In 2007, Minnesota’s Saint Agnes School, located in central St. Paul, was on the verge of default. With rapidly declining enrollment, an institution which for more than a century had been considered a cornerstone of Catholic primary and secondary education, was now struggling just to keep its doors open.
In other words, a classical education is available to the children of almost any family willing to pursue it.
But today, the school is once again thriving, its student census more than doubled to 835 and its campus benefiting from $20 million in recent improvements. A 2024 finalist for Hillsdale College’s prestigious Henry Salvatori Award, St. Agnes has become well known among education reformers for daring to follow what in 2007 was still an unconventional turnaround strategy: not adopting some new fundraising plan or marketing strategy but fundamentally restructuring its curriculum.
The school not only offered more rigorous courses in math, history, and other basic subjects, but did so in a way that engaged pupils in daily discussions of life’s deepest questions: the nature of love, the meaning of suffering, and the definition of justice. Even athletic competitions, service clubs, and other non-academic activities were reorganized to provide students with opportunities to sharpen their moral and religious convictions. And in 2017, the faculty added four Dominican sisters for the purpose of reminding the school’s lay teachers of their obligation to be models of good character for their charges.
In the 18 years since St. Agnes began its revival, this blend of challenging coursework and character development – often referred to as a “classical curriculum” – has become a major educational movement and not just at Catholic academies. According to an August 2024 survey by the Heritage Foundation’s Rachel Alexander Cambre, there are now more than 1000 self-identified “classical parochial schools” in the US, many affiliated with Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, and non-denominational Protestant parishes. There are also two recently founded Hebrew programs, the Emet Classical Academy in Manhattan and Havruta in Austin, Texas.
Classical curricula from companies like Classical Conversations, Veritas Press, and Memoria have long been preferred by homeschooling parents, who appreciate the spiritual framing of academic content. But according to Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Keri D. Ingraham, these same homeschool programs are equally popular with the country’s 95,000 parent-run learning centers with low student-to-teacher ratios — so-called “microschools” — which have grown so rapidly since Covid. Arcadia Education consultants has calculated that just by themselves, homeschool families and microschools account for 39 percent of all U.S. students currently receiving a classical education.
Even some public charter schools, most often organized around a theme like “environmental sustainability” or “performing arts,” have instead elected to provide a classical education. Much of this is the result of an ongoing effort by Hillsdale College and the Barney Family Foundation, working with local citizens’ groups, to make an academically rigorous, values-based education more widely available. Since 2012, Hillsdale and Barney have launched dozens of classical charter schools, serving more than 14,500 K-12 pupils with thousands more on waitlists.
This is not to say that all classical curricula are the same. Classical charter schools, by virtue of also being public schools, are under predictable pressure to forgo religious advocacy and instead promote a moral outlook based on “community standards.” And even privately run religious schools have their own denominational characteristics.
There is also some variability when it comes to how children are taught, as many classical curricula break primary and secondary education into three distinct stages known as the trivium: the assimilation of basic facts (grades K-4), learning to reason logically (grades 5-8), and developing the ability to communicate clearly (grades 9-12). Other classical curricula are more flexible.
What does define a classical education is the conviction that memorizing facts, as important as that may be, is useless without the ability to clarify questions, express oneself clearly, and intelligently debate another person’s ideas. As a result, instructional focus is on the development of logical reasoning, often by treating that skill as a separate subject, just as phonics, handwriting, and arithmetic would be in a conventional public or private school.
Another common feature of the classical curriculum is its reliance on the great books of Western civilization to teach ethical and civic values. Especially those works which inspired America’s Founders, such as Homer’s Odyssey, Cicero’s De Republica and De Legibus, and Shakespeare’s plays.
And finally, classical curricula allow their schools to integrate — and thereby help preserve — local traditions which might otherwise vanish. Covenant Academy northwest of Houston, for example, works with a nearby farm to let students experience what it is like to grow their own food. Similarly, the Assembly of God school on Arizona’s San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation makes tribal culture part of its coursework.
Unsurprisingly, what inspires most parents to enroll their children in a classical venue is the alternative it provides to the progressive ideology which has overtaken so many K-12th grade schools in recent years. As the late Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Ian Lindquist observed in a 2019 essay for National Affairs, the rapid growth of classical schooling has largely been a response to America’s cultural divide. The widespread impression that “every elite institution seems to have turned itself into another combatant in the culture war or an instrument of hyper-aggressive progressivism,” he wrote, has made these [classical] schools “some of the most successful and thriving educational options in America.”
But enough young people have experienced a classical curriculum by now that its relative academic strengths have also become apparent. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Director of Education Policy Studies, Frederick M. Hess, has documented, classically educated students not only get exceptionally high scores on standardized achievement tests but have superior college acceptance rates as well. They even outperform students from conventional schools on the SAT, which is an exam that classical schools do not bother “teaching to.”
Thomas B. Fordham Institute senior visiting fellow Daniel Buck recalls how for years he had set himself the task of examining the various instructional techniques used by different K-12 teachers, separating out those which had been proven to improve learning from those which were just passing fads. By doing this, he imagined himself inventing a brand-new way of educating children, better than anything which had come before. But when he put all the most useful techniques together, he realized he “hadn’t discovered some great new curriculum” but simply restated the classical one.
It is not a coincidence that attendance at the National Symposium for Classical Education, which annually brings together scholars, curriculum publishers, and practitioners, has exploded from just 65 in 2021 to more than 850 at its most recent gathering in Tempe, Arizona. There is a growing realization among educators that classically schooled students end up with cognitive abilities significantly greater than those produced by other curricula.
Once more, these abilities can be cultivated in a wide variety of learning venues, from the modest family-run homeschool to the public charter school to the most expensive private school. In other words, a classical education is available to the children of almost any family willing to pursue it.
There appears to be a new elite emerging in America. Not one based on race or class or gender or connections, but on the belief that the most successful adults are those who have been taught what it means to be a good person and how to think for themselves.
READ MORE from Lewis M. Andrews: