Classical education is not anti-technology

A growing number of schools describe themselves as classical. Ask what that means in practice and the first answer is often about technology: no computers in the early grades, paper books only, phones locked away. Some of those rules are sensible. The trouble starts when the rules are treated as the definition.

The aim of the tradition

Classical education is a way of forming a person. Its core is the trivium: learn the facts and language of a subject, learn to reason about them, then learn to speak and write about them well. Dorothy Sayers described this in her 1947 Oxford lecture, The Lost Tools of Learning, which many classical schools take as a starting point.

Nothing in that description mentions a ban on tools. The question the tradition asks is whether a student is becoming attentive, truthful and able to think. A tool can help with that or get in the way, and the age of the tool has little to do with which.

The tradition has always used new tools

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story of an Egyptian king who warned that writing would produce forgetfulness. The schools that followed him taught writing anyway. Scholars moved from scrolls to codices because a codex was easier to use. In 1501 the printer Aldus Manutius began publishing the classics in small octavo editions that a scholar could carry in a pocket. The people who built the classical tradition were often the first to adopt a better way to preserve and spread good books.

A school that refuses all technology in the name of that tradition has copied the look of it and dropped the habit.

The better question

The useful test is the one the tradition would apply to anything: what does this do to the student?

Some answers will be unfavorable. A tool that splits attention into thirty-second pieces works against the discipline of reading a long argument to its end. A tool that supplies the answer before the student has tried works against memory and reasoning. Keeping such tools out of a young child’s day is a reasonable decision, and it follows from the goal.

Other answers will favor the tool. A digital library puts primary sources in front of a student who could never reach them otherwise. A recording lets a student hear their own recitation and improve it. A word processor makes revision cheap, and revision is where most writing is learned. An older student who has built the habits of attention can use a screen without being used by it.

The age of the student matters as well. What suits a sixteen-year-old studying logic does not suit a six-year-old learning to read, and a school can say so plainly, without turning that distinction into a doctrine.

Our interest

We build software for individuals and not-for-profit organizations, and a good share of our questions about design come back to this one. A tool should serve the person using it. Schools that think carefully about technology, and neither reject it by reflex nor adopt it without thought, are asking the right question, and we would like to build for them.