Have you ever read Good-bye Mr. Chips or Anne of Green Gables? If so, you may have noticed that the students seemed to spend a lot of time studying Latin grammar and that this study was completed before high school. In fact, this is where the name “grammar school” came from: from the days when the most important […]
Author Archives: Cheryl Lowe
For most classical educators, teaching history chronologically means covering the eras of history in three cycles, each cycle in increasing depth, and each cycle corresponding to one stage of the trivium. Here is a typical sequence of historical eras covered chronologically within each four year cycle: Old Testament and Egypt Greece and Rome Middle Ages, […]
The Four Principles of Latin Study In the last issue of the Classical Teacher, I gave some principles of Latin instruction as set forth in Charles Bennett’s 1911 book, The Teaching of Latin and Greek. This book, though long out of print, contains what I believe to be very sound insights into the teaching of classical […]
Benjamin Disraeli was one of the great 19th century prime ministers of Britain. His wife once revealed the confusion we all feel about the subject of history when she famously stated that she “could never remember who came first, the Greeks or the Romans.” Since American schools have largely ignored ancient and world history in […]
Critics of traditional American education have correctly observed that it focuses on the same 200 years of American history every year in K-8, and covers all the rest of the 6000 years of human history in one year of high school. Clearly this is a plan that has produced generation after generation of historically illiterate […]
The heart of a classical education is the cumulative study of Latin and the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. In the Western tradition, education has always been synonymous with classical education. It began with the Greeks and Romans, was preserved and expanded by Christians during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and continued unabated until […]
Have you ever wished you had a good answer for those people who ask why you would spend your valuable education time studying Latin when you could be spending it on something more “practical”? There are three reasons Latin has long been considered the one master subject before which all others must bow. First, Latin […]