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Demand for classical education in America is on the rise. During the 2023-2024 school year, classical school enrollment—encompassing religious schools, secular charter schools, homeschool co-ops and microschools—was estimated to reach nearly 700,000 students across 1,500 schools in the U.S. This is an increase from fewer than 1,300 schools during the 2019-2020 school year, according to Arcadia Education [ [link removed] ].
Part of the rising interest in classical education comes from the results classical schools produce—i.e., better standardized test scores, higher graduation rates and more higher education enrollment. Washington Latin [ [link removed] ], a charter school network in Washington, D.C., for example, received a Tier One ranking during the 2018-2019 school year, the highest performance level granted by D.C.’s charter school board. Great Hearts Academies [ [link removed] ], a secular classical public charter school network that operates 47 K-12 schools in Arizona and Texas, with more planned to open in Florida and Louisiana, had a 96% college acceptance rate [ [link removed] ] among its 2022 graduating class.
Another aspect of interest is the curriculum that classical educators follow. Religious and secular classical schools alike, as well as homeschooling families, often focus their instruction on texts from ancient Greece and Rome, with some following the Great Books of the Western World [ [link removed] ], a list first curated by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins. Parents who have become disenchanted with modern public schooling believe [ [link removed] ] that returning to a classical liberal arts education, given its long history and deep roots, provides a sturdier base for building knowledge, induces more rigor and—particularly with its focus on the arts and humanities—ignites a love of learning. 
Whose Canon?
Essentially, parents are demanding, and schools are delivering, a classical education following the Western canon, a predetermined set of texts. Certainly, there are disagreements about what ought to be included in the canon, and tweaks have been made to the Great Books list by various institutions and individuals who promote its use. The list of books prescribed by Adler and Hutchins, for instance, differs slightly from the list of John Senior [ [link removed] ], an academic who founded a university program centered around the canon.
I doubt classical educators or their advocates would argue for a state-curated reading list, but they are arguing for a defined body of work that children should read. Of course, what should be included in that body of work is a hotly contested issue, with those on the left advocating for more inclusivity [ [link removed] ] (especially for authors of color and LGBTQ+ authors) and those on the right fighting to ban the books [ [link removed] ] they view as objectionable. Nevertheless, the rising interest in classical education raises the question: Should there be a canon for K-12 students?
The notion that what children read should be monitored, even if not by the use of a curated list, has been argued for centuries, even millennia. One of the first to advocate for this view is Socrates, the most prominent philosopher of the Western canon alongside Aristotle. Socrates, in Plato’s “Republic,” envisioned a society in which the music and texts that children have access to is curated. He didn’t go so far as to spell out what they should read, but he did paint a picture of a heavy-handed approach to education that carefully cultivated what children were exposed to and cut them off from accessing certain stories.
Today, E.D. Hirsch Jr [ [link removed] ]., founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, argues for a canon for the sake of cultural literacy and social cohesion. He asserts, in his book “How To Educate a Citizen [ [link removed] ],” that to understand one another, we need to speak the same cultural language and possess a common body of knowledge. One means to achieve this, he notes, is by establishing a canon that all children read in school. This would, in effect, establish a national curriculum.
But localities differ, and prescribing a body of work that children in every town across the U.S. must read strips communities, specifically teachers and parents, of their ability to offer variation based on local customs, values and traditions. Certainly, children need to have a shared knowledge of the U.S. government and how it functions, but localities may choose different novels and poems.
Finding a Framework
Instead of a curriculum adopted by all schools nationwide, schools could look to a common metric to help local districts and communities determine which texts meet the bar of being good and “the best that has been thought and said [ [link removed] ],” which was the intention behind curating the Great Books of the Western World.
Currently, textbooks and book sets created by textbook publishers determine much of what children read in many, if not most, schools. They are filled with short stories that lack depth and are disconnected from what students are learning in other subject areas. These curricula focus too heavily on teaching the process of reading, or they simply present a dull litany of facts without explaining their relevance. This approach to education robs students of access to rich content that can bolster their store of knowledge and impairs their reading comprehension [ [link removed] ].
Charlotte Mason [ [link removed] ], a 19th-century icon of homeschooling parents following a classical education curriculum, argued that a proper education of the young includes a curated library of works of literature, history, geography and so forth, but she left it to the educators and parents to decide what gets added to the list. 
Mason does not prescribe a list of books that ought to be read, but she does propose principles to follow when choosing books, which are worth considering by schools who wish to curate their own libraries.
The book must be living. “Living books,” as she calls them, are written by an author who is knowledgeable and passionate about the subject matter and writes in a conversational style. Living books make the subject matter come to life; they are not dry like textbooks. They don’t just list facts; they involve the reader's emotions, making the content easier to remember.
The work, whether fiction or nonfiction, must be presented in its entirety—no abridged versions. To get the full experience of the text, and to glean the information that the writer aims to convey, students must read the complete work.
Primary texts are preferable, but secondhand accounts are suitable so long as the authors are entrenched in the subject matter and have made it their own. If writing about history, for example, authors ought to have experienced the event firsthand or have an intimate understanding of the events they write about.
Mason was a Christian and thought that religion, or at least the moral underpinnings of religion, was a key element of a proper education aimed at nurturing the whole child. Absent religion, secular schools may consider the moral dimension through the sorts of literature presented to students. For instance, an educator may ask when choosing works of fiction: Do we want our students to behave as the protagonist of the story does?
Today, there is much talk about relatability concerning race, ethnicity and culture, but the books that have endured—the ones that people read over and over again and that have influenced the works of subsequent thinkers and writers—are universal. They can be read at any moment in time across history and be understood. With such stories, readers don’t just understand what the author is saying; they feel an intimate connection with the author. Considering whether a book is universal, whether it conveys and relates to a broader sense of what it means to be human, is a better measure for relatability.
Teaching children to read is a primary dictate of schools. And as Adler put it in his guide, “How To Read a Book [ [link removed] ]”: “We must be more than a nation of functional literates. We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies.” Whether schools choose to follow Hirsch’s focus on a common body of knowledge for cultural literacy and social cohesion, or the Great Books of the Western World’s emphasis on understanding ourselves as products of Western civilization, or a library of books with a hyper-local bent, the chosen works ought to be good. They ought to build students’ stores of knowledge, help them understand themselves as citizens of their community and nation, and get to the core of what it means to be human.

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