If you do not have the teachers who can teach a classical curriculum, begin to find them.

Classical Education Can Purge a Multitude of Sins

By Anthony Esolen


I was in Oklahoma City last fall, sitting in a restaurant with my host, Father Nathan Carr, an Anglican priest and the principal of The Academy of Classical Christian Studies. That is a new and most heartening educational initiative—a school now comprising three campuses in and near the city. The Academy is the result of a merger of two schools founded in 2004 by Christian parents who wanted their children to be immersed in the cultural heritage of the west. They knew that the state’s schools would not serve.

From those fragile beginnings the schools grew quickly. The Academy has an enrollment of 465 children, most of them attending five days a week, others taking advantage of a “blended” schedule for parents who want to teach their children at home for two or three days in the week, and send them to school for special courses on the other days.

They are indeed classical, as I witnessed in that restaurant. By chance one of the school’s families was there, so Father Carr asked their daughter if she’d recite to me some poetry she had committed to memory—that faculty which wise educators have always known how to foster, but which is now neglected or despised. All of the Academy’s students learn poetry by heart. That’s the finest way to learn it, as any lover of poetry or music will tell you. So she obliged. She recited, flawlessly, sixty lines of the second canto of Dante’s Inferno. Her selection was the moving conversation between Beatrice and Virgil. “I was among the souls in Limbo,” she began. She was eight years old.

I cannot praise highly enough what I observed in that school, especially the clear vision of the principal, the teachers, and the parents, setting out to recover what has been abandoned. They had the cheerfulness of people who have taken on a difficult and wonderful task, and who knew they were in the right. They had integrated their intellectual and spiritual lives. It was invigorating to be in their company.

Thence I derive a lesson for Catholics (well represented in the Academy, by the way), and some recommendations.

...............


Read more: www.crisismagazine.com