Digital Homeschool, Virtual Academy: The Classical Tradition Meets School Choice

In the past five years there has been a resurgence of public debate about what history is taught in classrooms. These controversies play out through discourses about the origins of the nation (1619 Project, 1776 Project), the nature of contemporary institutions (CRT, anti-CRT), and about authority (parents’ rights, school choice, transparency bills). These controversies unfold within the world-historical condition of crisis as pandemic, in which boundaries between home, work, school, and childcare simultaneously collapse. The moment is charged with ambitions to form society otherwise.

This talk looks at a subcultural movement gathering steam which draws together several strands of interest in re-imaging the future of education in traditional terms. Based upon fieldwork interviews, and original archival research, I sketch the contours of a “Classical Education Renewal” currently underway. This movement brings together coalitions interested in antiquity, liberal arts, religious education (Judaic, Protestant, Catholic), and the Western Canon with homeschoolers, voucher activists, GOP operatives, classicists, humanists, think-tank analysts, and critics of standardized testing.

I analyze coalitions that are coordinating in the present to provision specific modes of futurity by drawing upon tropes about legacy and the past. I historicize contemporary experiments in micro-schools, digital homeschoolers, alternative standardized testing for college admissions, virtual reality classical charter schools, and the establishment of new classical colleges. Here, arguments about books, the trivium, and ancient languages are the basis of twenty-first century political education. Amidst attempts to privatize public schooling and racialized curriculum fights, the classical movement is at the forefront of new media experiments that work to dismantle a century of progressive education by fusing anti-modern virtues to novel organizational forms.