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Articles about Latin-Centered Education

  • The Latin-Centered Curriculum Way to Climbing Parnassus  debra duran loucks - Last fall, I picked up the book Climbing Parnassus by Tracy Lee Simmons. I could not get enough of this book. I must have underlined something on every page. Last spring I came across Andrew Campbell's The Latin-Centered Curriculum. While I found Climbing Parnassus to be inspirational, I found The Latin-Centered Curriculum to be practical... doable. It is as though Campbell is saying, "This is how you climb Parnassus."
  • Medieval Tales Online  Drew Campbell - Mary Pope Osborne's Famous Medieval Tales, recommended in LCC2, is currently out of print, but Rachel Proffitt has put together a resource list of online versions of the stories from the book. The list is shared here with her permission. Thank you, Rachel! Note: As always, parents should pre-read materials to determine their suitability for their families. Finn Mac Cumhaill
  • Adapting LCC: A Further Example  Drew Campbell - Some states require both a full year of American history and a semester of Civics (Government) in high school. If yours does, or you would like your students to spend more time on American history in high school, here's one way to arrange the courses:
  • Adapting LCC: An Example  Drew Campbell - Here is an example of how you can adapt the LCC reading lists to your needs. The following is a four-year literature plan that I drew up for the directors of a classical high school who asked my advice on curriculum.
  • *Updates to LCC2*  Drew Campbell - This page lists updates and additional recommendations for Latin-centered homeschoolers. New materials appear all the time, so check back often!
  • *Corrections to LCC2*  Drew Campbell - Mea culpa! This page lists corrections to the new edition of The Latin-Centered Curriculum. If you find an error in the book, please write to me and I'll list the correction here. Thanks! * p. 210: Grade Six History schedule should read "Read through Famous Men of Modern Times..." * I inadvertently omitted a few books from the supplementary reading lists. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood Tales should have been listed as additional read-alouds for third grade Literature. James Baldwin's Fifty Famous Stories Retold can be used as a supplement to the kindergarten and first grade History and Literature readings.
  • Teacher, Teach Thyself!  Drew Campbell - Homeschoolers rightly rejoice at the increasing options for home Latin instruction. We have excellent programs for elementary-age students. Parents looking for Christian Latin materials no longer have to haunt the stacks of university libraries searching out 19th-century textbooks. Online academies are breathing new life into tried-and-true methods, with a range of offerings that puts some colleges to shame. For many busy homeschooling parents, these opportunities are real blessings, enabling us to pass on to the next generation a rich inheritance that we ourselves may not have shared in fully.
  • A Latin Testimonial  Drew Campbell - Julie recently posted this inspiring testimonial to the LatinClassicalEd list. It appears here with her kind permission. You can visit Julie's web site at livingmath.net. My middle son, age 11, started Latin for the first time last year. I held off trying to teach him because he has been a language-delayed learner,
  • Classical Education: Some Distinctives  Drew Campbell - I am frequently asked how the type of education I describe in The Latin-Centered Curriculum differs from other classical homeschooling styles. I offer the following as a brief summary of some of the characteristics of classical education as I understand it. - Drew Campbell
  • Ordering Principles  Drew Campbell - [I hardly dare add to the CiRCE Institute's excellent outline of principles that undergird and guide classical - and specifically Christian classical - education. But I do want to share some of the ideas I presented in Arizona. I apologize to any readers I met at the conference who have been patiently waiting for a whole month for my promised post on this subject.]
  • "Let nothing disturb you; let nothing frighten you"  Drew Campbell - I tend to take a live-and-let-live approach to homeschooling philosophies. I assume that families are different, kids are different, and no one method will work all the time with all kids. Not even LCC. ;) But I do expect people to do their homework. If they're going to argue against a particular philosophy, they should be knowledgeable enough about it to go beyond stereotypes and generalizations. When a homeschooler - or worse, a homeschool author or publisher - says they don't support Latin-centered education because "you have to teach more than Latin," I know they haven't done their homework. They are simply misinformed.
  • Demythologizing Myth  Drew Campbell - What are we to do about those pesky Greek myths? The violence, the immorality...why exactly are we studying these stories again? The "why" is simple enough: the myths, Greek, Roman, and Norse, form the foundation of so much later literature, art, and music, that to neglect them is to risk ignorance of some of the greatest cultural artifacts of the West. Besides, read in their proper context, the myths are fascinating in their own right, even when - perhaps particularly when - they bring us up against a very foreign worldview.
  • Ordering Knowledge to the Child's Nature  Drew Campbell - There is no doubt that the idea of "child-directed learning" would have struck the ancients as laughable: how can you entrust education to someone who, by definition, doesn't know what he needs to know? Classical education has always been directed toward the adult the child will one day become, not to his current immaturity. What's more, orthodox Christians acknowledge that our nature - that which Rousseau and his intellectual heirs would elevate to a formative principle - has been wounded by the Fall. We simply cannot accept the premise that, left to her own devices, a child will make wise education choices based on her natural desires and interests alone. That is why Catholic thought has not supported child-directed educational philosophies - quite the opposite.
  • Dropping the H-Bomb  Drew Campbell - Most of us know enough to avoid earthy, four-letter Anglo-Saxon words in polite company. But who would think that saying the word humanism could have the same effect in some Christian circles? Why such hostility to a word that many of us struggle even to define clearly?
  • Why Not Latin?  Drew Campbell - Classics - the study of classical languages, history, and culture - are the defining factor of a classical education. That is, they are what makes an education classical in the first place, as opposed to a modern liberal arts education or vocational training. However, I would never go so far as to say that an education without Latin is not worth having. There are reasons not to teach Latin, or not to teach it from an early age with the goal of reading literature in the original. For the sake of balance, I'd like to share what I understand as some of those reasons.
  • Why Latin?: 10 Answers to a Perennial Question  Drew Campbell - Let's get back to basics: What is it about Latin, anyway? Why privilege this "dead" language over other subjects? Why spend so much time on something that probably won't help your students earn a higher salary or win friends and influence people?
  • The Pearl at the Center  Drew Campbell - "Why do you want your children to read literature in the original Latin or Greek?" On one level, we can answer this common question with an Italian proverb: Traduttore, traditore -- every translation is a betrayal. A Japanese person reading Shakespeare in translation may well understand plots and character development, but can she be said really to understand Shakespeare's artistry without access to his language? The same is true of the classical literary masters: Homer, Virgil, Cicero.
  • Weight of Liberty, Freedom of Form  Drew Campbell - I remember the moment in which I realized one of the great perks of signing on to a particular educational philosophy: I didn't need to worry about curriculum that was clearly not in line with that philosophy.
  • LCC: The Reality Edition (Part III)  Drew Campbell - This "day in the life" comes from Heather at Culloden House Farms, homeschooling mother of three. Thanks, Heather, for "keeping it real"! Our main plans for today are to do school, pay bills, write the grocery list, finish mowing the front yard, weed the garden, and go out tonight with Hubby. It's his normal game night, but we haven't seen much of him and we'll be eating dinner together, then I'll drop him off at the gaming store and do some grocery shopping with the kiddos. It'll be a late night, so I'm letting the boys sleep in.
  • LCC: The Reality Edition (Part II)  Drew Campbell - Christine Proctor shares her "day in the life" story about a multi-age homeschool that includes friends as well as family. Am I Latin Centered? This year I've made an effort to be, by moving Latin early with Math, trying to learn it myself, and cutting out R&S English entirely, in favor of Classical Writing. It was a step in that direction when I realized I could do more multi-age teaching, and even fold in more children in the process.
  • LCC: The Reality Edition (Part I)  Drew Campbell - This is the first in a series of articles from parents sharing "a day in the life" of their LCC homeschools. Enjoy! Whitney writes: I have 5 children. My day goes like this:
  • On Being a Braveheart  Drew Campbell - Maybe it's my Scottish blood, but every time I watch Braveheart and William Wallace (Mel Gibson) gives his stirring pre-battle speech, I choke up: Aye, fight and you may die, run, and you'll live... at least for a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!
  • Latin-Centered Classical Education: It's Not What You Think  Drew Campbell - Latin-centered classical education is not...
  • Advice to a Harried New Homeschooler  Drew Campbell - The options for today's homeschoolers seem limitless. Which method? Which curricula? And what about the new baby? And the housework? Or that part-time job? How can I do it all?
  • The Tools of Learning Rediscovered  Heather - Most 30-year-olds could not do today what was expected of a teenager 200 years ago. Is this because life for teens is so much more complicated now? Because of a general breakdown in the family and community structure? No. The reason that today most adults never do what was expected of a colonial child is because we have shifted our expectations.
  • Decluttering Education  KathyJo - Successful homeschooling is purely a matter of setting priorities. One of the greatest flaws in the modern educational system is the attitude that everything can be taught. And in the end, we have exhausted children who know very little about anything at all.
  • Latin at the Core  Mamalynx - I homeschooled my children for three years, using modern, popular methods of classical education, before I realized something rather important: I could not explain to anyone exactly what classical education is.
  • It's Never Too Early - Or Too Late - For Great Books  Staci - From the beginning of our homeschooling journey, I have been reading the advice of experts. Many experts encourage parents to use simplified retellings of great books in their homeschool, explaining that an early familiarity with the stories will make the books less intimating to the student later on. The advice made sense, but I sometimes wondered if I was doing the right thing. By reading Black Ships before Troy and Garfield's Shakespeare Stories, wasn't I, in a way, ruining it for them? Would it in fact be better for them to experience Shakespeare in the original language, and Homer, if not in the original, at least in the form of one of the classic translations?
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