ARTICLE: Authentic Classical Education & The Use of Textbooks

Although we do use textbooks with our courses, we are implementing important steps to make our live courses authentically classical. Authentic classical education consists of Ten Timeless Elements© that have always been present including the integration of all fields of study in a hierarchical manner relying on the Great Books as the primary source material.

Although today the educational world relies on “textbooks”, you may be surprised to learn that textbooks are only a recent modern invention following the Protestant Reformation. John Comenius who was simultaneously a Realist, Rationalist and Unity of Brethren Protestant was the first to conceive the idea of a textbook c. early 17th century. The idea did not really take off in America until the mid-19th century “educational awakening in America” when America adopted the Prussian model and form of education including use of textbooks. For this, Comenius has been described as the “Father of Modern Education” or the “Prophet of Modern Education.”

As to classical education, Comenius would have none of it. He argued passionately for the complete elimination of the study of any classical secular works, and stated that those who had attended the classical schools “did not receive a serious or comprehensive education, but a preposterous and wretched one,” and agreed with another contemporary that the entire classical system had been “introduced by some evil and envious genius, the enemy of the human race.” And this is the man who conceived the notion of textbooks in opposition to classical education. He instead wanted textbooks that summarized for students what the great authors had said rather than have the students read the actual Great Teachers themselves.

Suffice to say that classical education does not consist in exclusive use of textbooks that attempt to relay or summarize or analyze what the “Great Teachers” themselves said. As Dr. Robert Hutchins noted such textbooks do “not suffer from the embarrassment of being either difficult or great” … The great books were written by the greatest liberal artists. They exhibit the range of the liberal arts. The authors were also the greatest teachers. They taught one another. They taught all previous generations, up to a few years ago. The question is whether they can teach us.”

Since 1895, all of us have become accustomed to learning via textbooks often written by a lower-tier scholar with a degree in a particular field under contract to a commercial textbook company—textbooks that distill and summarize concepts, thoughts, and facts amalgamated and framed in accord with the popular cultural thinking of the time (conventional wisdom or worse). These do not excite the imagination. They do not inspire challenges to one’s own thinking or greater self-awareness. In short, it is only the “Great Books”, most of them outside our time, place, and current culture, which can accomplish this by telling the “story” of that field of study within the entire world of knowledge and its hierarchy. It is these timeless works that can fire the imagination and inspire imitation of virtue that is timeless. As Dr, Mortimer Adler and Dr. Robert Hutchins have explained, the “Great book are great teachers; they are showing us every day what ordinary people are capable of… [As to] the fundamental problems of mankind, there are no easier books to read …they are the clearest and simplest expression of the best thinking that can be done…These books came out of ignorant, inquiring humanity. They are usually the first announcements of success in learning. Most of them were written for, and addressed to, ordinary people…Great books teach people not only how to read them, but also how to read all other books.”

Authentic classical education requires a return to education based on what the greatest teachers had to say. This return will take time and effort but it begins with supplementing our live courses with selections from the Great Books employing them in accord with authentic classical pedagogy. This may be as simple as a spelling or vocabulary list in the lower grades that uses people, places, and things we read of in the Iliad, Odyssey, or other Great Books. Or it may be emulating something like St. Patrick’s method of using the alphabet to teach religion, or using the same grammatical methods that St. Bede the Venerable or St. Isidore and countless others used incorporating examples from the Great Books including Sacred Scripture. It may involve teaching and learning about geography, algebra, astronomy and other sciences through examples found in the Iliad, Odyssey and many other Great Books. It may mean teaching reading and speech/rhetoric using short poems or prose from the Great Books. There are many other examples, but this conveys what we mean by integration. If it works well, our K-8 students will hit the Great Books years like their counterparts from the 4th century B.C. to the 19th century, i.e., not already fully educated in the trivium and quadrivium but also already well familiar and relishing the basic stories, characters, places, names, etc. found in the Great Books.

This is the approach that the Early Church Fathers like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexander, Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzen, St. Gregory of Nyssa and many others not only learned as children in secular classical schools but later adopted for use in Christian schools. The Church has always followed their lead in this since then.