ON Classical Education - Spring Edition
Carol McNamara
In this issue of ON Classical Education, we turn our attention to the work of formation across disciplines, classrooms, and institutions. Many of the essays published today were first presented as workshops or scholar talks at the 2026 Great Hearts National Symposium for Classical Education in Tempe, Arizona in February at which we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American experiment it inaugurated. These essays address the great themes of the American experiment and its intersection with classical education. They ask what it means to teach mathematics as something beautiful and worthy of contemplation, to recover reading as an active encounter with great books, to preserve authority and friendship in the classroom, and to think seriously about leadership, history, liberty, literature, and physical education as parts of a whole human education. Taken together, they remind us that classical education is not merely a curriculum or a collection of inherited texts. It is a living tradition within the American experiment ordered toward the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, courage, judgment, and delight.
Teaching Math Classically: How do Classical School Leaders and Teachers Think it Should be Done?
Dr. Josh Wilkerson, Dr. Albert Cheng, Sandra Schinetsky, and Dr. Jon Gregg take up a question that has often been less clearly defined in the classical education movement: what makes a mathematics classroom truly classical? Drawing on survey data from classical school teachers and leaders, along with student reports from an established classical school, the article explores whether classical math is shaped more by content, pedagogy, assessment, teacher expertise, or some deeper vision of the subject itself. The findings point to a strong desire to teach mathematics as something beautiful, meaningful, and worthy of contemplation, while also revealing tensions around historical context, classroom practice, and teacher formation—making this a timely and necessary reflection for anyone seeking to recover mathematics as part of a truly liberal education.
Is History Repeating in Math Education?
Jessica Kaminski, M.Ed., looks back across 250 years of American math instruction and finds that today’s debates are not nearly as new as we often imagine. From early arithmetic textbooks to “new math,” standards-based instruction, and modern parent frustrations, Kaminski traces the long pendulum swing between memorization and conceptual understanding, then argues that the better path is not choosing one camp over the other, but recovering a fuller vision of mathematical proficiency. Her article invites educators and families to see mathematics as both procedural and conceptual, practical and beautiful—a discipline that requires fluency, reasoning, training, communication, and a shared willingness to move beyond false choices.
Classical Literature and the Science of Reading: When Two Worlds Collide
Jennifer Ramirez brings together two conversations that are too often treated as separate: the classical commitment to whole books, great texts, and the formation of the moral imagination, and the research-backed urgency of explicit, sustained reading instruction. Framed through Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway’s The Teach Like a Champion Guide to The Science of Reading, the article argues that classical educators must not only preserve the beauty of literature and the Great Conversation, but also ensure that students have the fluency, knowledge, vocabulary, attention, and close-reading habits needed to enter that conversation fully. It is a compelling reminder that reading instruction is not merely about achievement scores or decoding words, but about forming students who can encounter Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Virgil, Plato, and others with stamina, understanding, and love.
The Spotify Student: Reckoning with Audiobooks
Jeannette DeCelles-Zwerneman offers a sharp warning against treating audiobooks as an easy substitute for the hard, formative work of reading. Against the backdrop of declining literacy and shrinking student stamina for long-form texts, she argues that audiobooks can quietly undermine the very habits classical education seeks to cultivate: close attention, interpretive judgment, patience with difficulty, and the joy of discovering meaning directly from the page. Her essay makes a forceful case that students do not become readers simply by consuming stories or ideas, but by wrestling with words, rereading difficult passages, marking the text, and learning to think alongside great authors with an active and disciplined mind.
Daniel Buck makes a provocative and timely case for recovering a serious understanding of teacher authority—not as tyranny, ego, or mere classroom management, but as the necessary condition for safety, order, learning, and moral formation. Drawing on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the essay argues that classrooms without real adult authority quickly drift toward disorder, and that teachers and school leaders have both the right and obligation to uphold the rules, routines, and habits that make education possible. At its strongest, the article pushes beyond compliance for its own sake and reminds readers that authority in a classical school should serve a higher end: forming students who are disciplined, thoughtful, free, and capable of receiving the intellectual and moral inheritance entrusted to them.
A Word on Teaching in our Upper Schools
Dan Scoggin argues that classical schools are uniquely equipped to meet young men and women at the very moment they begin asking life’s most urgent questions: Who am I? What is my purpose? What should I do? Rather than accepting the tired narrative of adolescent alienation, the essay calls teachers and school leaders to form real friendships around what is true, lasting, and heroic, offering students not shallow relevance but a tradition large enough to answer their growing philosophical and existential hunger. With practical attention to proper praise, right competition, authenticity, kindness, and predictability, the piece makes a hopeful and bracing case that upper school teaching is not merely about retaining students through graduation, but about helping them discover courage, magnanimity, and a calling worthy of their gifts.
Erik Twist offers a rich meditation on leadership as something far deeper than strategy, systems, dashboards, or professional competence. Beginning with J.H. Prynne’s reflections on literary formation and the transmission of humane values across generations, Twist argues that true leadership is not merely the ability to create movement or achieve outcomes, but the formative work of handing on reality rightly. The essay challenges leaders to see their example, habits, judgments, and tone as culture-shaping acts, reminding us that the best leadership cultivates people, protects what is human, honors truth and beauty, and creates institutions where rigor and delight can live together.
Jonathan Bate traces Shakespeare’s surprising, complicated, and deeply American afterlife—from Revolutionary-era parody and Emerson’s vision of Shakespeare as a “father” of American interior life, to Lincoln’s love of Macbeth, John Wilkes Booth’s grotesque self-fashioning through Julius Caesar, the Folger Library’s cultural ambitions, and the groundbreaking performances of Ira Aldridge, Orson Welles, and Paul Robeson. The essay shows that Shakespeare in America has never been merely literary; he has been a language for conscience, identity, race, politics, ambition, violence, national unity, and national argument. At its heart, Bate’s piece suggests that Shakespeare endures in America because his plays resist easy possession by any one party, people, or ideology, instead forcing every age to confront the human riddle beneath its own labels and battles.
Second Treatise, Second Look: Revisiting John Locke on America’s 250th
Jeannette DeCelles-Zwerneman argues that Locke remains essential reading for secondary students seeking to understand the moral and political foundations of American liberalism. Rather than reducing Locke to contemporary caricatures, the essay returns to the Second Treatise itself, highlighting his account of liberty, equality, consent, natural rights, limited government, property, and the justification for revolution. With practical guidance for teachers, DeCelles-Zwerneman shows how Locke’s ideas can help students wrestle with enduring questions about authority, freedom, virtue, and political order—questions that feel especially urgent as America approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding.
Frederick Douglass: On Declaring and Achieving Liberty
Diana Schaub examines Frederick Douglass’s remarkable journey from radical alienation to a hard-won and deeply principled American patriotism. Through Douglass’s evolving relationship with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Schaub shows how he came to use the nation’s founding documents not to excuse America’s sins, but to expose them and call the country back to its own highest promises. Centering especially on Douglass’s battle with the slave-breaker Edward Covey, the essay presents liberty not merely as something declared or inherited, but as something that must be claimed with courage, defended with honor, and achieved anew by each person and each generation.
In Defense of Western Civilization
Michael Austin begins with Aristotle’s famous distinction between poetry and history, then asks whether history can rise above a mere sequence of facts to become something morally and philosophically meaningful. Through a reflection on Allen Guelzo and James Hankins’ The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, the essay argues that the study of Western civilization is not simply an academic exercise, but a moral enterprise that helps students understand the conditions under which human flourishing becomes possible. At a time when confidence in civilization itself is often weakened or dismissed, this piece makes the case that history, rightly studied, can train gratitude, humility, proper pride, and the affections needed to pass on what is worth preserving.
The Same Scale: Excellence and Disability in Physical Education
Patrick Whalen offers a humane and demanding vision for classical physical education: every student, regardless of ability, belongs on the same path toward excellence. Rather than creating a separate track for students with disabilities, the essay argues that PE should be oriented toward maximizing each student’s physical potential through thoughtful modifications to movement, environment, measurement, and role. At its heart, this piece is not only about inclusion, but about dignity, character, and formation—insisting that every student with a body deserves the challenge, discipline, and honor of striving toward excellence rather than being quietly moved to the margins.
We hope these essays invite you to think more deeply about the daily work of classical education: the books placed before students, the authority entrusted to teachers, the habits formed through study and discipline, and the larger inheritance we are called to preserve and pass on. Whether considering Shakespeare in America, Locke and Douglass on liberty, the teaching of mathematics, or the dignity of physical challenge for every student, each piece points back to a shared conviction: education is never merely about information. It is about forming human beings capable of seeking truth, loving what is good, recognizing beauty, and carrying that inheritance into the next generation.