What is a "Classical Education"?

And why are anti-public school activists so into it?

And yet what greater proof can there be of a bad and disgraceful state of education than this, that not only artisans and the meaner sort of people need the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but also those who would profess to have had a liberal education? Is it not disgraceful, and a great sign of want of good-breeding, that a man should have to go abroad for his law and physic because he has none of his own at home, and must therefore surrender himself into the hands of other men whom he makes lords and judges over him?

-Plato, Republic (attributed to Socrates)

Last week, I wrote about Christopher Rufo and his promise to “lay siege to the institutions”— his telling slogan for a rightwing plan to return fire in a culture war he imagines began in 1968 when former guerrilla fighters and washed-up Marxist radicals became college professors and took over Disney… or something. Part of that campaign is making Florida’s New College— where, thanks to Ron DeSantis, Rufo is now a board…