Very often we call something modern because we do not know what is ancient. Many so-called “modern” ideas are really old errors with new labels. We owe a greater debt to the past than is generally recognized. The waters of ancient cultures are constantly washing our shores. One of the greatest epic poets who […]
From earliest times, Christians have argued about the role of pagan learning in Christian education. The debate has never gone away, but generally speaking, the church has preferred rather to use the learning of the pagans than to repudiate it. An essential part of the classical Christian education that held sway in schools from the […]
I once got an e-mail from a friend who took me to task for something in my Traditional Logic text. I had said that angels are not rational. He thought this was a sort of insult to angels. Angels are indeed rational, he said, and to argue otherwise was to argue a non-Christian position. Is this true? […]
The great books speak to us of honor and love and sacrifice; but they do not always speak in familiar phrases. They do not tell us what we already know. Transcending current opinion and fad, through symbol and metaphor they reveal a clear and uncluttered access to the realities that determine our lives. Sometime back, […]
Memoria Press has come a long way over the past 15 years. I still remember when all we were was Cheryl (mom), Brian (son), and me, and all we had to offer was a little blue book called Latina Christiana. As you can see from this, our newest catalog, we have a few more things […]
There are a lot of good reasons for thinking that Latin should be restored to its former place of honor as the Basic Subject in the elementary years. In previous issues of the Classical Teacher, I talked about some of these. But knowing that you should teach it and knowing how to teach it are […]
It is now well-recognized that boys are not reading. What is the problem? Most commentators want to say that boys have an aversion to books. But the problem is quite the opposite: books—modern books, that is—have an aversion to boys. A recent edition of The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured a Robert Lipsyte article that attempts to […]
McAllen, Texas is at the lower tip of the Lone Star State. Just across its border is one of the most violent places in the world: Reynoso, Mexico, where infighting between Latin American drug cartels has resulted in firefights in the city streets. But just a couple of minutes outside McAllen, and just several miles from the frightening […]
Kathryn Jean Lopez: When you write about classical education, you mean more than learning enough Latin to help with the SATs. What is a classical education? Tracy Lee Simmons: This was the Humanist’s education, in the sense in which Erasmus and Thomas More were Humanists. A classical education used to mean simply a curriculum based upon […]
When we were deciding which version of the Bible to use at Highlands Latin School, there were a number of things we took into consideration that led to our choosing the King James Bible. There are undoubtedly different criteria one could apply to decide what Bible to use, depending on the context. A person might […]