What is Classical Education?

This is a "classic" view of classical education. The woman who wrote it was home schooled by her mother, and is now teaching her 4 kids. She and her mother wrote one of the most fameous lbooks in the classical ed world, in fact probably in the homeschool world, called The Well-Trained Mind. Next to Les Miserables, it is probably me favorite book ever. At least, it is one of the few I have read more than twice. I consider TWTM my home-school Bible.

What is Classical Education?

by Susan Wise Bauer

Classical education depends on a three-part process of training the mind. The early years of school are spent in absorbing facts, systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. In the middle grades, students learn to think through arguments. In the high school years, they learn to express themselves. This classical pattern is called the trivium.

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Lost tools of Learning, By Dorothy Sayers

This is an oldie, but a goody. It explains/justifies the classical learning model. I love it. It was part of my inspiration when I decided to home school and specifically when I settled on classical education.
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The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is a kind of behavior to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists, about metaphysics; inorganic chemists, about theology; the most irrelevant people are appointed to highly technical ministries; and plain, blunt men write to the papers to say that Epstein and Picasso do not know how to draw. Up to a certain point, and provided that the criticisms are made with a reasonable modesty, these activities are commendable. Too much specialization is not a good thing. There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or another, been taught. Even if we learned nothing—perhaps in particular if we learned nothing—our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value. However, it is in the highest degree improbable that the reforms I propose will ever be carried into effect. Neither the parents, nor the training colleges, nor the examination boards, nor the boards of governors, nor the ministries of education, would countenance them for a moment. For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages. Before you dismiss me with the appropriate phrase—reactionary, romantic, mediaevalist, laudatory temporis acti (praiser of times past), or whatever tag comes first to hand—I will ask you to consider one or two miscellaneous questions that hang about at the back, perhaps, of all our minds, and occasionally pop out to worry us.

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