Classical Education Forms a Whole Person not just a Worker

Beyond the Reduction of the Human Being

Classical education begins with a fundamentally unmodern premise: the human being is not merely a future worker, activist or even citizen, but a person—possessing intellect, will, imagination, conscience, and a capacity for transcendence. Education worthy of the name must address the whole of this reality.

To form only the intellect without moral character is to produce cleverness without wisdom. To emphasize skills without judgment is to train efficiency without direction. Classical education resists these reductions by insisting that education concerns the whole person: mind, body, and soul.

The Human Person as Rational and Moral

The Western tradition has consistently understood the human being as a rational and moral creature. Reason is not an optional accessory; it is constitutive of human dignity. But reason does not operate in isolation. It is shaped by habits, loves, and moral orientation.

For Plato, education ordered the soul so that reason governed desire, rather than being enslaved by it. Knowledge alone was insufficient; without internal harmony, the soul remained disordered.

Augustine of Hippo understood education as a reordering of love—ordo amoris—so that the soul learns to desire rightly. Formation, not mere instruction, was the goal.

Classical education inherits this anthropology. It recognizes that learning shapes not only what a student knows, but what a student values.

Encountering the Great Questions

A central feature of classical education is its refusal to shield students from fundamental human questions.

What is justice?
What is courage?
What is a good life?
What do we owe to others—and to those who come after us?

Through sustained engagement with works such as The Odyssey or Confessions, students encounter these questions not as abstractions, but as lived realities. They witness loyalty and betrayal, pride and repentance, suffering and perseverance.

This encounter builds intellectual depth and emotional maturity. It teaches students that life is morally serious, that actions have consequences, and that wisdom is hard-won. Such formation cannot be replaced by technical proficiency or ideological instruction.

Cultural Literacy and the Shared Language of Civilization

To think clearly and communicate meaningfully within a society, one must share a common cultural vocabulary.

E. D. Hirsch described this as cultural literacy: the reservoir of shared knowledge, references, and ideas that allow a people to understand one another and participate fully in civic and intellectual life.

A person who lacks this shared inheritance is not merely uninformed; he is excluded—from history, from public discourse, and from the deeper layers of meaning embedded in language itself. Ultimately, he is lost in time wandering formless space.

Classical education takes this seriously. It seeks to induct students into the cultural conversation of the West so that they can understand what they read, hear, and inherit. This is not elitism. It is inclusion into a tradition that once belonged to all educated citizens.

Joining the Great Conversation

Systematic study within the classical tradition allows the student to enter what Mortimer J. Adler called the Great Conversation—the ongoing dialogue among the greatest minds across centuries.

This conversation is not about agreement. It is about engagement. Plato argues with Aristotle; Augustine challenges the pagans; Aquinas synthesizes faith and reason; later thinkers respond, refine, and dissent.

The student formed within this conversation learns intellectual humility. He discovers that his own moment is neither uniquely enlightened nor uniquely corrupt. He learns to listen before speaking, to argue without caricature, and to recognize wisdom wherever it appears.

Such formation produces not dogmatism, but depth.

Mind, Body, and Discipline

The Greeks understood that physical discipline supported moral and intellectual discipline. The body, like the mind, requires training. Order in one supports order in the other.

Modern education often neglects this unity. Students are encouraged to express themselves freely while being deprived of structure, limits, and meaningful challenge. Classical education restores balance by recognizing that freedom grows through discipline, not in its absence.

Habits of attention, perseverance, and restraint are cultivated over time. These habits form the foundation of both intellectual excellence and personal responsibility.

Education as Preparation for Life, Not Escape From It

To form the whole person is not to retreat from reality, but to prepare for it.

A student educated classically is not insulated from difficulty. On the contrary, he is better equipped to face it. He has encountered suffering in literature, tragedy in history, and moral complexity in philosophy. He has learned that life is demanding—and that meaning is found not in avoidance, but in engagement.

Such formation fosters resilience, humility, and purpose. It prepares individuals not merely to succeed, but to endure—to live well under conditions that are often imperfect.

Against Fragmentation

The fragmentation of modern education mirrors the fragmentation of modern life. Subjects are isolated, knowledge is compartmentalized, and students are rarely invited to see how truth fits together.

Classical education resists this by seeking integration. Literature illuminates history; philosophy clarifies theology; rhetoric disciplines thought; mathematics reveals order. The student begins to perceive coherence where before there was only accumulation.

This integrated vision is essential to forming a whole person. Without it, education produces specialists who know much about little and little about what matters most.

Formation as an Act of Hope

To educate the whole person is an act of hope.

It assumes that human beings have inherent value, are capable of truth, that virtue is attainable, and that civilization is worth preserving. It rejects cynicism and despair without resorting to naïveté.

Classical education does not promise to produce perfect individuals. It promises something more modest and more important: human beings oriented toward truth, formed in judgment, and capable of living responsibly within the inheritance they receive.

In the next entry, we will turn to the structure that makes such formation possible—the Trivium—and examine how grammar, logic, and rhetoric shape the mind over time into clarity, coherence, and eloquence.

Education as Moral Formation

Education Is Never Morally Neutral

Modern education presents itself as neutral—concerned with skills, competencies, and information, typically avoiding judgments about moral right and wrong. This posture is reassuring in theory and misleading in practice.

Education is inherently formative. Every curriculum, every selection of texts, every pedagogical method shapes the moral imagination of the student. The decision to withhold moral judgment also communicates a value judgment: that all beliefs are provisional, that conviction is suspect, and that moral clarity is either impossible, dangerous or even harmful.

Classical education rejects this fiction of neutrality. It begins from the recognition that young people are moral beings long before they are autonomous thinkers. They are constantly being habituated—by stories, examples, language, and expectations—toward certain loves and away from others. The only real question is whether that formation will be coherent and intentional, or incoherent and accidental.

The Classical Understanding of Moral Formation

In the classical tradition, education was never reduced to the transfer of information. It was understood as the shaping of character.

Plato argued that education should train the soul to love what is noble and to hate what is base. This was not accomplished through abstract moralizing, but through immersion in music, poetry, physical discipline, and philosophy—each ordered toward harmony within the person.

For Aristotle, moral formation was inseparable from habit. Virtue was not merely known; it was practiced. Education, therefore, had to train both reason and desire, so that the student learned not only what is good, but learned to want what is good.

This insight remains decisive. Knowledge without character does not elevate; it amplifies whatever moral orientation already exists.

Standards of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful

Classical education rests on a further conviction that is deeply countercultural in the modern West: what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful are objective realities.

Taste is not merely arbitrary. Reason is not merely instrumental. Beauty is not, in fact, “in the eye of the beholder”. These standards exist independently of individual opinion, and education aims to align the student’s judgment with them over time.

Young people today are particularly in need of such standards. In a culture saturated with novelty, distraction, and relativism, they are rarely taught how to discriminate—how to recognize excellence, coherence, depth, and moral weight. Without standards, freedom becomes paralysis, and choice becomes anxiety.

Classical education offers formation in judgment by exposing students to works that have endured precisely because they meet these standards. Not everything old is good, but what is truly great cannot be understood apart from time, tradition, and disciplined attention.

Stories That Form the Soul

Moral formation is not primarily abstract. It is narrative.

Classical education understands that stories shape conscience more powerfully than rules alone. Through literature and history, students encounter models of courage and cowardice, loyalty and betrayal, pride and humility.

The rage of Achilles reveals the cost of unchecked passion. Aeneas embodies duty to family, gods, and future generations. Socrates demonstrates fidelity to truth even unto death. These are not moral lessons delivered as slogans; they are lived realities presented for contemplation and imitation.

Such encounters invite self-examination. They ask not merely “What is right?” but “Who am I becoming?” Over time, this forms a moral compass grounded in experience rather than abstraction.

Why Virtue Cannot Be Outsourced

Modern education often treats character formation as either a private matter or a peripheral concern. Schools may speak vaguely of “values” while hesitating to articulate what those values are or why they matter.

Classical education takes the opposite view. It insists that moral formation cannot be outsourced to chance, peer culture, or bureaucratic policy. If education does not intentionally cultivate virtue, something else will cultivate vice.

This does not require rigid moralism or ideological enforcement. It requires clarity about human goods, humility about human weakness, and patience with the slow work of formation.

Virtue is not imposed; it is cultivated. And cultivation requires time, example, and deliberate practice.

Education Ordered Toward Responsibility

The aim of moral formation is not conformity, but responsibility.

A person formed by classical education is not merely obedient, but self-governing. He possesses the internal order necessary for freedom. He can reason about ends, restrain impulse, and act with deliberation.

Such formation is essential not only for personal flourishing, but for civic life. Free societies depend on citizens capable of moral judgment. When education abandons virtue, it undermines the very conditions that make freedom possible.

Classical education understood this. It sought to form individuals capable of living well, ruling themselves, and contributing responsibly to the communities they inherit.

Formation Before Reform

Education that neglects moral formation inevitably turns toward external reform—political, social, or technological—as a substitute for internal order. But no society can be repaired solely from the outside.

Classical education begins where all lasting renewal begins: with the formation of the person.

It does not promise perfection. It does not deny human frailty. But it insists that education worthy of the name must concern itself with who we are becoming, not merely what we can do.

In the next entry, we will turn to the idea of forming the whole person—mind, body, and soul—and examine why classical education has always resisted the reduction of human beings to economic units or test scores.

The Classical Tradition: The Founding

Classical education is not an abstract or unproven theory. It arose organically from the civilizations that first asked, in a sustained and serious way, what it means to live well.

Its origins lie in ancient Greece, where education was understood as the cultivation of the soul through reason, beauty, and moral formation. The Greeks did not separate education from character. Poetry, music, physical training, philosophy, and rhetoric were ordered toward producing free men capable of self-government and civic responsibility. Homer, Hesiod, Plato, and Aristotle were not studied for information alone, but for formation. This was the first people to systematically seek the highest good.

Rome inherited this Greek tradition almost wholesale. Roman education refined Greek philosophy with an emphasis on law, rhetoric, and public service. The Roman ideal was not the detached thinker, but the vir bonus dicendi peritus—the good man skilled in speaking. Cicero’s synthesis of philosophy and rhetoric became the model for education for centuries, shaping statesmen, lawyers, and citizens alike.

This classical inheritance did not disappear with the fall of Rome. During the Middle Ages, it survived in monasteries, cathedral schools, and early universities. Christian thinkers did not discard the classical tradition; they baptized it. Augustine, Boethius, and later Aquinas integrated Greek philosophy with Christian theology, preserving the liberal arts as a preparation for higher wisdom. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric—the Trivium—became the intellectual spine of Western education.

The Renaissance recovered and refined classical sources. Greek and Roman texts were studied anew in their original languages. Education once again emphasized eloquence, history, moral philosophy, and the formation of judgment. This humanist revival restored confidence in the capacity of education to shape both intellect and character.

From Italy, the classical tradition passed to England, where it became deeply embedded in grammar schools and universities. Latin and Greek were the foundation of serious education. Students learned to think, argue, and write by immersion in the best models of language and thought Western civilization had produced.

It was this English classical inheritance that crossed the Atlantic. In colonial America and at the time of the founding of the United States, classical education was still thriving. Greek and Latin were central to early adolescence. History, rhetoric, and moral philosophy shaped the intellectual formation of leaders. Thomas Jefferson strongly recommended the study of Greek and Latin as essential to forming judgment and taste. The Founding Fathers of the United States were  practical men whose education had given them historical perspective and moral vocabulary.

One of their most cherished books was Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. These biographies served as moral instruction. They offered concrete examples of virtue and vice, ambition and restraint, honor and corruption.

Eighteenth-century Americans trusted George Washington in part because he consciously embodied a classical ideal.

Like Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer-statesman, Washington relinquished power when his duty was complete. His authority rested on both success and character—today, we understand success, but character is an idea intelligible only within a classical moral framework.

This is an important point: classical education was not marginal at the founding of the modern West. It was normative. It supplied the language, the historical analogies, and the moral assumptions that undergirded constitutional government, the rule of law, and ordered liberty.

The decline of classical education represents not progress but rupture. When the tradition weakened, so too did the shared cultural language that once allowed citizens to reason together about justice, duty, and the common good. Education gradually shifted from formation to function, from inheritance to innovation, from wisdom to technique.

To recover classical education is not to retreat into the past. It is to reconnect with the intellectual and moral roots that made the West intelligible to itself. A civilization that forgets how it was formed cannot long sustain what it has built.

Understanding this historical continuity matters because it answers a fundamental objection: classical education is not an experiment. It is the longest-running educational tradition in Western history. Its durability is itself evidence of its effectiveness.

In the next entry, we will turn from history to substance—examining education as moral formation, and why any serious account of learning must grapple with virtue, judgment, and the formation of character.

What Is Education, and What Is It For?

The English critic and educator Matthew Arnold offered a definition of education that has not been improved upon: it is the passing on of “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”

Note what it excludes. It does not define education as training or credentialing. It does not reduce learning to utility, productivity, or employability. It assumes instead that there exists a body of knowledge, insight, and wisdom worthy of preservation for the benefit of the recipient—and that education is the means by which that inheritance is deliberately transmitted.

This assumption is no longer widely shared. Yet without it, education loses its coherence.

Education as Transmission, Not Innovation

At its core, education is an act of transmission across generations. A civilization educates not to reinvent itself each generation, but to preserve what it has learned to be true and good.

Modern education increasingly reverses this logic. It treats the past with suspicion, tradition as an obstacle to be “disrupted”, and inheritance as something to be overcome rather than received. Students are encouraged to critique before they understand, to innovate before they have mastered, and to express opinions before they possess knowledge. This is not education.

Classical education begins from the opposite premise: one must first receive before one can judge, and one must first belong before one can reform.

This is not an argument against progress. It is an argument against collective amnesia.

The Illusion of Neutral Education

Education is often presented today as morally and culturally neutral—concerned only with skills, information, or procedural competencies. This is a convenient fiction at best.

Every curriculum implies a vision of the human person. Every selection of texts, every omission, every pedagogical priority teaches students what matters and what does not. Even the decision to avoid moral judgment is itself a moral stance.

Classical education rejects the pretense of neutrality. It acknowledges that education is inherently formative. Young people are not blank slates; they are moral and social beings in the process of becoming. They are constantly being habituated—toward certain loves, and prejudices, certain ideals, and certain conceptions of the good life.

The question is whether that formation will be intentional and rooted in wisdom, or accidental and shaped by wims or fashion.

Why the “Best” Matters

Arnold’s phrase—the best that has been thought and said—rests on a further claim: that not all ideas are equal. If they were, you wouldn’t need any.

The classical tradition unapologetically maintains standards. It distinguishes between what is enduring and what is ephemeral, between insight and novelty, between excellence and mediocrity. It does not deny that new works can be great, but it insists that greatness must be tested against time, reason, and moral weight.

The great works of the Western tradition endure not because they are old, but because they speak with unusual clarity about permanent human realities: justice and injustice, courage and cowardice, hubris and humility, order and chaos, duty and desire. They illuminate the human condition in ways that remain intelligible across centuries.

To exclude these works from education is not an act of liberation. It is an act of impoverishment.

Education and the Formation of Judgment

A properly educated person is not merely informed. He is formed in judgment.

This requires more than exposure to facts. It requires sustained engagement with serious ideas, demanding texts, and exemplary models of thought and character. It requires learning to reason logically, to speak precisely, to recognize fallacy, and to discern truth from persuasion.

Just as importantly, it requires moral orientation. Knowledge without character is not neutral; it is dangerous. History offers no shortage of technically skilled individuals whose lack of virtue proved catastrophic.

Classical education insists that intellectual development and moral formation are inseparable. It aims not merely to produce clever minds, but ordered souls.

Education in a Time of Decline

We must be candid about our moment.

We are living through a period of cultural fragmentation and confusion. Many parents now sense that something essential is missing. Schools increasingly struggle to articulate what education is for, beyond vague appeals to inclusion or social striving.

Classical education offers no quick fixes. It does not promise to solve every problem or reverse cultural decline overnight. What it offers instead is clarity of purpose.

Education exists to form human beings capable of truth, virtue, and responsible freedom. Everything else is secondary.

A Modest but Serious Aim

No individual can master the full inheritance of Western civilization. That task is beyond any one lifetime. But this does not absolve us of responsibility.

By learning even a little, we quickly grasp how much there is to know—and how much has been lost. The proper response to this realization is not despair, but humility and effort.

Our aim, then, must be modest but serious: to recover what we can, to pass on what we have received, and to hope that those who come after us will do the same.

Education, rightly understood, is an act of fidelity—to truth, to civilization, and to the generations that will inherit what we choose to preserve.

What Endures in culture and learning?

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”

— C.S. Lewis

The return of classical education comes at an opportune—and necessary—time.

Across the Western world, parents and educators increasingly recognize that the modern education system has failed in its most fundamental task: the formation of virtuous, discerning and disciplined young citizens with a sense of shared culture and tradition. In place of intellectual depth, moral formation, and cultural inheritance, students are offered a fragmented curriculum, progressive trends, and a narrowing conception of education as mere job training.

Classical education represents a deliberate and necessary alternative. It is not trendy. It is not novel. It is a return—to what is proven, and worthy of transmission.

Ad Altiora exists to serve that return.

A Civilization-Long Tradition

Classical education is not a theory or innovation. It is the most successful and long-lasting educational tradition in human history.

It emerged in ancient Greece, was adopted, refined and systematized by the Romans, preserved imperfectly and enriched through the Middle Ages, and brought to renewed excellence during the Renaissance. From there, it passed to England and, through colonial inheritance, to the United States, Canada, and Australia. The Canadian national motto, “A Mari Usque ad Mare”, drawn from Psalm 72:8, confidently promoted Canada’s inheritance, Roman and Christian. 

A century earlier, at the time of the American founding, classical education was not a counter-cultural alternative—it was both the norm and ideal. Greek and Latin were central to early education. Plutarch’s Lives shaped the moral imagination of statesmen. George Washington was trusted in part because Americans recognized in him the Roman ideal of Cincinnatus: the citizen-soldier who relinquishes power once duty is fulfilled.

This tradition was never just academic. It aimed at forming human beings capable of reason, virtue, and civic responsibility.

At its best, classical education:

• Values knowledge for its own sake

• Upholds standards of morality, logic, beauty, and coherence

• Demands moral formation alongside intellectual development

• Prepares free citizens for responsible participation in the political order

These aims are not irrelevant today. They are only absent—and much needed.

The Purpose of Education

Matthew Arnold famously described education as the passing on of “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” Education is not primarily about credentials or conformity to the present moment. It is the inheritance of knowledge, wisdom and tradition and the formation of virtuous moral agents. A civilization survives only if it deliberately transmits its intellectual and moral achievements to the next generation.

Today, that transmission has more or less ended.

In an era marked by cultural degeneration, many parents now understand a difficult truth: without conscious effort, the inheritance of Western civilization will not survive intact. What replaces it will be less humane, less beautiful, and less capable of sustaining free societies.

Classical education is not about reverence for the past because it is old. The great works endure because they speak with clarity and depth about permanent human realities—justice, courage, pride, duty, love, suffering, and transcendence.

They teach us not what to think, but how to think—and how to live.

Education as Moral Formation

Education is never morally neutral.

Young people are constantly placed in moral situations. Every curriculum implicitly teaches what is worthy of imitation and pursuit. The question is not whether character will be formed, but which character will be formed.

Plato understood this clearly. For him, education habituated the young to love what is noble and to reject what is base. Music, poetry, physical training, and disciplined study elevated the soul toward harmony and order.

Aristotle went further, insisting that education must form virtuous citizens rooted in the traditions and laws of their society. Knowledge divorced from virtue was not only incomplete—it was dangerous.

Classical education accepts this proposition. It insists that truth, goodness, and beauty are objective realities, not matters of preference. As soon as an educator says “this is right” and “this is wrong,” character is being taught. The only question is whether that teaching is deliberate, coherent, and rooted in wisdom—or accidental and incoherent.

Among the Ruins

We must be honest about our situation.

We are not heirs standing at the height of a flourishing culture. We are custodians among ruins.

The common culture that once sustained classical education no longer exists. We obviously do not have a Plato, an Augustine, Dante or a Leonardo da Vinci among us. We lack not only the giants, but also the cultural fluency required to understand them. It is difficult to pass on what we ourselves possess only in shattered fragments.

Virtues such as courage, self-denial, humility, perseverance, and magnanimity cannot be transmitted by books alone. They require living examples that are lifted up by a common culture.

And yet, abandonment is not an option.

Education is the passing of a torch, and the number of torchbearers has grown thin. Still, all is not lost. We cannot reconstruct what has been shattered—but we can recover much. We can gather the fragments. We can rebuild enough to pass something real to the next generation.

This work requires humility and resolve.

Why Ad Altiora

Ad Altiora means toward higher things.

This project exists to make classical education more accessible, more intelligible, and more grounded for parents and educators who sense its importance but feel overwhelmed by complexity, cost, or fragmentation.

Classical education today is often burdened by sprawling curricula and intimidating systems. Yet its core materials—the great texts of Western civilization—are more accessible than ever. Many are in the public domain. Others are inexpensive. The real challenge is not access to books, but clarity of purpose and guidance in their use.

Ad Altiora begins here: with first principles, with humility among the ruins, and with a commitment to recover what can still be recovered.

The work will proceed gradually and deliberately.