My daughter and I recently went out on a date. After missing the movie we wanted to see, we ended up watching The Book of Eli, a movie I had not heard anything about. The movie opens in the future, after some sort of apocalypse. There is little vegetation, water is scarce, the roads are littered […]
Before I began teaching Latin and writing my programs, I surveyed a number of high school Latin teachers in public and private schools to determine the common practice regarding pronunciation and macrons. The macron is the straight, horizontal line above some vowels indicating that they are long. None of the teachers I spoke to required […]
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 […]
“Good readers will become good writers!” A mantra frequently heard in the lecture halls of academia, echoing along the corridors of junior high schools, and boldly preached from the homeschool conference lectern (most often out of the mouths of the more wizened and experienced parents and educators), this statement strives to be a truism. But […]
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 […]
By Andrew Kern The classical purpose for teaching literature is the same as the classical purpose for teaching anything: to cultivate wisdom and virtue so that the student is better able to know and enjoy God. Classical literature exposes the student to models of virtue. It also places demands on his intellect, thus developing his […]
There are many twists and turns to the pronunciation history of a very old language like Latin. The pronunciation of the ancient Romans, called the classical pronunciation, was modified by Christians in the Middle Ages, when Latin became the language of the church and of the educated class. You may see this pronunciation referred to […]
There were strange signs and ominous portents. Forget about the world burning up in a fit of global warming, or being destroyed by spreading popular revolutions or earthquakes, or being engulfed by tsunamis. No. We are faced with a far more anomalous and alarming phenomenon: atheists saying good things about the Bible. I recently saw a debate […]
Several years ago, a killer whale at the Orlando Marine Park drowned his trainer. Tilikum, the whale, made national headlines by dragging Dawn Brancheau, his young female caretaker, by her ponytail underwater to her death. And it wasn’t the first time. It was, in fact, Tilikum’s third such indiscretion, giving him a rather unattractive personality […]
Does a natural explanation always disprove a supernatural one? It is said that for many years the Abbey National Building Society employed a full-time secretary at 221B Baker Street in London to answer mail that was addressed to Sherlock Holmes, the legendary but fictional detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle. So real did Holmes seem […]