Originally published in Classis 2011 Volume XVIII, No. 1 By Ben House Only twelve percent of adult Americans read poetry, according to a recent statistic.1 Several of my students, my eleven-year-old son, and I fit into an even smaller minority: the number of Americans...
ACCS
How ‘Bout Them Apples
Originally published in Classis Volume XVI, no. 3 By Eric Indgjerd In an address titled, “The Greatest Single Defect of My Own Latin Education,” Dorothy Sayers confessed the lamentable fact that, although she had started upon Latin at the ripe young age of seven—her...
Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education
Originally published in Classis Volume XXXII, no. 1 By David Seibel In Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, Stratford Caldecott (1953-2014) shines a fresh light on the classical Trivium to remove the fog hanging over schools today. This is not...
Passing the Torch: An Apology for Classical Christian Education
Originally published in Classis Volume XXXII, No. 2 By David Seibel Healthy bodies have strong immune systems that recognize and respond to attacks from foreign invaders like parasites and bacteria. The human immune system is involuntary, like breathing when asleep,...
Culture and Curriculum
Originally published in Classis Volume XV, no. 3 By Bryan Lynch In Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase, 'the medium is the message'. That is, the way an idea is presented or delivered may often communicate more powerfully than the content of the message itself. Following...
Rhetoric: What’s It Good For? Absolutely Everything!
Originally published in Classis Volume XV, no. 1 By Corrina McKenna When one works at a tree farm in Georgia, work has a way of following one home at night. On days we took cuttings to propagate new trees, I would close my eyes after hours of clipping and snipping and...
Getting Beyond the Lord of the Rings
Published in Classical Teacher, Spring 2007 Reprinted in Classis, Volume XIV, no. 5 by Martin Cothran We all know them. They fight imaginary sword battles. They draw pictures of orcs and dwarves. Sometimes they even try to learn the elvish language. They seem, in...
Today’s Classical Education is Worth Pursuing Even if it’s not Precisely Recreating the Past
This article first appeared at The Federalist and is reprinted by permission. Republished in Classis Volume XXVI, no. 2 Classical education is not at the mercy of our culture. Instead, it has the potential to shape a new culture that is anchored in reality. In 1981,...
The Bible, Northrop Frye, and Classical Education, Part II
Originally published in Classis, Volume XXVI, No. 1 In my previous essay, I considered a sevenfold narrative paradigm employed by Canadian literary critic and ordained minister Northrop Frye in The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (HBJ, 1982) to help readers...
Plagues and Classical Literature
Originally published in Classis, Volume XXVII, No. 3 By William Isley During this coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown, it occurred to me to read a few of the descriptions of plagues in some classic texts of Western civilization. In times like these, which are...