What is a "classical education?">

We see constant change in the prevailing educational fashions, with each new fad, like clothing, replacing the one previous. The textbook industry publishes and republishes Science, Math, and History books at a pace that could make one believe that the stuff of each course is in a constant state of flux.

Classical education, however, claims that both the nature of the mind and the way the mind knows are the same today as they were in the beginning. Perennial truth about nature and about God is the proper object of classical education, not the changing conjectures and opinions of today’s educational trend setters. Classical education proposes only the same time-honored, enduring methods. And what are these methods?

• Reading the ‘great books’ and discussing them around a table.
• Asking and answering ‘yes or no’ questions in a sustained dialogue while pursuing the truth about a question.
• Demonstrating logically a necessary or probable theorem before a critical audience.
• Reciting or singing from memory the words or music of those who were wise and loved beauty.

These are some of the methods used in a classical education. Young people deserve to have a few years in which to fulfill and develop the mind for its own sake; to have a protected time when they are not asked to sacrifice their minds to some utilitarian end. We at The Lyceum would love to see each student begin this kind of education in high school and continue it at a Catholic four-year liberal arts college. This would indeed help them to live the examined life.

Classical education is about learning to think well; to order one’s thoughts and words wisely. To do this, one must know the arts of the Trivium: Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic.

Attaining wisdom presupposes having not only the tools of thinking (or of learning) but also a comprehensive knowledge of the things that God has ordained for us to speak and think about, namely the physical and Spiritual world, and, at last, Himself. Hence the arts and sciences of the Quadrivium, the four arts which prefigure all that is knowable: all practical and speculative knowledge of the world inside man and the world outside of man.

The Lyceum is not a school for everyone. While classical education is a privilege, it is also a great responsibility. Classical education demands that students be actively engaged. It demands an individual response from each student. Classical education does not come in a glitzy package, republished and reformatted from year to year.

John Henry Cardinal Newman proposes the object, aims and methods of liberal education in his Idea of a University. He says:

"This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal Education."

The Lyceum proposes "to form Catholic, liberally educated ladies and Gentlemen." We hope that Newman would be pleased and that he will bless our endeavor from the exalted company of the saints, among whom he now dwells.