Espired, a partnership with Florida investor Brad Saft, sells right-leaning , from Fighting Indoctrination and The Truth about Climate Change to an updated guide on this year’s election, including the against President-elect Donald Trump.  Last week, Trump tapped Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister who hosts a on a Christian network, to serve as .

But the company also sells , with animated Old and New Testament stories, like Noah’s ark and the Resurrection. The series features colorful illustrations drawn in the identical style as those in the Texas curriculum. A kindergarten lesson’s image of , for example, and two more on the are lifted wholesale from covers of the company’s books.

Saft, a Princeton graduate and , did not answer emails or messages on social media. Chad Gallagher, an eSpired spokesman and former Huckabee adviser, declined to provide more details on how the company contributed to the program, but called eSpired the “leading provider of curriculum to states searching for unbiased history” and “lessons that explain the literary and historical value of the Bible.”

Saft and Inspired by Education LLC, an alternate name for the company, were on a list of subcontractors for the curriculum that the Texas Education Agency shared with ����Ӱ�� in May. Contacted earlier this month, officials did not respond to questions about how much the state paid eSpired or the degree of influence the company had over the lessons.

The connection to Huckabee’s business venture, also known as EverBright Media, comes as the State Board of Education is set to vote Monday on whether to add the program, called Bluebonnet Learning, to a list of approved reading programs. The state is heavily the program at a time when some districts are . The board’s blessing means districts would be eligible for extra funding — up to $60 per student —  if they adopt the program.

“Districts’ hands are tied because they are in desperate need of additional funding, yet the state of Texas is trying to force them to use this curriculum as the only way to get additional funding,” said Clinton Gill, a specialist with the Texas State Teachers Association and a former teacher in Lubbock, one of the districts that piloted an early version of the program. The state, he said, should involve teachers in developing the curriculum, “not some company with a political agenda.”

The curriculum has won praise from GOP leaders, classical education proponents and who want the Bible to be more prominent in public schools. But the first draft, unveiled in late May, drew sharp criticism from those who said the authors disregarded other religions and introduced topics of faith more appropriate for church and home.

The state has since corrected many factual errors, but the bias toward Christianity remains, according to several experts. Education Commissioner Mike Morath will need eight board members in favor of Bluebonnet for it to be added to the list, but the vote is expected to be tight. 

“This is one of the hardest votes I’ve ever had to make in 22 years on the State Board of Education. I have lost sleep over it,” said Republican Pat Hardy, who was defeated in this year’s election. This week’s series of meetings are her last on the board. “I’ve literally heard from hundreds of people on both sides.”

Last week, Texas Values, a nonprofit that promotes “biblical, Judeo-Christian values” in public policy, held a ” event to promote the curriculum in Allen, Texas, part of Board Member Evelyn Brooks’ Fort Worth-area district. She’s among the conservative Republicans opposed to the program, and has called for more transparency over who wrote the lessons. 

Officials won’t identify who wrote the biblical material. Because a contract for the work fell under a pandemic disaster declaration, the state waived typical requirements that would have shed light on what those companies did and how much they were paid. 

Mary Elizabeth Castle, government relations director at Texas Values, said the curriculum has been unfairly accused of teaching about faith “in a devotional way” and only educates students to “understand the hundreds of idioms that we use in everyday language that actually come from the Bible.” 

Texas Values also of the curriculum to speak at Monday’s public hearing before the vote.

But opponents see Bluebonnet as part of a GOP-led movement to steer public schools to the right — one that is expected to accelerate under the incoming Trump administration. More than 15,000 opponents of the Bible-themed lessons have signed , organized by Faithful America, an online network of Christians, with about 200,000 members nationwide. 

“We’re pushing back on the folks who are ignoring the teachings of Jesus because they are seeking political power for themselves,” said Karli Wallace Thompson, the group’s digital campaigns director. “There’s nothing in the Gospel that tells us we need to go out and force our neighbors to worship the way that we do.”

‘Sacred story’

The state made noticeable efforts to respond to many of the public’s concerns, according to biblical scholars who have reviewed the changes. Revisions in include a brief introduction to the prophet Muhammad, who was completely neglected originally, a chart displaying variations on the Golden Rule from six religions and a slightly shorter description of Jesus’s ministry.

But officials seemed to prioritize accuracy over making the curriculum more religiously balanced, said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University who has reviewed the newest version.

“Some of the many embarrassing gaffes and factual errors are now gone,” he said. 

The original first grade American Independence unit, for example, incorrectly described the Liberty Bell as a “symbol designed to celebrate our freedom from being controlled by the British and our freedom to pray,” even though it was cast before the revolution. Now the lesson reads: “Many people believe the Liberty Bell was designed to celebrate the traditions of religious freedom and self-government in the colony of Pennsylvania.”

The on Jesus’s life and early Christianity no longer says that Christians hid in the catacombs to worship, that scholars have debunked. The unit also excludes the miracle of the disciples’ overflowing fishing nets, reducing the lesson on Jesus from eight pages to seven. 

But it still cites Josephus, a first century historian, who reported that Jesus’ disciples said that he “appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive.” Biblical scholars largely , which they say was probably added by priests during the Middle Ages in an effort to prove that Jesus was the son of God. 

The state eliminated what Texas Jews said was an offensive activity in which students would play dice to mimic how Haman, a Persian functionary in the biblical story of Queen Esther, cast lots to decide when to kill the Jews.  

But while there is somewhat more attention to Judaism in the edited version, the bias toward Christianity is still “clear and indisputable,” Chancey said. 

If the board signs off on this version and districts adopt it, elementary school children “will learn the main contours of the Christian sacred story“ — from Creation to the work of the Apostle Paul, he said. “No other tradition gets similar treatment.”

Other modifications acknowledge that Christians have used their faith to justify discrimination and violence throughout history.  A fourth grade lesson originally titled “If You Were a Crusader” has been renamed “The Journey of a Crusader” and the fact that in addition to capturing Jerusalem from the Muslims, crusaders “were given permission to persecute and kill non-Christians.”

A fifth grade lesson now explains that Martin Luther King Jr. directed his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to clergymen who supported segregation. “It was unfortunately also true that many people of the time supported those laws, including Christians like these clergymen,” the text reads. Critics of the original version said glossing over that point gave students an inaccurate portrayal of the Civil Rights movement.

Critical examinations of some of Christianity’s darker chapters are a welcome addition to the curriculum, said David Brockman, a religious studies scholar at Rice University who has both versions. But a third grade lesson still says Spanish conquistadors’ merely “shared” their Christian faith with indigenous tribes and doesn’t delve into slavery, forced labor and other harsh methods used to convert them.

The updates don’t “correct the overall problem of soft pedaling Christian involvement with violence and oppression in the past,” he said.

Presenting students with America’s virtues as well as its faults was important to Steve Meeker, a retired middle school world geography teacher from the Montgomery Independent School District, north of Houston, who was hired to review earlier drafts of the curriculum. 

He provided feedback on a second grade unit that discusses how an evangelical religious movement called the Great Awakening  influenced the Founding Fathers’ views on slavery. The text quotes a letter in which Thomas Jefferson expressed that he “ardently” wanted to see slavery abolished. But while children would learn that George Washington made plans in his will to free his slaves, Meeker feels there’s still too little attention to the founders’ role as slave owners.

Jefferson might have wished for the end of slavery, but “he certainly didn’t act on it,” Meeker said. “He owned more than 600 slaves and is only recorded as having freed ten of them.”

Meeker, who also teaches a class at his church on the , appreciates the overall attention to familiarizing students with the Bible. Over his 42 years of teaching, he noticed that students were increasingly puzzled by everyday sayings like “my brother’s keeper” and the “handwriting is on the wall.” But he also noted that lessons about Jesus might make non-Christians uncomfortable. 

‘Exciting and engaging’

Some supporters of the state’s program are concerned that the intense debate over the biblical material has overshadowed other aspects of the curriculum, which, Morath says, is meant to improve students’ vocabulary and background knowledge. 

The state’s lessons will give students “great exposure” to Texas history with material that reinforces content from science and social studies, said Courtnie Bagley, education director at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. The state also hired her to work on lessons about geology and the state’s oil and gas industry.

“I could see how engaging and enjoyable it would be for a kid to read in second grade about the and Dolly Madison rescuing all the artifacts in the White House,” she said. “Those are exciting and engaging stories.”

The state, meanwhile, continues to expend vast resources to get the materials in teachers’ hands. According to grant documents, the agency is spending $50 million on printing and another $10 million to train districts how to implement the curriculum. That’s on top of the $103 million the state has already spent on the program. 

Work on the project began in 2020, when it paid Amplify, a leading curriculum provider, $19 million in federal relief funds for its program. Based on the work of educator E.D. Hirsch, the lessons teach basic reading skills as well as content from art, history and science.

But Morath viewed that purchase as just a starting point and began commissioning lessons, like the one on Queen Esther, based on the Bible.  

In 2022, the agency signed an $84 million contract with Boston-based Public Consulting Group, which includes a . That company then subcontracted with a mix of curriculum developers and experts to modify the program with more Texas-related content and Bible-based lessons.

Espired and Saft, Huckabee’s business partner, were among them. The company markets primarily to a homeschooling audience, with ads on and . But in the first months of the pandemic, the , under former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, paid $245,000 for its and distributed it to schools.

Gallagher declined to comment on whether the company has completed work for other state education agencies, but said, “ESpired has many clients for their curriculum development services because parents are generally not satisfied with much of the existing materials and curriculum that has traditionally been available.”

Learn Our History, another series of eSpired guides, “helps kids learn all about American history from a positive, patriotic and faith-based standpoint,” Huckabee said in a . Like the Texas program, it emphasizes the role of in the nation’s founding.

The company, however, also has some , with several complaints to the about recurring charges for products that parents said they never purchased or guides they never received.

“I’m a pretty savvy consumer who doesn’t usually get bamboozled by the fine print,” parent Shannon Ashley after ordering the company’s COVID guide. “I knew I never actually gave them permission to regularly charge my card, and they never actually threw that fine print in there.”

An advisory board member for the , which seeks to pass legislation based on “biblical principles,” Huckabee has who argue the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. His 2020 book, , warns of the “dangers of corruption advocated by liberal politicians.”

Before serving as governor from 1996 to 2007, Huckabee was a pastor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He ran for president in 2008, but has also led tour groups to Israel, where “I have been visiting since 1973 when I was a teenager,” he . Huckabee, who there is “no such thing as a West Bank” and has expressed for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would lead efforts to bring an end to the war in Gaza, Trump said in a .

‘Rules of the game’ 

Texas’ move to write its own curriculum has also left traditional publishers, like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Savvas, wondering how competing against a state agency will affect their business — and whether districts will drop their materials in favor of a program that comes with strong financial incentives.

“Publishers have always sought after the Texas market because obviously it’s very large, with over 5 million students,” said Eve Myers, a consultant for HillCo Partners, a lobbying and government relations firm whose clients include publishers. “The biggest question is, ‘What are the rules of the game now?’ ”

Curriculum companies also frequently make their authors available to districts to train teachers and explain the research behind their product, Meyers said. 

But so far, the state has refused to identify the authors who transformed Amplify’s program into Bluebonnet. And even with the recent edits, some board members, like Brooks, say it’s too soon to know if it will improve students’ reading performance. In a , she blamed “grassroots leaders who say ‘You have a Bible story in the curriculum, so it must be good.’ ” 

“There’s no time to say how effective it is,” she said. “It’s being rewritten and revised in real time.”

This was the enduring insight of E.D. Hirsch Jr., whose 1987 best-seller  argued that there is a common body of knowledge, including names, phrases, historical events and cultural references, that “every American needs to know” in order to effectively communicate, navigate the world and be fully literate. 

Like the Texas curriculum, Hirsch’s book met with and was deeply misunderstood. Critics accused Hirsch of seeking to impose a dead white male canon on schools. But these criticisms missed his central and unassailable point: Words, phrases and ideas from history, literature, mythology and, yes, the Bible form the bedrock of much of English speakers’ linguistic heritage. Without complete command of these references, students — particularly poor, minority and immigrant students — will struggle to fully comprehend what they read, no matter how well they can decode the words on the page.

This distinction between decoding and reading comprehension is critical. The long-running debate over how to teach children to read is often oversimplified to a battle between phonics and whole language. However, when children score poorly on reading tests, it’s often not because they can’t decode the words on the page; it’s because they have difficulty making sense of what they’re reading. Most people probably think of reading as a skill, like riding a bike: Once you learn, you can ride any bike. But it’s not so. Any given text is the tip of an iceberg. Beneath the surface is a vast body of vocabulary, background knowledge and context that enable the reader to make meaning. Well-educated people perceive reading comprehension as a skill because it feels like one. But like the proverbial fish that doesn’t know it’s in water, literate people are unconsciously awash in knowledge and vocabulary that they employ reflexively and on which language comprehension depends. 

I often compare a reading passage to the child’s game Jenga, where every block is a vocabulary word or a bit of background knowledge. You can pull out a few blocks and the tower still stands; pull out one too many, and it collapses. The same thing can happen when readers and listeners lack the rich array of mental furniture that writers and speakers draw from. Language comprehension suffers or can break down entirely.

This is where biblical allusions come into play. Everyday language is peppered with references to biblical stories and phrases, many of which are used by English speakers of all faiths — or none at all: Good Samaritan, prodigal son, forbidden fruit, pearls before swine and countless others. Scrubbing biblical references from school curriculum may seem like a step toward inclusivity, but given how deeply such phrases and allusion are embedded in the language, such an effort would more likely impose a form of illiteracy on students, leaving them unprepared to engage with the world around them and at risk of a lifetime of verbal disadvantage. 

It’s equally important to recognize that no curriculum is handed down to teachers on tablets of stone and delivered robotically. “Most teachers do not use a single curriculum as it is written,” reported the RAND Corporation in its annual . “Instead, they reported using multiple curricula, making substantial modifications, or creating their own

curriculum materials.” According to RAND, 99% of elementary school teachers and 96% of secondary school teachers rely on material they create or select to teach English language arts. Frankly, this poses an even bigger challenge for classrooms in Texas and across the country. Teachers, often pressed for time and resources, tend to select materials that what their students are capable of learning. The language and knowledge-rich Texas curriculum is a significant improvement over what’s available on the most commonly used lesson-planning websites, such as Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers, which one study as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using.” 

Given the way classroom materials are actually deployed, it makes little sense to reject an entire curriculum over objections to a small number of individual lessons. That said, the Texas Education Agency shared with me a 22-page letter it sent to the board detailing modifications already made to the curriculum in response to criticisms made over the summer during the public comment period, many of which were repeated at the hearing.

Some speakers there also voiced concerns about a perceived over-reliance on reading aloud in the proposed curriculum. But this, too, misses the mark. Listening comprehension outpaces reading comprehension well into a child’s middle school years. In other words, children can understand complex texts when they are read aloud long before they can read them just as well on their own. Read-alouds are a crucial tool for building vocabulary and background knowledge until reading comprehension catches up with listening comprehension.

In short, the concerns over the new curriculum’s inclusion of Bible stories, while understandable, are largely misplaced. What’s at stake is not the promotion of Christianity but the cultivation of cultural literacy, an essential component of reading comprehension and academic success. If parents, policymakers and other education stakeholders want students to be fully literate, able to understand the world of ideas they will encounter in literature, conversation and the wider world, they must be furnished with the common knowledge that educated people take for granted. Removing these references from the curriculum and public education at large does a disservice to students, leaving them at a disadvantage not just in school, but in life.

Rep. James Talarico had concerns.

The third-term legislator from Round Rock, near Austin, pointed Morath to a lesson on the Sermon on the Mount — Jesus’s instruction to “do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

The text makes only passing reference to similar messages in and , and never mentions that taught a version of the Golden Rule 600 years earlier. 

“I think it’s pretty egregious and will shock a lot of Texans,” Talarico said of the curriculum.

If it seems strange that four paragraphs about an ancient text in for kindergartners arouses such passions, welcome to the latest Texas-sized controversy about Christianity in the classroom.

Talarico is not just a Democrat in a deeply red state, but a former middle school English teacher and a seminary student studying to be a Presbyterian minister. Morath, he said, agreed the new material doesn’t grant “equal time“ to other religions. “I thought that was a fundamental flaw in this curriculum. He did not.”

As parents, academics and activists begin to pore over the thousands of pages the education department released, Morath’s acknowledgement sheds light on the state’s approach. 

The new curriculum is based on the increasingly popular notion of “classical education,” which stresses the primacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition in shaping Western literature and U.S. history. As ����Ӱ�� first reported last week, the project won praise from conservatives and parents who want students to get more rigorous reading material. Connecting coursework to ancient texts, including the Bible, offers students a cultural vocabulary they’ll need to tackle more complex assignments in middle and high school, Morath said.

He downplayed the religious material as a “small piece” of the curriculum, and called the biblical lessons

But a review by ����Ӱ�� shows that biblical figures and stories are central to multiple lessons across the 62 K-5 units. The curriculum not only gives short shrift to other religions — Muhammad appears to have escaped mention, despite his role in shaping a faith practiced by half a million Texans — but scholars who have examined the material say it offers a decidedly Christian interpretation of history, particularly the story of America’s founding and civil rights struggles.  

A textual guide for a third-grade unit on recommends teachers play “Silent Night” or “Away in the Manger” as they begin a lesson on the life of Jesus — from his birth and ministry to Crucifixion and Resurrection. In addition to a smattering of New Testament vocabulary (“messiah,” “disciple”) students get what appears to be a factual account from Josephus, a first century historian, on Christ’s death: Jesus’s disciples reported that he “appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive.”

But scholars overwhelmingly the authenticity of this account, which they say was likely added by medieval clerics more than a thousand years later in an attempt to prove Christ’s deity.

“To use this as historical proof, which is exactly how it is presented in this lesson, is quite unwarranted and specious,” said L. Michael White, a biblical scholar at the University of Texas-Austin.

In keeping with classical education’s focus on religious allusions, that lesson sets the stage for a fifth grade study of C.S. Lewis’s The celebrated fantasy tells the story of four siblings who evacuate to the English countryside during World War II. They emerge through a magical armoire to encounter Aslan, a noble lion who later sacrifices himself for one of the children and returns from the dead. 

The teacher’s guide calls it a “biblical allegory.” 

“Explain how the Old Testament of the Bible had many prophecies about a future savior that are written as fulfilled in the New Testament by Jesus,” the note says. “There are also prophecies in the New Testament by Jesus. There are prophecies in the Bible about a future where Jesus returns to the world to make wrong right.”

Those instructions alarm one prominent education figure. In the early 1990s, Sandy Kress helped develop an accountability system for Texas schools that inspired No Child Left Behind, the landmark federal education law. Kress, who is Jewish, later advised George W. Bush when the former governor became president.

“I would argue this is teaching Christianity,” said Kress. His school reform days behind him, Kress now teaches and funds projects that encourage between Christians and Jews.

Morath’s staff called on Kress for guidance on the curriculum last year, and on his advice, recruited his rabbi to review earlier drafts of the material. Kress told ����Ӱ�� that he wants further revisions and is hopeful the state will consider them.

“Can Christians do this in a way that is respectful of other faiths … without feeling the need to prove Christian doctrine? That’s the test for them,” Kress said. “Whether they pass the test or not will prove whether this is an honorable exercise and whether it would be able to survive a constitutional challenge.”

State officials declined to comment on their dealings with Kress and Talarico. In a statement, Morath said the biblical material in the curriculum “does not include religious lessons as one would find in a religious school.” He added that the content reflects “various religious traditions” and that “students will learn about aspects of most major world religions.”

But in response to criticism, education officials promised to add “language from the First Amendment” on the need for a clear separation between church and state to its lessons on American history.

The public has to comment on the proposed curriculum, which goes to the state Board of Education for approval in November. The stakes are high. If adopted, the curriculum would instantly become not only the nation’s largest classical education model, but the biggest infusion of Judeo-Christian teachings into the public education system in decades. The state is encouraging districts to adopt the material by offering incentives of up to $60 per student.

To Morath, the new curriculum offers schools their best chance at raising reading scores in a state that saw during the pandemic. In addition to phonics-based instruction in the early grades, the curriculum draws from history, science and the arts to boost students’ knowledge of the world. While the biblical material has drawn the most attention, there are many units that have no religious references and highlight famous Texans, like civil rights leader and Black-Native American aviator . Students learn best, Morath said, when they get early and repeated exposure to a subject.

“When you’re designing elementary reading materials, you have to pick topics and stick with them for a few weeks,” he told ����Ӱ��. In districts that have piloted some of the material over the past three years, “the vocabulary complexity is night and day different” than some of the more simplistic reading lessons teachers used before, he said.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush Texas on offering districts “rich content based on the science of reading and not outdated practices,” while and classical education advocates brushed off concerns that the materials have too many biblical references.  

The Texas curriculum “strikes me as a rather mild step in the right direction,” said John Peterson, a humanities professor at the University of Dallas. For years, he said, “anything passingly biblical [has been] treated as a form of pornography, something filthy and shameful, and only to be consumed in private.”

‘Zero reference points’

Jeremy Tate knows firsthand how difficult it can be to engage students who lack a basic knowledge of the Bible. When he taught Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to 10th graders in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, they had “zero reference points” for the collection of stories told by medieval pilgrims on their way to Canterbury Cathedral.

Some students didn’t have any knowledge of the Bible, let alone “anything about a pilgrimage, a relic or any of the language that was so much a part of the vernacular,” said Tate, now CEO of the , an alternative college entrance exam.

He’s concerned, however, about the classical movement being “politically hijacked” by Republicans trying to appeal to conservative Christians.

“In some ways, it’s an impossible battle,” he said. “We’re living through a moment where very few people can think outside of political categories.”

As if to underscore that point, the new curriculum arrived just four days after the state’s Republican party unified behind calling for mandatory “instruction on the Bible, servant leadership, and Christian self-governance.” Delegates also want students to study an from Thomas Jefferson that use to argue that church-state separation is a myth. 

‘Cultural heritage’

That approach contrasts with Morath’s more measured admonitions to those who reviewed the materials. The commissioner’s charge to a 10-member advisory board at their first meeting last summer was to “make sure we were on the side of literature as opposed to a worshipful treatment of that material,” said Marvin McNeese Jr., an adviser who teaches at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston, an orthodox school that he said takes a “traditional interpretation of the Bible.”

The volunteers included some recognizable names, like former GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, who served as a cabinet member during the Trump administration, and Danica McKellar, and mathematician who has been outspoken about her faith.

McNeese said he spent about 40 hours between August and February reviewing lessons and doesn’t see a problem with its Judeo-Christian emphasis. 

“It’s because of our own cultural heritage,” he said. “All the stories that I read directly explain something that students may very well come across. I mean, we have laws named Good Samaritan laws.”

Under federal law, schools can teach the Bible as literature, but not in a devotional way. Mandatory Bible readings and prayer were common in many public schools until a series of in the early 1960s ended those practices. The court, however, allows voluntary prayer and under its current conservative majority has increasingly tilted in favor of religious expression. 

Conflicts about biblical material in public school have recently erupted over Bible verses in a Florida and in an that posted a New Testament verse on a hallway wall. But experts say the scope of Texas’s undertaking increases the potential for trouble.   

The Bible references in the new curriculum start in kindergarten, when children draw pictures inspired by the creation story in the Book of Genesis. By fifth grade, students studying poetry ponder what King David meant in Psalm 23 when he wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd.” In between are familiar Bible stories about the wisdom of King Solomon, the prodigal son and Paul’s conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus.

The Texas lessons frequently say “according to the Bible” or “as the Bible explains,” but Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, dismissed those as “meager efforts” at objectivity. “The literalistic way they present Bible stories encourages very young children to simply take them at face value,” he said. 

He pointed to a fifth grade lesson on Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in which teachers read a passage from the Book of Matthew for added context. Students, he said, are bound to be left with questions. 

“How did Jesus know someone would betray him? What does Jesus mean when [the teacher] says the bread is his body and the cup is his blood?” Chancey asked. “Is the teacher ready to explain all the different versions of Eucharistic theology found in different forms of Christianity?”

Many of those teachers have probably never received training on how to discuss religion in a public school classroom, said Kate Soules, founder and director of the Religion and Education Collaborative, which focuses on how schools talk about matters of faith. Teachers might be better off focusing on the literary value of Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” than prompting students to think Aslan, the lion, represents Jesus, she said. Teachers could “very quickly end up in violation of the First Amendment.”

The tone and focus is a concerted departure from the curriculum Amplify, a leading publisher, offered the state in 2020 under a $19 million contract. In over 40 pages, that version gives to Christianity, Islam and Judaism. A separate unit features on Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism.

The state, however, rejected those sections, said Amplify officials, who later balked when Texas asked for additional biblical content. As ����Ӱ�� previously reported, the company opted not to bid on a contract for the next phase of the project. 

Experts say the current curriculum is notable not only for its emphasis on Christianity, but for what it omits. 

A first grade lesson on American independence, Chancey said, paints an idealistic picture of religious liberty by asserting different denominations “thrived in the colonies.” In reality, pilgrims were often intolerant of . 

The program devotes ample space to the evangelism of the colonists during a period of religious revival known as the Great Awakening. But ����Ӱ��’s review found no material on the considerable influence of thinkers from the Enlightenment, a concurrent intellectual movement that inspired the writings of early American thinkers on individual rights and church-state separation. 

‘Both sides of that debate’

That stained glass lens extends to the Civil Rights era. In both second and fifth grade, the text emphasizes the Christian faith of Black leaders as key to the movement to end segregation. But there’s no mention of who used the Bible to justify racism and Jim Crow laws, like Henry Lyon Jr., who that God “started separation of the races.”

“If you just portray that religious leaders were against segregation, that’s extremely misleading,” Chancey said. “You had religious leaders on both sides of that debate.” 

An assignment on points fifth graders to Martin Luther King Jr.’s biblical allusions, including the persecution of early Christians and Jews who refused to worship false idols. But it ignores King’s intended audience — “white moderate” preachers “who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation.” 

“Dr. King’s focus was the incompatibility of racial segregation with Judeo-Christian values and the Christian faith,” said Raymond Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit focused on equity. 

Pierce has a divinity degree, leads a Sunday school class and teaches political theology at Duke University. His family tree extends back through the founding of the Black Pentecostal Church in the early 1900s. “It does not get much more fundamental than that,” he quipped.

But he’s also a civil rights attorney. In reviewing excerpts from the curriculum for ����Ӱ��, Pierce found himself turning to to Virginia lawmakers in 1785. Madison wrote that while Christians fought for their own religious liberty, they could not “deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” 

Those who support the Texas curriculum are “pushing a warped version of Judeo-Christian principles,” Pierce said. “It is quite troubling that these supporters either intentionally or naively want to bring divisive issues within the Christian Church into our public schools.”   

To share tips on Texas’s proposed reading curriculum, contact Linda Jacobson at lrjacobson@proton.me.

From the story of Queen Esther — who convinced her husband, the Persian king, to spare the Jews — to the depiction of Christ’s last supper, the material is designed to draw connections between classroom content and religious texts.

“If you’re reading classic works of American literature, there are often religious allusions in that literature,” state education Commissioner Mike Morath told ����Ӱ��. “Any changes being made are to reinforce the kind of background knowledge on these seminal works of the American cultural experience.” 

With the potential to reach over 2 million K–5 students in the nation’s second-largest state, the update marks a big step in a movement embraced by conservatives to root young people’s education in what they consider traditional values. But it’s bound to raise questions about the potential for religious indoctrination in a state that has been a battleground for such disputes. Last year, for example, Texas passed a law allowing to work as school counselors.

“It is reasonable to devote some attention to [the Bible], and state education standards across the nation often require such attention,” said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The problem, of course, is that sometimes the legitimate reason of cultural literacy is used as a smokescreen to hide religious and ideological agendas.”

In an interview with a Christian talk show, GOP , who describes himself as a “,” praised the curriculum changes, saying they will “get us back to teaching, not necessarily the Bible per se, but the stories from the Bible.”

The release comes four days after the state Republican party calling on the legislature and the state Board of Education to require instruction on the Bible. Texas education department officials declined to comment on the platform and have emphasized that the new curriculum includes material from other faiths.

While largely hidden from public view, the redesign sparked behind-the-scenes debate long before its release. When a leading curriculum publisher balked at the state’s request to infuse its offerings with biblical content, Texas officials turned to other vendors. They include conservative Christian in Michigan and the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, which an unsuccessful to require the 10 Commandments in every classroom, according to a list obtained by ����Ӱ��.

‘Great works of literature’

Going far beyond typical reading and writing fundamentals, the new lessons draw on history, science and the arts — “what many people call this classical model of education,” Morath said.

To understand “,” a book about a Jewish family hiding in Denmark during World War II, he said students should understand more about “Jewish cultural practices” and “the vilification of this ethnic minority.” 

A unit on “Fighting for a Cause,” one of several that officials shared with ����Ӱ��, includes the Old Testament story of Esther and how she and her cousin Mordecai “fought for what they knew was right and made a difference that not only affected the Jews of Persia but also Jewish people today.”

The mentions range in size from a page on Esther to a few paragraphs about Samuel Adams at the Continental Congress. His plea to fellow delegates to pray together, despite religious differences, is offered as a first-grade vocabulary lesson on the word “compromise.” 

Fifth graders are asked to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “.” Written after his 1963 arrest for leading a , King compared his act of civil disobedience to the “refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar” in the Book of Daniel.

“If you don’t know who Nebuchadnezzar is, you don’t know what [King’s] talking about,” Morath said. “How do you make sure that you can unlock in the minds of our kids their ability to wrestle with … ideas that have surfaced in great works of literature?” 

Not just literature, but art. A lesson on “The Last Supper,” da Vinci’s Renaissance masterpiece, points fifth graders to the New Testament. 

“The Bible explains that Jesus knew that after this meal, he would be arrested, put on trial, and killed,” the text reads. “Let’s read the story in the book of Matthew to see for ourselves what unfolded during the supper.”

While drawing parallels to religious texts, Morath said the lessons would respect bright lines regarding the separation of church and state.

“This is still a curriculum for public school and we’ve designed it to be appropriate in that setting,” he said. 

New religious-related material in a proposed Texas elementary school reading program includes Old Testament references to the Liberty Bell, an exploration of the meaning of the Jewish holiday Purim and the story of Christ’s last supper. (Texas Education Agency)

The role of Amplify

The redesign builds on a $19 million m delivered during the pandemic by Amplify, a based in New York.

Roughly 400 districts have used their materials since 2021. Some teachers give them high marks for building students’ and comprehension. But not everyone has been pleased. Last year, Morath who decried its emphasis on and minimal attention to Christianity.

“There’s one mention of Jesus, that he was a teacher a couple thousand years ago,” said Jamie Haynes, who runs a on “concerning” curriculum and library books. “The only other time we can find God, our God — the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — is in the American unit.” 

The issue of how — and whether — to incorporate religious content was fraught long before the curriculum reached school districts.

State officials asked Amplify to provide a lesson on the story of Esther and suggested a unit on Exodus, said Alexandra Walsh, the company’s chief product officer.

While it had previously tweaked its curriculum for other states, Walsh said the company had never been asked to add biblical material. And when it suggested inserting content from other world religions, the state rejected the idea, said Amplify spokeswoman Kristine Frech.

“There was not much appetite for a variety of wisdom texts,” she said. “There was much more of an appetite for the tie to traditional Christian texts.”

The company opted against bidding on a contract to provide additional revisions. In a statement, Texas education officials dismissed Amplify’s charge that they turned down material from other religions as “completely false” and stressed that the finished product “includes representation from multiple faiths.” But the state declined to specify how many of the new lessons have religious themes or derive from Judeo-Christian sources.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Morath pointed to a World War II lesson that focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s upon witnessing the explosion of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The words, featured prominently in the recent Oscar-winning film, derive from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture.   

Kindergarteners studying the Golden Rule would learn that the idea comes from the “Christian Bible,” according to the text, but that similar principles can be found in the “ancient books” of Islam and Hinduism. Another section on the Renaissance highlights Muslim settlers in Spain and their contributions to philosophy, poetry and astronomy.

‘Biblical literacy’

After Amplify bowed out, the state an $84 million contract to the Boston-based Public Consulting Group to revise the curriculum.

For the reading program, the company worked closely with several authors who specialize in , including its role in westward expansion and launching the national space program, according to a list of vendors provided by the state.

But it also leaned on conservative organizations steeped in the culture wars. Contracts went to two officials at the Texas Public Policy Foundation: Courtnie Bagley, the think tank’s education director, and Thomas Lindsay, a higher education director and vocal opponent of . The foundation, which called the 10 Commandments bill an “important step in bringing faith-based values back to the forefront of our society,” declined to comment on their contributions. Public Consulting Group officials also did not respond to questions. 

Hillsdale, another vendor, is a major player in advancing classical education. It authored the , a civics and history model that emphasizes American exceptionalism and is a favorite of conservatives opposed to lessons on institutional racism. When the Florida Department of Education dozens of math textbooks in 2020, citing content influenced by critical race theory, a analysis showed two Hillsdale representatives objected to the proposed materials.

The state did not respond to questions on the role Hilldale and the Texas Public Policy Foundation played in the new curriculum. Hillsdale officials said they provided their feedback free of charge. 

“Hillsdale never profits from its work in K-12, nor does it accept one penny from federal, state or local taxpayers,” said spokeswoman Emily Davis. She added, “Religion is taught for the sake of cultural literacy, not to promote a particular religion.” 

Originally the province of well-heeled private or parochial schools, classical education has blossomed in recent years both as a response to pandemic lockdowns and what some parents view as progressive trends in traditional public schools. The philosophy is rooted in the liberal arts and historical texts, with a sharp focus on the Greek and Roman foundations of Western civilization.

The movement entertains healthy debate about the role of religion, but most practitioners agree that giving students a strong body of knowledge requires the use of primary sources, including the Bible.

“They’re going to need to have some biblical literacy, if only to interpret John Milton, or Dante or Shakespeare,” said Robert Jackson, a senior research fellow with the at Florida’s Flagler College.

‘Devotional in nature’

In Texas, the proposed changes would go far beyond any previous attempt to inject biblical content into its classrooms.

A allows school districts to offer high school electives on the Bible. Demand has been extremely low, however. According to the Texas Education Agency, just over 1,200 of the state’s 1.7 million took the course this year.

But even with their limited scope and popularity, the courses offer ample fodder for skeptics. Writing for the Texas Freedom Network, a religious liberty and civil rights organization, Chancey, the Southern Methodist professor, the courses to be “explicitly devotional in nature.” Despite requirements for teachers to complete special training and maintain “religious neutrality,” Chancey wrote that the Protestant Bible was the preferred text in these courses, while Catholic, Hebrew and Eastern Orthodox Bibles were “presented as deviations from the norm.” In several districts, the courses were taught by local ministers.

The state is now working with a much larger canvas: not a mere elective, but an entire elementary reading curriculum, with a potential audience of millions of students.

Officials are quick to point out that adoption of the new program is voluntary. But a potential $60 per-student it is offering for participation may make it difficult for school systems to refuse.

The updated materials are now open for public review and are scheduled to go before the state Board of Education for approval this fall. Aicha Davis, a Democrat on the Republican-led board, predicted “they would totally support something like that.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that this is happening,” she said.

Diana Smith stands at the head of a cluttered classroom at Washington Latin Public Charter School. The lights are dimmed, and projected on the wall behind is one of the most famous images in European art, Raphael’s The School of Athens, which acts as the anchor for today’s lesson in art, history and philosophy.

On a handheld whiteboard, Smith jots a word that perhaps 1 in 10,000 adults could define: “Aetiology,” the study of causes and origins. Not contenting herself with one stumper, she quickly adds more SAT material below it, this time written in Greek letters: “Logos.” Coaxing the kids to recite them with her, she wonders aloud what they could mean. 

If the prompt is a bit advanced for 10-year-olds, no one seems fazed. In fact, through the rest of the 80-minute period, Smith’s students gamely follow along as she traipses through more of the antiquarian lexicon, sometimes gesturing toward the image of an early modern masterpiece that decorated the walls of the Vatican for over 500 years. The tutorial, part of the school’s foundational coursework for young pupils, is a concentrated dose of a pedagogy that Smith has spent much of her career refining. 

Washington Latin’s approach to K–12 schooling comes from the somewhat esoteric world of classical education, a movement dedicated to reviving liberal arts instruction as it was understood by the men (and one woman) depicted in The School of Athens: Socrates, Aristotle, Diogenes, Pythagoras and Archimedes. After decades building schools and writing curricula in the parochial and homeschool sectors, its most ardent proponents can sound like evangelists for a long-abandoned faith, laying a heavy emphasis on dead languages and peppering their own speech with words like “quadrivium.” 

But the leading minds in classical education are fixated by the future as much as the past. Pitching a humanistic alternative to both progressive and state-sponsored school reform efforts, established players like the southwestern Great Hearts network and Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School Initiative are attracting more families and diversifying their offerings. With millions of students leaving traditional public schools since the beginning of the pandemic, classical education providers are attempting to step into the breach with not only a content-rich model, but also a worldview extending deep into the foundations of (another phrase that gets used frequently) Western civilization.

Those efforts have met with early, if somewhat controversial, success in states like Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis of seven Hillsdale-affiliated charters and of a classically oriented college admissions test as an alternative to the SAT. 

The question is whether the opportunity for growth can be seized, or if the movement’s internal differences, religious as well as political, are too cacophonous to allow for anything but niche appeal. Some within the field worry that “classical” might become a byword for “conservative,” particularly as a growing number of activists and families have grown leery of public schools’ teaching of subjects like race, gender and sexuality. Others believe that classical education can’t fully deliver on its potential without religion at its core. 

A public charter, Washington Latin sits at the center of some of these debates. It is a deliberately small program, its roughly 900 students divided into average class sizes of 18 in middle school and 15 in high school. Unlike some of the better-known actors in the classical charter world, it hasn’t laid plans for exponential expansion in the coming years, and its leadership acknowledges that its attraction to families in the nation’s capital rests more with its demographic diversity and strong academics than its classical orientation. 

At the same time, the school is growing. After with district officials, its second campus opened last fall in a provisional space about a mile south of Catholic University. Though a more permanent site has , Smith teaches for the moment in a former warehouse with few windows. The longtime Washington Latin principal now serves as its head of classical education, shuttling between campuses to observe and occasionally lead seminars like this one, which moves from ancient mythology to medieval history and back.

Noting that Raphael lived and worked around 1500, roughly 2,000 years after his Hellenistic subjects passed from the scene, Smith asks the significance of the term “renaissance,” derived from the Latin word for birth. A 10-year-old named Alice thrusts her hand up.

“It means to be born again, but it’s not just talking about people,” she offered. “It’s talking about ideas or beliefs from the past being used again. It’s the rebirth of an era, into the modern day.”

‘We can’t get away from Plato and Aristotle’

The ascendance of classical education in the 2020s is itself a tale of rebirth.

What properly qualifies as “classical” instruction is somewhat contested, but the term generally refers to the educational strategies descended from the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome. In those rigidly ordered societies, the honing of the mind was seen as a pursuit for the sons of prominent families. The masses — women, the poor, vast populations of slaves — received little or nothing in the way of formal schooling.

It was the teachers of antiquity who laid the foundations of Western thought: Socrates, sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens; Plato, whose Republic provided the quintessential vision of justice for both man and the state; and Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great. In their explorations of the nature of existence and virtue, all three inspired not only the intellectual awakening of their own age, but also those of the early Christian period, the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment.

“If we live in the West, which we do, we can’t get away from Plato and Aristotle,” said Susan Wise Bauer, who has written widely on theories of classical instruction. 

With the development of mass education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, some felt that cultural inheritance, and the pedagogy necessary to transmit it to future generations, were being abandoned. 

In , “The Lost Tools of Learning,” the British author Dorothy Sayers remarked on the paradox of widespread literacy being accompanied by the rise of propaganda and advertising, the seeming inability of the public to distinguish truth from misinformation, and what she identified as the chief failure of modern schooling: “Although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably…in teaching them how to think.” 

To reverse this confusion, she argued, educators needed to rediscover the educational program pioneered in the ancient world and ubiquitous in European schooling for a thousand years: the trivium, a three-part sequence of grammar, logic and rhetoric. 

The trivium — along with the similarly dusty-sounding “quadrivium” of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy — makes up what were historically known as , and form much of the substance of the revived classical education movement. To the thousands of families and teachers drawn to it, the antique origins of the liberal arts represent a sturdier basis of learning than the progression of newfangled interventions and orthodoxies that have emerged in recent decades.

“We’re starting to see, parents and educators alike, that we need to return to a better way of doing things,” said Kathleen O’Toole, the assistant provost for K–12 education at Michigan’s Hillsdale College, which has launched or partnered with dozens of schools around the United States. “We need to stop trying to innovate, stop trying to experiment when it comes to K–12; we think the answer lies in some sort of return.”

A lack of ‘core knowledge’

As in the 1940s and ‘50s, part of the dissatisfaction with mainstream public schooling arises from the perception that much of what is taught in classrooms lacks spark and rigor, leading to a disenchantment with learning and a devaluing of the arts and humanities. 

The most obvious manifestation, critics say, can be seen in higher education, where that the number of degrees awarded in languages, literature, history, philosophy, and religion have plummeted in the last two decades. But even among younger students, disturbing signs are emerging. By their own admission, American kids are reading for pleasure since the 1980s, and in an echo of Sayers’s warning, that the vast majority of high schoolers have only a slipshod sense of media literacy. 

Jeremy Wayne Tate is a classical education proponent and entrepreneur who founded the , an alternative to the SAT that has caught on with Christian classical universities and of DeSantis in Florida. Despite mainstream American schooling’s overwhelming focus on the cultivation of skills for college and career, he argued, huge numbers of students graduate in a state of “educational neglect.”

“They spend 12 years and graduate without any serious core knowledge,” Tate said. “They don’t have knowledge of the great books and the classics, but they don’t have any vocational skills either. You almost want to say, ‘Do one of these things!’”

At Washington Latin, the aim is to combine a classical course of study with a grounding in and acceptance of the contemporary — or, as the institutional motto puts it, “a classical education for the modern world.” 

All students of Latin, with an additional option of Greek. But the school also requires credits in modern languages like French, Mandarin, and Arabic. Courses in robotics and computer science accompany robust helpings of world history and literature. The highlights texts from a diverse array of authors past and present — including Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, of have drawn complaints from parents in other states. 

Particularly for children in younger grades, the classical bent can veer more toward the conceptual. In an elementary math exercise, for example, students are asked to design a poster or comic strip illustrating fractions. At adjoining desks, 10-year-olds Justice and Maddy work on an eight-panel story of a group of friends dividing three cookies.

After only a few months attending their new school, which opened exclusively to fifth- and sixth-graders in September, they have largely adjusted to its structure and routines. Justice compares the experience to that of her last school, a local Montessori whose self-directed ethos emphasized “finding yourself and doing your own thing.”

“We learned a lot too, but we usually started drawing and doing funner” — she quickly corrects herself — “more fun things. So this is more of a straight education instead of just doing what you want, when you want. It’s a bit of a transition not being able to, like, crochet during the lesson.”

‘Explosive’ demand

Judging from local interest, Washington Latin’s approach and offerings are extremely popular. Since the school, like many charters, is oversubscribed, it runs a lottery to determine admissions; show that nearly 1,100 students are currently on the waitlist for seats at its original middle school campus.

That partially reflects the school’s enviable academic results. On district-wide standardized tests last year, 58 percent of Washington Latin middle and high schoolers performed at or above grade level in English, compared with 30 percent of D.C. students overall. Forty-seven percent of its middle schoolers, and 29 percent of high schoolers, scored at or above grade level in math, compared with just 19 percent of Washingtonians in those grades.

But its strength in enrollment mirrors the rest of the classical education space, which has likewise seen what Tate of the Classical Learning Test called an “explosive” surge in demand in recent years. 

Much of it has come in the parochial sector. According to the Association for Classical Christian Schools, an organization that to Protestant classical academies, its membership now stands at over 400 schools enrolling between 60,000 and 70,000 students; those figures over the last half-decade.

Catholic institutions are making their own strides. Since Chesterton Academy opened in Minnesota in 2008, the “joyfully Catholic, classical high school” across the United States, Canada, Italy, and . In the fall of 2021, the Archdiocese of Boston opened the Lumen Verum Academy — its first new Catholic school in a half-century — which features a classical curriculum and operates on a “blended learning” schedule.

But nowhere is the expansion of the classical footprint more noticeable, or more controversial, than in the charter sector. Great Hearts, which already operates over 30 charter schools across Arizona and Texas, will soon open new campuses in Louisiana and Florida and this fall. In with education commentator Rick Hess, CEO Jay Heiler announced plans to leverage Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarships Account program to launch “private schools with church communities” in that state.

The other major entity in classical charters is Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative, which made national waves in 2022 in Tennessee at the invitation of Republican Gov. Bill Lee. as a popular speaking venue for conservatives; its president, Larry Arnn, led President Trump’s commission to create a “patriotic” U.S. history curriculum as an alternative to the 1619 Project. 

Though the partnership between Tennessee and the Barney Initiative was meant to eventually bring 50 Hillsdale-affiliated charters to the state, the proposal came under fire after Arnn opining that public school teachers are trained “in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

Criticisms of the phonebook-sized “1776 Curriculum” added additional strain, with critics citing embedded in its lessons (the Civil Rights Movement was “almost immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders,” one passage read). With bipartisan detractors growing louder by the week, the initial charter proposals . 

By the middle of last year, were classical education with the political Right. Notably, however, figures within the private wing of the movement have also expressed some skepticism of how the moral instruction of classical education could be applied in a charter school. David Goodwin, head of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, argued that true classical instruction “cannot exist without a transcendental.”

“My judgment is that Barney largely does that with the Constitution and the American Declaration — what they’re trying to do is use the Bible as maybe a supporting document for Americanism.”

O’Toole, who founded and led a classical charter in Texas before her stint at Hillsdale, said that while there were “fundamental questions about divinity…that we are not going to take up in a direct way” with students,” she preferred the charter environment to that of an independent school and didn’t “see it as a hindrance at all that we don’t talk about religion.” 

Washington Latin’s Smith, a Christian, argued that the study of “timeless truths” doesn’t require sacred underpinnings; Socrates and Plato, to take obvious examples, were not Christian or even monotheistic, and their philosophical explorations have influenced secular as well as religious systems of thought.

“I get as close as I can to talking about schooling in a religious way without being religious, because it’s a public school,” she said. “But it’s holy work that we’re doing, and if you’re in the school, you’ll get a feeling of the transcendent — a feeling of inspiration.”

Fears of partisanship

The divides within the movement are a long way from becoming all-out fissures — in fact, most parents still aren’t aware of their existence. 

But signs of its increasing prominence are stoking worries that, as with seemingly everything in American life, polarization will eventually discover classical education. Tate, a vocal cheerleader for school choice who has called classical schools to what he views as the leftward drift of public schools, said he was “concerned” that partisanship might come to overwhelm their appeal.  

“As a conservative, I don’t want to see this movement politically hijacked. But there are aspects of it that are threatening to the progressive establishment.”

Many in the national press got their first exposure to classical education in January, when DeSantis unveiled to shake up the leadership at the New College of Florida, viewed locally as one of the state’s most progressive universities. The administration’s hope, his chief of staff , was to transform it into a classical institution akin to a “Hillsdale of the South.” 

Wise Bauer, the homeschooling author, grouped DeSantis with other conservative actors aiming to “co-opt” the branding of classical education as a means of appealing to right-wing instincts of what should be taught and excluded from school curricula.

“What I see right now is this big battleground where some people — and I would put Ron DeSantis in this category — use ‘classical education’ without reference to the process, but only in reference to past thinkers who were white and European,” Bauer said.

For her own part, Smith contrasts the outlook of her school with those of more conservative classical Christian and public charter programs, which “tend to treat the modern world as a problem that needs solving.” The building in which she stands, Washington Latin’s newly opened Anna Julia Cooper Campus, takes its name from a pioneering African American educator and classicist who made her home in Washington, not Thebes or Athens. 

“We don’t have the same attitude towards the time period that people have been born into,” she continues. “What we’re trying to do is bring the wisdom, the curriculum, and the pedagogical approach of the Socratic seminar to a public school audience.”

The school’s climate clearly differs from that of progressive icons like Montessori, but also from many of its famous counterparts in the charter sector. For the most part, students come and go as they please without falling into silent transitions through the hallways. During some class periods, they are allowed to sit in chairs or on the floor. Smith describes their freedom of movement as reflecting the liberal embrace of individual autonomy, even in the case of elementary schoolers.

As if to illustrate the point, several classrooms soon empty into a jumbled mass of pre-adolescent energy, breaking for a 20-minute interval between periods. About two dozen kids are soon sitting on the stairs of the building’s main foyer, chatting or playing quick rounds of chess. 

Two friends, Alex and Nikolas, practice bringing out their knights on a linoleum board while entertaining the question of whether even reigning World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen could outplay a computer. Likely not, they conclude; in this realm, human genius has yielded to the heights of mechanical proficiency. 

Soon after, finishing their own game, they scuttle back to their next encounter with the ages.