Because our most fundamental realities are immaterial—like love and death—few artistic forms remain as capable as fairy tales and poetry for housing such depths. Fairy tales carry us from the prosaic landscape of our workaday rhythm to mountain streams of simple wonder and truth. No filter necessary to drink of this pure water, just the […]
St. John’s Academy, which is located on a little country road in beautiful St. Augustine, Florida, celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year. The school is now a fully accredited member of the Classical Latin School Association. The independent, inter-denominational school has, like many small Christian schools, struggled during economic hard times. But in recent years, the school has thrived through […]
Mt. Parnassus was considered by the ancients to be the dwelling place of the Greek god Apollo and the nine muses. They were the inspiration for almost all knowledge and expression: science, philosophy, art, music, etc. The ancients constantly looked towards Parnassus as a symbol of “poetic inspiration and perfection.” These last words are author […]
Q. Our school uses Memoria Press K-8 classical curriculum. Currently we have a child with Down Syndrome in first grade. We are looking for any help you could offer with new modifications to the existing curriculum. A. Children with Down Syndrome can vary widely in ability, but these initial thoughts might spark more ideas of […]
One Saturday many years ago, when even my oldest children were young, we had a visit from two friends, Jim and Renee. They were not quite my parents’ age, but they were old enough that they had just become grandparents. We invited them in, and, as happened when anyone entered our home at that time, […]
About a year ago, Universal Pictures released the movie Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman. It is about a man and a woman (Cruise and Andrea Riseborough) stationed on a post-apocalyptic earth. They are charged with maintaining the drones which protect a number of orbiting installations, mining water for the human encampment now situated […]
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 […]