Classic rebuke of failure

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The trivium is based on a three-stage learning process. The first stage, or the "grammar stage," is used during the primary-school years, emphasizing memorization and accumulation of facts. When a child reaches the point where he or she finds memorization trivial and begins to ask "why?" he or she has entered the "logic stage" typically associated with the middle-school years. The student then begins algebra and the study of logic. When the student progresses at the high school level to the "rhetoric stage," he or she learns to write and speak persuasively.

The term "liberal arts" is perhaps a more accurate description of the classical-education educational model, says Mr. Veith. The trivium is the first three arts of the seven liberal arts of the ancient Greeks. And it all goes back to the difference between the education of a free man and a slave, he says.

In ancient Greece and Rome, slaves received only vocational training, says Mr. Veith, because the Greeks did not want them to develop the capacity to think for themselves. The free man, however -- who was expected to vote and participate in the republic -- was taught how to think, judge and use his mind.

"I think a lot of today's education goes back to the education for the slaves," says Mr. Veith.

Critics fault classical education for its lack of vocational training. But classical educators such as Susan Wise Bauer point out that rapid changes in the workplace mean vocational skills learned in school may be out of date by the time students enter the job market.

"Businesses today are saying 'Teach them to read, write and think, and we will teach them everything else,'" says Ms. Bauer, author of "The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home" and "The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had."

Other critics charge that classical education is elitist, teaching the works of "dead white guys" to the privileged few. But that is just why a classical education should be available to everyone, advocates say.

"If the wealthiest, most successful people use this model of education, why not make it available to everyone?" Mr. Veith asks.

And it is downright racist, classical educators say, to claim that minority students can't master great literature.

"All of the things traditionally inner-city children can't do, our students do," says Mrs. Collins, most of whose students are black, many of them poor.

Mrs. Collins, who is black, is motivated by a "positive anger," she says, to provide a top-quality education to children who have been "written off" by the school system.

"I am out to prove a point that people who look like me are not failures," she says. "No one in my community is considered a scholar and that infuriates me."

The current trend toward classical education first emerged in the Pacific Northwest, scholars say, and has especially caught on in Christian schools and in home-schooling communities.

Ms. Bauer, who developed a home-schooling model of classical education, says parents often convert to classical home-schooling because of the inferiority of public education.

The Logos School, which provides a Christian classical education, began with 18 students in 1981 and now has about 300 students in grades K-12. In 1991, Principal Douglas Wilson founded the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, which now has more than 100 members.

"The movement is burgeoning," says Mr. Wilson. "It's growing rapidly."