From Classical Schools Aren’t Really Classical.

In study after study over the last forty years, Krashen has found that exposure to extensive comprehensible input is the decisive factor in language mastery.

The implication for language instructors is clear: Students should read and hear as much interesting, intelligible content in the target language as possible.

Sayers reminded her audience of the Medieval Trivium, the core subjects of a classical education: grammar, logic (or dialectic), and rhetoric. Then, in an imaginative reapplication, she proposed that these subjects were not merely complementary areas of study but corresponded to distinct stages of child development. Elementary-age children should be taught grammar, channeling their love for rote memorization; junior high students should learn logic, since they are beginning to form independent opinions; and high school students ought to study rhetoric, the pinnacle of the pyramid, since they are honing the art of persuasion. The problem with this interpretation of the Trivium is that it has no basis in history. Earlier educators never conceived of the Trivium primarily as a sequence, and Sayers’ assertions about children’s learning preferences were founded solely on her own recollections of childhood.

Regrettably, today’s “classical” educators have embraced this hypothesis in the realm of Latin teaching. They argue that the goal of studying Latin is to develop problem-solving skills, recognize English word roots, or learn how to think in systems—in short, anything other than to actually read Latin.

It is not hard to conclude that the claim to be “classical,” like the insistence on Latin teaching, is rooted in nostalgia. Older is better; ancient is virtuous. But it is a nostalgia for something that never existed. As we have seen above, CCE’s script has little in common with the educational philosophies of Aristotle, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Rhabanus Maurus. It does not appear to have been examined in the light of actual classical thinking. The many, many articles commending the “classical” model to parents and defending it against critics—and expanding its definition to encompass all sorts of non-classical things—suggest that whatever is not “progressive” is “classical” by default. The term is being used as a foil.

There is a terrible irony in all of this. CCE advocates want to guard the treasures of Western civilization against an iconoclastic liberalism, but instead they wind up constructing a totally novel interpretation of the classical tradition and an instrumentalist view of language learning, revealing themselves to be just as “progressive” as their opponents. By prioritizing process over content, using superficial Latin study to develop other skill sets, they follow the standard progressive model of education, which treats “critical thinking” as the end-all, be-all of schooling.

The answer is that we learn by reading. We need lots of comprehensible input in the form of engaging texts and audio content, and that rules out many of the go-to course materials (looking at you, Wheelock’s)

In the words of the earthy and brilliant Reginald Foster, the Vatican’s official Latinist for many years, “Every bum and prostitute in ancient Rome spoke Latin, and they didn’t learn it by memorization.”