“Feet flat.
Hips back.
Shoulders straight.
Eyes forward.”
We’d drone in unison.
This was how we announced our readiness at the teacher’s command from the front of the classroom.
Opinion
Thirty years ago, I thought this was how all young minds engaged in education. The teachers checked our bodies for compliant tucked-in shirts and belts; our pencil cases for only allowable writing utensils — six-sided pencils, sharpened, unmarred by bored children’s chews. Our curriculum was classical, before The Heritage Foundation touted classical curriculum as the hope for America’s future.
Thirty years ago, I was 7 years old. I was learning how the world worked.
This summer, the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act began disbursing up to $7,000 per K-12 student to Wyoming private and homeschool families despite ongoing litigation regarding the law’s constitutionality. Supporters, like Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, assert that this law justly provides due support for families called to root their children’s education in religion and moral order from the home. Critics, like the Wyoming Education Association, believe it siphons already limited tax dollars without oversight, creating immense risk for Wyoming’s public schools and the quality of education for the state’s youth.
Both my elementary school, Fort Caspar Academy, and its related middle school, Casper Classical Academy, were founded in the mid-90s, predating Wyoming law allowing charter schools. Both remain public schools. I can’t speak to their founders’ intentions beyond a desire to shape young minds thoughtfully. However, the parallels are undeniable, particularly around “the trivium,” a foundational pillar of my alma mater and a favored tool of the highly conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.
In Latin, the trivium means “where three roads meet.” Those three roads — grammar, logic and rhetoric — formed the foundation of my classical education.
My schools operated with “pillars of virtuous character development” and “purposeful high expectations.” In our elementary classrooms, we recited long-form poetry. We dissected grammar and math verbally at the overhead projector with daily exercises called “Daily Oral Language (D.O.L)” and “Daily Oral Math (D.O.M).” In middle school, we were required to take Latin and logic class, learning the roots of rhetoric. In short, my schools were strict about everything from your midriff to your penmanship.
Aristotle’s philosophy on logic is regularly quoted as: “All men are mortal. Socrates was a man. Therefore, Socrates was mortal.”
If children with poor posture often disrupt class, and disruptions to class interrupt the classroom experience, then children with poor posture interrupt the classroom experience. Enter the mantra recited in unison between lessons.
Follow the syllogism further: If America needs compliant, orderly adults and schools discipline children toward compliance and order, then America will soon have its desired population. Yet, I look at myself, a once classically educated youth, and question that truth. I hesitate to believe I am the picture of the Heritage Foundation’s ideal case study. One glance and I’d be quickly diagnosed as terminal with “woke mind virus.”
Thirty years ago, I looked to my teachers to teach me how the world worked. I was beholden to their power through report cards and threats of dress code violations. I learned to thrive in their systems with their tools for better and for worse.
I don’t believe the trivium was a formula for compliant citizens. Rather, it was a foundation for what’s next: thought, expression, conversation — Heritage Foundation nightmare fuel. Imagine if they found out I have a nose ring.
The discourse around the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship explores topics that could be excavated endlessly. How does the state’s budget reflect how we educate our children? Who gets to decide what that education should produce? I don’t have those answers.
Perhaps I am a product of an education designed to shape America’s youth. From the time I was 7 years old, I anxiously adjusted my body and belongings to be granted my teacher’s approval. Sometimes, I still do. I learned to crave my teachers’ praise for my obedience. That’s a lot of power to hand in for a letter grade.
Yet my future was not predetermined by my education. Rather, it was honed by it in ways that no trendy ideology or curriculum ever could.
I learned the rules and followed them. Then I questioned them.
