It is now the case, as it has always been the case, that it is by exposing our children to good character and inviting its imitation that we will help them develop good character for themselves. This means our schools must have what the ancient Greeks would have called an “ethos”—that is, our schools themselves […]
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” So begins Dickens’ David Copperfield. It’s a wonderful passage and immediately confirms Dickens’ reputation for having captured the “feel” of childhood as few others have. The dream of […]
My son loves a good find. Antique malls and secondhand stores delight his mind. Yesterday he showed me his latest purchase, a set of old radio comedies on cassette to enjoy from his retro-tech cassette player. My daughter is the same way. She once rescued a bedraggled doll with legs dangling. Michelle gave the doll […]
The dinner hour approached as our riverboat sailed up the Rhine. Passengers, dressed as requested in red or white, entered the ship’s sleek dining room that was asparkle with crystal, china, and silver candelabras decked in clusters of tomatoes, purple grapes, and bunches of scallions. Alongside them perched baking potatoes, parsnips, and turnips, held up […]
Not long after George Lucas’ Star Wars movies came out, it became widely known that he had used the classic myths as a grounding for the stories in his films. Lucas later acknowledged that he had been influenced by the writings of Joseph Campbell, an American professor whose most famous work, The Hero With a […]
In Aesop’s well-known fable, “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” the lazy Grasshopper fails to prepare for the future, choosing instead to sing away autumn days in the sun. The industrious Ant, by contrast, works hard collecting grain and preparing for the upcoming winter. The story tells us that when winter finally comes, the hungry Grasshopper […]
Can a book with a heroine—as opposed to a hero—be a great book? It probably sounds like a silly question—or a disingenuous one: one you would never be allowed to answer with a “no,” even if you wanted to. But I’m not asking whether a book with a heroine can be well-written, multi-faceted and rich, […]
Memorization is the cornerstone of a traditional education. At Memoria Press, we use repetition, memorization, and formal recitations to create a comprehensive, connected, and consistent experience for students from junior kindergarten through twelfth grade. Naturally, if memorization is the goal, repetition and recitation are the complements—repetition as the preparation and recitation as the proof and […]
“A language must die to be immortal.” When it comes to expressing the eternal and immutable truths of the Christian faith, the only good language is a dead language. Chesterton once made a disarming retort to the customary detraction of Latin as a dead language. He simply remarked that to say this is not a […]
In 1965, on the small island of Tonga in the South Pacific, six schoolboys, ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen, “borrowed” a local fisherman’s boat and took it on a joyride that lasted over fourteen months. They were bored, and so they decided to sail for Fiji, another South Pacific island five hundred miles […]