"There is a point at which we really can't appreciate beauty unless we truly understand it."

That is how Mrs. Katy McKinney sums up the art program at Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA), and she brings in the teacher behind it to show what she means. Amy Coffelt found LCA after driving past a yard sign for a week straight. She came as a parent, stepped in as a kindergarten teacher, and now teaches art across the school.

When people hear "classical education," Mrs. McKinney says, they tend to think of literature and the humanities. Art rarely makes the list. But with the Hillsdale K–12 Program Guide which Lafayette follows, students are asked to study great works before they are asked to create their own. Mrs. Coffelt shows how that plays out across the trivium, from the elements of art in the early grades to original work in high school.

Then come the projects: this year's Veterans Day art, built grade by grade on Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena"; scratchboard animals that made middle schoolers reverse everything they knew about shading; first graders pressing marks into clay slabs like scribes in Mesopotamia. And a fourth grader whose Greek columns looked like he had ignored the directions entirely, until Mrs. McKinney found out why. "I ate humble pie that day," she says.

None of it is easy, and that is the point. These students are held to a high standard, and they keep at it because they have studied the masters and know what good work looks like. As Mrs. McKinney puts it, "Education, I think, finds its purpose in the loving of the beautiful."

Lafayette Classical Academy is a classical school pursuing excellence in academics and excellence in character, together. If this episode encouraged you, share it with a friend — because our nation is not renewed first in the courts or in the capitals, but in our classrooms, in our families, and in our children's hearts.

For more information about Lafayette Academy, A Classical School please visit https://lafayetteacademy.org/

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