Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?

In many public schools, kids learn to read by guessing words using context clues, rather than by decoding the sounds of letters. In most classical schools, phonics reign, and students learn grammar by diagramming sentences. Some public schools have moved away from techniques like memorization, which education scholars knock as “rote learning” or “drill and kill”—the thing that’s killed being a child’s desire to learn. In contrast, classical schools prize memory work, asking students to internalize math formulas and recite poems. And then there’s literature: one New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante. In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.