Within the last century, schools have traded classical education for efficiency, leaving generations of students taught but not truly educated. We’re shoved into classes like chemistry and physics with little prior knowledge that would actually help us get through them. We begin learning complex formulas and concepts without any basic understanding of the subject. It’s strange how we spend years studying topics without ever learning the foundation of what makes them matter.
Classical education may seem outdated in comparison to modern education. It’s less focused on careers and direct job preparation, but classical education forms stronger thinkers and communicators, skills that are beneficial for any career. Every job or subject benefits from a foundation of reasoning and classical education prioritizes that foundation.
However, a classical education is not entirely self-taught. Teachers provide students with the foundation for everything, along with the skills necessary to help them look deeper. Beyond thinking, there’s a strong emphasis on grammar, writing and rhetoric, which strengthens communication skills. An understanding of history and philosophy allows students to connect ideas across time and disciplines, tying everything they learn together. This style aims to create not just workers but well-rounded people through lessons in ethics and teachings of personal responsibility. Students become capable of engaging in conversations about anything from physics to literature to art.
On the other hand, modern education is often overstandardized, a one-size-fits-all system that ignores individual learning styles and places an excessively high emphasis on test scores. In 2001, with the No Child Left Behind Act, teachers were required to meet test scores—or rather, their students were. Under this system, teachers are pressured to meet standardized benchmarks rather than nurture intellectual curiosity. In many subjects, the curriculum feels rushed, topics are disconnected, and learning is done in isolation and rarely builds on one another. It creates surface-level knowledge with little depth and lacks a focus on critical thinking and character.
But with that in mind, a classical education isn’t without its faults. It places far less focus on modern subjects such as technology and stresses ancient texts and traditional methods that may feel outdated. These methods require highly skilled teachers and time-intensive, deep discussions, and extensive readings that may not serve a real, relevant purpose in modern curricula.
Given today’s fast-paced schedules and extracurricular demands, modern education does have its advantages. It’s adaptable to changing times and offers clear requirements and structured pathways that create stability. There’s often a broader range of subjects, with exposure to many sciences, arts and mathematics. Yet this often makes the system feel rushed. While modern education prioritizes efficiency and breadth, it frequently lacks the depth and interconnectedness that classical education provides.
A classical education shaped many important historical figures—people we grew up reading about or even admiring. Aristotle, one of the world’s most influential philosophers, built his ideologies on logic and ethics. Founding Fathers such as Jefferson, Adams and Hamilton built our democracy on the concept of reasoned debate. Beloved authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit”, and C.S. Lewis, author of “The Chronicles of Narnia”, were deeply influenced by classical learning. Even Isaac Newton benefited from it. Though many assume classical education focuses only on writing or the arts, it actually studies human nature and society through an interdisciplinary lens—languages, arts and both the social and natural sciences. By connecting knowledge across disciplines and emphasizing reasoning over rote memorization, classical education shaped minds capable of innovation in many fields.
In modern schools, before we even understand the world, we’re expected to memorize it. We’re thrown into classrooms filled with formulas, data and definitions we’ve had no prior exposure to, yet we’re expected to make sense of it. Schools promise to prepare students for the real world, but somewhere along the way, they forgot to teach us how to think.
We may graduate with impressive test scores, but without the tools to question, analyze and connect ideas, much of that knowledge remains superficial. It isn’t enough to simply know the facts; we must also be trained to understand, interpret and apply them beyond the walls of school and the limits of standardized tests.
