A Classical Education Is Not About Finding Your Passions

“Parent: High school is the time and place to figure out who you are and what you love.

Gibbs: It’s really not.

Parent: No?

Gibbs: No, I wouldn’t say it’s the place to figure out who you are and what you love. At very least, a classical Christian school isn’t that sort of place. I think that plenty of public schools bill themselves that way. Perhaps some Montessori schools do, as well, but not classical schools.

Parent: That’s a little baffling. Aren’t high school students figuring out what they want to do with their lives? What they want to study in college? What sort of careers they want to pursue?

Gibbs: Yes, and that’s fine, but the fact those things happen during someone’s high school years doesn’t mean a high school exists for that reason. A classical school exists to help students love the right things—and to help them love the right things in the right way, and to the right degree.”

-from A Classical Education Is Not About Finding Your Passions