WHY CLASSICAL?

When defining Paideia, words such as education, training, and culture are often used. Other frequently used phrases are “Christian worldview” or “good character,” but Paideia involves much, much more. It shapes what a person loves, what they enjoy, and how they think and act. Paideia is the ingredient in our hearts and minds that motivates the choices we make, determines how we see the world, and sustains our culture.

We’ve all heard of the classics: Homer, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, with the list still expanding. There’s a reason we’ve heard of them. In the 1950s, Mortimer Adler assembled a collection of classics based on the Western tradition which he called the “Great Books.” The term “Western Canon” includes much of the same corpus, but it highlights Western works, whereas great books are not necessary.

The great conversation is the age-old conversation carried on by thinkers and writers as they build on, respond to, and refine their predecessors’ great ideas. It happens when Aristotle reads Plato and disagrees, a Roman reads Aristotle and adds to him, an early Christian like Augustine uses one of their ideas to explain a Christian doctrine, a medieval monk systematized it, a reformer reforms it, and early moderns discusses it. And now we have the conversation in the form of classic texts and it’s our turn to learn from and add to it. Dealing with ideas in the great conversation has proved for centuries to develop critical thinking skills, imagination, logic, and rhetoric.

The trivium is the liberal arts that involve language. And we must not forget that, according to ancient and medieval understanding, the ability to use language goes hand in hand with the ability to reason and think; his ability to reason and speak sets man apart from animals. The curriculum of the trivium is grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

This method comes from Socrates as portrayed by Plato in his dialogues. It is said that an oracle declared Socrates to be the wisest man alive, simply because he understood how little he actually knew: “So I appear to be wiser…in just this one small respect: that when I don’t know things, I don’t think that I do either.”

While fine arts produce beautiful music and art, and mechanical arts produce solid rocking chairs and car engines, liberal arts train the mind to think. They train the human mind in logic, language, and mathematics. In doing so, they strengthen one’s mind, which benefits the other arts and gives one the tools of learning needed to find knowledge (i.e. science). They are called “liberal,” because they make for free-thinking people, people who don’t need others to direct them but can direct themselves, people who can lead others.

Classical educators understand the importance of truth, beauty, and goodness, and there is no better way to cultivate a love and appreciation for beauty than by learning to create beauty for oneself. When a student learns to make music or paint, they also learn to see and enjoy the detail and skill in someone else’s music and art.

“Subjects” are a hallmark of modern education: algebra for an hour, then literature, then physics, then Bible. But when subjects are isolated from each other, students make fewer connections, even between subjects that fit well together such as history and literature. Instead, classical students learn to use all their skills in every class, and develop the habit of taking everything in life from a Christian perspective.

The quadrivium involves mathematics. It develops reasoning with numbers and quantities. The four subjects that the medievals categorized under mathematics were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Today, arithmetic and geometry are considered mathematical, although astronomy and music might seem out of place. The classical art of arithmetic dealt less in rote computation than in finding number patterns and number theory. Geometry, too, was less about plugging in the proper equation than about understanding magnitudes and doing proofs to understand and deduce equations for oneself.