What is Classical Education?

A Classical Christian education is one of partnership with parents. At Nittany Christian School, parents are their child’s primary educators, responsible for encouraging their child to be disciplined and diligent.

The term classic means using the best practices from our history – both recent and ancient. A Classical Christian education instructs students with what they want to know when they want to know it.

When young children’s brains are developing ever so rapidly, the curriculum focuses on grammar and the development of language. In early adolescence when they naturally want to challenge everything, the curriculum focuses on logic. When they want to express themselves as teenagers, the focus is rhetoric, or persuasive writing and speech.

The stages of the trivium are:

• Grammar: The factual knowledge (the who, what, where, and when) of each subject.
• Logic: The ordered relationship of factual knowledge (the why and how) of each subject
• Rhetoric: The written and spoken expression of the grammar and logic of each subject.

Many parents are recognizing and experiencing the devastating effects of the last several generations of a progressive education. Key components of a classical education include:

• classical language such as Latin as a tool of leverage for learning English
• phonics and decoding skills
• logic and dialect
• imitating master writers
• drill and practice
• history versus social studies

Subjects are connected, not isolated and teachers favor tools of learning over content, thereby teaching students how to learn. In contrast to gaining tools of learning with a Classical education, a progressive education instructs students to read using the sight method, allows for inventive spelling, creative self-expression, and the study of man through isolated, non-sequential units of social studies.

Classical Christian education encourages students to be eager and diligent. They do their best in a peaceful environment with clear rules of behavior. Above all, we desire to train the heart (character) as well as the mind (intellect).

For a more detailed explaination, please feel free to download:

The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

An Introduction to Classical Education - A Guide for Parents by Christopher A. Perrin