Monthly Archives: August 2011

In Defense of Latin

Defense

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 […]

Why First Start Reading?

Reading

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 […]

Letter from the Editor: Late Summer 2011

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, […]

10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

imagination

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 […]

Becoming as Rational as We Think We Are

Rational

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 […]

What is Classical Rhetoric?

Classical Rhetoric

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 […]

Recovering the Lost Tools of Latin (Parts I & II)

Tools of Latin

  Progressive education began its destructive march through schools at the turn of the century, and the first thing it corrupted was Latin. In his book The Teaching of Latin and Greek, published in 1911, Dr. Charles Edwin Bennett describes the changes in Latin textbooks that had occurred over the previous two decades and contrasts them with the successful classical methods […]