About the CCLE
The Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education encourages and serves families, teachers, and schools working to restore the classical arts of learning and the best traditions of Lutheran education.
The CCLE cultivates this restoration through educational conferences, online resources for teachers and parents, and accreditation for classical Lutheran schools. We heartily agree with Martin Luther that “You parents can provide your children with no greater gift than an education in the liberal arts.” The Consortium’s goal is to give every family the opportunity and tools to follow Luther’s advice.
A liberal arts education . . . the arts of classical learning . . . classical education all refer to the same tradition that has been the standard of excellence in education for more than 2000 years. To the ancient Greeks and to the Romans following in their footsteps, this was the only sort of education worthy of a free man, hence the term liberales artes, literally “the arts of freedom.”
It was a return to this classical learning that fueled the Reformation and the Renaissance. Martin Luther, Phillip Melanchthon, and Johann Sturm fostered and guided that restoration in the sixteenth century setting up schools that became the pattern and model for hundreds of years in America cultivating wisdom, eloquence, and piety.
Today, the CCLE is working for the restoration of this inheritance among Lutheran schools and educators.
“So it was done in ancient Rome. There boys were so taught that by the time they reached their fifteenth, eighteenth, or twentieth year they were well versed in Latin, Greek, and all the liberal arts (as they are called), and then immediately entered upon a political or military career. Their system produced intelligent, wise, and competent men, so skilled inevery art and rich in experience that if all the bishops, priests, and monks in the whole of Germany today were rolled into one, you would not have the equal of a single Roman soldier. As a result their country prospered; they had capable and trained men for every position. So at all times throughout the world simple necessity has forced men, even among the heathen, to maintain pedagogues and schoolmasters if their nation was to be brought to a high standard.” - Martin Luther