One of my favorite children’s books happens to be Uri Shulevitz’s How I Learned Geography. Touchingly illustrated by the author, the story is based on Shulevitz’s actual childhood. Born in Warsaw in 1935, he fled with his family after the Nazis incinerated the city center in 1944 and razed Warsaw to the ground. The family […]
Category Archives: The Classical Teacher
If we seek to conserve the Western tradition, then what are the principles that constitute it? There is a recognizable tradition of Western civilization in which we all participate, one governed by the concept of beauty. Let us consider six key insights about the nature of the cosmos and of the human person that constitute […]
When discussing the heliocentric (sun-centered) view of the universe, the brilliant astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote, For in the sphere, which is the image of God the Creator and the Archetype of the world … there are three regions, symbols of the three persons of the Holy Trinity—the center, a symbol of the Father; the surface, […]
they have become hard to distinguish from one another. These three harmonic cultural voices speak to us out of the past and are sometimes hard to disentangle. But we can draw some basic distinctions. Greek culture was artistic, literary, and philosophical. The Greeks invented representative art, drama, and philosophy as we know it today. The […]
In his book The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman argues that the goal of education in a university should be the cultivation of a “liberal” type of mind. In Latin, liber means a “free man” as opposed to a slave, and the education appropriate for such a man is an education in the […]
In Ernest Hemingway’s book A Moveable Feast, he gives the best advice I have ever read on dealing with writer’s block. He tells you to sit down, take up a pen, and write one true sentence. That’s it. Just one true sentence. For example, I had writer’s block as I sat down to write this […]
What is a classical education? The essential core of classical Christian education includes the study of Latin and the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. — Cheryl Lowe What is the goal of classical education? Classical education focuses on the development of the whole student—heart, mind, and soul. It strives to give students a broad […]
I was asked to speak to a gathering of classical educators recently on the issue of “pedagogy,” the science of how to teach and a word to which modern educators are very attached. One of the major points I made in my speech was this: Pedagogy is not the most important thing in education. It’s […]
To say that a book is a great Christian novel obviously and necessarily implies two things: first, that it is great and, second, that it is Christian. Many of the books here are widely considered to be great, but there seems to be little consciousness that they are also explicitly Christian. Although Dostoevsky’s The Brothers […]
C. S. Lewis said, “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty.” The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald is a book worth reading. It is worthy of the primary student as an exemplary fairy tale […]