Classical Education in the United Kingdom

Classical education has a rich history in the United Kingdom. Distinct in content and methods from the educational orthodoxies dominant today, it was by the end of the last century on the verge of extinction. Now, however, it is at the centre of a spirited worldwide revival. 

 

A sketch of classical education  

William Shakespeare was far from the most educated man of his day. In fact, he may have left the King’s New School in Stratford-upon-Avon at just fourteen years old. But his time there was well spent, and he would have received what we now call a classical education. Latin was essential, as a language and more. It was a window onto grammar, rhetoric, logic, poetry, ancient myth, history, and literature. Older boys were likely to learn Greek, too. The fruits of all of these lessons may be found throughout Shakespeare’s poetry and plays. To take just one example, observe his boyhood study of logic at work: 

     Timon:     Away! What art thou?  

     Flavius:                                       Have you forgot me, sir?  

     Timon:     Why dost ask that? I have forgot all men. 
                     Then, if thou grant’st thou ’rt a man, I have forgot thee.  

                                                                               (Timon of Athens, IV, iii, 528-532)  

It is the structure of Timon’s reply that gives it its bite: it is a play on the simplest form of the syllogism. At the little school in Stratford, Shakespeare was drilled in just these sorts of logical figures: 

     Major premise (S is M): Socrates is a man. 
     Minor premise (M is P): All men are mortal. 
     Conclusion (S is P): Therefore, Socrates is mortal.  

To paraphrase Timon: ‘I have forgot all men. Thou art a man. Therefore, I have forgot thee.’ 

With Latin, Greek, and the arts of speech and thought we already see in Shakespeare’s training several distinctive elements of a classical education. To these we may add mathematics as well as Christian formation. In its pedagogy, this kind of education unabashedly insisted on the importance of repetition, memorisation, and recitation prior to original composition.  

This tradition was far from monolithic. Sometimes certain elements were emphasised at the expense of others. Still, in its paradigmatic form it may be sketched as follows: 

• Latin and the great works of Latin authors;  

• likewise, Greek, to the extent possible;  

• the three linguistic arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the so-called ‘Trivium’); 

• the mathematical arts of arithmetic and geometry, and perhaps also astronomy and music theory (the so-called ‘Quadrivium’, forming with the Trivium the classical ‘liberal arts’);  

• Christian formation through catechesis and Scripture;  

• a teacher-led pedagogy making full use of pupils’ active powers of memory 

Variations on this educational vision drove the grammar schools and the public schools that would give British education its global reputation. This is how Britons as diverse as More, Cranmer, Milton, Newton, Locke, the Wesleys, Boyle, Burke, Wilberforce, Johnson, Gibbon, Newman, Pusey, Gaskell, the Arnolds, Gladstone, Ruskin, and Morris spent their formative years. What they learned at school allowed them to cultivate their talents to the fullest, and in turn to shape the world they left behind. 

Decline and revival  

Most schools today do not much resemble those of either Shakespeare’s time or Gladstone’s. Some change is, of course, good. Developments in maths, natural sciences, and vernacular literature belong in the curriculum; flogging, less so. But other forces have been destructive. Job skills and ‘creativity’ have been elevated over knowledge and discipline. Such subjects as logic and such methods as memorisation—eliminated for being ‘useless’ or ‘slavish’—turn out to be essential and liberating. 

In many countries, the most recent two or three generations can no longer write, speak, or think clearly and compellingly. Employers struggle with workers who cannot add, subtract, multiply, or divide with any confidence. We know neither the countries of the world nor the kinds of trees we walk past every day. We have no songs left to sing. In pursuit of usefulness and creativity, we have made ourselves useless and dull.  

Education in America imploded sooner and more thoroughly than it did in the United Kingdom and Europe. By the 1970s classical education had all but vanished, replaced by progressive initiatives and experimental pedagogy. But this early collapse also inspired an early response. Since the 1980s and 1990s, parents, teachers, and supporters all around America have founded thousands of schools and home education co-operatives that aspire to the standard of classical education. Most are independent Christian initiatives, either ecumenical or denominational, but where laws allow, state-supported free schools also offer a secular classical education in a traditional ethos. Their numbers are only growing. 

 

Classical education in the United Kingdom today  

The United Kingdom has already been an inspiration in this project of renewal: Newman, Livingstone, Lewis, Tolkien, Sayers, and other British writers are standard reading in the transatlantic classical revival. 

But what of British schools? To be sure, the United Kingdom is not America. GCSEs and A-Levels, despite some merited criticism, have maintained higher standards than those commonly seen in American state schooling. We still find schools here which teach core subjects rigorously. Latin is widely available, sometimes to proficiency; Greek also, if less widely. The memory of classical education survives. 

Yet Britons know that an educational crisis is underway here, too. Elite schools are prohibitively expensive, and even they are not what they once were. Veteran teachers of the state and independent sectors lament ideological fads, bureaucratic suffocation, and declining academic expectations. Daisy Christodoulou, in Seven Myths About Education, has shown that the United Kingdom’s classrooms are full of pedagogical principles that simply do not work.

Today, British parents, teachers, and entrepreneurs are drawing inspiration from the American experience of the last few decades. In this case they are finding not another new and exotic fad, but a reminder of centuries of local practice. Classical education in the United Kingdom, for all its storied past, is also a tradition with a bright future ahead of it. 

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To learn more about Memoria’s work in the United Kingdom and Europe, write to schools@memoriapress.co.uk.