Recently, my husband and our eight-year-old son went to cheer on friends who participated in an Academic Challenge competition. These trivia-style contests involve questions on such subjects as history, geography, science, math, and popular culture. One question that night, however, involved a topic near and dear to my heart: which ancient Greek philosopher died by drinking hemlock? None of the middle school-aged competitors knew the answer, although one hazarded a guess: Aristotle? 

No.

Maybe that’s fair. Ancient Greek philosophy, history, or literature are no longer standard fare at most public schools in America. But there is one type of schooling where, at least sometimes, they are still taught: Classical schools. As it happens, the Classical approach to education has found itself in recent years in the crosshairs of culture wars. 

How did we get here? Can there really be burning controversy around learning a dead language, or reading some dead poets with frog choruses? As someone with a PhD in Classics (of the Greco-Roman variety), but who also is a Classical homeschooling parent, I have found the heated conversations around the topic remarkably confused and confusing. 

In an excellent recent article in the New Yorker, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?,” journalist Emma Green provides what may be the best (and most balanced) survey of the Classical education movement that I have seen from an outsider to it all. In what follows, I would like to begin with an overview of Green’s arguments and then offer my own response as an insider of sorts—as a homeschooling parent who has been involved for many years in a Classical education co-op and as someone who still uses methods of Classical education in homeschooling children and holds a PhD in Classics. 

Historians like to complicate things, and here I would like to complicate the picture of Classical education a bit. While some public faces of the Classical education movement, including conservative politicians, do see it through the lens of culture wars, the reality looks different for the majority of ordinary families—like my own. Try as some might to see every act as political, sometimes it’s about the oikos, not the polis.

Lost Tools of Learning

For some time now, Green has been interested in the nexus of conservative politics and education. Last spring, for instance, she wrote an in-depth profile of Hillsdale College. Turning her attention to Classical schools may seem a logical next step—since they are the main pipeline of students who end up at schools like Hillsdale. Many of them, indeed, were either educated in Classical Christian schools or were Classical homeschoolers. 

Green begins her piece by setting up the contrast between Classical education and mainstream public education. Classical education places an emphasis on phonics rather than sight words when teaching kids to read. It requires much rote memorization of facts in an age where most educators oppose the idea. Last but not least, Classical education privileges reading Great Books as opposed to modern “quick lit” or graphic novels and the like. 

However, the classical view of education involves more than just what is learned and how it is learned. There is an emphasis, in the process, on moral formation—the why piece of education, which is too often lacking in modern public education. The education of the whole person in the virtues is essential, and that’s where many in the movement eagerly cite Dorothy Sayers’ famous 1947 essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” It seemed to Sayers that her society had lost the hunger for learning, and she attributed this lack of appreciation for the true, beautiful, and good to the inadequacies of modern education. Dismissing recent educational innovations, she instead talked up the Medieval Trivium, with its emphasis on the building blocks of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. 

Green is impressed by Sayers’ argument. Her curricular approach seems very sound. Why then would people like author Diane Ravitch wield the charge that “Classical charters have become weapons of the Right”? Green sees two related problems. First, the emphasis on moral formation and civics—along with the use of mostly white male authors in the curriculum—sets up Classical education for conservative takeover. Or, at least, it seems to be an attractive alternative to the “woke” public school education. The politicians on the right whom Green quotes indeed say as much.

Second, the idea of pursuing goodness, truth, and beauty sounds grand in theory, but not everyone defines these terms the same way. Green is left wondering: how can the Classical education movement grow without embracing a pluralistic definition of these values? Some decry wokeness in response to this very question, while others, like Jessica Hooten Wilson, note that the task is one merely of restoring the voices who had always been a part of the movement anyway. Still, the question remains: can the movement be inclusive of students who are not white and Christian, if Doug Wilson is one of the movement’s spokespeople? This is a good question, and Green is not the only one asking. When she interviewed Susan Wise Bauer, a writer and teacher widely respected in the Classical education circles, the latter noted: if she and Wilson were having a conversation about Classical education, perhaps the only thing they would agree on is the importance of teaching grammar. (I guess this means she’s opting out of “No Quarter November.”)

Green has done her homework, and yet, the Classical education movement is even more diverse than perhaps she realizes. I contend that the key to seeing Classical education flourishing between the left and the right is to examine Classical homeschooling.

Doing Homer at Home

I first stumbled into the world of Classical education completely by accident. In the summer of 2012, I was trying to figure out the homeschooling approach for the following year for my then nearly seven-year-old, when a homeschooling colleague at the secular state university where we were both teaching at the time told me about a Classical Conversations homeschooling co-op that was meeting three minutes from my then home in rural Georgia. I had never heard of Classical education as a philosophy, nor had I heard of Classical Conversations. I did, however, hold a PhD in Classics and had been planning to teach my child Latin and Greek at some point. And I was firmly committed to homeschooling.

In retrospect, my complaints against American public schools bore a remarkable resemblance to Sayers’s own jeremiad against mid-twentieth-century British education. She phrased her concerns much better than I could, but like me, she was a trained Classicist, and studying dead languages was what she loved best—with the possible exception of learning languages that weren’t quite so dead. She did, after all, master Renaissance Italian just to be able to read and translate Dante.

Alas, Classical Conversations turned out to be a different sort of Classical schooling than I expected. I suspect Sayers too would have been disappointed. CC involved no Greek, only minimal Latin until middle school (and then taught poorly out of an appalling textbook first published in 1938), and no Greco-Roman Classics until high school. There were also factual errors in some of the “memory work” that kids were supposed to memorize at the grammar stage of the program. The history curriculum peppily referred to the Civil War as “the war between the states.” And then there was the logic curriculum used in middle school, crafted by an illogical guy who contradicted himself regularly—his name was Doug Wilson, and I had never heard of him before my child had to suffer through his logic textbook, which we promptly took out with the mixed paper recyclables at the end of the year. Oh, how I miss 2015, when one could be a conservative evangelical and not be familiar with Doug Wilson. 

Still, for all its flaws, Classical Conversations proved mostly good for my oldest, who attended it for six years, and for my middle son, who thoroughly enjoyed his one year with it. The emphasis on memorization at the elementary school level proved wonderfully useful for such subjects as math and geography. In early middle school, my oldest and his classmates were able to draw both a map of the US and the world on a massive blank sheet of paper from memory. That was pretty impressive, to say the least. Most importantly, some of the moms I met in CC are still friends who are dear to me, even as our oldest kids have now graduated high school. 

As I think back, the reason that we stuck it out with CC for six years had nothing to do with the curriculum, which was a mixed bag. Rather, our decision to stay had everything to do with friendships and with location. It was a community that met close to my home, and it was a community that really bonded as a community of friends with diverse political and theological views, but with a shared commitment to teaching our children together. When that meeting site closed and the nearest chapter was thirty minutes away, we were done with CC. 

Longing for Beauty

We were not, however, done with Classical education. Most of the truly Classical content that my kids have learned has always been, after all, at home. The homeschooling method my family uses these days, as we homeschool our younger two kids, is closest to unschooling. Still, our unschooling has a Classical flavor of the sort that Sayers would approve—even if perhaps the idea of a child standing on his head while trying to solve a math problem would have appalled her as much as it might appall anyone who has never homeschooled an energetic boy. Or maybe Sayers would have just joined him herself. She definitely had enough spunk.

Speaking of spunk, my eight-year-old is currently in his second year of koine Greek. He asked if he could start Latin next year. Who am I to deny such a request? He is also a walking encyclopedia of information on US and world history—largely because of his own reading. He always had a great memory, but the Classical emphasis on memory training—the process of having to memorize facts, poems, speeches—seems to have strengthened his memory further. Last but not least, we read a lot of Great Books, both as family read-alouds and also individually—books that the eight-year-old reads to himself. We are deliberately picky about reading materials for all ages. In particular, while modern bookstores too often peddle subpar offerings to children, I am firmly convinced that children’s books should be beautiful. 

It is this quest for beauty in everything we read, consume, and analyze that drives the selection of books and topics we study. It is a particularly powerful instinct for my youngest, who recently turned five, and is currently in the throes of learning to read. She loves writing—the beauty of crafting letters painstakingly, one at a time. Words to her are beautiful pictures to decorate. A graceful dancer and an enthusiastic singer, she draws rather than writes the names of friends, family members, and her doll. 

This longing for beauty in the every day, however, brings us back full circle to the questions Green had set out to investigate in her research on Classical schools. Is this kind of education inherently political? Perhaps it is, as the views of some political leaders who have expressed support for the movement declare. Outside the realm of education, I have previously written about the far right’s obsession with Socrates. And the hijacking of the Greco-Roman Classics for various political aims, including by the Third Reich, is well documented. But these are not people in my home. Should the quest for beauty in the every day, including in education, be coded “left” or “right”? This sounds utterly absurd, and nowhere is the absurdity as clear as in the highly libertarian environment of schooling at home.

The real question may be: is this desire for beauty, goodness, and truth political for me and my family? Is it political for every homeschooling family that opts for a similar approach? This is a more difficult question to answer. I never thought, when I was first attracted to the study of the ancient world as a (then) secular Jewish high school sophomore, that signing up for Latin class was a political statement. I simply loved the beauty of intellectual puzzles. Over a quarter century later, I still do. 

And so, searching for political motives in Classical schooling is complicated, especially so among Classical homeschoolers. While none of us exist in a vacuum, it is more difficult to peg individuals into any specific category. Besides, the quest for human flourishing, including the intellectual flourishing of children and families, should not be a partisan affair.

The story of Classical homeschoolers, more than anything, is a story of an incredible diversity of motivations, transcending the predictably facile political categories. Classical homeschooling, in other words, dwells between the right and the left, because the love of life-long learning and the idea that this kind of intellectual curiosity is part of what makes us truly human is not a partisan value. Indeed, as I wrote six years ago, the study of Latin has been growing faster among homeschoolers than any other segment of the population. These Latin-studying homeschoolers are remarkably diverse politically and religiously. I noted at the time that “lest you think that Classical education is entirely a Christian homeschooling phenomenon, Wiccans are able to claim it as their own thanks to Martianus Capella, the Late Antique pagan writer who first proposed the idea of the Seven Liberal Arts.” Green’s own experience in visiting an immigrant and POC-serving Classical charter school that is thriving in South Bronx underscores the point.

In some ways, of course, everything any of us do is political. By choosing to homeschool, we already made a possibly unintentional political decision: the local public school is funded based on the number of children enrolled. No less political, perhaps, is the decision to teach my children Latin and Greek. What else could they be learning instead? This has become a political question, a real hot-button issue. 

But as a homeschooling parent, grounded in my own family’s day-to-day life, it is not a question for which I have time. I’m too busy reading Homer with my eight-year-old.