As you teach the struggling student and help him with his weaker areas, look for his stronger interests and abilities. Does he love to draw? Does he long to write stories? Does he delve deeply into areas of scientific or historical research? Does he enjoy developing patterns or solving math problems? Does he have a […]
Tag Archives: classical education
Two Views of Education 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 […]
By Andrew Campbell It is all well and good to talk about traditional classical education, but how do we put it into practice today? Don’t we have far more history to learn other than classical history, not to mention science, modern languages, and common school subjects like health and driver’s ed.? After all, we’re not […]
Recently, Rush Limbaugh tied his whole brain, not just half of it, behind his back. In the process he ended up sounding a whole lot like the cultural barbarians he claims to be fighting. Limbaugh, channeling his inner Gradgrind (see Hard Times by Charles Dickens), launched a tirade today against classical education, saying that a […]
Mrs. Hogue is standing at the front of the room reading a story from her copy of The Golden Children’s Bible. Every student has a copy open and is reading along with the teacher. She stops reading and looks around the class: “Why did Pharaoh fear the children of the Hebrews?” Every hand in the room […]
By Bryan Smith We all participate in a broad human conversation. Sometimes the conversation is casual and banal, at other times it is more formal. In either case, it can be trite or profound, flattering or confrontational, degrading or uplifting. Books are one of the ways we have packaged our reflections upon our common experiences; […]
Have you ever read Good-bye Mr. Chips or Anne of Green Gables? If so, you may have noticed that the students seemed to spend a lot of time studying Latin grammar and that this study was completed before high school. In fact, this is where the name “grammar school” came from: from the days when the most important […]
For most classical educators, teaching history chronologically means covering the eras of history in three cycles, each cycle in increasing depth, and each cycle corresponding to one stage of the trivium. Here is a typical sequence of historical eras covered chronologically within each four year cycle: Old Testament and Egypt Greece and Rome Middle Ages, […]
What if your mind is hungry, but not particularly literate? “Acquaint yourself with your own ignorance,” Isaac Watts advised his readers in his self-education treatise Improvement of the Mind (published in 1741). “Impress your mind with a deep and painful sense of the low and imperfect degrees of your present knowledge.” Today, as in Watts’ time, intelligent […]