What is Classical Education?
Education only begins when you begin educating yourself.
And if you're interested in educating yourself, there's a method that many people followed for centuries before modern day universities took over. That method is called classical education.
Classical education is a system of self-education that focusses on reading the classics, writing about them in a notebook, and talking about them with your friends.
There is a more formal system that someone doing a classical education for home school might follow, but all it really comes down to is reading a particular set of books, keeping notes on them, and talking about them with other people.
What Books?
Reading the classics means you start with books written by the Greeks and Romans and then keep going along the historical timeline with the books that followed from there.
These books give us access to some the most influential people who ever lived, without any restrictions of time or space. All of Plato's recorded thoughts from 2000 years ago are there for you to see right now whenever you want. The method of a classical education is to capitalize on this fact.
And it has the additional advantage that language, as opposed to images, forces your brain to work harder and get stronger. Translating words into ideas is better exercise for your brain, as opposed to pictures or images that do most of the work for you and let you be passive. It's not that TV or video are bad, only that reading is better if you're interested in learning how to think for yourself.
Keeping notes
Another important part of reading is writing. Writing your own short summary of what you've read helps to show that you understand it. It helps you remember more, and it helps make what you think about the book better informed. You'll absorb what you read more if you take the time to write even just a few sentences about it.
Follow the Reading List
Classical education reading lists begin with the oldest books first and then work their way up from there.
If you read this way, you get to see the ways that humanity and our ways of thinking have evolved over time. And there's less separation between different subjects. History, Philosophy, Literature, Science - they all happen together. Reading these books in this way lets you see the ways they connect and interrelate, instead of walling them all off into separate fields and specialties.
You can do it!
Reading some of these books can be a bit tricky, but really they're not that bad. If you can read Harry Potter you can probably read Plato, too.
A few things to keep in mind before you begin: Make sure to skip the scholarly introduction/preface unless it was written by the author. Don't let an expert tell you how you should think about a book before you read it for yourself. And if you come to a section you don't understand, it's okay, just keep going. You can always go back and review that part again later if you want.
Another great thing to have is a friend you can talk about all these great books with. But if you don't have that, that's okay, too.
It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter where you are in life, or how many friends you have, you can give yourself a classical education. Why not give it a try?