Over the past decade numerous articles and books have been written on the resurgance of an approach to education commonly known as “classical”. One of the early books, Douglas Wilson’s Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, reintroduced the reading population to a short essay by Dorothy L. Sayers entitled The Lost Tools of Learning. Both texts are well worth reading. But listen to a couple of specific points Sayers makes. She writes,

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education--lip- service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.

Does this sound familiar?

To get a better sense of The Classical School’s purpose and mission it would be beneficial to read Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. First published in 1940 by a high school dropout (expelled, actually) who would become an editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica and one of the founders of the Great Books of the Western World program, HtRaB became a classic best seller. It is also one of the most tedious books to read. Adler argued that people should read books that are initially too difficult to read in order to elevate their minds. How to Read a Book, required reading for students entering Classical Independent Studies, teaches the reader how, in fact, to accomplish this noble and challenging task. The Classical School, over the six years of grammar and dialectic classes, is consciously and deliberately coaching students through the various stages of improving reading skills in order to furnish them with the freedom and ability to be independent, critical and reasonable adults.