Evidence · Classical education
Does a classical, knowledge-rich education work?
What the research shows about teaching children history, literature and a broad base of knowledge, and why more families now choose classical schools.
The short answer
Reading scores in the United States have fallen back to where they were in the early 1990s. Decades of cognitive science show that what a child already knows drives how well the child reads and thinks. The strongest causal study of a knowledge-rich curriculum found large, lasting gains in reading. Classical education builds on the same idea: children study history, great books, grammar, logic and clear writing in a planned order, grade by grade. More than 1,000 classical schools now operate across the country, and a broad base of knowledge also helps children check what AI tools tell them.
Reading scores keep falling
On the 2024 Nation's Report Card, 40% of fourth graders read below the Basic level, the largest share since 2002. A third of eighth graders read below Basic, the largest share ever. A fourth grader below Basic likely cannot work out why a character in a story acts as he or she does. For scores since the school closures, see our learning loss evidence page.
Knowledge is what makes reading work
To understand a text, a reader needs background knowledge about its subject. In a classic 1988 study, middle school students who knew a lot about baseball understood and remembered a baseball story better than students who knew little, whether they were strong or weak readers.
Researchers at the University of Virginia tested the idea at school scale with kindergarten lotteries at nine Colorado charter schools that teach the Core Knowledge curriculum. Core Knowledge lays out the history, literature, science and art that children learn in each grade. Lottery winners who attended these schools scored 16 percentile points higher in reading in grades 3 to 6 than applicants who lost the lottery. The lottery chose students at random, so the study shows cause and effect, not only a link. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham co-authored it, and the lead researcher, David Grissmer, says the range and depth of what children already know drives their future learning.
National data point the same way. Researchers at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute followed thousands of children from kindergarten through fifth grade in a federal study. More time on social studies, not more time on English class, went with better reading. Girls and children from lower-income or non-English-speaking homes gained the most.
Knowledge is what makes expert thinking possible
In a famous 1973 experiment, chess masters recalled real game positions far better than beginners, but no better when the pieces sat at random. The masters did not have better memories. They had a large store of chess knowledge that let them see patterns. In a 2019 review for the New South Wales Department of Education, Daniel Willingham concludes that critical thinking looks different in each subject and depends on knowing that subject well. A child cannot think critically about a subject the child knows nothing about.
A state that put knowledge back in the classroom
Louisiana built its own free English curriculum, the ELA Guidebooks, around complex texts and units that build knowledge. On the 2024 Nation's Report Card, Louisiana was the only state whose fourth graders beat their 2019 reading score. The state also trained teachers in phonics, so the curriculum is one of several changes, but it shows that knowledge-rich teaching can work at scale in public schools.
What classical education teaches
Classical education passes down the wisdom of past generations. Students read great books and primary sources, study history in order, learn grammar and often Latin, and practice logic and clear speaking and writing. Many schools organize the years around the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric. Schools differ in the details. Some are public charter schools and many are private, so ask each school for its reading list and its history sequence by grade.
More families choose classical schools
A 2024 Heritage Foundation report counted more than 1,000 classical liberal arts schools across the country and profiled 882 of them. Many of these schools report waiting lists.
Great Hearts, a network of public classical charter schools in Arizona, reports that 47% of its students were proficient in English and in math on 2024-25 state tests, compared with 41% in English and 34% in math statewide. Comparisons like this do not account for differences between the families who apply and those who do not. Lottery studies, like the Core Knowledge study above, give the clearest answer, and families should ask any school for its own results.
Classical education in the age of AI
A child with a broad base of knowledge can check what an AI tool says against what the child already knows. A child without that base has nothing to check it against. See our evidence page on children, AI and learning.
What Restore Childhood is doing
We are raising funds to bring Landmark-style history books back into print for young readers, and to build a shelf of in-print classics on American history and Western civilization.
What you can do now
- Ask your school which books every student reads in each grade.
- Ask how much time the school gives to history, geography and science each week.
- Ask how the school teaches history, and whether students read real stories and primary sources.
- Ask whether the school teaches grammar, spelling and handwriting directly.
- Read history and classic literature aloud at home.
- When you compare schools, compare their reading lists and their test results.
Related
We update this page as new data comes out. If you see an error, please contact us.