Growth of Classical Education Schools Astonishing

I hope you had a blessed and grateful Thanksgiving with family and friends.

The growth of classical education schools is astonishing. 

The numbers keep rising; there is no sign that the movement is beginning to plateau. Schools open, networks are created, charters are authorized, and kids fill the seats. One would think that as more spaces are available, the (supposedly) small number of parents who favor the classical way would be satisfied, and demand would diminish.

But that is not the case. Parents are waiting in line for the opportunity to give their children a "classical" education.

A great cultural shift is underway in our country. It is both spiritual and political.

Be informed, not misled.

Education.

While progressives believed they had all but won the war for the minds of our children, parents have become fed-up with the Left's indoctrination as a substitute for education.   

How many Americans want their children to study Latin, read the Old and New Testaments, and appreciate the High Art of the Renaissance? Couldn’t be too many, say intellectuals and educators on the Left. Those enlightened practitioners can’t help assuming that a classical curriculum should turn people off, given the half-century of multiculturalist criticism of Western civilization and American exceptionalism, but apparently, the long campaign to kill respect for the old lineage hasn’t succeeded.

A prime example is Valor Education, a network of five schools in Texas. The first one opened in Austin in 2018, a charter school squarely in the classical mode. Two years later, school leaders saw enough local interest to open another school in Austin, then in 2022, a school in Kyle, and in 2023 schools in Leander and San Antonio. The numbers now: 4,200 enrolled in the five campuses and 5,500 on the waitlists.

Valor speaks forthrightly of Great Books. It requires students to memorize poetry, learn Latin, and study the fine arts. In 8th grade, students read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Tom Sawyer, and The Merchant of Venice. Two years before, they read William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. 

Another example is Alberta Classical Academy in Calgary, which was authorized as a charter school in January 2022 and started in August of that year. Caylan Ford, one of the founders, says that they had to pass out fliers, circulate at the Calgary Stampede, and reach out to local churches in order to recruit because the idea of a charter classical school was unknown in the region. The building could handle 280 kids, and in the spring Ford worried that they wouldn’t reach nearly that number.

But on day one, 294 students had signed up, many of them Nigerian Christians worried about safety and wokeness in the public schools. In its second year, a campus opened in Edmonton, and enrollment tripled, with 2,000 kids on the waitlist. This year, Alberta Classical has 1,300 students. The curriculum shows the same rigorous classical focus as Valor. Mandatory Latin begins in 5th grade, there’s an Ancient Greek Club and a Mandarin Club, and 9th-grade readings include Shakespeare, George Orwell, and Marcus Aurelius.  

The readings are daunting, especially in an age of screen-induced aliteracy, but it’s exactly what thousands of parents want for their kids. If we showed the Valor and Alberta curricula to a public school instructor not long out of ed school and well-trained in leftist dogmas, that teacher would shake her head in disbelief.

To ask kids to memorize classic poems and speeches is to turn youths into automata, she believes. Rote memorization has no place in active learning, she’s been told. And Great Books are wholly age-inappropriate — few kids can handle them. The list is too dead-white-male, Eurocentric, and obsolete. Why sink kids into writings irrelevant to contemporary affairs and 21st-century identities?

Parents are rising to the occasion.

Times have changed. Parents are voting with their feet. 

Conservatives, both Catholic and Protestant, are telling so-called public education, "No. You can no longer indoctrinate my children with Leftist, Marxist beliefs."

Classical education isn’t a logistical innovation or a testing regime. It’s a positive vision of the past, challenging and rigorous but constructive and inspiring.

It’s a sad feeling for the educators, though, not just because of the loss of students. The reason for the loss cannot be ignored; the departure is an indictment of leftist learning theories. 

Classical schools treasure precisely what leftist principles reject: old books and Great Books, Western Civilization, memorization, religion, dead languages, and high art.

Every shift of public school children to classical schools erodes the authority of progressive schooling. Traditionalists are still vastly outnumbered by progressives, but their popularity among a growing population of parents gives them confidence. 

Spiritual renewal is underway in America.

Matt Brown writes in the Washington Times: "In the summer of 2019, my friend Malachi O’Brien called me and said, 'I feel like we are supposed to call one million young people to fast and pray as we enter into the Roaring Twenties.' We had the sense the 2020s would be a time when God would do something significant and powerful in America. Little did we know what was coming."

On Feb. 8, 2023, Zach Meerkreebs a minister in Kentucky was preaching at the chapel at Asbury University when something unusual and extraordinary happened. It started with a handful of students who didn’t want to leave after service was over. They sensed they should keep praying.

Over the next few hours, more students filled the chapel, which snowballed into a 24-hour service that lasted 16 days. More than 200,000 people converged on the small town of Willmore, Kentucky – a town of just 6,000 residents. There was no desire for publicity. No famous Christian speaker or band played. The only draw was the unusually strong presence of God. What was it like to be in the room?

This movement of prayer, spiritual renewal, and worship is sweeping our nation's cities and secular institutions, but the legacy media mostly does not report it.

I was a youth pastor in North Hollywood, California, in the 1970s when the great revival that we know as the "Jesus Revolution" took place. We didn't realize it was history in the making at the time. Thousands of us ministry leaders saw it simply as an answer to prayer.

We are amid another great cultural shift, spiritually and politically.

I'll be writing more about both in the coming days.

Takeaway 

I pray this "shift" will remind us that God is not silent and inactive in our world. He responds to people of faith and moves in mighty ways when we pray to Him. He hears our cries for help and cares about this generation just like He did for past generations of Americans.

Renew your passion for God. Pray fervently. And spread the good stories of what He is doing. 

It has been said,  “The fame of revival spreads the flame of revival.”

Be Encouraged. Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.