Christian Classical Education

by Lee Cordon on January 12, 2016 in Education, Homeschooling, School-Aged With the flip top wooden desks and lack of computers or iPads, you could easily mistake my daughter’s classical school for something out of the 1950s. But it’s not a longing for the good old days that motivated my husband and me to make the counter-cultural decision to send our daughters to a classical school. After five years of having children in a classical school, these are the reasons I am so happy my husband and I made the decision we did: They learn how great minds learned for centuries. Classical…

Classical Christian education cooperates best as a model with the growing child's mind.  Ancient, yet contemporarily effective, classical Christian education applies the trivium to organize and graduate a students learning from the simple to the complex.  The trivium is known as the grammar, logic and rhetoric stages. In the grammar stage, a classical, Christian school teaches the structure, vocabulary, rules and conventions of each branch of learning.  Next the student is ready to connect this knowledge and to reason clearly about it.  This is learned through the study and application of logic across each arena of learning.  Finally, at the rhetoric level, the…

Why is it that in general, students today read at a lower level, reason less clearly, and are more receptive than ever to the misinformation constantly bombarding them? Why is it that Christian students are ill prepared to defend what they believe and often drift from their biblical moorings? Educationally, how has this country lost its way? Has it always been this way or did teachers of past generations educate children differently? What is missing? These were some of the concerns addressed by Dorothy Sayers, student at Oxford who delivered a 1947 landmark essay entitled, The Lost Tools of Learning. Since…

Brain research is fascinating.  And the fact that more research has been done on the physical brain in the last 30 years than in all the years before is a wonder. Early educator books on brain research and its relation to the growing, maturing brain were insightful reads.  Dr. Jane Healey's books, Endangered Minds and Your Child's Growing Mind cautioned against too much television and video games. It begged the question, what can parents and educators do to stimulate and foster lively, developing brains in children and students? In those books, we grew to appreciate Albert Einstein donating his physical brain…