In the United States, there is a growing reform movement taking place in education, and it isn’t coming from our politicians or our universities. This movement finds its inspiration in a British crime writer, poet and educational reformer of the early 20th century named Dorothy Sayers, who is probably best known today for her outstanding translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

The grassroots movement is largely led by parents who are unhappy with their children’s academic formation, and equally their moral formation. Inspired by an address Miss Sayers gave at Oxford in 1947, these parents are rejecting public and parochial schools and starting their own. They are reaching back centuries for their pedagogical structure and content, creating what has come to be called in the US a “classical education movement”.