Classical education is a different way of thinking about education.

If you ask different people in different times and places why they are educating their children and what they should be teaching them, you will get some different answers. If you asked the puritans who settled America, they would say, “so that our children can read the Bible for themselves.” This is not a bad answer: this is a very worthy thing to do. If you asked the founding fathers of our country, they would say, “people need an education befitting a free man and a statesman, so that they can participate in public political life and decision making.” A democracy of ignorant people is just a dangerous mob, so I think that this is also a pretty wise answer. If you ask most public school principals in modern America, I’m pretty sure they would say that the skills taught in school prepare students for life: in other words the systems that exist in modern life require you to be literate, more or less arbitrarily, and you’re going to struggle if you don’t get an education. If you ask the average American why kids have to go to school, the answer is “so they can get a job later”. This is very pragmatic, although I’m not entirely sure that it is true. 

What would a philosopher say? Plato and Aristotle would say that we haven’t asked “why” enough times. You need to keep asking until you get to the very bottom. All of these answers are true, but they don’t get at the real reason.

What Aristotle discovered is that when you ask “why” enough times, you discover the things that people really do for their own sake. These are called the three transcendentals: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Everything that we do is for the sake of one of these things. 

Classical education is the education of the philosophers. It tries to drill right down to the true, the good, and the beautiful without taking shortcuts or aiming for lesser goods like money or job skills.

Annunciation Classical is a Catholic homeschool academy rooted in the classical tradition, with a focus on Latin and the Great Books. Contact us today to get started