His new book, his classical education advocacy.
a POLYSEMY Q&A

The final months of 2008 brought the release of Living Memory: A Classical Memory Work Companion, by Dr. Andrew Campbell. If you are a home-schooling parent or an adult learner using the classical model, this was very exciting news. Dr. Campbell is a leading advocate of classical education in the home, as demonstrated by the success of his first book, The Latin Centered Curriculum, and the Yahoo Group following it has garnered (see also his personal blog). Dr. Campbell generously agreed to take questions from Matthew Dallman on the lost art of memorization, classical learning, how both can positively impact writing skills and aesthetics in general, the state of classical education, Latin, and more.

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MATTHEW DALLMAN: Congratulations on the release of Living Memory. It is obviously the product of a great deal of work and passion on your part, and both clearly radiate from the book. For those unfamiliar with the book and the topic, why don’t you tell us a bit about the book, and what you aimed for it to be.

ANDREW CAMPBELL: Thanks, Matthew. The book seems to have filled a need for many homeschoolers, and I’m grateful for the positive reception it’s been getting. The book was designed to be a “one-stop shop” for homeschoolers who want to include memorization in their curriculum. For several generations now, progressive educators have denigrated memorization as a pedagogical tool. Classical education, in contrast, has always emphasized the importance of the memory as an intellectual faculty. We recognize that without a strong memory and a storehouse of basic information at hand, it’s impossible to do that “higher-level thinking” that all educators aim for.

DALLMAN: Why this book, now?

CAMPBELL: When I was trying to put together memory work for my own daughter, I found that there were a lot of resources available, but it took a lot of time and effort to draw them together. I’d rather spend my time with my child than on the Internet, tracking down poetry and the capital of Tuvalu.

At the same time, neoclassical education — programs based on Dorothy Sayers’ reinvention of the Trivium — tend to make memory work too mechanical. In “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Sayers talks about the “poll-parrot” stage, when young children’s capacity for rote memorization is at its peak. The result is that some neoclassical educators have focused on memorization in grades 1-4 almost to the exclusion of all else. I think this is a mistake. Living Memory is designed to provide memory work selections for all the basic subjects for grades K-12.

DALLMAN: Give us a sense of what went into making Living Memory, on the research/preparation side.

CAMPBELL: I spent over a year collecting material for the book. I used the scope and sequence from my previous book (The Latin-Centered Curriculum) as an organizing principle. When choosing what to include, I asked myself: “If Western Civilization crumbled tomorrow, what works would I want my child to carry with her as seeds of rebirth?” Obviously you can’t fit all of that between the covers of one book! But in the back of my mind were the Benedictines who salvaged classical literature during the Dark Ages. I wanted not only important facts (multiplication tables, the contents of the Bill of Rights), but also beautiful poems and songs to nourish the spirit.

DALLMAN: And your own background, academic and not: would you summarize that for us?

CAMPBELL: Sure. My academic background is not in education or in Classics, but in German. I got my doctorate from Washington University (St. Louis). I was trained as a medievalist and did most of my research on 14th-century chapbooks. Fascinating, but very obscure! I was required to take Latin for my degree and fell in love with the language. Had things been different, I would have dropped German altogether and switched over to Classics, right then and there. Instead, I carried on with the degree and then set about self-educating in Latin and Greek.

DALLMAN: How did all this start for you — as a child, did you want to grow up to be a leading classical education advocate?

CAMPBELL: Unfortunately that wasn’t an option on all those multiple-choice career placement tests they had us take in high school! I had always intended to be either a writer or a teacher, and now I’m both.

When I finished my degree, the job market in my field was terrible. There were four positions in all of the US that were even remotely suitable, and all of them went to older faculty angling for better jobs. (I don’t blame them; that’s the way the profession works.) I decided I was not willing to move all over the country, taking one-year appointments and hoping to find a tenure-track position in a tolerably good location. I also noticed that the most successful academics tended to be either single or divorced, and so free to move around and focus exclusively on their work. I was not willing to sacrifice my dream of having a family to my career. So after a few years of part-time language teaching and stop-gap employment, I found work in publishing.

More recently, I’ve been involved in starting up a classical high school in southern New Hampshire, New England Classical Academy.

DALLMAN: Starting up a school! — what an endeavor that must be. I take it, then, you don’t view “school”, in the common sense, as mutually exclusive from home-education?

CAMPBELL: Not at all. The Academy’s freshman class is made up entirely of students who were homeschooled K-8, and most of them have younger siblings who are currently homeschooling.

Parents are the primary educators of their children, and each family has to respond to the needs — academic, social, spiritual — of the children in its midst. There are many situations in which outsourcing some or all of a child’s education is the right choice. What I want to encourage is the idea of parental authority in matters of education; parents are the ones who should be making these decisions, not the state. But if parents find a traditional school that meets their child’s needs and the parents’ standards, then I say, more power to them!

DALLMAN: I grew up having to memorize a little bit — in Sunday School, some in elementary and middle school, not much afterward; certainly much less than people even fifty years ago had to. I doubt I’m unique in this. Why has the emphasis on the importance of memory work, and memorization in general, decreased so much?

CAMPBELL: It’s largely the result of progressive education’s stranglehold on our schools. We no longer agree that children should master a body of knowledge to prepare them for adult life and for citizenship (let alone for Heaven!). Aside from classical educators, the Core Knowledge Foundation is the only real voice for a more traditional understanding of the role of memory — and of substantive content — in education.

DALLMAN: Just for our readers, would you clarify what you mean by progressive education and its goals (vs. mastering a body of knowledge, etc.)?  And what is the Core Knowledge Foundation?

CAMPBELL: Progressive education has been the dominant educational model in the United States for the past century. The big name here is John Dewey, and the slogan is “Learning by Doing.” Lots of ink has been spilled in trying to define its goals, but I would say that the overriding concern of progressive educators is socialization — by which they mean preparing students to be productive members of their society. It is radically utilitarian in that the main concern is furthering progressive social ideals rather than developing the individual human person’s mind and character. If readers want a good introduction to the history and effects of progressive education, particularly in the public schools, I’d recommend Diane Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform.

The Core Knowledge Foundation was created by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., the author of Cultural Literacy. Homeschoolers are familiar with his “What Your … Grader Needs to Know” series. Core Knowledge emphasizes the need for students to master a body of knowledge that will enable them to navigate their own culture. The Foundation has developed a curriculum to achieve that goal and helps schools, both public and private, implement it. Core Knowledge has done some great work with low-performing schools and has shown that it is possible to level the playing field for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds — and without dumbing the curriculum down. Quite the opposite.

DALLMAN: You write that a good memory is a key to good writing and good speaking. For the skeptics out there, give us a sense of how a good memory serves those skills.

CAMPBELL: Andrew Pudewa does a good job of explaining this, but the idea goes back at least to Cicero. We can’t express what we don’t have words for. By stocking our minds with “the best that has been thought and said,” we have a storehouse of phrases to express, succinctly and beautifully, what we want to say. Those phrases are just a beginning: we are not doomed to repeat others’ words forever. But they do provide good models on which to base our own writing and speaking.

DALLMAN: One of the more fascinating passages from your book’s excellent introduction, which is titled “How — and Why — to Memorize”, is how you suggest that memorization is most effective when various language skills are “paired”. Would you explain what you mean by that?

CAMPBELL: We learn through language. Even a concept like 2+2=4 can be — and routinely is — verbalized as “two plus two equals four.” Now there are four skills associated with language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. When we learn a natural language, like our mother tongue, we usually do so in that order: listening first, then speaking, then reading, then writing. Listening and speaking naturally go together, as in conversation. Likewise reading and writing are a natural pair, based on the abstraction of symbolic representations of sounds by the conventional marks we call “letters.” (At least in Western languages!)

When most people sit down to memorize something, they usually rely on reading. Think about how a student typically prepares for an exam: he sits down and re-reads his notes or the textbook. But our memories work best if we use all of the natural language modalities. So re-writing one’s notes — which obviously requires reading as well — will be more effective than just reading them silently, and reading them aloud will add another level of effectiveness. In general, you want to look at the modes in which you will need to express the information you’re memorizing: will you have to recite a poem aloud? Then listen to it and speak it yourself.  Will you need to write answers on an exam? Then write the material out. But the more language modalities you include, the better you will remember.

DALLMAN: How has memorization helped you, in your work as a writer and teacher?

CAMPBELL: Memorizing poetry has helped me gain a sense of cadence in writing. I read everything I write out loud as part of the editing process. If I can’t complete a written clause without taking a breath, as you would at the end of a line of poetry, it’s too long.

As a teacher, memorization is vital, since you can’t teach what you don’t know. The connection is particularly obvious in language teaching: if I don’t know how to decline a Latin noun, I can’t teach my students how to do it.

DALLMAN: Another book you have written is the well-known and well-regarded, The Latin Centered Curriculum. One of the chapters in that book is entitled “Multum Non Multa” (linked at The Bookshelf at POLYSEMY). In that chapter, you eloquently describe the educational benefit of depth over span; a thorough exploration of relatively fewer core disciplines over many years, rather than the many disciplines of current education practice — in other words, quality over quantity. Why has our current education practice drifted from what you describe in “Multum Non Multa”?

CAMPBELL: We’ve muddied the distinction between liberal education and vocational training. If you ask 100 parents why they want their kids to go to college, I would wager 99 of them would say “so they can get a good job.” Since we look to our schools to train everyone for every possible life path, the curriculum has spread out into areas that were once the domain of the family or the churches (cooking, “health,” personal finance), trade or technical schools (shop class, computers), or private instruction (drivers’ ed). I call these “lifestyle classes,” and they have nothing to do with education per se. Do you know that wonderful quote from Jacques Barzun? We expect our schools to turn out “ideal citizens, supertolerant neighbors, agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually adept and flawless drivers of cars.” That pretty much sums up the current state of education in the US.

Classical education is liberal in the sense of “freeing.” It frees us from our personal and chronological prejudices. It teaches us to give our ancestors a vote (to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton). The focus in classical education is on educating free persons, not consumers or workers. When we look at what it takes to make a person free, then we are back to basics: the ability to listen and  read with understanding, think with precision, and write and speak with clarity. And the classical curriculum does that better than any other.

DALLMAN: That Barzun quote is perfect. Now, to be clear, by “classical education” we mean an curriculum anchored in, but not exclusively devoted to, the study of Latin and Greek and the civilizations from which those arose. Speaking more historically now, in your estimation what led to the receding of classical education? What are the reasons or factors that led to where we are now, with classical education, at best, misunderstood, and at worst, largely abandoned?

CAMPBELL: If I had to point to something in history that led to the decline of classical education, it would be the Industrial Revolution. That’s the point at which “the market” becomes the driving force of our civilization, and with that comes the redefinition of citizens as “workers” and finally as “consumers.” It’s not that people before that didn’t want education to prepare students for “real life” — meaning economic realities, career, and so on — but that they assumed that liberal education, not vocational training, was the best way to accomplish that goal.

The other factor — which I almost hesitate to name because it sounds positively anti-American! — is the rise of universal public education. Again, if you are going to school everyone, you have to create an educational system that will accommodate everyone. Economic pressures from above, the need to get a job and earn a living after graduation, necessarily influence the school curriculum. And when businesses refuse even to look at a résumé for an entry-level job unless it lists a B.A. — why, then you have the situation we find ourselves in today, in which college is recast as a “birthright.”

DALLMAN: As one of the leading advocates of classical education in the home, through your books, your Yahoo group, and more, how would you characterize the state of the movement?

CAMPBELL: Classical homeschoolers are still a minority within a minority, and traditional (Latin-centered) classical homeschoolers are a minority within that already small group. I am heartened that so many people have found The Latin-Centered Curriculum liberating, but we are still in the early stages of an educational revival. The Sayers Trivium model, which is still the dominant classical education paradigm in the homeschool world, has only been in practical use since the early 1980s.

I try to remind myself that those early Benedictines spent their time clearing rocky land and growing enough food to feed themselves and the poor. It took centuries for the great monastic houses with their scriptoria and libraries to grow and a vibrant culture to appear. My hope is that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have the opportunity to learn Latin at home from “native speakers.”

DALLMAN: Speaking Latin — is this something you do? Outside of the Catholic Church, how common is spoken Latin today?

CAMPBELL: It’s not even that common within the Catholic Church, sadly! There is a growing community of professional educators and scholars-at-large working to revive Latin as a spoken language. There are annual conventions, message forums, and social gatherings for Latin speakers. Although the idea of speaking Latin probably sounds a little geeky to most people, this is exactly how Latin was taught for centuries. The grammar-translation method that many of us learned Latin with was only developed in the 19th century. Before that, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, students learned to speak Latin as a quick and fairly painless way to master the language.

I do try to use oral Latin in the classroom as much as possible, and we use it at home as well. My daughter calls me “pater” (“father”)!  My next big project is an elementary Latin curriculum that uses spoken Latin as the basis for learning the language. The challenge is to make the curriculum accessible to parents who don’t know Latin themselves.

DALLMAN: What is the most unfortunate misconception about classical education that you have encountered in your advocacy?

CAMPBELL: “Classical education is elitist.” Sadly, I’ve even heard this from other classical homeschoolers, including one well-known author.

If it is elitist to assume the children are born for more than “getting and spending,” then classical education is guilty as charged.

Underlying this accusation are some historical realities; classical education was the education of the cultural and political elite and for many centuries it was available to very few outside the ruling classes. But we are not living in 19th-century British Empire. What this canard really comes down to is a combination of anti-intellectualism, envy, and fear. We Americans are a practical people, and that has too often expressed itself in impatience with ideas that seem too abstract or “high-falutin’.” As a nation, we still have a bit of an inferiority complex vis-à-vis Europe, which we try to make up for by sheer economic heft. (Although now we all may be sharing the same handbasket as the financial markets slide south.) Finally, on a personal level, parents are afraid that they’re somehow not good enough, not smart enough, to educate their children for intellectual excellence. They don’t know Latin; maybe their math or science skills are shaky; they’ve never read Homer. So they give up before they even try, with a cry of “sour grapes!”

I don’t say this to trash other parents. I didn’t have a classical education myself, and I have often joked that I’ve spent that last 20 years trying to learn all things I should have known before I left high school. But I believe America’s parents are, on the whole, good enough and smart enough to do what needs doing. Part of my job as an advocate for classical education is to convince the of their own abilities!

DALLMAN: What about those who might say, “classical education” is just another “education theory”, like what’s been going on in school over the last century; and “where’s the proof of classical education’s results, anyway?” — your responses?

CAMPBELL: Here’s my challenge: Pick up any standard list of Great Books. Now do a little research on how the authors from the Roman Republic on were educated. The overwhelming majority had classical educations, that is, they studied Latin and (usually) Greek, logic, philosophy. We agree that these are the best and brightest of the West. Yes, some of them were geniuses, pure and simple, but they were able to make the most of their gifts because they were educated in the classical tradition.

DALLMAN: In Latin Centered Curriculum, you devote a chapter to adult learners, if they themselves are interested in a classical education beyond that for their children (or if they have very young children, in preparation for being a home-educating parent). Can you summarize your advice for adults reading this who might be intrigued by classical education, but are either intimidated by the word “classical” or scared that they are too old to start, or both?

CAMPBELL: Just do it. Really. In the book I lay out some guidelines for people to follow, but adult learners have the advantage of knowing their own motivations and having more self-discipline than children. I advise starting with Latin because it’s the cornerstone of classical education and, for homeschooling parents, it’s the subject that is most often out-sourced because the kids have outpaced mom or dad’s learning.

There are lots of great independent study tools for Latin out there. I’d point to Evan Millner’s Latinum podcast as an excellent resource for busy adults. Evan’s course uses the Direct Method, so learners get to hear and speak Latin as well as read it. As I mentioned earlier, using all the natural language modalities is ideal, and the Latinum course does that beautifully. It’s also entirely free, including the textbook (from Google Books), although Evan does accept free-will donations to support his work.

DALLMAN: Am I right to sense that amidst all the differences in recently developed Latin programs, at least one thing most have in common is attempting to respond to the criticisms, justified or not, of Latin as this incredibly boring, left-brained puzzles for puzzles’ sake, onerously difficult sort of endeavor. I’m thinking of programs as diverse as Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latina, Cheryl Lowe’s Prima Latina and Latina Christiana, Evan Millner’s Latinum. Am I off-base in sensing this, call it maybe “user-friendliness”?

CAMPBELL: Certainly curriculum developers are trying to make the language more appealing. Professional classicists have done some amazing work in the face of declining enrollments, and now you can barely pick up a newspaper without reading an article about the resurgence of interest in Latin. That has everything to do with teachers “marketing” the language as exciting and fun.

I certainly see homeschool curriculum writers trying to make Latin more interesting to young students. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a disconnect between many curricula written for homeschoolers and the “state of the profession” as understood by classicists. Homeschoolers are still skeptical of using a text like Ørberg’s Lingua Latina. Some don’t seem to understand what real fluency in a language means: it doesn’t mean “finding the verb” or laboriously translating passages from ancient writers into “good English prose.” It means being able to pick up a text and read it with understanding, without recourse to English. It means being able to think in Latin, to communicate in Latin. You wouldn’t consider someone who has to translate every word of a French sentence into English “fluent” in French. You’d consider them a beginner. The same is true of Latin. Unfortunately, some methods focus so heavily on grammar and translation skills that they never give students true fluency in the language.

It is true that Memoria Press’s materials, to take one example I’m familiar with, have to do double-duty. They have to teach the language to students and do so in such a way that parents without Latin can learn alongside their children. It’s far easier to do that with a stripped-down, grammar-translation method text than with something like Lingua Latina, where the teacher must work substantially ahead of the student. The down side is that students can come to see Latin as an algebra word problem rather than as a natural language that people used — and can still use — to communicate ideas.

DALLMAN: As you know, POLYSEMY is devoted to the renewal of fine aesthetics on the artist side, so let me ask: do you think there is anything to the notion, suggested by many and disputed by as many if not more, that somehow there is a relationship between classical education, on the decline, and aesthetics (the “Beautiful”, the “Sublime”, of “Taste and Style”) in some kind of decline as well? That the erosions are not merely coincidental? Is making that sort of connection simply too convenient and easy?

CAMPBELL: I think both are victims of larger cultural forces, including consumerism and the anti-intellectualism I mentioned earlier. Certainly the great masters were immersed in a literary and religious culture that is largely lost today, and that makes much of their art impenetrable to those without the necessary background. This is one of the arguments I make for classical education: without it, the arts (including the performing arts) before the 20th century are simply incomprehensible.

DALLMAN: What would you say the benefits might be for a fine artist today consciously choosing to immerse, or re-immerse, their studies in various classical models, both within their art discipline, and those regarded as “canonical”, meaning “highly influential”?

CAMPBELL: In classical education, we talk about “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” At a certain level, these three are identical. For Christians, they have one source – God. Speaking as an amateur (in the best sense, I hope!), I think we need to get back to the idea of artists not only reflecting but forming culture. That means seeing beyond the chaos of our world and the confusion of postmodern identity to something better. That sounds terribly old-fashioned, but I believe artists have a high calling. They are educators in their own right. Art needs to move beyond shock value and “consciousness raising” about various social issues to inspire us. What are your ideals? What is your vision? That’s what the rest of us need from artists.

DALLMAN: Two more questions. I wanted to ask you about “unschooling”. Many people have heard of it, regardless if they agree with its tenets 100%. What is your view of unschooling, and do you think it has a place within classical education?

CAMPBELL: I’ve gone on record as saying that unschooling and classical education spring out of fundamentally different worldviews. In its radical form (and I must emphasize the word “radical” here), unschooling is educational romanticism. It follows Rousseau in claiming that, left to their own devices, children will learn all they need to know in their own time, and that any attempt to direct that learning is an act of violence, of coercion. It assumes that children are born good and stay that way unless meddled with by misguided adults. (This raises the question of how adults got so misguided in the first place. Maybe Adam did do something wrong after all?) Unschooling also does not posit any body of knowledge that all adults in a given culture should master; schooling should be what meets the individual’s self-perceived needs. In short, unschooling is radically relativistic and individualistic.

Classical education, on the other hand, assumes that children need to be civilized, and that it is the natural order of things for parents, or those chosen by parents, to direct their children’s learning. Children simply can’t know what they don’t know, or why it’s important to know it. So classical education is hierarchical in several senses. First, it acknowledges that adults, specifically parents, have legitimate authority over their children and their children’s education. Second, it assumes that who teach should know more than their students. Third, while it affirms the importance of individual motivation and self-discipline, classical education is pragmatic enough to point out that having a teacher to lead the way is more efficient than each student’s attempting to reinvent the pedagogical wheel on his or her own. Finally — and most important to my mind — classical education posits a hierarchy of knowledge. Some things are more important than others; some things need to be mastered before others can be attempted. A classical educator is willing to say should, as in “You should read Vergil” and must, as in “You must master the Latin grammar before you attempt to read the Aeneid in the original.” Radical unschooling is unwilling to do either.

Now I hasten to say that what I’m responding to here is an extreme form of unschooling. There are people who say they are “classical unschoolers,” by which they mean things like teaching Latin but letting their kids do independent research on topics that interest them. I wouldn’t call that unschooling at all, but definitions do differ, and I’m at peace with that fact. The Latin-Centered Curriculum allows students plenty of time to pursue their interests on their own without sacrificing cultural literacy or basic practical knowledge.

DALLMAN: Finally, you aren’t just a homeschooling advocate, but a homeschooling parent. Would you share with us what’s been a surprise for you in your own journey and role in your daughter’s education?

CAMPBELL: It’s probably the same realization that all parents have, sooner or later: kids are not mini-me’s! My daughter has a very different temperament from mine, and I have to work with the person she is, not the person I would have been in her situation. I’m an extreme introvert and would have been a perfect candidate for homeschooling as the only child at home, but my daughter is much more extroverted and needs a lot more social interaction that my wife and I can provide. This year we had the opportunity to get involved with a classical cottage school three days a week. There are four families, and we meet three days a week. I’m able to teach there and at New England Classical Academy, which is right next door. It’s been a great boon for our daughter to have access to other kids and to older, wiser homeschooling parent-teachers. I never expected to be in a group like this, but it’s working beautifully for us.

DALLMAN Thank you so much, Drew. I can’t recommend enough that people check out Living Memory and The Latin Centered Curriculum. Dr. Campbell, good luck with your work.

CAMPBELL: Thank you, Matthew!