Classical Curriculum

classical curriculum

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education" - Aristotle

The American Classical Lyceum is a liberty-based education that leads a scholar to servant leadership through the pursuit of truth and the development of virtue and wisdom. It is Excalibur Classical Academy’s unique model of education formed after the education that produced the great servant leaders who founded our great nation.

To understand the model, one must first look to what it was about America that produced such great servant leaders. Some leaders had formal classical educations—Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Some did not. Some were self-educated. George Washington independently read the books his brother sent back from England. Fredrick Douglass fought for his own education, which ultimately led to his liberation from slavery. Benjamin Franklin was self-taught as a young apprentice, giving up eating meat in order to afford the purchase of books. Abigail Adams had no formal education but learned from the classics in her family library. She was articulate, astute, and had a keen political mind. But what they all had in common was they were all rooted in liberty and engaged the liberal arts through the classics and mentors, which prepared them for servant leadership.

Classical StructurE

While the three subjects of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric were originally taught as independent disciplines, they have been adapted to a variety of modern subjects as "stages" of learning, rather than discrete branches of study.

In this way, the classical model of education is to teach first the "grammar" or basic ideas, skills, concepts, language, and methods of a given subject before encouraging pupils to explore the "logic" or inter-relatedness of such concepts. Once mastery of the "grammar" of a subject has been achieved, pupils in a classical model are guided through an exploration of the connections and implications of the concepts they have learned as they proceed through the "logic" portion of their educational journey. The final stage of classical education is that of "rhetoric" or the art of persuasively expressing to others the implications of the knowledge they have acquired through the first two stages of learning. It is during the rhetoric stage that students in the classical model find and express their own voice in the "great conversation" of the Western tradition and become "scholars" who attempt to ethically influence the world around them through skillful presentation of the knowledge they possess. While classical learning is intended to progress roughly along this trajectory, the path to "scholarship" is rarely linear. At any given time, the scholars at Excalibur Classical Academy are engaged in all three stages of classical learning and are constantly seeking to improve their understanding of the world.

Classical Curriculum