Increasing Academic Achievement with the Trivium of Classical Education

In this age of accountability, the future success of our educational system in the United States may well be achieved by embracing the 'classical" methodology of our past. Dr. Hart provides a brief summation of classical education, its history, and how its implementation increases academic achievement. Two models of classical education that have had a significant effect on the reemergence of classical schools across this country-Mortimer Adler's Paideia Proposal and the Trivium as espoused by Dorothy L. Sayers in her essay 'The Lost Tools of Learning"-are reviewed. To understand Adler's and Sayers' approaches to classical education, Dr. Hart provides a summation of the writings of the key philosophers and teachers who greatly impacted the development of classical education since the Hellenistic Age. Hart also shows how the recent philosophy of pragmatism, embraced by John Dewey, so directly impacted the decline of classical education during the past century. Ultimately however, Hart's book informs us of the reemergence of classical education in hundreds of schools across our nation that are raising achievement by providing the basis for a liberal arts education.