by Mark Hemingway

F or Ben and Melissa Sasse, choos-ing a school for their oldest daughter, Corrie, was an im-

portant decision. In fact, they had a checklist of things that were important to them. For instance, they wanted their daughter to attend a small school and get a religious education. However, at the top of their list was the curriculum of the school itself.

Many parents assume that as long as a five-year-old is learning basic reading and math skills, curriculum preferences aren’t really a factor until later in their education, if at all.

But Ben and Melissa aren’t ordinary parents. Both have advanced degrees, and Ben is a professor. They know firsthand from their own educational backgrounds that the method of learning is crucial to how and what you learn.

Like an increasing number of parents today, the Sasses wanted Corrie to get a more traditional education, one that moved away from current educational trends that are focused on issues such as self-esteem and teaching techniques like “fuzzy math” that have been criticized as ineffective. So they enrolled their daughter in Immanuel Lutheran School of Alexandria, which has a classical curriculum-a method of teaching that hearkens back to before the nineteenth century, when the United States’ current educational model was adopted from Prussian schools. In fact, in the classical model, primary education methods date all the way back to Aristotle, focusing on what’s known as the “trivium.” The three areas of study that comprise the trivium are grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and everything the children learn falls under the umbrella of these three subjects. Classical education proponents argue that to be educated in any given disci-pline, students must know its basic facts, be able to think deeply about the subject, and be able to act on that knowledge in a personal, original, and independent way.

“The curriculum holds knowledge as an absolute that the children should be

striving for,” said Jackquelyn Veith, Im-manuel Principal. “Instead of focusing on the process of learning, it focuses on the content and the goal of learning.”

However, getting back to educational roots isn’t just a luxury reserved for small private schools such as Immanuel. There’s a back-to-basics movement afoot in Alexandria public schools as well. Its name alone suggests that Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy isn’t your typical K-5 public school.

“We got away from having concrete knowledge back in the feel-good ‘70s and ‘80s, and I think it undermined what our children should have and could have learned,” said Lyles-Crouch Principal Patricia Zissios. Ms. Zissios was instru-mental in the school’s adoption of a “core knowledge” curriculum when she took over as principal four years ago.

Core knowledge is an educational reform movement that declares: “For the sake of academic excellence, greater fairness, and higher literacy, elementary and middle schools need a solid, specific, shared core curriculum in order to help

children establish strong foundations of knowledge, grade by grade.”

While not as radical as the classical method, core knowledge is definitely a return to more traditional methods of teaching-methods that Ms. Zissios has seen work firsthand. She embraced core knowledge while working at a difficult school in Fairfax County and was im-pressed by the results. “There were chil-dren who had never been read to, didn’t know what a nursery rhyme was, didn’t know anything about history, what it meant to be an American or be part of a global society,” she said. “They began un-derstanding things because core knowl-edge puts it in a way that really engages children. So when I saw the turnaround of my children there, who came from very needy backgrounds-95 percent of the kids were on free or reduced lunches, [and] not many were from two-parent families-I thought, ‘This is great.’”

Lyles-Crouch is a comparatively more affluent school than the Fairfax County

School News

Immanuel Lutheran students Gabrielle Ramey and Binyam Ephrem put their heads to-gether to tackle an assignment.

Photo: Jackquelyn Veith

In Local Schools, Everything Old Is New Again

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school, but Ms. Zissios says that core knowledge can be adapted to challenge children at any level. Core knowledge promotes a shared classroom under-standing of basic knowledge in a world where educational approaches are often fractured and problem-specific.

“Part of core knowledge that my par-ents here really love is that it does enrich and extend and go beyond the basic curriculum. It does so much for cultural literacy. It works no matter what your population. It could work with poor, undereducated children or those with so many experiences and so much support.”

Similarly, one feature at Immanuel that has especially impressed the Sasses is the integrated nature of what the children study. “What I really like is the coher-ence of the curriculum,” Mrs. Sasse said. “If they study a particular subject in history, they also study it in literature. I didn’t see that in other places we looked.”

The Sasses also appreciate the other hallmarks of classical education pres-ent at Immanuel. There’s an emphasis

on memorization, for one, and children start learning Latin in the third grade. English can be a difficult language to grasp, with few consistent grammatical rules. Latin, however, is a very elegant, if comparably simplistic, language. Learning how to apply Latin gram-mar to English can help children speak and write exceptionally well. Linguistic experts note that an early grasp of Latin also greatly enhances a child’s ability to learn foreign languages in the future.

Mrs. Sasse added that she’s really impressed with the homework, and not just because students are challenged constantly. Even though Corrie is only in first grade, her homework is graded thoroughly, with marks for missed capi-talization.

“Curriculum at Immanuel is substan-tive in its content and it is accelerated in its delivery, both of which are com-ponents which lead to high academic achievement,” noted Principal Veith. In some subjects, students may be up to a year ahead of children their age in other schools.

But while curricula like those found at Immanuel Lutheran and Lyles-Crouch aren’t a dominant force in the American

landscape yet, they’re definitely found in increasing numbers in Northern Virgin-ia and around the country. A few years before she even began at Immanuel, Ms. Veith’s husband, Gene Edward Veith, the provost at Patrick Henry College, coauthored the book Classical Educa-tion: Towards the Revival of American Schooling.

And if area schools haven’t embraced tradition in their curricula, they’re embracing it in other ways. Many other local schools, such as Maury Elementary and Mt. Vernon Community School, have a newfound emphasis on academic achievement and smaller class sizes, and are even adopting uniforms.

In an educational system that many view as increasingly broken, it seems that in Alexandria and elsewhere, everything old is becoming new again.

Mark Hemingway is a journalist in Washington, D.C. and serves on the

Board of Education at Immanuel Lu-theran. For more information, visit

Immanuel Lutheran School at www.im-manuelalexandria.org, and Lyles-Crouch

Traditional Academy at www.acps.k12.va.us/crouch/.

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