What is a “classical” school? If you’re a moviegoer, perhaps you imagine heart-warming scenes of an “emperor’s club” or of young men standing on desks in defiant honor, reciting “Oh Captain, my Captain!” Or maybe what comes to mind is a secret society that prompts mothers to talk of Latin and logic at coffee, or that impels the use of obscure terms like “trivium” and “liberal arts” on letterhead, or that exalts names such as Sayers and Lewis joined with phrases like “lost tools” and “the abolition of man.” It’s only logical then to wonder whether there’s a secret handshake.
On the other hand, if you’ve studied history at any depth, it’s more likely that you imagine beards, chitons (clothing similar to togas), and sandaled feet; that is, you imagine scenes from ancient Greece. Now, at The Geneva School, you won’t find any chitons—unless of course you happen to see the third-graders or the eighth-graders recreating, in Homeric fashion, battle scenes that once happened on “the fair plains of Ilion.” Nevertheless, if in response to the question “what is a classical school?” you imagined the ancient world, you are in a sense correct, because the “classical” tradition of education was birthed there. Perhaps it began with the Greek philosopher Thales, who wondered about the nature of the world. We know that, later on, Socrates built on this tradition when he told to us examine ourselves, and then his student Plato followed suit when he mused on the importance of geometry. Plato’s student Aristotle expanded the tradition like no other, inventing subjects as diverse as logic, biology, meteorology, and metaphysics.
Classical education, however, is not stuck in the past, much less the ancient past. It is a living tradition that continues to develop and grow as the seeds of Greek thought sprout in different soils and diverse climes. In western civilization, this classical tradition of education grew, especially under the auspices of the Church, into the “liberal arts” curriculum: grammar, arithmetic, logic, geometry, rhetoric, music, and astronomy. At The Geneva School you’ll find that these liberal arts are framed within a larger vision for education that emphasizes the development of the body through physical training and the development of the imagination through the fine and performing arts.
Interestingly, this three-fold emphasis upon the intellectual development of the liberal arts, the imaginative and “poetic” foundations of learning, and the physical development of athletics is not unique to The Geneva School—it’s actually the classical tradition … with no secret handshake!