Learning together: There are 'things a free people ought to know'

Atlanta Classical Academy's Class of 2026

What happens when education is personalized for each student's interests and goals? When it's no longer a common civic experience? In a commencement speech to Atlanta Classical Academy students, Robert Pondiscio congratulates graduates on learning together.

Once, "the McGuffey Readers, an elementary school collection of stories, poems, essays, and speeches, became nearly universal in American classrooms," Pondiscio tells them. They helped reproduce a common culture.

Now teachers are asked "to differentiate instruction, to tailor learning to each student’s needs, interests, and pace," he says. Artificial intelligence makes it easier to personalize instruction, to meet each student where they are take them where they want to go. But something is lost when education becomes a private good.

Classical education gives us "a common vocabulary and a common world," he says. Atlanta Classical graduates "can participate in a conversation that stretches across time and place." You've "read the same books — not just heard of them, but wrestled with them. You’ve struggled with the same questions and ideas."

. . . a society depends not just on individuals who are well-informed, but on people who share enough in common to understand one another — to communicate, to cooperate, to live together. In many parts of life, we still do the same things people have always done — but we do them alone. We watch alone. We listen alone. We scroll alone.

At Atlanta Classical, Pondiscio says, "you have not been handed a menu of choices and asked to construct 'my truth.' You’ve read the same books, studied the same ideas, and moved through a shared education with the people sitting beside you." Your school has insisted that "there are still some things a free people ought to know and have in common."

Our nation is celebrating its 250th anniversary, he reminds the graduates. "Democracies do not survive merely because people are free to speak. They survive because citizens possess enough shared knowledge and understanding to speak meaningfully to one another."