One of the things that makes me smile in life is standing in front of novice Latin students and listening as they recite declension endings, their Ss slurring because of missing teeth, their eyes straining upward, and heads nodding as they grasp for the mental picture they have of those ten little endings. I also […]
Category Archives: Subjects
I was talking with a couple of fellow teachers at an end of school party recently. One of them, a student at a local seminary, told me about a Greek professor at another prominent protestant seminary, the author of a widely used Greek textbook, who had gotten in a car accident and lost part of […]
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 […]
That the greatest publishing event in history should turn out to have been a children’s book about an English orphan boy training to be a wizard has, depending on who you are, been a cause for celebration—or a matter of concern. There are parents whose children wait for months for the next volume in the […]
By Eben Dale There are two basic Latin pronunciations used in the United States—Ecclesiastical (Italianate) and the Reformed Classical. Whether the magnificence, beauty, and power of Vergil’s poetry is best captured by the Reformed Classical pronunciation or the Ecclesiastical pronunciation is a matter of opinion. But pronunciation of Latin should not be a point of […]
Winners of the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee and the 2007 National Vocabulary Championship cite textbooks published by Memoria Press as keys to winning. Textbooks written by Cheryl Lowe and Martin Cothran were key tools used by the winners of both the 2007 National Spelling Bee and National Vocabulary Championship to prepare for the competitions. […]
By E. D. Hirsch Jr. The Disney Corporation’s Celebration School sounded like yet another fairytale from the creators of The Little Mermaid and The Lion King. It was supposed to be the ideal school, set in Disney’s newly created Florida community, Celebration. According to The New York Times, the school was to follow the “most advanced” progressive educational methods. […]
G.K. Chesterton once said that superstitions are most prevalent in rationalistic ages like our own. One of these superstitions is evident in the answer you often hear to the question, “What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction?” When asked to distinguish between the two, some people say that, while nonfiction is true, fiction is […]
We all know that memorization is a keystone of classical education. Yet somehow this is an area where we sometimes lose our discipline. Maybe it’s because we feel silly reciting out loud or we get more gratification from completing a tangible worksheet. Maybe we relegate memory work to the last item on the agenda because […]