In this episode we answer the question “Are you a classical school?” In the show opener Trent maintains that it does, in fact, take a village to raise a child. The episode moves from there to a description of what the term “classical education” meant prior to the turn of the century and a discussion of how the recent attempt at redefinition by the New Classical Schooling movement is fraught with problems. In the final segment Trent describes nineteenth-century German Lutheran parochial schooling in America, suggests that this historical model provides a better pattern for Christian schooling than the New Classical Schooling model, and hints that another episode on the topic might be warranted.
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- The Axehead Circular on Spotify
- The Axehead Circular on Apple Podcasts
- The Boniface Group on X
- “The New Classical Schooling,” by Peter Leithart
- “Why A Classical Education Is Almost Impossible Today,” by Shawn Barnett
- “The Blind Guides of the Classical Education Movement,” by Shawn Barnett
- “Plagiarism, Wilson, and the Omnibus,” by Rachel Green Miller
- “A Classical Christian School—Two Centuries Ago,” by Ian Mosley
- “Against the Dorothy Sayers Movement,” by William Michael
The Boniface Group 
don’t have children yet, but this is great info. Idaho sounds like the most viable place left to raise a family.
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Appreciate the episode and still working through later episodes, so maybe this is addressed in other ways, but I wanted to ask further about the label “classical” as it is used today. While I understand the distinction being made from how classical education was traditionally defined, I never thought the contemporary use of the term was meant to convey that it was a replication of that traditional definition. Instead, it was that it borrowed the education/teaching/learning approach/style/philosophy, such that the contemporary use of classical education is less about the content and more about the how (e.g., classical style v. Montessori v. student-led, etc. etc.). As an example, I would characterize early education in a contemporary classical education as including more rote memorization whereas that seems to be eschewed or looked down on in more modern teaching methods. I was wondering if you could comment on what might be right or wrong about this assumption or better ways to think about or label these teaching approaches that doesn’t import the use of terms that are broader. Thanks.
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