On June 2nd 2025, the Learning Institute at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, in conjunction with the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture in Poland, will hold a one day conference in Warsaw. This international event will continue a discussion begun in Brussels in early 2024, which aimed to revive an interest in classical education in light of a renewed crisis facing schools and universities across the Western world.

In a declaration produced in Brussels, contributors defined classical education as a rigorous system of education that is content-heavy and based on an appreciation of the best of human culture from Socrates to David Hume and Shakespeare to Goethe. This classical approach has been followed by generations of people, from Ancient Rome right through the rise of industrial society and beyond. 

The knowledge-based curriculum assumes that a child needs to know the facts about their world before they can develop their critical faculties. Classical education trains children in the foundations of human knowledge and understanding so that, as they grow and mature, they can develop their ability to observe, analyse and question, compare their understanding with others, and engage in dialogue and debate.

Participants, from countries across Europe and North America, expanded upon these ideas in Reclaiming Classical Education, an edited volume which will be published by MCC Press in Spring 2025. Among them are teachers, university professors, academic researchers and policymakers; all share a concern with the current state of education. The Warsaw conference will bring the authors together once more and mark the launch of this new book.

The conference will offer insight into the problems currently facing our schools and universities and suggest a more positive future for education. It will also provide an opportunity to celebrate the publication of Reclaiming Classical Education.

Keynote speakers at the conference include:

• Nicholas Tate, author of What is Education For? (2013) and The Conservative Case for Education (2017, translated in 2023 into Hungarian as Konservatív Iskola). From 1994 to 2000 Tate was chief executive of the bodies responsible for supervising England’s school curriculum, national tests, academic and vocational qualifications, and national occupational standards. In this capacity he was chief adviser to both Conservative and Labour secretaries of state for education. Since then he has been head of independent schools in England and Switzerland and executive chairman of a global group of international schools.
   
• Professor Artur Górecki, historian, educator and publicist; teacher, university lecturer and rector; in 2020–2023, plenipotentiary of the Minister of Education and Science and director of the Department of General Education and Core Curricula at the Ministry of Education and Science; in 2021–2024, member of the Council for National Library Resources. Author of three monographs and numerous scientific and popular science articles. Propagator of classical education. Currently Director of the Ordo Iuris Educational Centre.
   
• János Setényi, director of the Learning Institute at Mathias Corvinus Collegium.  Setényi has worked on projects for the OECD, the Council of Europe and the EU for over 25 years, gaining extensive experience in education development in the Balkans and the post-Soviet region. In 1995, he founded one of the first for-profit educational consultancy companies in Central Europe, Expanzió Consulting Ltd. Since the turn of the millennium, his interest has focused on evaluation, from policy level to institutional and training program level. His research focuses on new system integration models for traditional schooling.
   
• Attorney Jerzy Kwaśniewski, President of the Board and co-founder of Ordo Iuris Institute, Chairman of the Ordo Iuris Foundation Council. Kwaśniewski, a graduate of the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Warsaw University and a scholarship holder at the University of Copenhagen (international commercial law, comparative constitutional law), is a managing partner of Parchimowicz & Kwaśniewski Law Firm (est. 2008). He was appointed to the advisory councils of four Ministers of Justice, including the Council for the Strategy of Modernization of Justice and the Council for the Protection of Family Autonomy and Family Life. He is a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the International Bar Association and the IBA Human Rights Institute. Kwaśniewski is regularly listed as one of the most influential Polish lawyers.

Extract Three

From: Cornelis J. Schilt. How the West was Won: Liberating the Past to Preserve the Future

Traditionally, the term ‘academy’ or ‘academia’ held a very particular meaning and connotation. Originally, it referred to the school established by Plato in Athens in 388 BC. Noted historian of ancient science David Lindberg described it as ‘a philosophical community, consisting of scholars who had reached various levels of maturity and attainment and who interacted as equals. It must have been a centre of academic freedom, to use the modern term, as it ‘was (at least in principle) open to students of any persuasion.’ It was certainly not the only school in town – after Plato’s death, Aristotle founded his Lyceum, there was the Stoa, and the Garden of Epicurus – but clearly the name stuck. In the modern world, it seems the term ‘academy’ came into vogue during the first half of the eighteenth century, connected with centres for the scientific study of nature such as the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, the London-based Royal Society, and the French Académie des sciences, all founded already during the middle of the seventeenth century.

[...]

Clearly, the beacons have shifted. Frequently, and with notable exceptions, what today goes for ‘academic research’ and even ‘the academy’ seems far-removed from the lynx-like qualities of Cesi’s Accademia. It is not just that the sciences and the humanities have gone different routes and barely talk to each other, the two cultures so eloquently described by C.P. Snow in his Rede lecture of 1959, but that both cultures seem to suffer from a unique combination of myopia and hyperopia. Myopia, or shortsightedness, because they focus on what is near, whilst losing sight of the bigger picture in time and space. Specialisation has brought deep knowledge, but the hyper-specialisation of today means that two colleagues occupying adjacent offices or labs – or even share one – in the same department cannot understand each other. Perhaps more disturbing, most researchers are unable to have a meaningful conversation at the dinner table, or indeed teach students or – the horror – the general public. They have no interest in anything outside of their microbubble. Rest in Peace, ye Intellectual. It is rather odd than, that the same researchers frequently suffer from hyperopia, or far-sightedness. They see distant objects clearly, but near objects appear blurry, or so it seems. They have firm theories about the distant past, or distant future, extremely strong convictions that they adhere religiously, yet cannot distinguish between daily fact and fiction even if the evidence stared them in the face. They live in worlds of extreme disconnect. And these are the people that we entrust with the education of our children.