McAllen, Texas is at the lower tip of the Lone Star State. Just across its border is one of the most violent places in the world: Reynoso, Mexico, where infighting between Latin American drug cartels has resulted in firefights in the city streets. But just a couple of minutes outside McAllen, and just several miles from the frightening […]
Kathryn Jean Lopez: When you write about classical education, you mean more than learning enough Latin to help with the SATs. What is a classical education? Tracy Lee Simmons: This was the Humanist’s education, in the sense in which Erasmus and Thomas More were Humanists. A classical education used to mean simply a curriculum based upon […]
When we were deciding which version of the Bible to use at Highlands Latin School, there were a number of things we took into consideration that led to our choosing the King James Bible. There are undoubtedly different criteria one could apply to decide what Bible to use, depending on the context. A person might […]
We are often asked, at our school and at Memoria Press, why we use the King James Bible in our program. There are many reasons, but one occurred to me a couple of years ago as I was teaching a young adult Sunday school class on the New Testament book of Mark, which begins with […]
SOME CRITICS HAVE SAID that the value of Roman literature is that it has been the vehicle which conveyed Greek ideas to the world. The Romans took their art and, as far as their civilization rests on these, their civilization from Greece. Why, then, do we study Latin? Some of the reasons are given by Cicero […]
First Start Reading is Memoria Press’ phonics program that covers the kindergarten phonics taught at Highlands Latin School. After completing First Start Reading, our first and second graders continue with Classical Phonics and Traditional Spelling. So why did we write a phonics program? Let’s face it, there are so many phonics programs out there that finding one is […]
My daughter and I recently went out on a date. After missing the movie we wanted to see, we ended up watching The Book of Eli, a movie I had not heard anything about. The movie opens in the future, after some sort of apocalypse. There is little vegetation, water is scarce, the roads are littered with abandoned cars, […]
A few years ago, a vandal seized some forty or fifty thousand books from my college’s library. He didn’t want to read them, or even to sell them. He wanted simply to get rid of them, on the grounds that nobody would read them anyway. Some of the volumes he had branded for destruction were […]
G. K. Chesterton once said that the “whole modern world is at war with reason.” “The tower,” he added, “already reels.” In what sense can this be true? When we think of ourselves in all of our modern glory—unadulterated by the myths and superstitions of the past, don’t we think of ourselves as more informed, more enlightened, more rational than we […]
This meant that, in his education, a great man must not only study the rules and principles of eloquent expression, but he must know and do the good; he must not only have mastered certain techniques, but he must be familiar with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The discipline that taught a man […]