Parents Across America Are Flocking To Classical Education

The growth of classical education schools is astonishing. The numbers keep rising; there is no sign that the movement is beginning to plateau. Schools open, networks are created, charters are authorized, and kids fill the seats. One would think that as more spaces are available the (supposedly) small number of parents who favor the classical way would be satisfied and demand would diminish.

How many Americans want their children to study Latin, read the Old and New Testaments, and appreciate the High Art of the Renaissance? Couldn’t be too many, say intellectuals and educators on the left. Those enlightened practitioners can’t help assuming that a classical curriculum should turn people off, given the half-century of multiculturalist criticism of Western civilization and American exceptionalism, but apparently the long campaign to kill respect for the old lineage hasn’t succeeded.

A prime example: Valor Education is a network of five schools in Texas. The first one opened in Austin in 2018, a charter school squarely in the classical mode. Two years later, school leaders saw enough local interest to open another school in Austin, then in 2022 a school in Kyle, and in 2023 schools in Leander and San Antonio. The numbers now: 4,200 enrolled in the five campuses and 5,500 on the waitlists.

Part of the attraction of Valor campuses is the free tuition, to be sure, but public schools are free too. Valor doesn’t screen students for background or ability, so anyone can apply and have an equal chance of admission. The real draw, however, is the curriculum, which is certainly not geared to a no-child-left-behind attitude that ends up lowering standards so that, indeed, no child is left behind.

Valor speaks forthrightly of Great Books. It requires students to memorize poetry, learn Latin, and study the fine arts. In 8th grade, students read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Tom Sawyer, and The Merchant of Venice. Two years before, they read William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In 12th grade, it’s Dante and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Another example is Alberta Classical Academy in Calgary, which was authorized as a charter school in January 2022 and started in August of that year. Caylan Ford, one of the founders, says that they had to pass out fliers, circulate at the Calgary Stampede, and reach out to local churches in order to recruit because the idea of a charter classical school was unknown in the region. The building could handle 280 kids, and in the spring Ford worried that they wouldn’t reach nearly that number.

But on day one, 294 students had signed up, many of them Nigerian Christians worried about safety and wokeness in the public schools. In its second year, a campus opened in Edmonton and enrollment tripled, with 2,000 kids on the waitlist. This year, Alberta Classical has 1,300 students. The curriculum shows the same rigorous classical focus as Valor. Mandatory Latin begins in 5th grade, there’s an Ancient Greek Club and a Mandarin Club, and 9th grade readings include Shakespeare, George Orwell, and Marcus Aurelius.  

The readings are daunting, especially in an age of screen-induced aliteracy, but it’s exactly what thousands of parents want for their kids. If we showed the Valor and Alberta curricula to a public school instructor not long out of ed school and well-trained in leftist dogmas, that teacher would shake her head in disbelief.

To ask kids to memorize classic poems and speeches is to turn youths into automata, she believes. Rote memorization has no place in active learning, she’s been told. And Great Books are wholly age-inappropriate — few kids can handle them. The list is too dead-white-male, Eurocentric, and obsolete. Why sink kids into writings with no relevance to contemporary affairs and 21st-century identities?

Parents Have Voted with their Feet

It’s a tiresome response that has prevailed in orthodox education spaces for 50 years. Conservatives and traditionalist liberals, however, have struggled to refute it. I have sat in many education meetings and witnessed a few dissenters, myself included, attempt a reply and persuade nobody.

But times have changed. We no longer have to argue against the leftist outlook in order to justify Valor education and other classical initiatives. The parents do that for us. They have voted with their feet. To educators who object to the conservative thrust of classical education, we can say, “Don’t criticize us — blame the parents.”

We are in a happy situation, a stronger one that followed the inauguration of charter schools and Washington-led efforts such as No Child Left Behind. Classical education isn’t a logistical innovation or a testing regime. It’s a positive vision of the past, challenging and rigorous, but constructive and inspiring.

It’s a sad feeling for the educators, though, and not just because of the loss of students. The reason for the loss cannot be ignored; the departure is an indictment of leftist theories of learning. Classical schools treasure precisely what leftist principles reject: old books and Great Books, Western Civilization, memorization, religion, dead languages, high art.

During the so-called Canon Wars of the 1980s and early 1990s, multiculturalists believe that they had defeated Western Civ for good. Multiculturalism conquered schools of education and district offices, and it eradicated Western Civ courses from general education requirements at colleges across the country, tarring traditions such as the Great American Novel as racially, sexually, and politically suspect.

Trend in Colleges Too

Now, to the left’s dismay, Western Civ is back. Valor and Alberta are two of many extraordinary success stories.

What is likewise becoming clear is the trend at classical colleges with a forthright conservative orientation. The Cardinal Newman Society has a small network of colleges that it recommends because they adhere strictly to Catholic identity and Catholic tradition. It grants a gold rating, for instance, only if a school never gives honors or tenders speaking invitations to individuals who question Catholic moral teaching. It praises the old general education model that set “classical works and the ideas that shaped Western civilization and Christianity” at the center of the curriculum.

Schools in the network — Ave Maria in Florida, Belmont Abbey in North Carolina, Benedictine in Kansas, Franciscan in Ohio, Christendom in Virginia, Thomas Aquinas in California and Massachusetts, University of Mary in North Dakota, University of St. Thomas in Texas, and Walsh University in Ohio — have seen record entering classes and total enrollment.  

Every shift of public school children to classical schools erodes the authority of progressive schooling. Traditionalists are still vastly outnumbered by progressives, but their popularity among a growing population of parents gives them confidence.

Mark Bauerlein is emeritus professor at Emory University and an editor at First Things magazine.