Articles From The Classical Teacher

Cheryl Lowe is a Louisville, Kentucky native whose books and essays on Latin instruction have garnered a national reputation for excellence within the classical education renaissance. Yet, her own education was grounded in math and science: a B.S. in chemistry, M.S. in Biology, and minors in mathematics and history. It is an unlikely background for a classical education innovator.

Highlands Latin School

The arrival of her sons shifted Cheryl's interests to elementary education. She began to absorb a vast body of literature on the history of education, a practice that continues to this day.

Aware of the troubled state of reading instruction, she taught both boys to read before they started school, but a strong preschool foundation was not enough to weather the faulty classroom practices and badly-written materials which the boys encountered in their highly-touted public and private elementary schools. She homeschooled them for two middle school years, making academic "course corrections" which enabled both to become National Merit Scholars at St. Xavier, a highly-regarded private boys school in Louisville.

Cheryl's research into the history of education alerted her to the critical role which Latin grammar can play in forming the intellect, so she incorporated Latin into her sons' homeschooling. She taught herself at the same time, always managing to stay a few paces ahead, and that self-education continued after her sons had returned to the classroom.

Cheryl began offering classes of her own to the growing local community of homeschoolers. Teaching Latin one day a week in a leased room at a Highlands church to grades 3 and up, the results were striking, especially in children who started early.

In the process of teaching classes in classical subjects, she began to compile her teaching materials into a course that could enable families and schools to begin Latin study at an earlier age. That course became Latina Christiana. When she first put the program under cover (many homeschool mothers still remember the primitive blue covers that used to house the course contents), it was made available to a few homeschool mothers. It didn’t take long, however, before it was selling over a thousand copies a year—solely through word of mouth.

Cheryl's publishing company, Memoria Press, now ships tens of thousands of copies of the popular program worldwide. Latina Christiana, which was originally designed to enable homeschool mothers with little or no experience in Latin to teach it to their children, has now become popular with elementary Latin teachers, and is a staple in many private schools across the country.

In 1998, Cheryl teamed up with Martin Cothran to add logic and classical rhetoric to Memoria Press’ classical program, filling out the trivium subjects. In recent years, Memoria Press has added more products and authors, becoming one of the premier sources of classical materials in the United States. All of the programs emphasize accessibility. “Classical education is not necessarily easy,” says Mrs. Lowe. “And a lot of work needs to be done by the teacher in order for students to be able to understand the material. We try to do that with our programs: we try to make classical education doable for teachers and parents.”

Both of Cheryl’s sons now help in the production and distribution of Memoria Press material. Brian, Cheryl’s younger son, who has degrees in physics (Transylvania University), electrical engineering (Virginia Tech), and law (top of his class at Vanderbilt), runs the business aspects of the publishing company, doing everything from developing the website to installing the phone system.

Memoria Press authors develop and teach their courses in Highlands Latin School classrooms. Highlands was founded in 2000, when families who had attended Cheryl’s one-room Latin school urged her to expand the curriculum. With the help of Leigh Lowe (married to Cheryl’s son Brian), who undertook the task of learning Latin and teaching the elementary students, Cheryl began to concentrate on teaching advanced Latin and developing additional courses. With the addition of two new directors, Marcia Cassady and Martin Cothran, and a dozen outstanding teachers, Cheryl's vision for a classical Christian school that serves the needs of Highlands Latin's founding families and the wider community has become a reality.

Leigh Lowe at HLS

Cheryl has often tapped the parent community for the faculty, which is the school's extraordinary strength, but the staff now includes several professional classical teachers with long resumes in their fields. Several faculty members are also parents who have witnessed the tremendous benefits of classical education in their children. The entire faculty has profound respect for Cheryl's unerring instincts for educating the mind and character.

“I wanted to create a model school to develop a classical course of studies, as well as a model school organization,” says Mrs. Lowe, whose ideas of school organization were modelled in the medieval universities, which were run by teachers.

What’s in store for the future? Highlands is looking at both growing the school at its present location (the historic Frankfort Road district of Louisville) and opening another campus across town. Whatever happens, it will be an outworking of Cheryl Lowe’s fertile educational vision.