The Importance of Outlining

Generating an outline before working is not just a good idea, it is essential. Most of the thinking that goes into an essay should be done by the time the outline is written, so that when you actually sit down to write your essay from the outline, your writing is not a matter of formulating ideas in your mind but merely a matter of presenting those ideas in a coherent and persuasive manner.

Let me present a fictitious situation with following essay prompt:

For more than six hundred years-that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215--there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused.
~ Lysander Spooner.

Research the process of trial by jury in America and write a five paragraph essay confirming or refuting Lysander Spooner's statement above.

A composition student may write an outline, which looks something like this:


"Trial by Jury"

I. Introduction
1. Development of trial by jury throughout history.
2. Thesis: Trial by jury is a good idea.

II. Body of Essay
1. Explain what trial by jury is.
2. Explain the use of trial by jury throughout the world.
3. Give some alternative to trial by jury.

III. Conclusion.
1. Explain why trial by jury is such a good idea.
2. Spooner's quote about trial by jury system

This outline is too sketchy and too vague to bring about a focused and persuasive essay. Any student who wrote an essay based on this outline would not really know what he or she was really going to write about, not in general, nor in any specific sense.

1. The thesis statement is too vague, no criteria can be set up for evaluating whether something is a 'good idea'.
2. Each paragraph in the essay is so vague as to leave the student still wondering what he is going to write when he finally sets pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard.
3. The essay does not ask for trial by jury throughout the world, it asks specifically that the student refute or confirm Spooner's statement. Any thesis statement that does not confirm or refute Spooner has not answered the essay prompt.

Apart from not answering the essay prompt, the outline above has another fatal flaw. It does not perform the 'office' that an outline should perform. It does not serve as a blueprint for what the student is going to say, nor how he is going to say it. A student with a poor outine doubles his work and also the possibility of getting writer's block. He has to both think about what he is going to say at the same time that he is trying to figure out how to say it when he gets down to the task of writing his paragraphs.

The outline should be written so well that it guides and serves the student through the essay writing process by laying out the arguments long before the student gets to the paragraph writing stage.

Let us look at how to achieve this, first by discussing how to write a strong thesis statement and then by discussing how to write a strong outline.

A Strong Thesis Statement

The thesis statement is the guiding sentence around which the essay revolves. A weak thesis statement such as "trial by jury is a good idea" is impossible to defend or refute definitively. We need to help our students focus that thesis statement down to something that can be demonstrated.

The first step is to boil the essay prompt down to a specific question that can be answered. In the prompt above Lysander Spooner says that it is the right and duty of juries in trials to judge the facts, the law, and the intent of the accused. The student is asked to confirm or refute Lysander Spooner's statement that it is the right and duty of juries in trials to judge the facts, the law, and the intent of the accused. This essay prompt is then boiled down to the question.

Question: "Is it the right and duty of juries to judge the facts, the law, and the intent of the accused?

Answer: The function of juries in a criminal court case to discern the facts of the case, decide how they align with the law, and to establish the intent of the accused.

Now the outline can be written. Every point in the outline points back to the "Answer" above, supporting it and elaborating the thoughts contained in it.


A Strong Outline

For any essay, the general outline will look something like this


I. Introduction

• Introductory opening strategy
  
• Thesis statement __________________________________

II. Body

1. Paragraph 1: Topic _______________

• Opening sentence
• Detail 1
• Detail 2
• Detail 3
• or more details ...
  
• Concluding sentence
  

2. Paragraph 2: Topic ______________________

• Opening/Transition sentence
• Detail 1
• Detail 2
• Detail 3
• or more details ....
  
• Concluding Sentence

etc for as many paragraphs as the body of the essay has

III. Conclusion

• Recapping the essence of your thesis
• Summarize what you said.
  

For the specific essay prompt I gave above, the outline might look something like this:


I. Introduction

• Introduction - Discuss briefly medieval trial by ordeal, the the modern more objective form of justice found in trial by jury.
• Thesis statement: The function of juries in a criminal court case to discern the facts of the case, decide how they align with the law, and to establish the intent of the accused. This assures the accused of a fair and objective trial.
  

II. Body
1. Paragraph 1: Topic - Define what a fair trial is.

2. Paragraph 2: Topic -discerning the facts of the case

• Opening sentence - The first step in getting a fair trial is establishing what really happened and whether the accused committed the crime he was accused of.
  
• Detail 1 - What does the narrative account say the accused did?
  
• Detail 2 - If so, what did he do? Define the action he did in light of the facts presented .
  
• Concluding sentence - Establishing the facts leads to a fair trial.
  

2. Paragraph 2: Topic - decide how the facts align with the law

• Opening sentence - We know what the accused did. Is it a crime?
  
• Detail 1 - What does the law say about his actions?
  
• Detail 2 - If what he did was a crime, of what severity was it?
• Concluding Sentence - Establishing what the law allows is part of a fair trial
  

3. Paragraph 3: Topic - Establish the intent of the accused

• Opening sentence - If we have established that the accused committed a crime, and of what severity the crime was, we now need to establish his state of mind while committing the crime.
  
• Detail 1 - did he do it by accident, in anger, or on purpose and pre-meditated
• Detail 2 - Intent is the indicator of the moral state of the mind of the accused when he committed the crime.
  
• Concluding Sentence - Establishing intent ensures a fair trial.
  

III. Conclusion

• A fair trial is ensured by establishing the facts of the case, by knowing what the law allows, and by establishing the intent of the accused when he committed the crime
  
• Quote Spooner's quote to back up the thesis statement.
  
• Conclude that trial by jury is the best way to ensure a fair trial and an improvement of trial by ordeal.
  

After Writing the Outline

When the outline has been written, it needs to be checked (preferably today and then again tomorrow when the mind is fresh) against the thesis statement.

Every paragraph must refer back to and support the thesis statement. If it does not, it needs to be revised or possibly even thrown out. It is not enough that the paragraph is about the same topic as the thesis statement.


To Sum Up

Write a strong outline for every essay assignment, and the essay writes itself. It is an indispensable tool for writing confidently and well.

~lmj

Basic Rhetoric: The Canon of Invention and the Progymnasmata

Rhetoric has as its purpose to persuade. It is for the sake of persuasion that we educators torture our students with essay writing. We want them to be able to express their ideas persuasively and well.

For the purposes of writing, there are three 'canons' of rhetoric, not the sort of cannons that go 'boom', but 'canons' with just one 'n', the accepted principles and standards in the field of rhetoric. Those are: the canon of invention (figuring out what you are going to say), the canon of arrangement (figuring out in what order you want to say it), and the canon of style (figuring out with what style you are going to say it).

In this not-so-short blog, I will discuss the canon of invention.

Imagine yourself back in the good old days when you were a student. You have been given an essay prompt, and you now have the task of spending the rest of your week, thinking about, writing, and editing (and re-editing) your essay.

You need help, and to that end, the canon of invention is at your disposal -- should you choose to make use of it.

The canon of invention helps you decide what you are going to say (as well as what you are NOT going to say). The canon of invention is where you generate your thesis statement as well as the arguments to support that thesis statement.

Invention

First of all, let us discuss invention. Most of us think of Edison with his light blub, or of physicists inventing atom bombs. Rhetorically speaking, what is ‘invention’? It comes from the Latin 'in-venire' which means 'to find'. Invention is where we find a list of thoughts to think through in response to the the essay prompt. It is a tool we use to make sure we have investigated the issue raised in the essay prompt comprehensively.

Invention stipulates the occasion for the writing, the audience that you are writing for (college professor, perhaps), as well as the message (of the essay) exhaustively.

Included in invention are the following:

Rhetorical Occasion
Rhetorical Situation
The Special Topics
The Three Appeals
The Common Topics

and finally

Stasis Theory.

Most of those terms should be unfamiliar to you. Let us unpack them, one at a time beginning with 'the rhetorical occasion'.

Rhetorical Occasion

Why are you writing? Well, bluntly put: you're a student; you were given an essay assignment; you're writing because you have to. But as artificial as a college essay feels, teachers try to make the essay writing experience real by imagining real-life situations where you may be called on to write. They ask you to write in that spirit. People in real life do write political speeches, funeral orations, court room sentences, magazine articles, law codes, cook books, or dubious Internet blogs on writing education :). Worse, some of us write whole books that are over five-hundred pages long, and we haven't even said half of what we intended to say yet.

But back to your specific rhetorical occasion. You are writing an essay for a class. And this occasion combined with your rhetorical situation serve as the background for your essay.

Rhetorical Situation

Whom are you writing to and what are you going to write about? Simple questions, but ones that need to be considered carefully.

First of all there are two types of people involved in your communication attempt here (ahem... your essay):

1. you—the writer
2. your audience (or reader[s]).

You know yourself, or at least you think you do.
(But, even so, in invention you will take a closer look at yourself and how you present yourself).

More to the point: Do you know your reader? Who is he? What state of mind is he in? What does he already believe about the topic you are writing about? What level of education, religious background, political predispositions does he? How might you best convince himm of what you are about to say?

What you are about to say is your ‘message’. It consists of the position that you are taking on the issue you are writing about.

The Special Topics: Deliberative, Judicial, and Ceremonial

Now you have an occasion, you have a reader, and you have a message (your response to the essay prompt). The next thing you need to consider is what type of rhetoric you going to be using.

The special topics help you with this. They define the purpose of your essay. There are three special topics, one dealing with issues of the past, one dealing with issues of the present, and one dealing with issues of the future.

Are you writing to condone or condemn and act of the past? Are you writing to celebrate or vilify a person or an event in the present? Or are you writing to recommend or reject a course of action or an idea for the future? The special topics that deal with those three types of writing are judicial rhetoric, ceremonial rhetoric, and deliberative rhetoric.

Judicial speeches deal with justice and injustice. They assert whether an act committed in the past was right or wrong, or whether a person accused of a crime was guilty or innocent.

Ceremonial speeches address the issues of virtue and vice. They tell the reader whether something or someone in the present is noble or base.

Deliberative speeches may speak of the good, the worthy, and the advantageous. Or they may speak of the bad, the unworthy, and the disadvantageous. Deliberative speeches speak for or against our plans for the future.

The Three Appeals: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos

Now, you have an essay prompt (rhetorical occasion), you have a reader and a message, and you have identified which one of the special topics that applies to your essay, and now you need to consider what sorts of appeals you need to use in your essay.

Do you primarily want to engage your reader’s mind or heart in your essay? Is your focus primarily to show him that you are an intelligent and thoughtful and sympathetic writer (appeal to ethos)? Do you want to engage his mind with clear and persuasive arguments that will convince him (Appeal to Logos)? Or are you trying to evoke his sympathies for a particularly difficult and perhaps outrageous situation (Appeal to Pathos)?

We use all three appeals when we write, but in general we can classify an essay in terms of its dominant means of persuasion. You may wish to persuade your reader that something is true; to this end, logical arguments (appeal to logos) may be employed. However, it is usually not enough that your reader should agree with you. Often a writer will want to stir his readers into action: Vote for me; don’t buy this product; demonstrate against this or that bill in Congress. To this end, the writer may seek to arouse the reader’s emotions (appeal to pathos). But— no amount of emotional appeal is successful unless the reader trusts the writer. Before we allow our emotions to be engaged by something someone says, we must believe that the writer is a man of intelligence and good will. Therefore, as a writer, you must appear attractive and trustworthy (appeal to ethos).

Stasis Theory

Now, if your essay involves judicial or deliberative rhetoric , stasis theory is a useful tool that you may employ. Stasis theory clarifies the nature of the argument and defines the specific issue that people are in disagreement about.
Stasis theory can be used in the court room where the job of both the prosecuting and the defense attorney is to tell the jury what it is that has brought the defendant to court. What is he accused of doing? How far do both parties agree on what happened, and where is the exact point (‘the stasis’) where they violently disagree on what happened.

Let us say John Smith is accused of murder. Then first of all, what does the word ‘murder’? Define it carefully without reference to John Smith or anything specific that he is accused of doing. Once the word ‘murder’ has been defined, it is the job of either lawyer to establish whether or not John Smith did in fact commit this murder. Of course, the prosecutor is arguing that John Smith did commit the murder, the defense attorney is arguing that John Smith did not commit the murder. Sometimes.

Sometimes both attorneys agree that John Smith did commit murder, but what kind of murder did he commit? Did he do it in self-defense? Was it an accident? Did he lose his temper, or did he plan this act for months in advance?

Stasis theory includes four steps, all designed to answer the questions we posed above:

1. Definition (The event of the past)
2. Conjecture (What happend and who did it?)
3. Quality or degree (What kind was it?)
4. Procedure (What shall we do about it?)
Stasis theory can be particularly powerful in helping you generate thesis statements for your judicial or deliberative essay.

The Common Topics

Now that you have considered your occasion, reader, type of rhetoric, special appeals as well as generated a thesis statement, you need to dig into the specific content of your particular essay.

To this end, you use the common topics, a list of topics from which you ‘invent’ arguments for each paragraph of the essay about your subject, X.

Do you need to define what X is? Do you need to show how your use of the term X differs from how people normally understand it? Are you going to show how the issue associated with X is actually very similar to issue Y (an issue your audience already has sympathy for)? Are you going to quote a famous expert who agrees with you? Are you going to construct a long logical argument that will prove you point? Will you need to explain the reasons why X has gotten as bad as it is today? Are you going to present examples from history or literature? All those types of paragraphs can be generated from a list called the ‘common topics’--a part of invention.

Progymnasmata

So, how does all this (rhetorical occasion, rhetorical situation, special topics, three appeals, common topics, and stasis theory) fit in with the progymnasmata?
Most of Classical Writing's students are used to the term progymnasmata, but for those who are new, the progymnasmata were a series of writing exercises that Greek boys of antiquity used to learn speech writing. The exercises introduced them to the basic concepts and techniques of rhetoric that I mentioned above.

One of the earliest exercises was narration, which taught the student to present a clear, concise and plausible account of events. Later, the paired exercises of refutation and confirmation brought the student back to narrative, and taught him to take a critical view of narration (written narratives).

The student would then learn deliberative rhetoric by writing essays about common proverbs, telling why the proverbs were wise. Students also took common legends and myths and wrote essays for and against each myth, telling why it was credible or not credible.

The students would write essays praising and blaming people, praising and blaming a virtue, writing descriptive detail, writing dialogue, as well as writing a research paper.

In other words, the progymnasmata were the 'textbooks' that the ancients used to teach rhetoric to their students. Rhetoric was the curriculum of the ancient schools, because without being able to understand material and express oneself in writing and in speaking, how can we communicate anything about what we have learned?

Stay tuned. Canon of Arrangement is next.

Lene

Classical Ed 'Lite'

This weekend I was talking to some folks about the different levels of rigor that may be employed in a classical education.

Some were adamant that there is a lot of new 'fad' curriculum out there that calls itself classical because being classical is all the rage these days, and so the mere label of classical will attract customers.

So what? some said. So what if some just do classical 'lite'. It is not our job to make sure that those who claim to school classically do so with rigor. But, others objected, words have meaning, and the very word 'classical' implies something rigorous and traditional.

But do we need to ensure 'quality control' in the world of homeschooling? Is it even possible?

When I mentioned this to my husband, he paralleled it with his experience in the world of martial arts. There are many karate schools out there, where you can get a black belt in two years. Those who are serious in the arts call such places McDoJos. The point is, those schools are'lite' drive-through dojos that allow you and your family to dabble a little in the martial arts while having fun and getting exercise. There is nothing wrong with them. They just aren't the rigorous real schools that will get you in top shape and give you a credible black belt.

The same could be said for a classical education. We live in an age where most people achieve literacy, but not all people get their jollies by spending Monday nights reading Dante's Divine Comedy with other avid literature fans. Not all people care to be able to read the Aeneid or the Iliad in the original. Not everyone needs to enjoy this. Some would rather watch "The Hulk".

But we are such a society of appearances. We all feel a NEED to LOOK like we're doing the best. And what sounds better than "a classical education". So we like the labels, even when they don't deliver what they appear to be about. We like to fool ourselves a little, to feel good about the education we're giving our kids. Certainly few of us are honest enough to say: I just don't care enough to give Johnny a rigorous education.

We want our kids to be well-educated; we really do. But the reality is that most of us do not provide a rigorous course of rhetoric for our students, nor do most of us care enough to read all the Greek tragedies, or delve into the Early Church fathers' writings. And that's OK. We don't all need to read all that... but in some sense, neither do we need to pretend we do. We're not better people, more valuable, more admirable for having read those Greek tragedies. Greek tragedy should be read for its own sake, for the love of it, not for showing off.

What when curriculum that is not at all rigorous calls itself classical?? Should we care? Well, when it happens the word "classical" has been diluted. It causes those who are more rigorously classical to need to beef their self-description with superlatives akin to "real committed" classical--we see this in Christianity where some feel a need to differentiate their faith as more authentic than others by the use of those very same modifiers, "real" and "committed".

But at the root of it, may lie a mistaken need to box everything into neat little compartments. This curriculum is "real committed classical". This curriculum is "not". So that once we have the boxes clearly defined, we can decide which camp we're in and then we all know "who we are"? -- And then what?

Well, I suppose life is easier at that point because I don't have to think as much. I can just react, because I know who and what IS and ISN'T of the sort I would lump myself together with.

But that is impossible. We can never definitively box everything (much less everyBODY) in. Yes, there will always be "rip off" curricula trying to get our money without delivering what they promise, there will always be watered-down versions of something that has become a fad (like classical education). We will always need to use discernment--with each person we meet, with each curriculum we evaluate. We will always need to watch to see, first of all whether this is 'someone/something' for me, and then secondly whether (in the case of curriculum) this is really classical.

No amount of classification or boxing in of anything will ever preclude our need to consider things carefully for ourselves (at each instance) before deciding to use, or not use, something.

In the case of classical education, you don't just need to decide whether something is classical or not. None of us are 100% authentically classical. That is not even the goal. The goal is for each homeschool family to evaluate carefully what the goals for each student and for each school year is, and then allow as much rigor, and as much authentic classical education as time, money, child's abilities, and teacher resources allow. -- This will look different for each family.

Don't sweat it. Nothing good was ever achieved by over-simplification, much less your child's education. You simply have to do your homework.

:)

Preparing to Read the Great Books

Classical Writing's recommended literature pages are up here:

http://home.att.net/~classicalwriting/Literature.htm

But I have since received several emails about how to prepare for (as well as how to tackle) reading what we call "Great Books".

Well, let's start by saying that every classical school, every tutorial, every co-op, every curriculum, every Christian group may have a different list for what to read in terms of Great Books. Your list will not exactly be mine. And that is OK. The "western canon" is not carved in stone.

Some have more modern books, some have more medieval books, some have an emphasis on Church doctrine, others prefer literature, and still others social, political, or philosophical emphases.

My recommendations for preparation for Great Books studies below are based on the idea that the goal of Great Books studies is to UNDERSTAND (to enter into) the mind of the author behind each work. Not necessarily with the aim to agree with each author ultimately--we couldn't possibly agree with them all--but with the aim to understand before we judge.

The most important steps to prepare for Great Books classes or Great Books reading are

1. Biblical literacy: If you and your students don’t know the Bible stories, Bible history/timeline, and the ‘orthodox’ doctrines of the Church (little ‘o’, orthodox), you will struggle with understanding the minds behind many of the Great Books. [That means familiarity with basic doctrines of the Medieval Church, even if your family is not Catholic. It means knowing the creeds and the early councils of the Church, even if your family's local church does not teach or make use of those directly.]

2. Graeco-Roman mythology literacy: READ ALOUD Edith Hamilton’s Greek Mythology (or a like volume of Greek myths) from beginning to end. Then read aloud children’s versions of Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. All this is to familiarize your students with all the deities, their oddities, and their stories.

3. A good sense of history from antiquity to now…. You and your students need a time-line sense that knows when the Iliad supposedly took place, when Socrates lived, what and when was the Golden Age of Greece, when did Jesus live, what was Rome like then, when do the middle ages start, what is the diff between the early middle ages and the late middle ages, when what and why were the reformation and the renaissance… that sort of stuff.

After that you READ aloud... and read alone. Read the Iliad and Odyssey aloud to each other. Read 19th century good literature (Dickens, Austen, Eliot, etc.), and then ‘dare’ to go backwards into the harder stuff. If you go back before the 1700s (before the eve of the novel) the reading consists mostly of epic poetry: Dante’s Comedia, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, medieval allegorical "morality" (as well as not-so-moral) tales. And of course there is philosophy, political theory and theology back there too.


Most homeschool moms and students don’t have an easy time with Great Books at first because the language is wordy and antiquated and the thoughts are alien--many of them. The key is to plunge in and read a little every day. We can all read two pages of the Iliad and attend to it carefully each day (IF we just do 2, even if it takes us a year to get through it). Lack of persistence and patience is what defeats most people with the Great Books, but if you have a regular read-aloud routine and if you stick with it and keep going in smaller chunks, your kids can handle it without being turned off.

I would not recommend making it your goal to get through all anyone's list of Great Books. Most lists go at a hair-raising pace. My take on Great Books is not to get through as many as possible, but to read thoroughly and well those few works that you do choose to read.

It is somewhat odious to hear people say “I read Machiavelli’s The Prince, but I don’t know anything about it, other than the ‘ends justify the means’.”

If we do not dig in well enough to have somewhat of an idea of the work, or well enough to let the work penetrate our thinking at least a little, we may as well not have read it. I would say “less is more” when it comes to great books, and that a person who thinks he or she has read them all, but knows nothing about any of them is rather a ‘dangerous’ person. It brings about a surface attitude towards reading and understanding which will not stand a kid in good stead in the long run. Read WELL, read slowly, and think carefully, even if you only cover a few works. AND IF you have only a little time, hone in on the Greeks, on Plato’s dialogues, on Greek plays (tragedies). There are few thoughts more profound than those… Those and the early church fathers.

Happy Mother's Day,
Lene

Using Older Literature in Classical Education

Among those educators who honestly strive hard to teach kids to write well, who believe in punctuation, spelling, syntactical, and logical correctness, there are two schools of thought:

1. The correctness school: People in this school tend to prefer modern literature for study to ensure that kids don't accidentally pick up antiquated usage and infuse it into their writing. This school holds that kids need to study only the 'correct' (modern) way, or they will be confused and misuse what they learn.

2. The holistic school: This is where Classical Writing belongs. We teach modern correctness (of course), but we also look at great writers from all ages, and haven't found that children who imitate Shakespearean syntax, spelling, or punctuation tend to infuse it into their own writing in any way that induces errors by modern convention standards.

Yes, we teach correct conventions for the 21st century as a matter of priority. Yes, we want our kids to spell correctly. We teach that before we teach anything else in the lower grades, but for the higher levels … it's different.

The English language is not static, and correctness in English right now is not correctness forever. Language does "evolve", much as we wish it were different. This is easily seen by the changes from Beowulf to Geoffrey Chaucer to William Shakespeare to Samuel Richardson to today. Correctness in spelling and punctuation, even in word usage, is a slippery slope, which in some countries changes by state-run commissions sitting down after Fifty years and deciding that now THIS spelling is correct and THIS punctuation is the accepted one. It is done, usually, because the people have changed the way they speak, culture has let common usage change, so language commissions or style authorities make the changes official.

Webster in the 19th century (more or less officially??) changed American spelling with his new dictionary which was intended to reflect in spelling how Americans spoke. This was one of the first deviations from British English, and we continue to change from British English in punctuation and spelling. American punctuation differs significantly from that of British English, and not only that, within this country itself, there are different conventions on punctuation, especially over that much disputed mark, the comma. Some punctuation is truly a matter of following a 'rule' learned in school, but in truth, if you want to be hyper-pedantic, much "comma-tation" is a matter of style.

In the US, so far as I know, our official language of English changes when certain self-proclaimed style authorities like the Modern Language Associate or the Chicago Style Manual-- our 'accepted' authorities--put out new style guides. Publishing houses, reputable journals, and educational institutions adhere to these style guides, not all to the same one, but they all more or less agree with each other, at least in the broad strokes.

Because there is no static quality to language, we should expect change in language (not that we need always embrace it with joy) because it has come and will continue come. As such it is actually a LIE to teach kids that correctness is static, because it is not. It may be early to introduce that concept to a kid who is merely doing CW Primer, but the fact is that kids need to know that language is not math; it is not an absolute for all time, it is a dynamic reflection of the culture, political, religious, and sociological ‘climate’ we live in—for better, and often for worse.

Classical Writing, unlike the schools I mentioned in class 1 above, teaches from ancient as well as modern models of English all the way through the curriculum, even in Aesop, our 3rd-4th grade book. We constantly expose kids to English of yester-centuries, and part of that to keep alive the best of our language from other ages, that which otherwise would be lost.

For most kids, it has been our experience that this is an enriching process. Their language skills grow, and they have more expressive powers than those kids who are only exposed to modern texts. For a few children, who struggle severely with English correctness at a very basic mechanical level, this would not be helpful, but for the majority of kids, I believe our broad model selection to be one of the greatest assets our program has to offer.

Most kids will sooner or later read Beatrix Potter, the King James Bible, or Edmund Spenser for themselves. One way or the other they will be exposed to much language that by modern standards has become 'incorrect'. I put 'incorrect' in quotes first of all because we can't 'grandfather' incorrectness into materials written before the particular incorrectness we are addressing was codified. And secondly there were eras, Shakespeare's was one, where 'correctness' was less at a premium than it is today where correctness sadly seems to be one of the only standards left by which we are allowed to evaluate the quality of a piece of writing.

Don’t get me wrong, we at Classical Writing very much want to be up to modern standards in terms of producing writers who can write to satisfy the standards of the world they live in, but in addition we want to produce flexible writers, who possess a broad battery of verbal skills with which to respond both in speech and in writing to the issues that face us today. This requires broad reading (from antiquity and up) and broad analysis and imitation of some of the pieces read.

To sum up: The reason we decided to write CW is because we had delved into classical education at many levels by reading Cicero and Aristotle and Quintilian, and there was nothing out there that went to those sources and taught the way those sources taught.
Lene

To New Homeschoolers Part II

Reading and writing are the monarchs of learning.

Classical education traditionally aimed at oral and written comprehension and expression. If you do not have command of your own language both to take in what others have expressed and to express yourself, you cannot communicate what you have learned to others.

This is not to say we don’t need to teach math or science or history also, but that an authentic classical education must put a higher premium on language.

Many moms will look at Classical Writing and see 60 minutes per day in language arts in 3rd grade and say, “I can’t spend that much time, I also have curriculum X, curriculum Y, and curriculum Z to cover.”

Well, not every day takes 60 minutes, and not every mom takes 60 minutes to cover the language arts lessons. Nonetheless, it may not be so far off to prioritize lanuguage arts (reading, spelling, grammar, and writing) with an hour on your daily schedule. Can you afford NOT to?

The trick is integrating all the other subjects to be subordinary to your language arts priorities. Take the skills you need to work on in language arts and apply them in all the other subjects.

Lene

To New Homeschoolers part I

What is a classical education? Can you buy it in a box? Can you find a simple three step formula on how to teach your kids classically?

No.

Why not?

Because being educated classically is being educated to THINK, and there is no instant "just add water" formula to thinking. There is no "stick it all in a box and we have it figured out" sort of mentality in classical education. Thinking takes training, and training is what classical education is all about. Training in thinking systematically, clearly, logically, virtuously, but also, ultimately broadly and imaginatively.

By imagination, we don't mean the nebulous, off the cuff, free association randomness of a mind that never had an education, but the expansive ponderances of possibilities that spring from well-disciplined minds who have feasted on and imitated the great thoughts and ideas of the great minds of human history.

Our aim is thinking, and for that, while boxes are neat containers to sort things into, boxes are also limiting, and there is often more than one way to sort a collection of bric-a-brac. Our aim is to have boxes, but to also teach students to move beyond the boxes.

But back off from imagination for a minute.

A classical education has as its essence the mastery of language, training students to read and understand the thoughts of others, as well as training students to speak and write about those thoughts.

For the early years this looks much like the sort of education that Charlotte Mason advocated: short simple lessons of phonics, copybook, and math. This is the sort of education where you instill a love of learning in your kids by showing them what a marvelous world we live in, what wonders nature presents us with, how grand the words of the Bible are, as well as reading aloud (and alone) book after book after book, revelling in stories, in myths, and in legends

Your formal academic sessions should focus on reading, spelling, copybook, and math. The other subjects such as history, literature, art, PE, and whatever else you may want to pursue with your students should be accomplished in a playful atmosphere of enjoyment, not as tasks that must be accomplished. That playful atmosphere of exploring does much to stretch that early imagination. That imagination will later be key to innovative thinking, to making connections, and to building bridges of communication to others.

Read!! And read some more.