Category: Winter 2014

When I was in junior high school, I had a horse named Lady Anne that could count to three. I would say, “Count to three!” and she would scrape the ground three times with her right hoof. She could do it for one and two as well. She also nodded her head when she was …

  Classical educators know that the quadrivium includes music as one of four core subjects along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. This list can strike our modern minds as puzzling. If we are to approach music as a classical subject, we need to rethink our terminology and what it really means to study music. Today, …

Most of us, most of the time, do not know what we are doing. It’s not that we can’t tell where we were on a certain date, or what we had for dinner last night, or who we had a meeting with this morning. It’s not even that we are incapable of performing our tasks. …

Imagine an arrow shot into the air, and high in flight, it bursts into flame. How cool would that be?! If you saw this spectacle, you would probably deem it a wonder, or perhaps a symbol or sign. This is how Aeneas and the Trojan remnant (traveling with him after the fall of Troy) responded …

When you ask a fellow teacher or homeschool parent what classical education is, you’re likely to get a different answer every time. To one person it is the study of history chronologically, to another it is simply a challenging academic curriculum. To many, particularly in recent decades, classical education is seen as the application of …

A common question asked of classical Christian educators is why we should read the pagans. If you had to buy one book to help you answer this question, this is it. Markos, one of the most exciting Christian writers today, explains how Homer, Hesiod, the Greek dramatists, and Virgil foreshadowed the Christian revelation. Markos joins …

Most of us know that C. S. Lewis was a great Christian apologist and author of The Chronicles of Narnia. What most of us don’t know is that, as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at both Oxford and Cambridge, Lewis was first and foremost a great literature scholar. Proficient in Latin, Greek, and Old …

“Look, Mom, I’ve finished memorizing the first declension!” I was in third grade and ecstatic. My two older sisters had been studying Latin with Cheryl Lowe for a year or two already, and I was anxious to prove I could do it too. “Then let’s hear you recite it,” was my sister’s reply. “A, ae, …

E. D. Hirsch, a first-rate scholar and the author of Cultural Literacy, masterfully exposes the philosophy behind progressive education to its source in 19th-century Romanticism, a European literary movement that produced some beautiful poetry, but was disastrous as an education philosophy. Why, he asks, does a shallow and fallacious Romanticism continue to dominate American education, …

One of the best books I have ever read on classical education is the just-released Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child from Memoria Press. Cheryl Swope’s book not only gives an unusually lucid explanation of what classical education is and how to teach it, whether in a school or at home—it reminds us …