3 ways a classical education is practical.

If you haven’t heard, I actually work at a classical school. In my job, I have the opportunity to talk with parents almost every day. I get to talk about the books we read in literature, how their history classes incorporate into their music and art classes, and show off our science lab equipment.

At the end of all that, I generally have a few parents who ask me something like, “But how is classical education practical? How are they going to use it in real life?” 

“…I was taught to have a disposition of tenacity when encountering a problem.

In my classes, we asked big, difficult questions and worked toward answers through discussions.”

This question is not new. I still hear some of my friends asking how they made it through high school without anyone teaching them how to do their taxes. When parents ask me, though, they are usually asking why we don’t have an excel class or why we require that students take Latin. It may even bleed into questions about history  - why don’t we cover more current events? What does an Ancient Literature class have to do with today? Each of these questions has its own answer. You can even read my thoughts about why we teach Latin here. 

For now, though, here are my top three reasons that classical education is, in fact, a practical one. If you still don't believe me at the end of this post, you’ll find some links to authors like Randall Stross and George Anders, who agree with me.

1. Classical education creates good problem solvers

I’m a millennial. My generation has a reputation for being lazy. In the workforce, we are known as entitled and unimaginative. We don’t take initiative and are paralyzed by anything that takes us out of our comfort zone.

As a hard-working professional, mom, and wife, I find myself frustrated by this reputation and consider myself very much the opposite. I’m also classically educated. 

That means that I was taught to have a disposition of tenacity when encountering a problem. In my classes, we asked big, difficult questions and worked toward answers through discussions. We examined every option. When we answered, we were asked, “why?” and “how?” We were never handed answers but were taught how to find them for ourselves. That’s what classical education does.


Has anyone considered that maybe the millennials who do indeed live up to their bad reputation were taught what to think instead of how to think?

2. Classical education sparks a student’s curiosity

Schools love to use the phrase “Lifelong learners.” In fact, I have a whole list of the buzzwords that schools use, and I plan to write an entire post about how parents can make sense of them.

But seriously - I want my son and any other future children coming down the pike to actually be lifelong learners. So what does that mean? It means I want my children to be interested both in the world in front of them and the world that came before them. I want them to challenge themselves to develop new skills rather than settle into a life of coasting.

To make this a reality, their educators and I have to nurture their curiosity. When you have curiosity, you’re willing to learn new things, and you’re interested in asking questions like “What’s next?” or “How does that work?”

There are a lot of opinions about how to do this. A quick Google search will present several different options - many of them are obvious. A knowledgeable, passionate teacher is a given. Boosting students with positive feedback is too. But what about content? What about the actual meat of what they’re learning?

In my opinion, nothing sparks a student’s curiosity in the classroom more than rich, engaging content. When they encounter it, they can’t stay away.

Take, for example, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I can remember the very moment in that book that I fell in love with literature. I can remember when the lightbulb lit in my brain as I understood the impact of stories.

I can remember reading Shakespeare’s King Lear for the first time and audibly gasping when Regan rips out Gloucester’s eyes. I was sitting in my sorority dining room surrounded by people, and the whole room went quiet as I exclaimed that I could not believe what had just happened and couldn’t wait to ask my professor about it the next day.

Now, that’s not to say that kids can’t also read what they want when they’re at home. I’m speaking now solely to what schools teach in their curriculum.

My point, and I think it’s a fairly good one, is that teachers give their students a great gift when they opt for rich, beautiful works that have stood the test of time.

Many books are entertaining, but only some spark real curiosity. And only when you have curiosity are you willing to take on a new venture, explore a skill you’ve never tried, or ask new questions about a topic you’ve studied your whole life.

3. Students leave a classical education empowered to figure it out.

You should know that I thought seriously about adding clapping hand emojis at the end of that sentence.

When you add the first two points I made about problem-solving and curiosity together, you get a person who is confident in the knowledge that whatever life throws at them - they will figure it out.

I don’t need a whole class dedicated to teaching me excel because I know that I can figure it out if I’m willing to find the answers. I graduated with a bachelor's degree in English Literature, took zero technology classes in high school or college, and now competently manage three different software for my school. Who taught me how to do that? Me. Plus, some really helpful customer support representatives. 

So, not only can classical students do the things that they are taught in school, but they also have the ability to figure out the things they aren’t taught. Not to mention, they can speak Latin - which is just awesome. 


Still don’t believe me? Here are those links I mentioned:

A Practical Education: Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees

You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education