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.
