Mission
Ostraka is a non-profit organization whose mission is to develop and support both innovative and traditional education that strengthens the individual, the family, and the community. We define this strength as prosperity, security, and engagement as active and informed citizens of free nations.
In this mission we are as interested in neighborhood teachers of arts and crafts as we are with established educational institutions and the manner in which they carry Western civilization.
Ostraka particularly supports school choice, homeschooling, and classical education. Support for Orange County Classical Academy, a charter school in Orange, California established in 2020, has been a major project of Ostraka, including renovation of the school buildings and providing much of the school’s classroom furniture and equipment.
Contact us at programs@ostrakalearning.org
What’s in a name?
An ostrakon is a shard of pottery, found incised with writing by the thousands in the archeology of classical civilization. Ostraka were like post-it notes, used from ancient Greece to ancient Egypt, scratched with everything from sales receipts to poetry. Ostraka therefore represent to us the books of the everyman and the democratization of formal knowledge through writing, the greatest invention in history. We choose ostraka as our symbol to remind us that elite education can never represent the full picture of a society or its systems of knowledge transmission.
Ostraka were also used in classical Athens as ballots, and so represent not only the greatest invention of writing, but perhaps the second greatest as well: democracy. The word ostraka comes to English as the root of ostracize, the Athenian tradition of voting annually on a citizen to be banished. While presumably some of the ostracized Athenians deserved their socially imposed fate, the word in English is unambiguously negative, and the practice of finding a man for a punishment rather than fitting a punishment to a crime is repugnant. As such, our symbol reminds us that democracy, while precious, is no guarantor of morality. Goodness is not inherent in education or democracy, but must be inscribed on them in every generation.