What Place Does Classical Education Have in Modern Tutoring Practices?

Updated from the January 2018 blog post

March 18, 2025

A few people may wonder why I moved from teaching high school English and Theatre Arts to teaching reading recovery in the elementary grades. Here is why. After a few decades spent outside the classroom in another profession and homeschooling my children, I felt like Rip Van Winkle, who only slept for twenty years. He returned to his New England town aghast and shocked at all the changes that had taken place over those two decades. After more than twenty years outside of the classroom, what struck me was when a high school student would point at a word and announce, "I don't know that word."

I was shocked and appalled when classrooms of 9th graders in a charter school had only a fraction of the ability to read, write, and speak English that my former students had way back in ye olde days. Why? My previous school taught phonics to early readers and scheduled two hours of English language learning every day for every student.

Not only that, but each child obediently and eagerly memorized a poem every month for a grade. The contrast I observed was disheartening. The simple tools of delivering phonics instruction to all kindergarten and first graders, prioritizing English instruction, and daily exposure to poetry cost nothing compared to the nearly annual campaign -- new and improved at $5,000 more -- represent marketing to funnel more dollars to regularly fill textbook company coffers. But always --" evidence-based" -- a buzzword that belies the continuous cycle of more and more spending with decreasing improvement in literacy. As they say, "Consider the source." The source of the failure, in this case. Dare I say it? Follow the money.

Five years ago, I left the classroom again and began tutoring struggling readers and writers online with Zoom. Since then, my confidence in classical education methods has been verified over and over with dozens of students, both long and short-term. Short-term students have filled their reading gaps and gone on to greater academic success. Once reading challenges were overcome, my long-term students have become excellent and prolific writers after exposure to great literature, vocabulary, and explicitl writing lessons.

As a classical "start" tutor, my mission is to provide multisensory phonics instruction combined with quality literature to allow beginning readers to read as early as possible using the most effective method and to bridge gaps for older students who have not achieved grade-level reading fluency using the same method. Here's how this works:

When a child says, “I don’t know that word” he has not been properly taught to read using phonics. Further, if there is no automaticity in decoding a word, how can one really think about the content that is being read? As a high school, English and theatre arts teacher I heard “I don’t know that word” so many times, and it always made me cringe.

If direct phonics instruction has taken place early in the school years, reading any word should be nearly subconscious because all of the sounds of each phonogram are taught early and simultaneously. The mind is trained to read from left to right across the page. No "sight" words. These are taught as exceptions as we come to them. For example, the phonogram “A” has three sounds: “cat,” “bake” and “wasp.” All these are taught from the beginning; the brain can easily store these in the same location for easy retrieval.

The English language has more than 500,000 words! Learning to read word by word is impossible in that context. But English has only forty-five sounds written in seventy basic letter groups or phonograms. The one thousand most frequently used words can be sounded out with these seventy basic phonograms.

Further, combined with twenty-eight spelling rules and a few additional advanced phonograms the logic of English can be directly taught over time to preschool and early elementary-age students. When the phonograms and spelling rules are mastered, the logic of our language becomes clear. Too often, only if a child has been failing in reading for years and tested to be dyslexic can he or she be taught using this proven method. At this point, it takes more effort to unlearn the habit of guessing at a new word. I believe all children are deserving of the best we have to offer in early reading instruction. What could be more important?

The most recently published versions of this method are known as Orton-Gillingham, Spalding, Spell to Write and Read, The Logic of English, and All About Reading/Spelling. Recently, the public education gurus have now come out with “The Science of Reading.” as its latest buzzword in the literacy world.  This is simply a return to the effective methods of the past with a few bells and whistles thrown in. I hope it works for our public school students.

My curriculum of choice is Spell to Write and Read, due to my longstanding familiarity with it and training. not to mention the cost. Since it is a one-time purchase, you do not spend money on consumable workbooks for each grade level.

The place classical education has in modern tutoring practices is to provide what most public school students lack in their current education system and to give home-educated students one-on-one instruction in reading and writing when the parents lack the time or knowledge.

If all early elementary children were taught with intensive phonics from day one inspired to read with daily exposure to the best of wholesome children's literature, children would love to learn and love to read. Enthusiasm would blossom. Then almost no child would be in high school pointing to a word on the page and saying, “I don’t know that word.”

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