YES: There are ‘things a free people ought to know.’

Once, “the McGuffey Readers, an elementary school collection of stories, poems, essays, and speeches, became nearly universal in American classrooms,” Pondiscio tells them. They helped reproduce a common culture.

Now teachers are asked “to differentiate instruction, to tailor learning to each student’s needs, interests, and pace,” he says. Artificial intelligence makes it easier to personalize instruction, to meet each student where they are at and take them where they want to go. But something is lost when education becomes a private good.

Classical education gives us “a common vocabulary and a common world,” he says. Atlanta Classical graduates “can participate in a conversation that stretches across time and place.” You’ve “read the same books — not just heard of them, but wrestled with them. You’ve struggled with the same questions and ideas.”

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