Ithaca Classical: Beginnings

What does it look like to build the idea of rigorous, classical education around the idea of home?

The idea of Ithaca Classical has been a long time coming—I have been intently fascinated by education since around the age of sixteen, in both the philosophical and practical sense. I read the famous “Lost Tools of Learning” by Dorothy Sayers around that age, and also began taking classes at Bethany Lutheran College, which marked my first time attending school outside the home. The admirable concepts of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric in education have fascinated me ever since, and I return to that article every few years as my thoughts on those three stages change.

After I graduated college, I had the honor of developing and teaching high school literature and philosophy curriculum for the online classical high school Wittenberg Academy. The biggest takeaway I have from that experience is the astounding ability of teenagers to learn and discuss difficult topics with joy and ease. These students could discuss grief and sadness in ways many adults struggle to, and read the plays of Euripedes and Shakespeare without difficulty or disgust. These students were growing into great thinkers as they simultaneously grew into Sayers’ Rhetoric stage of learning.

My experience teaching in person at a classical school furthered this interest in the Trivium and its practical application— Agamim Classical Academy is only a grade school, and falls traditionally therefore only into the first two stages of the Trivium; Grammar and Logic. Our principal, however, built Agamim with the intent that every single class period would teach according to the Trivium as a whole every single day. We built our lesson plans around a Grammar stage, a Logic stage, and a final Rhetoric stage for every hour of every day, from Kindergarten to Eighth Grade. Although Agamim is a young school and this concept is not yet perfected or practically implemented, I saw a great deal of benefit in approaching the Trivium this way. Some of our most energetic or disruptive students merely needed the opportunity each class to explore the Rhetoric of our lesson (to challenge it, debate it, and make broad claims about its worth), and our following discussion would keep them engaged and feel no need to act out. Allowing my second grade students to apply the facts that they learned about impressionism gave them the ability to paint truly beautiful renditions of Monet’s Sunrise and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

These various interactions with Sayers’ Trivium, while thoroughly convincing me of the Trivium’s worth for educating children, did not convince me that either was the route I wanted to use when approaching my own children’s education. And that is perhaps the biggest factor that lead to this idea of Ithaca Classical, i.e. Education for the Home.

While there are countless ideas, suggestions, and curriculums out there for aspiring homeschooling parents, I have found too many of them to be polarizing, political, fanciful, or even against rigorous education in general. None of these will do, however—if I am to educate my own children as we plan to do, I must do so for the sake of their rigorous instruction in all subjects, not in political ideals or polarizing views that alienate them from their neighbors, and not out of any sort of romanticized notion of homeschooling or childhood. Homeschooling, like parenting, is hard. Teaching is taxing, exhausting, and seldom rewarding on a day to day basis. This has lead me to the conclusion that the best way to homeschool, if that is your desire, is to remove the barrier between education and the home.

As we have begun planning Klaus’s education, this has been the focus—school will not be separate from our life together at home, and our life together at home will always echo our practices in school. After all, is it not a great advantage of homeschooling that the child can learn to behave according to the same standards at all times, with the same forms of discipline, rather than two separate at home and at school? And is it not a great joy of homeschooling that children learn the practical knowledge of the home, such as cooking, cleaning, gardening, and building? None of these things are fully encompassed into homeschooling, however, and I think it is because we still divide home and school, and it is this that we hope to move against.

There is clearly much more to be said on this than one article, or even five, could encapsulate, but in this first article, I want to express the practicality of this train of thought. As we map out our goals for Klaus, year by year, it is relieving to be able to put “learn to make his bed” right next to “learn basic Russian phrases”. Molding our lives and our home itself into one singular mode of growth and learning is the only way that we can practically educate multiple children at once if we are so blessed, and it is the way for us to keep our standards rigorous without creating expectations that will burn all three of us out.

Finally, I just have to point out the obvious—that this idea revolves around the beauty of home. Home is the place you turn to for comfort (second only to the church), and it is the place where you are most able to learn something new and to challenge yourself, since it is the place that forgives you all your failures. Hence the name I’ve chosen for our venture: Ithaca Classical, named for the greatest story about home ever written.