Classical Education History and Introduction

Dr. Brian A. Williams is Dean of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University which offers the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) in Classical Education. He also serves as Associate Professor of Ethics and Liberal Studies and General Editor of Principia: A Journal of Classical Education.

In four independent lectures, Dr. Williams guides learners in this course through the history and philosophy of education by treating ancient and medieval thinkers not as theorists but as active practitioners. These lectures provide a “salutary shock” to modern assumptions and overcome what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” as they explore this “longer tradition”.

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• The first lecture serves as an orientation, introducing key texts and exploring the educational systems of early societies like Sumer, Babylon, ancient Israel, and Homeric Greece. This session highlights how ancient education was largely oriented toward functional and civic roles rather than individual self-actualization.
• The second lecture addresses the cultivation of moral virtue, specifically focusing on Aristotle’s claim that young people lack prudence due to an “experience deficit”. It then examines Philip Melanchthon’s proposal that literature, especially Homer’s epics, can serve as a “workshop of humanity” by providing vicarious experiences that help form prudent judgment in the young.
• The third lecture frames education as part of the church’s “classical commission,” a threefold work of building sanctuaries, hospitals, and schools to care for souls, bodies, and minds. This session explains how education channels both God’s “creating grace” (developing natural abilities) and “saving grace” (healing error and ordering loves) by integrating Greco-Roman wisdom into a Christian framework, a practice described by Augustine as “plundering the Egyptians”.
• The fourth and final lecture is an “apologia” for the historical study of education itself. Using an anecdote about Italian coffee customs, Dr. Williams illustrates how encountering other traditions reveals the assumptions behind our own practices. This lecture contrasts modern educational paradigms—represented by Martha Nussbaum (moral formation), Stanley Fish (intellectual formation), and Bryan Caplan (practical formation)—with the more integrated vision of thinkers from the classical tradition, such as Hugh of St. Victor.

Ultimately, the course challenges contemporary paradigms by engaging with past educators as dialogue partners who can offer perspective on enduring questions about the purpose of education. The curriculum centers on key texts like Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon and Philip Melanchthon’s Orations on Philosophy and Education, which present an integrated vision of the liberal, moral, and practical arts. By journeying into this rich history, the course aims to form students and teachers who understand education’s highest goal as what Hugh of St. Victor called fulcrum esse—the formation of a beautiful being.

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Educators taking this course will gain a multi-faceted understanding of educational philosophy and practice, designed to prepare them for a successful and thoughtful teaching career. They will be oriented to key texts, primary readings and historical figures that engage with enduring questions of educational purpose, practice, and ends. The course also provides a rationale for integrated education in keeping with sources such as The Liberal Arts Tradition so that teachers understand the holistic aim of Christian liberal arts education. The course distinguishes between various modern educational paradigms (moral formation, intellectual formation, practical/employability) and the classical tradition’s aim of remedying ignorance, vice, and weakness by cultivating wisdom, virtue, and skill. With guidance on curriculum and pedagogy, the course surveys Philip Melanchthon’s significant educational reforms and offers insights into how literature, particularly Homer’s epics, can act as a “workshop of humanity” by offering vicarious experience, imparting lessons, and instilling moral images (“spines in the mind”) that inspire virtue and deter vice, thereby forming prudence.

The course encourages personal formation through encounters with older educators. This engagement can “enlarge ourselves as teachers, with ‘more of me to be a teacher with'” so that teachers understand their role in embodying a “rhetoric in conduct”—a living pedagogy passed on by imitation, serving as models for students to follow. This includes understanding that their lives are part of the curriculum. Those completing the course will be encouraged by Erasmus’s view of teaching as “the noblest of occupations” and Newman’s description of teachers as “fountains” of wisdom. The course provides a theological framework for classical education, rooting it in the doctrines of creation, sin, redemption, and eschatological hope, viewing education as anticipating the renewal of creation and a foretaste of eternal leisure. It will prompt teachers to reflect on questions such as how vocational training fits into broader formation and what role education should play in shaping society.