More News

Over the last seven months, our group has held public events each month to describe our proposed Frederick Classical Charter School, which will offer a free, secular, public K-8 education using the classical model, which has been modernized for today's students.

Quite often when we ask parents if they know what classical education is, they aren't entirely sure. Now that our application has been submitted to the Board of Education, we wanted to write this letter explaining classical education for the benefit of those who haven't yet attended our monthly events.

First, classical education is time-tested idea, originating in ancient Greece and Rome, reaching its full form in the Middle Ages, and continuing through the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. The classical approach was the dominant approach for teaching our young people for centuries up until the early 1900s, when the educational pendulum swung toward more "progressive" models of education, which focus less on academic content than the classical model does.

Second, starting a classical charter school is about filling a modern void, not returning to the past. Over the last 20 years, there has be a renewed interest in offering classical education in public school settings, driven in part by concerns that the current focus on test preparation has given short shrift to the liberal arts. Currently, there are no public or private schools in the county that offer a classical education, and our group wanted to fill this gap.

Third, classical education is rich in content and logically organized. History, which is taught chronologically instead of in a scattershot fashion as is common in most schools, is used as the organizing structure for science and the humanities. First-graders study ancient history, ancient art, ancient music, stories from ancient literature, and biology, since the ancients knew about plants and animals.

Second-graders study the Middle Ages and astronomy, third-graders study the Renaissance and chemistry, fourth-graders study modern history and physics. This sequence is repeated in grades 5-8, where students are expected to use original sources. This approach results in students taking two complete sweeps through world history prior to entering high school, connects the subjects to each other, and enables a deeper understanding than is typical for students at each grade level.

Our students will use the same math program used by the world's highest achieving nation in mathematics, which is rigorous but uses cartoons to make math accessible. Our reading program was cited by top reading researcher Dr. Louisa Moats as one of two programs that best follows scientifically based reading research that systematically and explicitly teaches phonemic awareness and phonics that will reach nearly every student. All students will learn Spanish starting in kindergarten and Latin in grades 4-6.

Lastly, offering a classical education in Frederick County benefits both students and the school system itself. No school system, no matter how good, educates all of its students to their potential. Parents whose children attend classical schools are often amazed by how their children thrive: kindergarteners who know what atoms and molecules are; first-graders comparing spilled milk to the Nile River during breakfast conversation; fourth-graders figuring out an unknown word by recognizing its Latin roots; eighth-graders conducting mock trials with real local cases and a real judge.

Teachers will get world-class professional development by top practitioners and an innovative "work out" process used by leading companies to eliminate bureaucracy and allow teachers to focus on teaching. The school system as a whole gains a community of practice focused on classical content and research-based teaching techniques, and positions itself is a leader in the growing movement to make classical education available to public school students.

Our group would love to bring the benefits of a classical education to the students, teachers, parents, school administrators, and residents of Frederick County. We encourage anyone interested in making this option available will sign our website at FrederickClassicalCharterSchool.org.

Tom Neumark, Point of Rocks

The writer is president of Frederick Classical Charter School Inc., the nonprofit putting forth the charter school application.