TEXT
Classical schools put Plato over iPad
There are more than 55,000 members on the forums at welltrainedmind.com, a site started by Susan Wise Bauer, an author and educator who in 1999 published “The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home.” The book has sold more than a half-million copies, and has become a bible for the classical education movement.
Some supporters will gather this week at the annual meeting of the Association of Classical and Christian Schools - an organization of 235 schools with more than 38,000 students. They'll attend workshops about how to delight students with poetry and strategies on how to introduce Van Gogh and Matisse to kindergarteners. Also in June, the Lynchburg, Virginia-based Society for Classical Learning will meet in San Antonio, where seminars focus on everything from rhetoric skills to overviews of ancient and medieval education methods.
For newcomers to the movement, these gatherings can feel like a trip back in time. Don’t look here for discussions on No Child Left Behind; chit-chat in the hallways focuses more on Saint Chrysostom, Tom Paine and how to make it interesting to modern kids.
“As the movement has grown, there’s been an increasing tendency to define a classical education as ‘This is what Plato or Aristotle would have recognized,’” Bauer said. “But there are whole new fields of knowledge since then. We wouldn’t reproduce their view of women, which was that they shouldn’t get an education. What we’re really doing now is neo-classical education.”
http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/21/classical-schools-put-plato-over-ipad/