraging teachers to use AI tools to cut these corners further (e.g., using AI for grading and generating student feedback), all the while increasing class sizes. The problem with this approach lies in the nature of human beings. Certain skills, reading chief among them, are best learned one-on-one. As for math, remember how kids in America fell farther behind in math during Covid, and everyone agreed that online learning was to blame? Yeah…
So, in other words, these key skills that most Americans would agree kids should still be learning–and, ideally, mastering even–all require more individualized in-person attention rather than less, which really means smaller classrooms, and that really means more teachers. (Or one-on-one homeschooling—although, of course, not everyone can take this route!)
This brings us full circle to the kind of schools that Green investigates in her piece: Classical Education as an educational method requires smaller classroom sizes than you would find in a typical public school. You just can’t have the sort of creative debate or interdisciplinary art exploration that Classical schools like to run in a class of 25 or 30. Indeed, this is true not only for Classical schools. The most elite private schools in America–whether they are Waldorf schools or Montessori or Classical or some other type–tend to have much smaller class sizes than public schools or more affordable private schools. Individualized attention for every child is the secret sauce of the best education.
The lie that everyone who supports mass education on the cheap, whether in elementary schools or even at the college level (why, hello, large state universities!), would like to believe is that talented teachers could somehow scale everything up and teach a class of 30 or 50 or 80 or 100+ students just as effectively as they might a class of 10 or 15 students. Unfortunately, this really is a lie. Until everyone can agree on this, we are going to continue living in a system where many kids in this country will simply keep getting inferior education—and their college professors will keep writing justified jeremiads about their students’ inadequate preparation for college (or creating resources to try and fix the problems at the college level).
But until there is a universal agreement–and action in accordance with that agreement–that kids are best taught in small classrooms, rather than increasingly larger ones, some kids will continue to be left behind.