Category: Spring 2014

Four guidelines for viewers who plan to see the film adaptation of this Tolkien classic.  1. Recognize variations & what they do. To properly evaluate anything, basic knowledge precedes critical thinking. Viewers who have read Tolkien’s stories have the basic knowledge necessary to evaluate the films. By knowing the original story, one can identify what …

I believe in another world … I hear it sing in Plato and Dover Beach. I see it in Cezanne and mist-shrouded mountains. I touch it with sweaty fingers on violin strings still ringing with the last chord of Stravinsky’s Firebird. I cry. Seven years of homeschool, then five at a classical Christian school, have …

One of the most noticeable tendencies in modern education is an aversion to the word “knowledge.” Why is this? Why is the one word you would expect to be at the center of the education enterprise the one word that so many modern educators find distasteful? Anyone who has taken the time to read the documents that …

Modern educators love to talk about “critical thinking skills,” but not one in a hundred even knows what he means by the term. Every time our country goes through an education reform spasm—which it has undergone about every twenty-five years since the 1920s—the education establishment trots out a set of slogans that always sounds good …

REASON #8: Philosophy Philosophy is a deep subject that can be quite intimidating. Modern philosophy is so esoteric that few can understand or relate to it, but classical philosophy is different. As with so many things, if you go back to the beginning and learn first principles, you can develop a deep and satisfying understanding …

A couple of years ago, I was sitting down on a Sunday morning reading my local paper. I was reading a story about the “new” things happening in education. One of the “new” things happening, said the story, was that they were going to start getting rid of “rote memorization” and putting more emphasis on …

In the first part of this article,  we discussed the origins of the modern Natural/Direct Method of teaching Latin in the unsuccessful attempt to teach modern languages by downplaying the traditional student memorization of the complicated grammatical forms and the emphasis on written translation exercises in favor of conversational methods of instruction and student response. …

If you were to walk into a public school primary classroom one day, and into the same grade level classroom in, say, a classical Christian school, you would see two entirely different things. And you wouldn’t have to wait to notice some of the differences. There would be certain things evident immediately. In the classical …