The Importance of a Classical Education

The Importance of a Classical Education

This essay will attempt to answer three questions; what is classical education, why is it necessary in our day and what are its benefits?

The word "classical" or "classic" is used in many contexts and often without specific meaning: Classic Coke, classical music, classic rock; however, classical usually means something that through time for various reasons has been proven worthy of our respect and interest. In music, the work of certain composers has been recognized as worth saving while that of others, even though perhaps popular in its own time, has been tossed aside to the dust-bin of history. The same is true of books; some books are more worthy of study than others because of the profundity and clarity with which they express the ideas that they contain.

The study of the great books has been the backbone of good education for centuries. If you look at the books read by the intellectual giants of our culture, you find that there are particular books that come up again and again. These books were required of most schoolboys until the rise of Dewey and the democratization of education through the public school system. The public school system saw these books as elitist and not easily comprehensible by the masses and therefore not appropriate for public education.

Another influence contributing to the demise of the great books was the demoralization of the Christian intellectual community. Most of the institutions of learning in this country were founded by Christians who saw it as their duty to conquer the intellectual arena for Christ. However, since the rise of secularism and especially since the humiliating defeat that biblical Christians saw at the Scope's Trial, the evangelical community has been in full retreat from the intellectual arena. Before the turn of the century, most institutions of learning were dominated by those who thought from a biblical worldview; however, this consensus quickly began to crumble and in 1925 at the Scope's Trial, through the public humiliation of William Jennings Bryan's creationism, academia as well as the general culture came to hold biblical Christianity as unworthy of intellectual regard. Even though the trial was in no way a rigorous debate of the creation issue, its effect on the Christian intellectual community was nothing short of disastrous. From that point on Christians felt as though the intellectual community had humiliated them and, to return the favor, they abandoned the intellectual community in droves.