Category Archives: Classical Education

The Fallacy of Teaching Fallacies First

Fallacy of Teaching Fallacies First

One of the most common mistakes I see in logic instruction in many schools is to begin teaching it by having students study informal fallacies. It’s not that it does them any damage; it just doesn’t do them as much good as many educators seem to think. The Two Kinds of Logic There are two […]

Are we teaching too many books too soon?

Too Many Books

Too Many Books Too Soon I was asked by someone in a post on Memoria Press’ forum to comment on an article by Douglas Wilson, author of Rediscovering the Lost Tools of Learning, the book that jump-started the Neoclassical schools movement in the United States in the late 1980s. The article is about an academic […]

A Language-Centered Education

My brother and sister and I all received a classical education, way back in the 1970s, because my mother homeschooled us the same way she’d been taught at home. Our education was language-centered, not image-centered; we read and listened and wrote, but we rarely watched. She spent the early years of school giving us facts, […]

2016 Sodalitas Gathering in Review

Reflections on the Sodalitas Gathering by Jessica Phillips Last week in Louisville, KY, over 60 Memoria Press homeschoolers from across the country gathered for the second annual Sodalitas Gathering at Highlands Latin School. Sodalitas is a one-of-a-kind experience of learning, encouragement, connection, and inspiration, all within the context of cultivating a classical homeschool using Memoria […]

Traditional vs. Progressive Education

Everyone agrees that education is a good thing. Unfortunately, the agreement pretty much ends there. Although almost everyone agrees that education is good, there is wide disagreement on what education is. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a sometimes heated debate, not only about what schools should do, but what they should be. Generally speaking, there are […]

The Freedom to Fail

In classical rhetoric, the divisio is the section of a persuasive speech that presents the division, the point at which the topic is divided into two opposing perspectives. Granted, many differences exist between traditional and modern education, yet where do the most fundamental of these divisions lie? What is the divisio when it comes to the topic (or “issue”) of education? I […]

The Well-Formed Person

The education we now call “classical” is our heritage as human beings. With roots reaching back to the greatest teachers and philosophers of all time, a classical education forms the student’s mind, character, and tastes by inclining him toward truth, goodness, and beauty. We trace classical education to the ancient Greeks, who prized wisdom and […]

The Path Less Traveled

Families come to trust Memoria Press for a variety of reasons. We came through desperation. Our oldest child did not speak until he was five, and he and his younger sister have significant receptive and expressive language difficulties. Finding a good, solid education for them was literally bringing us to our knees. We knew we wanted to homeschool. But having […]

How to Teach Phonics (And How Not To)

In the Summer 2014 Classical Teacher, I wrote an extensive article exploring the question, “What is the Classical Approach to Phonics?” The contention of that article was that there are two basic approaches to phonics in the classical education world: the traditional method and the Spalding method. The Spalding method is based on the book The Writing Road to Reading (WRTR), […]

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