Grosse Pointe News

Sean Cotton, Owner • Anne Gryzenia, Publisher • Jody McVeigh, Editor In Chief • Meg Leonard, Senior Editor

16980 Kercheval Pl. • Grosse Pointe, Michigan 48230 • 313.882.6900 • Monday-Friday 9am-4pm

Letter: Progressive vs. classicalFree Access


To the Editor:

What parents would not wish their children to learn what is good, true and beautiful as they are growing up? As adults, these young men and women would manifest courage, gratitude and wisdom.

Instead, the Grosse Pointe Public School System is promoting a mistaken strategic plan that holds up skin color and sex as critical metrics so students see someone who “looks like me” in order to be inspired by music, sports and classroom curriculum.

But a student doesn’t need to be a young farm girl like Fern in “Charlotte’s Web” to understand her desire to save a piglet runt from slaughter; a student doesn’t need to be formerly enslaved, black and a prominent orator like Frederick Douglass to sympathize with the struggle for human rights; a student doesn’t need to be Greek, male and lost at sea to identify with Homer’s “Odysseus” along his obstacle-laden travels.

Our district’s illogic is what makes the option of classical education so valuable.

Classical education is a system of education that underscores our common humanity; it values knowledge for its own sake, as a way of shedding light on the human condition. With its concurrent emphasis on character development, it teaches not only about science and literature, but also about freedom of choice and how actions have consequences, and how with each freedom comes a corresponding responsibility.

A progressive education might present things from a perspective of moral equivalence; a classical education presents history and the humanities such that students learn there is a clear difference between right and wrong, good and evil.

At a time in history when we are witnessing freedom of speech being limited through corporate and government censorship and freedom of belief being suppressed via lockdowns and mandates, perhaps parents would appreciate the option of a local, tuition-free classical education for their children.

Classical education adheres philosophically to the idea that our country was founded on eternal, true principles and that the gifts of equality and freedom achieved through self-government are worth understanding.

Classically educated students are enabled to transcend the narrow boundaries of their own individual experiences to share in the richer understanding of what it means to be one human among all humanity.

Kelly Boll

Grosse Pointe Park