Part I: Dorothy Sayers speaks about her experience learning Latin I was born at Oxford, in the fourth year before Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. My father was at that time Headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School, where it was part of his duty to instruct small demons with angel-voices in the elements of the […]
Category Archives: Subjects
By Evan Wilson When it comes to history, rhetoric comes before grammar… What has the teaching of history become in private Christian establishments? Here is a section out of a commonly used Christian school textbook, slightly rewritten to protect the innocent (namely myself), but preserving the idea of the original: During the Second Punic War […]
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 […]
If I see my logic program listed in the math section of catalogs one more time, I’m going to pull out my hair! Not that they’re trying to make me mad or anything. In fact, they’re just trying to sell my book, and they probably think that ought to make me happy, and they’re right. […]
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, […]
We have a tendency to put academic subjects into separate and unrelated categories which have little to do with each other. We have our curriculum chart where we put things such asReading, English, Math, Science, each one dealing with a different skill and a different body of knowledge. Logic seldom finds a place in our lists, although it may be […]
As homeschoolers, we rely too much on experts; this is true not just for homeschoolers, but for the American culture at large. We rely on experts to teach us what to do, how to do it, and sometimes even how to think. In many cases, there is a good reason to rely on expert advice. […]
by Peter Kreeft The content of the curriculum of a classical Christian school, on primary, secondary, or college levels, is similar to the core of the “arts and sciences” core of a university, which was developed from the medieval curriculum of the “seven liberal arts” of the “trivium” and the “quadrivium,” which was invented by […]
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 […]