Category Archives: The Classical Teacher

Aesop, Truth, & Children

AESOP, TRUTH, & CHILDREN

When we raise or teach young children, we must do so with the understanding that our Christian children are simultaneously citizens of a temporal realm and citizens of a heavenly realm. In both realms they are in need of Truth. In the temporal realm, Aesop’s fables have been prized as an ideal pedagogical vehicle. They […]

What is Classical Education for?

The most important part of the curriculum for classical education is what we call the humanities. They are an expansion of what the medieval system called the trivium—the three subjects of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic—which constitutes the language of the humanities as mathematics is the language of the sciences. Grammar means the structure of language, […]

Jerusalem’s Claim On Us

What has the Greek quest for excellence and order and beauty to do with the Hebrew quest for the living God? This is the question the Church Fathers asked themselves, a query that we still must raise from time to time. And in our day in particular, it is the question that Christian educators in […]

The Essential Ingredient of a Life in the Arts

The Essential Ingredient of a Life in the Arts

I read The Classical Teacher for the same reasons you do: to gather information and to garner inspiration. When it was suggested that I devote this article to reasons for studying the fine arts, I happily agreed. In truth, the short version of the topic would fit into three sentences. 1) The arts are critical […]

Three Ways to Think About Athens and Jerusalem

The expression “Athens and Jerusalem” is a familiar one in Western cultural history. It denotes two very different cultures: one a culture of reason and the other a culture of faith. So different were they that they became the subject of a raging debate in the early Christian centuries. As a matter of historical fact, […]

The Common Patrimony of All Mankind

“I am giving teachers a choice,” wrote the young Emperor Julian the Apostate in the summer of A.D. 362, not yet a full year into his reign. If they think the ancient writers were wise . . . then let them be the first to rival those authors’ piety toward the ancient gods. Or, if […]

The Contemplative Reader

The contemplative reader

How we approach a book can parallel the way we approach life itself. We can spend our time merely in pursuit of pleasure or we can strive toward a higher goal—the pursuit of what John Henry Newman calls the “philosophical habit of mind.” We would never dismiss the pleasure that reading can bring, but we […]

What Should We Lose by Our Ignorance?

Imagine for a moment that we had never heard the names of Greece and Rome. What should we lose by our ignorance? Those of us who read poetry would find much that was unintelligible in English authors, in all English poets, I think, without exception, from Chaucer to Rupert Brooke. We should not know in […]

Letter From The Editor: What Hath Athens to Do With Jerusalem? Plenty

Jerusalem

The expression “classical education” has been worked over pretty well in the last ten or twenty years. It’s hard to blame people for thinking it’s just a buzzword. Compounding the problem is the blizzard of seemingly different definitions of the term. When you want to define something, the best way to do this is often […]

The Language of Mathematics

The Language of Mathematics on a chalkboard

We are not a STEM school because we don’t treat science, technology, engineering, and mathematics equally—or even close to equally. It would be more accurate to say we are a math and science school, in that order. Our goal is not to graduate trained engineers, programmers , or technologists. Our job, as a K-12 school, […]