In my last article, I ended with the question of the teacher’s role in learning. Does the teacher need to be an entertainer? How does the teacher motivate and make learning engaging and satisfying for students? Teachers are often blamed for the lack of learning, along with the lack of interest and motivation in their […]
REASON #4: Education A classical education focuses on the study of the classical languages, Latin and Greek, and on the study of the classical civilization of Greece and Rome. But why is the word classical reserved only for the languages of the Greeks and Romans and only for their civilization? What really is so special […]
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 […]
In Pearl S. Buck’s short story, “A Field of Rice,” Wang Sun, a Chinese villager in the early 1950s, is in a situation in which he is told to do something he knows won’t work. Mao Tse Tung has taken over China, and he has sent functionaries out to every village to tell the farmers (who […]
If colonial America was suffused with classicism, what of Puritan New England? Was the pervasive influence of the classics and classical languages seen as a hindrance—or as a help—to those who labored in the Lord’s vineyard to establish a Christian government and culture in early America? It is an easy question to answer. Not only […]
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 […]
As homeschoolers, we rely too much on experts; this is true not just for homeschoolers, but for the American culture at large. We rely on experts to teach us what to do, how to do it, and sometimes even how to think. In many cases, there is a good reason to rely on expert advice. […]
by Peter Kreeft The content of the curriculum of a classical Christian school, on primary, secondary, or college levels, is similar to the core of the “arts and sciences” core of a university, which was developed from the medieval curriculum of the “seven liberal arts” of the “trivium” and the “quadrivium,” which was invented by […]
G.K. Chesterton once said that superstitions are most prevalent in rationalistic ages like our own. One of these superstitions is evident in the answer you often hear to the question, “What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction?” When asked to distinguish between the two, some people say that, while nonfiction is true, fiction is […]