ON Classical Education: Winter Edition
Carol McNamara
Classical education is a living tradition, sustained by memory, disciplined by reason, animated by wonder, and ordered toward human flourishing. The essays gathered here participate in that tradition by asking perennial questions in the context of our times. What does it mean to educate for freedom rather than mere function? How do we form the human mind for critical judgment rather than subjection to opinion. What must be learned and remembered to build a community of thoughtful citizens and future leaders?
Taken together, these essays invite us into a shared conversation about leadership, curriculum, imagination, civic life, and the formation of the soul. They remind us that classical education is at once personal and public, interior and institutional, ancient and of enduring contemporary relevance.
What follows is an annotated guide to the conversations unfolding across On Classical Education. Each piece stands on its own. Read together, they illuminate a coherent vision of education ordered toward truth, goodness, and beauty, and toward the responsibilities of thoughtful freedom in a democratic republic.
Jerilyn Olson
This essay reframes leadership as the cultivation of moral influence. Drawing on classical rhetoric and the metaphor of Archimedes’ lever, Olson argues that lasting change occurs when leaders operate through credibility, empathy, and reason rather than command and control. Ethos, pathos, and logos are not persuasive techniques to be deployed tactically, but habits of character that allow leaders to move others toward shared goods. Leadership, on this account, is an act of service rooted in love for the people one leads and responsibility for the common good.
Jazzing It Up: Thoughts on the Reception of Tradition
Junius Johnson
Using jazz as an extended analogy, Johnson challenges the assumption that tradition must be received either rigidly or rejected entirely. Jazz, he argues, models a form of faithful improvisation in which inherited forms are honored precisely by being inhabited creatively. Classical education, likewise, is not the rote repetition of settled answers but an invitation into an ongoing conversation that demands judgment, creativity, and responsibility. Tradition remains alive only when it is received actively and imaginatively by each new generation.
Life, Literacy, and the Pursuit of Happiness
Joshua T. Katz
Katz confronts the crisis of literacy in America by returning to a foundational text: the Declaration of Independence. He argues that the decline in reading proficiency is not merely a technical failure but a civic one. Through close reading, historical context, and rhetorical analysis, students encounter the Declaration as a demanding and formative text rather than a slogan or artifact. Literacy, in this vision, becomes an apprenticeship in judgment, humility, and self-government, and a necessary precondition for democratic life.
Erik Twist
This essay interrogates a familiar slogan and finds it wanting. While beauty may justify itself, art does not terminate in itself but points beyond craft toward transcendence. Drawing on classical and theological sources, the author argues that the arts are indispensable because they form attention, awaken longing, and shape the moral imagination. Art is neither ornamental nor merely expressive. It is a disciplined means of leading students toward contemplation of what is real and worthy of love.
The Exodus and the Declaration
Susan McWilliams Barndt
Through the story of the failed Great Seal committee, this essay uncovers the deep influence of the Exodus narrative on the American founding. Even Enlightenment figures such as Franklin and Jefferson turned instinctively to biblical imagery to articulate the meaning of liberty. The Exodus, Barndt argues, provided a shared moral grammar for understanding freedom, responsibility, and the dangers of collective self-rule. The founding is thus revealed not as a rejection of ancient sources, but as an act of imaginative inheritance.
Liberal Education as Civic Education
Jennifer Frey
Frey presents a clear philosophical account of why liberal education is inherently civic. The study of Great Books trains students not only to think clearly but to deliberate across difference, to listen with charity, and to pursue the common good. Through seminar-based dialogue, students cultivate the habits of judgment, patience, and courage required for civic friendship. Liberal education, on this account, does not produce experts narrowly trained for efficiency but citizens formed for freedom.
Stoke the Fire for America’s 250th
Andrew J. Zwerneman
Rather than treating the national semiquincentennial as an occasion for spectacle, this essay calls classical educators to lead from within. Drawing on history, literature, and political example, Zwerneman argues that freedom depends on memory and character. Americans at their best have interpreted moments of crisis through the lens of inherited wisdom. Classical schools, he contends, are uniquely positioned to preserve this culture of remembrance and to cultivate unity ordered toward the good.
The Harmony of Civic Pragmatism
Ryan Owens and James Shuls
Owens and Shuls diagnose a growing civic crisis marked by intolerance, polarization, and a willingness to justify violence. While affirming the formative power of the great books, they argue that civic education must also include empirical reasoning, statistical literacy, and institutional understanding. Civic pragmatism names the harmony between moral formation and analytical skill. Citizens must be able to recognize bad arguments and bad data alike if the public square is to remain civil and free.
Living Muchly: Do Less to Love More
Carrie Eben
This reflective essay returns to the classical principle of multum non multa, much not many. Drawing on Augustine, Charlotte Mason, and Comenius, the author argues that both curriculum and life must be pruned if love is to flourish. The effort to do “everything” leads to distraction and exhaustion. Focused attention allows wonder, gratitude, and rightly ordered love to reemerge as the end of education and a good life. Classical education, at its best, teaches students and teachers alike how to attend deeply to learning what is good and worthy of our attention at every moment.
Brandon Crowe
This essay offers a moral vision of leadership rooted in the assumption of goodwill. Drawing on Aristotle, Simone Weil, and literary exemplars, it argues that trust is the foundation of any healthy school community. Goodwill is not naïveté or the abandonment of accountability, but a disciplined posture that seeks understanding before judgment. Classical schools, devoted to the formation of young souls, must model this posture if they are to cultivate virtue rather than cynicism.
Wilfred McClay
McClay presents history as the work of memory essential to both personal and national identity. Through the biblical command to retell the story of Exodus, he illustrates how civilizations endure by narrating their origins to the next generation. The American founding, deeply shaped by this pattern of remembrance, calls educators to pass on not only information but meaning. Forgetting, whether individual or collective, leads to the erosion of identity and purpose.
Review of Another Sort of Mathematics
Jonathan Gregg
This review defends mathematics as a liberal art ordered toward wonder rather than mere utility. Gregg highlights Tawney’s portrayal of mathematics as both objective and participatory, a domain of eternal truths that invite human creativity and inquiry. By structuring the book around proofs, theorems, and unsolved problems, Tawney restores mathematics to its rightful place alongside music, art, and philosophy as a discipline that forms judgment, humility, and delight in truth.
Teaching Fiction From the Inside Out
John von Heyking on Jeanette DeCelles-Zwerneman
This review presents an imaginative pedagogy of literature rooted in interior encounter rather than external analysis. DeCelles-Zwerneman argues that fiction must first be inhabited before it can be understood. By resisting premature rationalization and ideological reduction, teachers allow students to develop imagination as the foundation of intellect and moral judgment. Literature, rightly taught, becomes a shared experience that binds students and teachers in a common pursuit of the good.
What Is Best for the Best Is Best for All
Ian V. Rowe
Rowe argues that classical education is not an elite luxury but a moral imperative for underserved communities. Drawing on the Great Books tradition and contemporary policy analysis, he demonstrates that access to rich, content driven education is a matter of justice. Through concrete examples of schools serving low-income students, Rowe shows that formation in virtue, literacy, and judgment is not only possible but transformative. The best education, rightly understood, belongs to everyone.