According to John Taylor Gatto in his September 9, 2009 Yes! Magazine article, "Take Back Your Education," "Classical schooling – the kind I was lucky enough to have growing up – teaches independent thought, appreciation for great works, and an experience of the world not found within the confines of a classroom. It was an education that is missing in public schools today but still exists in many private schools – and can for you and your children, too, if you take time to learn how to learn."
The classical method, based on the ancient Greek education system, approaches student learning in three developmental stages known as the Trivium: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. These stages are roughly similar to conventional school's division of elementary, middle, and high school levels. However, the classical approach focuses on the whole person, including mind, body, and imagination; whereas conventional schooling focuses primarily on academic training.
According the co-author of The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (W.W. Norton, 2009), Susan Weiss Bauer, in her WellTrainedMind.com article, "The Joy of Classical Education," the trivium approach also differs from conventional schooling, "because it uses real, living books and hands-on experimentation rather than relying on textbooks and canned presentations, classical education is a matter of exploration, of reading, thinking, and talking, and of discovery – not of rote memorization and regurgitation."
During his thirty-year teaching career, John Taylor Gatto used the classical emphasis on qualities and specific powers. He prioritized opportunities outside the classroom for each student to strengthen powers and work on weaknesses. He said, "If you understand where a kid wants to go – the kid has to understand that first – it isn’t hard to devise exercises, complete with academics, that can take them there." In a similar vein, Gatto is also a proponent of the playful, interest-driven homeschooling approach known as unschooling.
Gatto explained that "Classical schooling isn’t psychologically driven. The ancient Greeks discovered thousands of years ago that rules and ironclad procedures, when taken too seriously, burn out imagination, stifle courage, and wipe the leadership clean of resourcefulness. Greek education was much more like play, with studies undertaken for their own sake, to satisfy curiosity. It assumed that sane children want to grow up and recognized that childhood ends much earlier than modern society typically allows."
As Gatto claimed, his students were the exception. Most children in today's public schools don't receive a liberal education, because it conflicts with standard curricula and testing requirements, as well as the necessities of a capitalist culture. Gatto deliberately broke the rules. He said, "Liberal education served the ancient Greeks well until they got too rich to allow it, just as it served America the same way until we got too rich to allow it."
In a 1909 address to New York City teachers, would-be U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson said, "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity to forgo the privilege of a liberal education."
In other words, only a minority of children receive a liberal education. Homeschoolers can be among them, as Gatto said, "if you take time to learn how to learn." An adaptation of classical education, the Charlotte Mason Education method, is also popular with homeschoolers.
Sara McGrath - Sara is a veteran homeschool mom of three, Usborne consultant, and the author of Unschooling: A Lifestyle of Learning.
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