This spring, I sat in the back of a ninth-grade class at Eagle Ridge Academy, a classical charter school in the suburbs of Minneapolis. The students were talking about the part of Virgil’s “Aeneid” in which Aeneas tells Queen Dido of Carthage the story of the Trojan War and the travails that had brought him to her shore. Their teacher, Jeremiah Lemon, asked if Aeneas was telling the truth or shaping the tale to his own advantage, as Odysseus had done in “The Odyssey.”
“I think he’s telling the truth,” said one student. “Odysseus was trying to make himself look good, but Aeneas is telling Dido all the dirty details.”
“I agree,” said another. “I think he wants to show Dido that he can persevere, that he can go through hardship and still come out of it.”
That second comment was a reference to Eagle Ridge’s moral code: Citizenship, integrity, perseverance, honor, excellence and respect. Those virtues are meant to infuse the school’s daily life. Almost everyone in Mr. Lemon’s class wanted to talk, but no one interrupted. There was no showboating. The students had arranged their desks in a big square to facilitate this Socratic seminar. At one point, a girl looked at a student who hadn’t spoken and said, “What do you think about this question?” And the student answered.
Having recently spent a year in public school classrooms for a book on civic education, I can tell you that the average ninth-grader does not sound remotely as serious, or as respectful, as the kids in Mr. Lemon’s class. Eagle Ridge is one of a growing body of classical schools whose traditional ethos includes both a curriculum based on the great books of the Western canon and a culture founded on the idea of virtue. That includes old-fashioned rules of comportment. Students at Eagle Ridge wear uniforms; younger students are expected to stand when speaking. The elementary school children enter and exit class in an orderly single file. I heard a kindergarten teacher, Paige Schneider, praise her kids for their perfect performance in the previous day’s bathroom break. “Raise your hand,” she said, “if you’re ready to commit to that again.” They were.