Classical education is how teachers taught students many years ago. It is the concept of “teachers teach and students learn”. However, it has taken lots of beating for the past many years. For one, socialist professors say traditional education is giving children lots of knowledge they cannot chew anymore. Other says that in traditional education, schools are like factories where students are the products assembled by careless hands and delivered into the labor world.
Classical education , or what is also known as common core education, should not be regarded as that at all. It consists of teaching the skills of grammar, logic or dialectic, and rhetoric. These skills are called the “trivium’’, a Latin word for three roads or where three ways meet. This forms a very strong foundation for education.
Most public elementary schools in the Philippines still uses this method. It offers chances to learners for success. Ultimately, the purpose of classical education is to equip pupils to discover how the universe works. In classical education, children learn basics while in the process, new concepts are introduced to them and they learn brick by brick. This, basically, is the school’s function.
Some thinks classical education as regarding pupils to be like empty vessels being filled with facts and making this sound bad. How could this be bad when these “vessels” are filled with worthy and valuable knowledge, skills, and character? Eventually, because of the many contradictions classical education has received, many people now cannot remember what this approach looks like. Most of them cannot remember, especially those aged around 40 and above, that they were taught in this manner and how far they have come because of such foundation in learning.
Providing factual information in classical education also provides a strong foundation for future or higher learning. Teaching concepts of mathematics, science, history, and literature, which might entail memorization, are building blocks for success in higher education.
In classical education, one salient example is teaching languages. Say a child is taught to learn a foreign language, for example, English, he is taught basic words like girl, apple, pencil, house, dog, and very basic things like that. Eventually, he is taught how to put the words together to bring forth another meaningful conversation.
This area of classical education can actually help fix schools in providing knowledge, which is what school is all about in the first place. Transmitting knowledge to all students which classical education can provide.
References:
Bortins, Leigh A. The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education.Palgrave, Macmillan, Macmillan Publishers Limited, USA, 2010.
Gamble, Richard M. The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being. WIlmington, DE:ISI Books, 2007.
Sayers, Dorothy L. The Lost Tools of Learning, Lecture, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press 1947.
By: Jeramie J. Taclan | T-I | Diwa Elementary School
