I gave a brief introduction to the value of classics in my first column, whether or not they are part of your child's formal education. It no longer inculcates the shared civic knowledge and virtues that constituted our unique American experiment. Educators target them as subjects for societal experiments that will yield a future utopian state. Based on sociological analysis of interim results, they are subjected to a new set of experiments. The NEA considers this approach entirely positive and hopeful.
Process is everything.
This model regards the past as regressive and repressive from which children must be freed. It results in education that either abandons the best materials of our past entirely or alters them to suit the experimental agenda. Both arguments, about the repressive past as well as the inevitable future, are fallacious. Even if the future were to prove so disruptive, classical education provides students with the intellectual tools of learning they need to approach any given subject competently. There is nothing vague about these tools.