Author Topic: Inside the New Wave of Old-School Education  (Read 219 times)

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Inside the New Wave of Old-School Education
« on: March 28, 2024, 08:14:40 pm »
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.
By Julia Steinberg
March 24, 2024
Quote
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 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.”)

While this time-honored approach to education has fallen out of favor in recent decades—as many American schools have prioritized ideology and equal outcomes over excellence—it is now making a big comeback across the country. This is driven not only by parents’ growing realization of the old system’s academic failures but a sense that contemporary campus culture lacks much in the way of moral vision.

“If you are not given an education and the basic human skills of reading, writing, communicating, thinking, deliberating, you’re at mercy of being left in the dust; you’re being left where the animals are,” Greg Billion, Chesterton’s 32-year-old headmaster, told me. “We’re seeing that in the world: reason has been abolished, rational discourse has been abandoned. And that’s largely because our education system has failed to form people. The classical way of educating places a special emphasis on forming the faculties by which man can be free.” ...
Read entire article at The Free Press
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