“Another challenge has been the stereotype that classical education is for wealthy children with high IQs. To be fair, this assumption has a whiff of truth to it. Classically educated children score higher on standardized tests, and private education by nature costs more than public. ACCS schools average an annual price tag of $7,000.”

On a Monday morning 17 years ago, Russ Gregg quit his job because of a sermon he’d heard the day before about “venturing something for God that’s a little bit crazy.”

So he left his position as development director for a Christian school in one of Minneapolis’s wealthiest suburbs in order to launch a classical Christian school in one of the city’s poorest, most violent neighborhoods.

Without teachers, parents, a building, or financial support, Gregg was determined to love his neighbors as he loved himself. So he sought to give them the best education he could think of—a school like the one his own kids attended.

Seventeen years later, Hope Academy has grown from 35 students in a church basement to 500 students in a seven-story school building. Among Hope’s five classes to date, 99 percent of students have graduated. In fact, almost every graduate (95 percent) was accepted at two- or four-year colleges, with a few receiving full-ride scholarships to private liberal arts colleges.

“This is in a community where half of my neighbors aren’t even graduating from high school,” Gregg said. “The ones who do graduate read at an eighth-grade level.”

Even better, Gregg has also seen “promising fruit” among students in their desire to follow Christ.

The astonishing growth and success of Hope mirrors the classical Christian education movement that’s been sprouting up across the country for the past 25 years. In the fall of 1993, there were 10 such schools in the United States. By 2003, there were 153.

Today, more than 251 schools are members of the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), and they educate more than 43,000 students a year. But the total number of students receiving a classical Christian education each year is both higher and harder to calculate, since it includes both non-ACCS member schools and home schools.

Nonetheless, experts place the number of somewhere between 200,000 to 300,000 students nationwide.

Going Back to Go Forward

While calling education “classical” is new, the practice is as old as Plato and Socrates.

“What we call ‘classical education’ was before the late 1800s simply ‘education,’” said Christopher Perrin, a national leader in the classical education movement and founder and CEO of Classical Academic Press. “The word ‘classical’ as an adjective has become dominant now because we’re describing its renewal.”

In the late 1800s, classical education was “calcifying,” Perrin said. While there were some good schools, there was also “some severity and some austerity and some examples that weren’t great.”

At the time, many factors prompted the invention and rise of progressive modern education. And in the face of the industrial revolution, mass immigration, the scientific revolution, and the advent of social sciences, classical education simply couldn’t hold its own.

Early in the 20th century, influential educational reformer John Dewey argued against objective truth. He believed education should be solely pragmatic and focused on helping humans adapt to their environment. Dewey’s goal instead was to equip individuals for particular spheres of usefulness: business, medicine, housework, or factories.

“What it boils down to is that a certain group of people are educated for factories, and another group to rule, but everybody is going to be educated for practical reasons,” said Andrew Kern, who founded the Circe Institute in 2001 as a center for independent research on classical education.

This approach to education quickly became popular, so much so that progressive education has dominated the landscape in the United States since the 1920s, and until lately, classical education was nearly extinguished.

“The questions in education went from ‘What kind of citizen do we want?’ to ‘What do they need to be able to do, and how can we prepare them for that?’” said Keith Nix, who heads the Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. Nix also sits on the boards for ACCS and the Society of Classical Learning (SCL).

“Not only did we start to lose subjects like Latin, but we also started thinking differently about subjects like mathematics. If we think math is man-made, the question is ‘What do I need it for?’ rather than ‘What is true and beautiful and good about math that I need to pursue?’”

Reimagining math as a good gift from God shifts the entire framework, Nix said.

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