Readings and Resources
on Classical Education

by ANDREW J. ZWERNEMAN

Education is culture-centered. The culture benefits the students. It situates the students in the world and frees them to know and love it as they could not otherwise. At the same time, by knowing and loving what the culture has to offer, students benefit the culture they have inherited: They honor their forebears and preserve what they passed on for other generations, as their teachers do in bequeathing the culture to them.

By E.D. HIRSCH

“Knowledge of content and of the vocabulary acquired through learning about content are fundamental to successful reading comprehension; without broad knowledge, children's reading comprehension will not improve and their scores on reading comprehension tests will not budge upwards either. Yet, content is not adequately addressed in American schools, especially in the early grades.”

By JACOB HOWLAND

Liberal education is the individual assimilation of cultural memory: we recover the historical and metaphysical ground of our being by studying the accumulated riches of the past. This humanly essential undertaking, which every generation must begin anew, is worthwhile both for its own sake and for its fruits. It orders our lives towards goodness and decency, rescues hard-won truths from oblivion, and makes it possible to discern meaningful signals within the general noise of time.

By PATRICK DENEEN

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their minds are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten it origins and aims, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference about itself.