The Odyssey of Classical Education

Americans are buying into classical education on a massive scale, says Julian Zelizer .

Zelizer: Classical schools have been expanding rapidly due to demand from millions of families.

Students from classical charter schools consistently outperform students from other public schools on standardized tests, he says.

Students in classical schools practice the art of face-to-face conversation, Zelizer says.

Julian Zelizer : Classical education is based on an undesirable fantasy that schools should give every culture of the world equal attention in the curriculum.

But to say that classical education only teaches about the West is simply false, he says.

Students graduating from classical schools know as much or more about non-Western cultures than many students graduating from traditional public schools.

The works studied in classical schools are, like Odysseus and Western civilization itself, full of twists and turns.

The idea that these works all subscribe to a single point of view is contradicted by the millennia of diverse opinions in conversation.

At the center of Raphael’s The School of Athens , are two figures shown in disagreement: Plato points upward toward the world of forms, while Aristotle motions outward toward the empirical, natural world.