Are you a parent who’s considering classical Christian education? Or maybe you’re a teacher who has been doing this for years? Either way, the handpicked books and guides below will provide you with a wholistic and thorough picture. They are organized into levels based on understandability and importance. Find the book you need based on our descriptions, or read through the whole list.

100  Your first introduction

This essay by Dorothy Sayers played an enormous role in starting the classical Christian movement in America. You can read it for free on our website here. In it, Sayers proposes organizing schools with the classical trivium in mind and studying Latin.

300  Read next if you are involved in CCE

Subtitle: Moral Imagination in Politics, Literature, and Everyday Life

This book explains the damage modernity has done to our moral imaginations–imagination that pictures human dignity and goodness through stories and images. It traces the history of the term “moral imagination” and also looks at older Christian sources. For those who want to know more about moral education or the term “moral imagination”, this book is your book. If you’re looking for a shorter description, see our description here. 

Modern education was been limited to the transfer of bits of information. In this book Taylor explains that students from Greece through the renaissance were taught much more than information-knowledge. Instead, they relied on the integrated powers of sensory experience and intuition.

We offer a workbook you can purchase here.

500  A master’s level journey in history

This scholarly book on education in the late middle ages looks at their emphasis on moral education and imitating one’s teacher. It studies education in the period of time after the decline of Monastic schools and before the 12th century renaissance when we get authors such as Hugh of St. Victor. This book fills that gap for those interested in the history of medieval education.

Quintilian was a first century Roman rhetorician and teacher. He wrote this book, Institutio Oratoria, as a twelve part rhetoric training program, although it also paints a picture of education in general since rhetoric was a key element and goal of what we call the trivium.

Augustine, a Christian through and through, argues that there is much value in the excellent liberal education that dominated the pagan Roman world (e.g. Logic, Rhetoric). However, he takes great pains to preserve the antithesis between belief and unbelief, and so he urges his vision for a classical education that is distinctly Christian.

Hugh of St. Victor wrote in the late middle ages, the 12th century, near Paris. In an outline for all learning, he talks about the four branches of philosophy: theoretical arts (which includes the quadrivium), practical arts, mechanical arts, logical arts (which includes the trivium).

The Italian Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries produced what we call the humanities. The scholars of the time, the humanists, highly emphasized classic literature in education. This book deals with the ideas that came from their efforts.