The Latin-Centered Curriculum

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.

I wrote recently on the LatinClassicalEd group about how I consider plenty of free time for my boys to play and pursue their own interests absolutely vital. I believe that children are geared towards the type of play that helps them to grow and mature into adults. In these areas, we can guide, we can help, we can suggest. To do anything more than this robs them of something precious. When this type of activity is discouraged rather than encouraged, children begin to lose the ability to pursue it in the same way. I think we can see this especially well in the example of public school children: after nine solid months of having their days organized from waking to sleeping with little time to play or pursue their own interests, they are faced with three months of complete freedom. And they no longer know what to do with it. They may bounce back after a bit of time, but I believe it's a cumulative effect: the longer a child has lived in an environment where all games were supplied by an adult with rules attached and where all areas of study were determined by someone else, the longer it will take that child to remember how to play and discover new things of interest. It's the cause of the summertime lament -- "I'm bored!" -- by children who no longer remember how to be children.

Shortly after this, I was gratified to find supporting statements on the importance of play from two minds far greater than my own. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes:

Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children's games are so important. They are always pretending to be grown-ups: playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time, they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits so that the pretence of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest.

And in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, he states:

Still, all our pupils will require some relaxation, not merely because there is nothing in this world that can stand continued strain and even unthinking and inanimate objects are unable to maintain their strength, unless given intervals of rest, but because study depends on the good will of the student, a quality that cannot be secured by compulsion. Consequently if restored and refreshed by a holiday they will bring greater energy to their learning and approach their work with greater spirit of a kind that will not submit to being driven. I approve of play in the young; it is a sign of a lively disposition; nor will you ever lead me to believe that a boy who is gloomy and in a continual state of depression is ever likely to show alertness of mind in his work, lacking as he does the impulse most natural to boys of his age.

And so, when I speak of priorities, this is one of mine: to allow my children time to be children. Much of their play can actually be considered truly educational. Jack is often looking up information to include in their games and explaining these things to his non-reading brothers, which is how two-year-old Jed came to be sitting on the couch shouting something about Robespierre one day last week. But even at its demented worst, when Jed is chasing his laughing brothers around the house waving his "wand" and shouting the death curse at them after seeing The Goblet of Fire, I still see the value of their play.

At this point, the question becomes how to provide an education while allowing for plenty of free time. Years ago, a homeschooling friend with older children listened to me talk about wanting to teach Latin and Greek, and she told me that to cover everything that I wanted to cover would take all day. She was right, in a way. It's simply not possible with a modern educational system that has broken education down into tiny little parts.

Take away the progymnasmata, a series of exercises in the classical tradition to teach writing skills through the process of imitation, and it has to be replaced with inferior, time-wasting methods of teaching writing. This often starts with teaching a child to write a sentence. This wastes times because by the age that schools begin teaching writing, children are already quite familiar with forming sentences; they are simply unaccustomed to writing them down. But oral narration, which is merely a form of imitation, bridges the gap between the familiar -- speaking -- and the unfamiliar -- writing. Writing encompasses an entirely new set of skills, and yet in the end, it is simply another form of communication. But the modern educational ideal is to treat writing as completely unrelated to speaking, and therefore programs often drag children backwards to teach them to form a sentence as if they had not been forming sentences since they were two or three years old. Once these stilted and unnatural exercises have taken place, the focus becomes getting children to "express themselves." They are expected to learn to write well, but where are their examples, and precisely how are they to write well when they've been given little or no indication of what good writing is? And so begins the round of book reports and "what I did over summer vacation" essays that are the bane of children all over the country. In my mind, these activities are meaningless. They teach nothing about writing well; they only force children to write, and they tie writing to the (for many children, quite difficult) creative processes necessary for children to come up with their own subject matter. The progymnasmata, on the other hand, build on the speaking skills that children already possess and provide examples of both good writing and subject matter. Focus on teaching children to write well, and they will be able to express themselves in writing. Focus on teaching children to express themselves, and they are unlikely to learn either.

Take Latin out of education, and again, it has to be replaced with inferior methods of teaching the same subject matter. Suddenly, a program is needed to teach English grammar, and it will be far less effective than teaching grammar through Latin. For a child to successfully translate an English sentence into Latin, he must know the role of every word in the sentence: this word is the subject and needs to be in the nominative case, and this is the direct object so it must be in the accusative case. Familiarity with English is a hindrance to learning the grammar because it's automatic. It's also simpler since English lacks all the case endings; forming a sentence in English does not require the same amount of thought, and it also does not teach as much about grammar. With the absence of Latin, vocabulary must also be taught separately, so instead of the derivatives of Latin words, children learn lists of unrelated words. Reading comprehension becomes an issue. It shouldn't be, in most cases, for children who learn Latin; any child who has learned to decode complicated Latin sentences will have fewer problems understanding thoughts in his own language, and he has already had to learn to read carefully.

And critical thinking skills replace Logic. Critical thinking is the bastard step-child of Logic. It's what you teach when you don't want to take the time and effort to actually teach children to think logically. The difference between teaching critical thinking skills and teaching logic is the difference between using education as a means to produce an "educated" work force and using education to produce a thinking, educated voting populace.

Therein lies a great deal of my trouble with finding anything worth emulating in modern educational methods: I have different goals for educating my children than the state does, and our goals are far too different for our methods to find much of a meeting ground. In the process of "simplifying" education by removing classical methods and subjects, modern educational methods have actually complicated the entire process and made it much more difficult to teach anything of value.

I've seen people ask questions about scientific studies supporting classical education and challenging the notion that classically educated people should be less susceptible to propaganda and group think -- classifying the claim, in fact, as more propaganda and group think. And I can't help but feel like they've missed the point. As Tracy Lee Simmons said in Climbing Parnassus, "Manifestos canvassed for the reform of education have run thus ever since. They depart from the hard, specific, and achievable so that they may embrace the soft, indefinite, and ungraspable." This is what classical education has not done. I'm not spouting wishful thinking when I say that I'm teaching my children to be less susceptible to propaganda and group think; I'm simply stating the logical conclusion of the subjects that we are currently studying, as well as the ones we'll be studying in the future. One very good reason for teaching Latin is that it's early preparation for teaching logic, and teaching logic is training in recognizing the fallacies that we find daily in the news and advertising. It's not soft, indefinite, and ungraspable like critical thinking skills, and therefore it needs no scientific study to "prove" that it works. It's the hard, specific, and achievable. How do you counter propaganda? With logic. How do you produce logical thinkers? By systematically training the mind to think in logical patterns and teaching logic explicitly as a subject.

This is where neoclassical education really breaks down for me. To truly train the mind requires more than filling it with facts and focusing on history. I'm certainly not opposed to memorization and history, but to focus on them is, to me, missing the point, because these are not the type of mental exercises that will train the mind to think logically. And history is not the sort of subject that can be mastered in the same way that Latin and math can be mastered. To me, it's the difference between a series of exercises designed to strengthen only one part of the body compared to a series of exercises designed to condition and train the entire body. Latin is the total mind workout.

An amazing thing happens when we return to the hard, complicated subjects that modern education has dropped: suddenly, we have a lot more free time. Math, Latin, and Greek are our core everyday subjects, and we attempt to do Classical Writing at least every other week. Other subjects are covered far more informally. History, literature and poetry, and science are read-alouds and/or required reading. There are no review questions, worksheets, or book reports in this household; these things are necessary only as a means of determining how much a child has learned when the teacher is unable to spend time individually with each student. There are no creative writing exercises which can be both frustrating and detrimental for many children. Instead, there are difficult subjects to master, interesting discussions to have, and plenty of free time for my boys to explore their own interests, develop relationships with their brothers, and chase butterflies through the yard.

To me, these are balanced days. We focus on the "hard, specific, and achievable." We fuel the imagination through reading. And we allow them time to do those things which children do best without adult interference.

KathyJo blogs at barefootmeandering.com