Why I Lead a Classical School

The following is a brief speech I delivered at The Art of Teaching: Reading and Writing conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence.

I’d like to begin with the premise that to lead a classical school in the 21st century is to find oneself something like a monastic scribe scratching away in the flickering candlelight while a hundred printing presses thunder in the distance. To insist upon Latin declensions and Aristotelian logic when the world is fixated upon AI chatbots and Google docs with embedded links may initially seem like a relic of a bygone era taken to an almost comical extreme.

I lead a classical school because there are truths that must be known, truths that shape not just the intellect, but the soul. Not merely the facts that crowd the pages of standardized tests, not the transient data that fills our screens before vanishing into the ether, but the things that must be known in the depths of a cultivated soul. The tragedy of Hamlet, the geometry of Euclid, the virtues extolled by Aquinas, the poetry of Homer’s blind sight—these are not relics of an irrelevant past. These are the living roots of civilization itself, roots that must be tended, that must be nourished.

I lead a classical school because there is a “great forgetting” underway. You see it in the dull eyes of a child who has never been made to memorize a poem, in the hunched shoulders of a student so burdened by the jargon of pedagogy that he has lost all sense of the sublime. We speak now of ‘skills’ and ‘competencies,’ as if the human mind were a mere apparatus to be tuned for maximum efficiency, as if the great and golden inheritance of Western civilization were some expendable luxury, an ornamental frieze on the facade of a crumbling building rather than its foundation.

I lead a classical school because a generation unmoored from its own intellectual patrimony is a generation that will be led, docile and oblivious, into whatever mechanized dystopia awaits it. History, in fact, is littered with the wreckage of cultures that forgot themselves, that turned away from the labor of preserving and passing on their highest thoughts, their most exquisite expressions of beauty and truth. The once-mighty Rome, having built an empire upon the twin pillars of law and virtue, decayed from within as civic duty gave way to decadence.

The libraries of Alexandria, housing the accumulated wisdom of the ancient world, were left to burn, their destruction not only an act of conquest but a sign of a civilization that no longer knew how to guard its own inheritance.

The grandeur of Byzantium, with its luminous mosaics and theological profundity, faded as internal strife and complacency left it vulnerable to conquest. Even the flourishing culture of the Renaissance, which rekindled the intellectual fire of antiquity, eventually gave way to an age more interested in novelty than in wisdom, more enamored with dismantling tradition than with standing on its shoulders.

Again and again, we see that when a culture ceases to value its own highest achievements, when it no longer sees itself as a steward of something greater than the present moment, it begins the slow, inevitable slide into oblivion.

I lead a classical school because I don’t want to see that happen to us. A school that reads William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln is engaged in resistance, in defiance, in the sacred duty of keeping the lamps lit while the winds howl outside. It is the conscious decision to stand before a class of students and say: You are not consumers, you are not data points, you are not future employees of some faceless technocracy. You are heirs. You are the children of Athens and Rome, of Jerusalem and Florence, of Shakespeare’s England and Lincoln’s America. And if you do not receive what has been given to you—if you are not made to know it, to love it, to make it your own—then it will be lost. And you will be set aimlessly adrift.

I lead a classical school to teach students to write by hand. Because to write by hand is to think deliberately, to tether thought to the body, to slow down and dwell in language. In fact, the act of writing by hand reminds us that thinking is not a race but a craft, one that requires the kind of stillness and focus that can only be found when the mind is fully engaged with the tactile rhythm of pen or pencil on paper. We also teach students to write in cursive, a beautiful bridge between the aesthetic and the intellectual. The hand, shaped by the mind, becomes the perfect instrument to articulate the delicate balance of beauty and purpose.

We require students to take notes by hand in an organized way—not simply as a form of transcription, not as a mechanical exercise where words are tapped out on a chromebook or a laptop. To take notes is to engage actively, to wrestle with ideas as they unfold in real time, to sift, to select, to interpret.

But beyond the page, beyond even the discipline of written thought, we ask our students to engage with the world in ways that demand both introspection and outward vision. We require them to memorize and recite poems, to inhabit the language of the past as a means of anchoring the mind in something eternal. These poems are not collections of words to be memorized for a grade, but vessels that carry the wisdom of centuries, reminders that the soul of a nation, of a civilization, is preserved in verse. To recite these poems is to send thoughts backward and forward in time, creating a bridge between who we are and who we might be.

In every act of learning—whether it be reading, writing, memorizing, or reciting—we promote the deliberate cultivation of the mind, the slow, thoughtful engagement with the world around us and within us, so that our students may not merely exist, but understand, appreciate, and, in time, shape the world they inherit.

I lead a classical school so that students may learn traditional grammar, including the practice of sentence diagramming. No, these are not punitive exercises. They are acts of restoration, acts of reassembling language so that meaning is made clear, acts of reclaiming the power of language to convey truth. We teach students to read slowly, deliberately, carefully, not as passive consumers of text but as seekers of truth, as analysts, as interpreters of what lies beneath the surface of every word. To read well is a skill that requires patience and precision, the ability to hear what the author has said and what the author meant, and in that space between, to discover something vital and profound. And so we read the classic works of literature—not as lifeless relics of a past era, but as urgent voices speaking across time, voices that still have something vital to say. Poetry, too, not as a mere art form, but as the medium through which we speak with the divine. We re-read these texts because their truths are not exhausted; they linger, waiting for each generation to uncover the depths of meaning buried within.

I lead a classical school because we study logic, and not only in logic classes. Yes, we have logic classes, but we also teach the logic of Latin, of mathematics, of geometry and astronomy. The logic of language, where every sentence, every clause, must follow its own rules in order to clearly convey meaning. The logic of geometry, where form and structure reveal the beauty of the universe in its simplest expressions. The logic of astronomy, where the stars themselves follow an order that mirrors the same rationality governing language, geometry, and the laws of thought. We teach rhetoric, too, for without the power to speak clearly, to persuade, to call others to action, all the logic in the world remains inert. Each discipline sharpens the mind, forms a habit of thought, and prepares our students not for passive existence but for active participation in a world that demands clarity, truth, and reason.

I lead a classical school not merely to teach, but to initiate, to guide students into the long, unbroken conversation of the arts, to train their hands and voices to join in. We begin in the earliest years with line and curve, with hue and form, with the precise geometry of perspective. The principles of design—proportion, unity, symmetry—are not mere abstractions but pathways to an order that undergirds the world itself. And what better way to apprehend this order than through the study of those who came before? That’s why our curriculum is strewn with the works of Michelangelo and Caravaggio, of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Art history is not a parade of static images but an unfolding narrative, where students, by encountering the past, come to see their own hands as capable of shaping the future. The same holds in music, where the discipline of notation, of melody soaring above the structure of harmony, becomes a means of participating in something ancient, enduring, and transcendent. Palestrina’s polyphony, Bach’s fugues, Mozart’s operatic wit—these are living presences in the classical school.

At this point, someone in the back may be asking: Why does any of this matter? Why should a student in the 21st century be troubled with the polyphony of Palestrina, the syllogisms of Aquinas, the sonnets of Shakespeare? What can a boy with a smartphone in his pocket and the sum total of all human knowledge at his fingertips possibly gain from diagramming sentences with a pencil and paper? The answer, of course, is that knowledge is not wisdom, that information is not understanding. To consult a search engine is not to know the restless spirit of Augustine, nor the tragic vision of Sophocles. To read a Wikipedia summary of Dante’s Inferno is not to descend with him, step by harrowing step, into the abyss and to emerge, trembling, into the light of Paradise. It is, rather, to mistake the map for the journey.

I lead a classical school because the great conversation of Western civilization is not over, though its volume has been lowered to a whisper. I lead a classical school because there are still children whose souls have not been mechanized, whose imaginations have not yet been flattened by the dead weight of bureaucratic learning objectives. I lead a classical school because, in a world addicted to novelty, someone must remind the young that there are perennial truths still worth knowing, that there is an inheritance waiting for them, should they only have the courage to claim it.

I lead a classical school because education is not a formless pursuit of modern trends, but a timeless endeavor to shape minds and souls in the pursuit of goodness, beauty, and truth. I lead a classical school because we do not treat education as a shapeless mass of “21st-century skills,” but rather as a deliberate cultivation of seven pillars upon which true learning rests. We call them the Seven C’s: Curiosity (well, really “wonder”), Competency, Creativity, Culture, Compassion, Content-rich learning, and the Character to uphold them all. Each one is a defiant rebuke to the mechanization of the mind, each one a means of restoring the purpose of education itself.

I lead a classical school to cultivate wonder not as idle amusement but as the restless pursuit of wisdom. We demand competency, not for mere employability but for the mastery of disciplines worthy of devotion. Creativity, not as self-indulgence, but as participation in the divine act of making. Culture, not as an optional elective, but as the breath of civilization itself. Compassion, not as sentiment, but as the moral order that binds human beings together. Content-rich learning, not as an afterthought, but as the inheritance that must be claimed, preserved, and passed on. And at the heart of it all, Character, the inner architecture without which all else collapses into dust. These are the marks of the educated mind. These are the marks of the classical student.

I lead a classical school because our nation needs citizens who understand their history. Without knowledge of our past, we cannot navigate our present or plan for a prosperous future. When people disconnect from their history, they don’t become forward-thinking pioneers; they become castaways. They drift through institutions they no longer understand, guided by leaders who value efficiency over wisdom and quick fixes over lasting solutions.

I lead a classical school because a nation unmoored from its own inheritance cannot stand, cannot summon even the ghost of its former strength when the foundations crumble beneath the weight of slogans divorced from substance, of freedoms entrusted to those who wear them like borrowed garments, with no understanding of their value or purpose. Studying important historical texts and grappling with the great ideas from Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem isn’t just looking backward—it’s essential for moving forward. Without memory, we lose our sense of responsibility. Without virtue, we lose our liberty. And without true education that forms character and understanding, we lose what makes America itself.

I lead a classical school because to do otherwise—to surrender, to acquiesce, to allow the tide of forgetting to wash away even one more fragment of our inheritance—would be, quite simply, unconscionable.

Torches Up!