http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/LatinBackground/SilentReading.html

It is written by a Latin professor, and he is discussing how the ancients always read everything aloud, where we moderns always read everything silently, to ourselves.

Read his wise words for yourselves (or aloud to your whole family).

Our family’s homeschooling years were replete with reading aloud. We read our prayers aloud as we worshipped together in the morning. We read the Bible passages for the day aloud. In addition we had a daily novel we were going through, and we also read through ancient, medieval and modern plays together. I would estimate that the totality of our daily readings amounted to 90 minutes or more every day. It seems like a lot, you may say, and how can any homeschool spend that much time on just that?

It seems to me that it is a matter of where you put your priorities. Mine were for my students to master language arts and mathematics. Those were the two biggest priorities in our homeschool. As such literature, in particular excellently crafted pieces of literature, were of top priority, and I think much vocabulary and advanced sentence structures ‘sneaked’ into my kids’ brains as they were immersed in Euripides, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tolstoy. I have never regretted those hours of reading aloud. (Did I mention that the kids had another read-aloud-book they did with their father in the evenings?) We read and read, and when we finally compiled the kids’ reading portfolios for college applications, their lists were impressively long, and varied. (Excepting my one sin, that I did not spend very much time in 20th century lit, comparatively).

Today I teach college, physical sciences, mostly physics. I would say that the literary deficit of the students I encounter is profoundly disturbing. WHAT? you may protest, You teach physics. How would you know about their lack of literature?

Science is generally (and traditionally) taught in retrospect. Physics in particular is always honoring the giants that brought us to the next level of our understanding of the material universe. My students have no sense of who Aristotle was, when he lived, what his civilization was like, or why he is important. Ditto for the era of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and so forth. A strong basis in literature expands students’ minds and helps them engage with cultures of the past in ways that help them … yes!!! Even in science

If I may be didactic here for a moment, I would say. Spend your summer planning your reading ‘program’ for the fall. What Scripture do you want to read daily? (we cycled through the same 5 psalms as a prayer opener for every morning all school year, in addition to our daily Gospel fix). What novel do you want to read aloud? What play would engage your students in such a way that they can each read one character’s lines and be actively part of the readings? (Plato’s Dialogues, incidentally, along with other ancient writings, are written as dialogues and would make excellent read alouds for highschoolers. They are not that hard to understand.)

And then there is poetry: Over two school years I plowed through all of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid as part of our morning readings. Fagels’ translations of all three are easily readable and fun!!! We also read Spenser’s Fairie Queene, Book I aloud, and I survived Paradise Lost… beautiful lyrics. I don’t think anyone beats Milton when it comes to majestic language.

For fun, we spent a season in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and also Jeeves and Wooster.

I miss much of homeschooling now that my kids are all college aged and home only sporadically, reading most of all. We plowed through the greats, and they were so much more enjoyable for having been read aloud, by me, or better yet, by my students.

Advanced Poetry is on the front burner here. This book is already written, and currently in its last stages of editing. It is a one semester high school level poetry and lit text. It is optional, but highly recommended for students who plan to study the humanities in college.

Through this book you will review meter and scansion, read and analyze the major epic poems in the English poetry tradition, write poetry analysis essays, and also, YES!!! write your own poems.

Our emphasis is on reading and understanding. As always our mantra is that you cannot analyze anything, or try to figure out what something means unless you start with the original intent of the author.

Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Dante (OK, he was not English, but we can’t live without him!!), and more, coming your way towards the end of the summer.

Email us at inquiry@classicalwriting.com if you want to be on the advanced notice list when it comes out.

Now we get to ‘the good’. Like the True, we tend to ‘know it when we see it’, and yet, the good can also be hard to recognize and quantify.

In the same way that God is the standard for truth (I am the way, the life, and the truth John 14:6), God is also the standard for goodness, as we see in the verse that introduces this section of our blog. Only God is good.

But what is goodness? The dictionary says

good·ness
1.good quality: the quality of being good
2.virtuousness: personal virtue or kindness
3.good part: the nutrition or other benefit to be derived from something

We would go with definition 1 above for goodness. It helps hardly at all because now we need to define the adjective good, if we want to pursue this line of reasoning. When something is good in the sense that we want to use the word in this blog, it is morally excellent, virtuous, righteous, or pious, in the way that we know that a truly good man would be morally excellent, virtuous, righteous, or pious.

This fits with our assertion about that only God is good, because only God is morally excellent, virtuous and righteous. (We can only speak of God being pious in the sense of the incarnation of Christ. Christ was ‘pious’, in the sense of fulfilling every religious obligation and living an exemplary life as a human being.)

So when we talk about pursuing the good in a classical education, we refer ultimately to pursuing the divine, to aspire to see, touch, and experience the divine, and hopefully in the process to have it permeate our lives, our values, and radiate out to those whose lives we touch.

But not to get too out of touch with the dishes in the sink, the laundry that needs folding, and my preparation for next week’s classes, to say nothing of my sewing repairs, and the meal at church I am in charge of next week … how do I know what is good? How do I know it in my daily dealings with those whose lives I touch? How do I know it when I work over my monthly budget or decide which requests from other people I grant and which ones I deny?

In Genesis, Joseph tells his brothers that what they did to him they meant for evil, but God brought good for it. In a like manner, St. Paul talks about overcoming evil with good.

Alright … here is my supposition. We all know what evil looks like. Or at least we have seen much evil, perhaps in our own lives, perhaps in the news. Regardless, we know it when we see it, and we know not to do it.

Literature (part in parcel with a classical education) portrays good and evil in their many facets. This happens in medieval fairy tales or folk tales where the good and the evil are typified by beautiful princesses and ugly withces. Snow White is perfect, beautiful and good. Her stepmother is jealous, and the jealousy turns her to evil deeds, whereby she attempts to kill the innocent Snow White. The handsome prince rescues Snow White with love’s first kiss. We know who is good and who is bad in those tales. The story of Snow White affirms our values about purity and love. We read those stories, not to discern good from evil, but to didactically affirm the values we already hold. We read those stories to our children to awaken in them a sense of good and bad.

Myth does have some clear good and bad associated with it, as when Atreus murdered the children of his twin brother Thyestes and then fed those children to Thyestes. But often, Myth is more complicated. The world of myth is unpredictable, and you can be a person of goodness, and still get the short end of the stick. There are more forces at play in this world, and your efforts alone cannot save you from an evil fate, necessarily. Goodness is still a virtue worth holding, but do not expect, simply because you are good and do good, that all things good will result from your constancy. The world of myth is complicated, outcomes are not guaranteed.

Take for example Hippolytus, son of Theseus. He lived his life committed to chastity and to the virgin goddess, Artemis. Aphrodite takes her revenge by having Hippolytus’ step mother fall in love with Hippolytus, and disaster ensues, in spite of Hippolytus having done nothing wrong, apart from neglecting the worship of Aphrodite.

Oedipus in his ignorance kills his father and marries his mother. In his relentless pursuit of the truth, he undoes himself completely, and wanders the earth in despair for the rest of his days.

Orestes is caught up between his duty to avenge his father and his duty not kill his mother (who killed his father).

The world is complex, life is complex, and Greek myth spins many tales delineating how blind we humans are, and how difficult it is for us to achieve any semblance of goodness in our characters because of all the conflicting demands that present themselves to us.

Note that there isn’t really a Greek god or goddess of goodness. Goodness was more compositely found in acts of either excellence or nobility, but not as a value in and of itself. If you look at the cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, and add on the three theological virtues, faith, hope,and love, you do not see goodness among them.

If you look at goodness in literature, take for example Charles Dickens’ many novels, you see that Dickens is a master at portraying evil in its many facets. His depictions of Uriah Heap (David Copperfield), the Jew Fagin (Oliver Twist) , Mr. Guppy (Bleak House), Quelp (The Curiosity Shop), Madame LeFarge (Tale of Two Cities) are almost delicious in their villainous details. In contrast, behold Dickens’ through and through good people without any flaws, which for the most part consists of mother figures, so transparent as to almost be non-existent. I am thinking here of the mother of Oliver Twist, of Lucy Manette in Tale of Two Cities, and of the love interest Agnes, who wants patiently to marry David Copperfield. The women mentioned are almost non-existent, they are soo good, which to Dickens translates to unassuming, non-demanding, endlessly patient, and self-effacing.

Much as evil is lack of goodness, we can get a handle on evil, and clearly see if for what it is. In contrast, goodness is hard to depict, though, not hard to perceive. It cannot be squeezed into a box. Goodness usually breaks the mould and bursts the bubble of fear we’re living in, as in the case of the goodness of God, that allowed Joseph to be sold into slavery, so he could later rescue his whole family from famine. Goodness emerged in ways that the brothers could never have imagined. It takes the long view, and sees the big picture. Yes, it is found in the moment, and perhaps even recognized by some… but more so, it is seen in hindsight, perceived as a whole, but even then, it is not fully comprehended by all of us.

In the story of Oedipus, it was his blindness to who he really was and what he had really done, that prevented him from seeing. His life and all that he thought he was (but wasn’t) had to be stripped way, so he could truly SEE what was before him. He had to blind himself to the world to really SEE. In death he is favored, and the place where he dies (accepts his fate, who he is and what he did) becomes blessed (his good fortune).

I think of the goodness revealed in Christ’s week of passion leading up to the cross. We know the whole story. The disciples did not. They were blind and to a large extent because they were afraid. We today can, at least, articulate the goodness of God (though not fully understand the passion) as we can approach the story from all angles… BUT we struggle with it, with the goodness of God, in the daily grind, with our own issues and concerns–to say nothing of our fears. It is hard to trust God (the only one we know to be good), to trust Him to work all things for good in our particular narrow and perhaps myopic circumstances.

Only God is good, and we seek that goodness (hopefully) in all that we pursue, at work, in our homeschools, in our classical education, in our planning for the future. May our pursuit of classical literature play some part in helping us to see and understand what goodness is.

Not that truthfulness is one of the three components, but not the only component. As I mentioned in part ii, our political, religious, o r philosophical enemies may tell the truth, but because we do not have philosophical (religious, political, etc.) agreement with them and because they do not have our respect, we may not recognize that truth when it is expressed.

And often, when we are in philosophical agreement with someone and when that someone already has our respect, we may well assume that that someone is telling the truth without feeling the need to check into it.

In other words, our prejudices in terms of philosophy (religion and politics as well) may preclude us from recognizing truth, because our trust is based not in truth alone, but also in agreement with others and in our already established respect for others.

Ideology and truth — related or not?

Ideologies are not inherently dangerous or evil (though some ideologies are both). Ideologies are inherent and necessary in politics and often also in religion. I could discuss a variety of ideologies, some of which are decidedly evil, Nazism, and some of which could be debated as to whether they are or are not evil (political ideologies). We can discuss that more in the section on ‘the good’.

In this part, I want to address truth as it relates to one particular ideology, namely religion.

Religion (and in particular Christianity, which I am most familiar with and certainly a strong adherent to) propose a re-evaluation of our values, a new way of thinking about what is valuable in life. For example, ‚inverted thinking‘ is a part of Christianity: the first shall be last, the younger son inherits instead of the older, the poor shall inherit the earth, life comes through death, if a man takes your coat, give him your cloak, love your enemies …the list goes on. This kind of talk is foolishness to most of the world, which values money, security, and power, a world that strives to ignore death and defy disease and suffering, a world that medicates unhappiness or failure, a world where feeling good is the ultimate good.

In the passage from John which I quoted last time. Christ says that he bears witness to the Truth (and part of that Truth are the dichotomies I listed above). In another passage, Christ says that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Clearly within Christianity and its text, the Bible, Christ and God Himself is the Truth.
We do not say that Christ is „true“, we say that Christ is the „truth“. If Christ was merely „true“, we would have to ask, according to which standard? That implies that there is an entity higher and more important than Christ. By saying that he is „the Truth“, he has been proclaimed the standard.

In the sense of ‚turn the other cheek‘, ‚love your neighbor‘, ‚life comes through dying to self, being buried in baptism and born again in Christ‘, Christianity proclaims a message that is ideological in nature. And in its ideology, it proclaims its very direct relationship to ‚the truth‘, namely that Christianity itself is THE TRUTH.

Deeper truths — life truths — where do we look?

My suggestions for this section are going to be one-sided, given that we are ‘Classical Writing’ and obviously our suggestion is going to be that you pursue the classics.

I would tremble and shy away from having a claim on where to look for all of life’s truths. There is much between heaven and earth that I am little familiar with and ill qualified to speak on. But in general, when we speak of looking for the true, the good, and the beautiful, –and in this part looking for truth—a great place to start is with the sages of the world, the enduring canonical works of the western canon. (This is not to say that there is nothing to look at in the eastern ‘canon’… if such a critter exists. I have much respect for Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism for their human wisdom and also as sources that help us understand the cultures of the far East.) The compelling reason to start with the western canon in our search for truth is the Socratic imperative to “Know Thyself”. Let us start with our own culture and understand who we are and why we are the way we are, warts and all.

No book has been more influential on the western traditions than the Bible itself. It is a good place to start, a great place to read and study. Whether you are Christian or not, the Bible is foundational for the western intellectual tradition and well worth knowing and understanding.

Might I suggest reading aloud with your family. Start small in the younger grades with retellings of the classics at a level that your students can enjoy. My family, which is all grown now, crowned our final homeschooling days with (in addition to the Bible) Plato’s Republic, Morte D’Arthur, and Dickens’ Bleak House. The truth you find in those tomes requires digging, thinking, and discussion. There is no better way to spend time with your growing teens than to enjoy literature and the deep thoughts it provokes.

Suggested further reading and viewing

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-11-07-lillegard-en.html

Discussion of ideology and truth and wisdom

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=4620

Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=370

Foundations of Western Civilization

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=2120

Western Literary Canon in Context

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080106810X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=classicalscholar_homeschoolbooks_babies-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399377&creativeASIN=080106810X

Invitation to the Classics

TRUTH

Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. 38Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all. John 18:37

“What is truth?” Pilate asks. Is the question a genuine question? I.e. is Pilate really wondering what Jesus means? Pilate leaves Jesus and walks out to the crowd and tells them that he finds no fault in Jesus, so he seems to have understood something. Or has he?

My mini-series here is about the true and the good and the beautiful, the three classical ideals that a classical education seeks to both discover and emulate. What does it mean that something or someone is true? (or good, or beautiful). What is truth, what is goodness, what is beauty?

It is part of the classical Greek tradition to not so much give pat answers to these questions, but to hint at where answers may be sought. Clearly, in the classical tradition we need to look in the canon of books handed down to us by those who came before us. Over 3000 years of history, of literary exertions, of political decisions, of war and peace, we will find that which is true, that which is beautiful, and that which is good. Is there a way to teach this? Or a way to guide this inquiry?

Socrates rarely gave answers. He asked questions. He prodded and pried into stock definitions.
Was this because he thought the student would be better off finding the answer for himself? Partially, yes. A brief answer about the nature of truth is of limited value. My own quest for truth—a long arduous journey–I can internalize and live by. Someone else’s catechesis for the nature of truth may never penetrate me the same way.

Truth is not a simple concept to define. Truth is something we seek after our entire lives, and as we find glimmers of it, we may revise our understanding of what it is. Read Socrates’ Cave Allegory in Plato’s Republic, Book 7 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497 . Truth is complicated. It requires patience, wisdom, and humility to attain.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Cor 13:12

But before we get too fuzzy around the edges, let’s not forget that some truth really IS simple. Let us look at simple truths for a moment establish at the most basic level what truth is.

Did I or did I not tell the truth? Well, the instructor asked me if I had seen this test before. I answered that I had not, and he gave me the test in the good faith that I had not seen it before. But that was not true. A friend had shown it to me, and I had studied it extensively. In other words, I did not tell the truth to the instructor. I lied.

In the above example, we all agree that there is a clear way to tell the truth and a clear way to not tell the truth. When asked ‘what is truth?’, relative to my little story, none of us disagree. Furthermore, none of us disagree (I hope) that that basic level of truth telling is something we hope to instill in our children when they are little. It is the foundation for continuing to be truthful as adults… when truth gets more complicated, and selfinterest and blindness sets in for all of us.

“Mr. Brown, have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or no?” … “No, Mr. Brown, you cannot evade the question. I want a simple yes or no!”

If Mr. Brown has never ever beaten his wife, he cannot answer the question because the question implies consent to the assertion of violence in the past. The truth of this matter is more complicated, not frightfully more complicated, but complicated enough that binary answers will not suffice.

Often questions involving truth are questions that canNOT be answered unequivocally with a yes, or a no. An answer needs to be qualified with additional information to make sense… or even to be truthful.

Often words alone are not enough to express truth convincingly to other human beings.

I may express truth and nobody may believe me.

Or I may not tell the truth at all, and yet, everyone may think I do.

Truth is embodied not just in the words themselves, but also in my own person, in what is known about my life and my character, as well as in what character I establish on the spot as I address my audience. It is embodied in my eyes, in how they look at people, in the way I stand, and in the very spirit that emanates from my body during my interaction with the people in my vicinity. And it is embodied in the angle I take on the subject… my point of view, limited, narrow, weak, and at times uninformed as it may be. I am not omniscient, and even when I think I tell the truth, I may be mistaken. Or I may be partially right about part of my subject, and partially wrong about another part of my subject.

We expect truth from people and sources we already trust. And so we tend to believe those people.

We expect non-truth from people and sources we do not trust, almost no matter what those people and sources say.

In the following blogs, I will continue along the lines of

1. On what is our trust based?
2. How do we interpret the sources we trust?
3. Truth and trust – related? How?
4. Ideology and truth — related or not?
5. Deeper truths — life truths — where do we look?

This morning I sat down to write a blog discussing the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. My thought was that we discuss these concepts so much in classical education circles. We want these ideals for ourselves and for our students, but what are they? How do we find them? Where do we find them? And if and when we do, how can we capture them and pass them on to our students. While immersed in these ethereal thoughts, floating on a little pink cloud of confusion, while reveling in the very confusion itself, my palm slipped over the touchpad of my laptop in such a way that POOF!!! the whole blog disappeared from my page… and no amount of CTRL Z or alt F4 or any other key strokes would recall my words.

It is one thing to write about virtues, it is quite another to possess those self-same qualities. The truth of that hit me particularly hard as my very existence agonized over the work lost… not even that it was that insightful or brilliant, but frankly more that my very structured and (of late) somewhat harried existence had allotted precisely 40 minutes for the blog writing, after which other pressing matters were on my plate: physics lectures for next week’s classes, a professional portfolio due at work, to say nothing of piles of laundry to be folded, a kid or two to engage with, dinner to be cooked, and a Saturday evening Vespers service at church that I had PROMISED myself the luxury of going to this afternoon at 5.

The virtues …where are they to be found… if not in the mundane? Why do I struggle to catch more than glimpses of them in literature and in people more saintly than myself? What is it I need to do to even begin to grasp them… let alone pretend to teach them to my own students (at home and at the university where I teach)?

My goal this fall is to write (however feebly) a series on Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, and I will start where I probably can do the most good, historically by discussing the classical pagan virtues, what they were, how they were conceived of in literature, worship, philosophy and life, and then in another blog address how Christianity ‘altered’ those virtues, or at least how the Christian addition of humility, love, and mercy changed the way ideals were perceived. I will try to discuss both ancient and modern Christian ideals and virtues. And then I hope to follow with a final blog post or two discussing more practically (though meagerly) how to find literature and themes of virtue and how they might be incorporated into our teaching AS WELL AS (even more meagerly, though more importantly) hints and shadows of how we might pursue the virtues in our own lives and how that might reflect in our teaching.

I will end with this today (as I am well over my silly 40 minute limit ) that what has struck me most powerfully is that we often mis-define or equivocate what we mean by the word ‘virtue’.

The ancient Romans meant ‘manliness’. Virtue comes from the word ‘vir’, which means man. So the original meaning of the word we use, virtue, is that it pertained to being like and behaving like a man, which chiefly meant operating from a position of honor and strength, as opposed to ‘womanliness’ which ostensibly operated more from a position of the weaker partner, she who is in need of protection and patronage. I won’t go into the gender issues of this conception till a later blog. Rather let me contrast this with the Victorian understanding of virtue, as best expressed through Jane Austen’s character Mary in Pride and Prejudice. Mary notes (and I am going by memory here) that ‘virtue’ in a female, once lost, is irretrievable.

The meaning of virtue in the Victorian era had changed from the Roman ‘manliness’ to exclusively refer to adherence to sexual norms, and at that, for females only.

How did the shift come about? What caused virtue to move from an issue of manly strength and honor to an issue of female sexual purity?

And with such sliding in words and their meanings… as we attempt to return to the Platonic ideals of pursuing Truth, Goodness, and Beauty … can we hope to find some answers in our quest for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

Finally, as I contemplate my own immature, impatience, and irrational reaction to losing the first blog I wrote, is virtue found in the mundane jam stains on the refrigerator shelves and scratches in shiny new automobile paint?

Or is it to be sought in the sublime mountain top experiences that we are occasionally graced with?

What must be the states of our minds in hopes of detecting her?

Does she flitter about, teasing us, unattainable?

Or is she clear and apparent, if only we could be still enough to perceive her?

This is the third in a series on teaching language arts to early elementary students.

A sleepy three-year-old is carried from the car to his bed in his big brother’s strong arms. Drowsily, he gazes up at the starry host and says “Caleb, did you know that God is a Spirit? He doesn’t have a body like men.” My mother’s heart is flooded with the realization of the enormous impact of our small daily investment in memory work.

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed the philosophy of early preparation for writing which animates our Primer series. In Part 2, I considered the building blocks of writing instruction. First and foremost, reading is the indispensable foundation for writing. Reading to your child should begin early and continue until he or she leaves home, and perhaps even beyond as opportunity arises. Another building block which should be started as early as possible is memory work.

In the earlier days of formal education, memorization was aptly referred to as learning by heart or rote learning. The latter definition carries the idea of habit or routine, and routine is essential to early childhood education. However the so-called “progressive” education reformers of the 20^th century used the phrase rote learning disparagingly, and so it has come to have negative connotations ever since. And perhaps learning by heart is better anyway, because it addresses the main reason memory work is so important to a young child’s education – it does get at the child’s heart. In her memory work resource, The Harp and Laurel Wreath, Laura Berquist says, “The models in one’s imagination and memory become a part of the soul and affect all the rest of life. If the soul holds good, true, beautiful, noble, and heroic images, it will be inclined to love those things.”

Learning to memorize is foundational to academic success. Students must memorize many things from arithmetic facts to timelines to periodic tables to grammar facts to Latin vocabulary words…the list could go on. Young children are masters of memory, and we need to capitalize on that facility while it lasts. Children WILL memorize – it is innate to childhood. It is up to us to give them worthy and useful things to dwell upon, particularly if we do not want to hear endless repetitions of the inane jingles, insipid songs, and unimaginative slogans that pervade our culture. Children may be drawn the silly and the trite, but we can seek to mitigate that influence by filling their brains with noble and true thoughts.

Language development in young children is enhanced by memorization of well-chosen selections. Beautiful language patterns are planted in the mind, and these patterns will eventually influence the natural expressions which come from the lips and eventually the pen. From the time our children could string a few words together, we began to memorize short Bible verses, catechism questions, poems, and prayers. As we parents repeat these things over and over with our children, they become ingrained in our minds and hearts as well.

When our children reached the early elementary years, we began a more formal program of memorizing selected Scripture, poems, speeches, and literary excerpts, along with more challenging catechism questions. Because our family attends a confessional church, our children also pick up our church’s creeds, prayers, and hymns, so we do not have a formal program for that at home. During the years when we were in a non-confessional church, we did memorize creeds, prayers, and hymns at home as well. Over the years, we have developed a list of memory work that every child in our homeschool will learn. Many of those selections are included in the Primers.

Sweet remembrances crowd my mind as I recall some of my favorite poems and speeches our children have memorized. Someday, I hope to publish our memory work notebooks as an encouragement to others. In the meantime, here is a quick sampling of just a few of the poems and speeches:

 *We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union….

A child should always say what’s true…

Up in the air and over the wall, till I can see so wide…

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me…

We hold these truths to be self-evident…

The morns are meeker than they were, the nuts are getting brown…

All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe…

Scots, wha’ hae wi’ Wallace bled…

In the elder days of Art, builders wrought with greatest care…

Then outspake brave Horatio…

Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace– but there is no peace. The war is actually begun!…

There is no frigate like a book…

The Goops they lick their fingers, and the Goops they lick their knives…

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold…

For in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see…

Little Lamb, who made thee?…

Tyger, tyger, burning bright…

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me thine ears…

I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep…

and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth…

I hope to see my Pilot face to face when I have crossed the bar.

Although there are many things I wish I had the chance to do over in parenting and teaching my children, memorization is one thing we got right, and I am grateful. Because we valued and prioritized memory work, many good, true, and beautiful thoughts (along with some that are just plain fun) are forever lodged in my children’s brains. I hear the echoes in their spoken words, and I see the influence in their written words. As with many things in parenting and teaching, consistency is key. We built a very large repertoire by just spending a few minutes each day memorizing and reviewing. Truly, “little drops of water, little grains of sand” have created a “pleasant land” in the minds and hearts of my children. (Little Things, by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer).

Years ago, I wrote this in my commonplace book as I was reading The Daisy Chain, by Charlotte Yonge:

Shocked and saddened by the “Ladies’ Committee” decision to “leave off reading the Prayer-book prayers morning and evening!” at the neighborhood school, Ethel, the awkward but deep-thinking heroine, laments:

“And it is much to be expected that next they will attack all learning by heart…If they don’t learn them (the Psalms – the Gospels – these links to the church) by rote when they have strong memories…they will not know them well enough to understand them when they are old enough!…memory and association come before comprehension, so that one ought to know all good things…with familiarity before one can understand, because understanding does not make one love. Oh! One does that before, and when the first little gleam, little bit of a sparklet of the meaning does come, then it is so valuable and so delightful.”

Her older brother, Richard, agrees with her,

“…these lessons and holy words were to be impressed on us here from infancy on earth, that we might be always unraveling their meaning, and learn it fully at last…”

“Memory and association precede comprehension.” Even the very youngest of children are capable of memorizing great thoughts and truths, though it may be years and years before they can even begin to comprehend the meaning of them. That is what I realized when my young son murmured his sleepy catechism. And I expect he (and I) will be unraveling that great truth for a lifetime, along with many other great and beautiful truths that we have memorized.

*Selections from: Preamble to the Constitution; “The Whole Duty of Children”, “The Swing”, and “My Shadow” by Robert Louis Stevenson; Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, “Autumn”, by Emily Dickinson; “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll; “Bannockburn” by Robert Burns; “The Builders” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; “Horatius at the Bridge” by Thomas Babington Macaulay; Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech; “A Book” by Emily Dickinson; “The Goops” by Gellett Burgess; “Destruction of Sennacherib” by George Gordon, Lord Byron; from Early History of Rome by Livy;  “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” by William Blake; “Julius Caesar” by Shakespeare;  “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost; “Gettysburg Address” by Abraham Lincoln; “Crossing the Bar” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

This is the second in a series on teaching language arts to early elementary students.

At Classical Writing, we are often asked at what age instruction in writing should begin. My answer may startle some. When it comes to teaching children to write well, you cannot begin too soon. If possible, begin when they are infants.

Too young, you say?   Not if you consider that all writing actually begins before the act of putting pen to paper. I am certainly not advocating teaching your one-year old to read, or giving your two-year old a course in sentence diagramming. No, I am speaking of the things you can do long before you begin the necessary work of teaching your child the ABCs and the rules of spelling and grammar. First, you must give attention to what I call the soul-building stuff: filling their hearts and minds with the good, the true, and the beautiful. Then, when they actually do begin to write, they are more likely to have something worth saying.

In my view, there are six building blocks of preparing young children to be excellent writers. Here they are, in roughly the order they should be introduced:

1. Reading—Aloud and (Eventually) Alone
2. Memory Work
3. Narration
4. Enrichment
5. Copywork
6. Phonics, Spelling, & Grammar

In Part 1 of this series, I related how my philosophy of education for younger students has been shaped in many ways by Charlotte Mason. Anyone who is acquainted with her methods will recognize her influence on this list. Most of the things on this list can and should be begun in the preschool years, and most should continue into the teen years and beyond. For elementary age students, our Primer series provides daily structure, routine, and accountability in using Charlotte Mason’s gentle, but highly effective, methods. These are the building blocks which will prepare younger students for more challenging and rigorous work in later years.

In this post, I want to focus on the first, and perhaps the most important, building block to teaching writing—reading. In every lesson Primer lesson, students are instructed to read, and/or teachers are encouraged to read aloud to the students some selection from a worthy book. Both reading aloud and reading alone deserve a prominent place for students of all ages in your homeschool or classroom.

Reading Aloud

In the Introduction to the Primer books, I wrote:

Read, read, read to your child. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. Take it from a mom of grown children – this is a fleeting opportunity, so treasure the time reading with your child.  And keep reading to your child even as he reaches the teen and young adult years. The ideas, characters, and language in the books you read together will become part of the ‘language’ of your family, and give you countless opportunities for discussion…Horace E. Scudder, the late nineteenth century editor of The Atlantic Monthly and compiler of great literature for children wrote, “There is no academy on earth equal to a mother’s reading to her child.” I could not agree more.

Reading aloud gives students access to ideas they could not comprehend on their own, and exposes them to vocabulary and sentence structures which are way beyond their abilities to employ in their own writing.  They hear words pronounced properly, which can help to counteract the “creative pronunciation” of teen and young adult readers who read a great deal on their own. Reading aloud from the best literature develops the “ear” of the listener. Descriptive vocabulary and beautiful language patterns will be ingrained in the listeners’ minds and will naturally overflow into their own conversation and writing. I remember my utter delight when my very young son told me that he had seen a bunny “scutter” behind the shed, and I realized that he was using Beatrix Potter’s language from our morning reading.

Do not despair if you did not begin this valuable practice with your very young children. It is never too late! Begin today. And do not stop when they learn to read on their own; continue to read aloud as they become teens and young adults. Reading worthy books aloud together in the home or the classroom helps to develop a shared culture of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Reading Alone

As your students read books on their own, they see correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence patterns. This reinforces basic writing skills before students put pen to paper. Reading alone gives students time to think and reflect on ideas that they meet in their reading. Another of my cherished memories is an eight-year-old son, sitting on the porch swing reading John Gunther’s biography of Alexander. He finished the book, closed it, looked at me, and said, “Mom, Alexander the Great was a very foolish man.” The connection was his, and he owned it. It was not the product of a question and answer session focused on great life lessons from literature. It was simply his observation as his mind mulled over the accomplishments and frailties of an important historical figure. My son’s reading was building his soul.

What to Read?

I have always cringed when I hear people say, “It doesn’t matter what my child reads, as long as he reads!” Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as setting healthy eating patterns early in life can create lifelong healthy habits, so the reading tastes your student establish in their early years can help train their appetites for great books in later years.

Here are a few guidelines when choosing books for your students. First of all, look for stories that point you to the good, the true, and the beautiful. This does not mean your student should only read books that have no villains, no battles, and no scary monsters—in that case, you would have to avoid reading the best of all books, the Bible. In the hands of a skillful author, elements of evil in a story can actually uphold virtue and build souls in the way that flat, one-dimensional stories can never do.

Second, no twaddle!  Do not waste time reading books that are shallow and condescending to children.  Twaddle was Charlotte Mason’s word for books that are insipid, silly, worthless, and trivial. The tendency toward twaddle is rampant in children’s literature. The children’s shelves in bookstores and libraries are overrun with books written by authors who have little regard for the imaginations and intellectual powers of children. Like all other human beings, children are quite susceptible to developing an insatiable hunger for twaddle, so be discerning in your literary choices for your students.

Finally, remember the sage advice of C.S. Lewis: “A book which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s book. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally worth reading at the age of fifty.” As every parent of a toddler knows, the first reading of a particular book will be the first of MANY times. I cannot count the number of times I read Goodnight Moon to my young children. And yet, I never sighed when they handed it to me yet again. On the other hand, I cleared the shelves of certain books very early on out of concern that if I had to read any of those books one more time, violence might ensue. (As a side note, my first purchase as an expectant grandmother was Goodnight Moon.)

For more specific recommendations of books to read to your students, visit the Literature pages of our website. And for some additional thoughts on choosing worthy books for your students, Ambleside Online has a page with articles, links, and  explanations of Charlotte Mason’s ideal of the living book.

Strickland Gillilan’s classic poem “The Reading Mother” has been one of my very favorites for years. It is a standard memory work selection for our homeschool. It has inspired me, as well as given me a list of stories to include in our reading repertoire. I hope that my children (and grandchildren!) will recite this at my funeral:

I had a Mother who read me lays
Of ancient and gallant and golden days;
Stories of Marmion and Ivanhoe,
Which every boy has a right to know.

I had a Mother who read me tales
Of Gelert the hound of the hills of Wales,
True to his trust till his tragic death,
Faithfulness blent with his final breath.

I had a Mother who read me the things
That wholesome life to the boy heart brings –
Stories that stir with an upward touch,
Oh, that each Mother of boys were such!

You may have tangible wealth untold;
Chests of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I, you can never be –
For I had a Mother who read to me.

This is the first in a series on teaching language arts to early elementary students.

When I was expecting my first child, who turned out to be children (twins!), I heard a radio program about homeschooling. My husband and I were immediately convinced— we would certainly home educate our children. My husband never wavered in that conviction, but when we hit the toddler years, my conviction was severely shaken. How could I ever teach these children to read, since I clearly couldn’t even teach them to use the potty and tie their shoes? But here we are, with eighteen years of homeschooling under our belts, and with three graduated, two in high school, and one in junior high. I am happy to report they are all potty-trained, shoe-tying readers. And they are all pretty nifty human beings too.

A couple of years after those harrowing toddler-twin years, a friend dragged me to a home school convention, and in God’s good providence I happened upon For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay. Here, I was introduced to Charlotte Mason, the education reformer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I was immediately attracted to her ideas, having been primed throughout my teen and early adult years by repeated readings of Lucy Maude Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series. If you don’t know what I mean, read them for yourself! Anne is fabulous teacher/mother inspiration.

The following year, armed with Charlotte Mason’s ideas, we began our home educating journey and to my surprise and delight, my children and I thrived. We read aloud, studied artists, read aloud, studied composers, read aloud, went on nature walks, read aloud… I think you get the picture.

I will quickly skip over the occasional times and seasons where my fears and feelings of inadequacy for the overwhelming thought of being completely responsible for our children’s education gained the upper hand, and I decided we needed to get SERIOUS about school and do more (busy) work. This always led to a crash and burn situation, followed by several weeks just reading aloud on the sofa in order to recuperate.

Through the years, I have continued to use many of Charlotte Mason’s methods for my elementary age children. The Classical Writing Primer series is based on her principles and methods, along with a few other things I have learned along the way. All of the ideas in the Primers have been field tested with my five sons and one daughter. They constitute what I have found to be the very best foundation in language arts to prepare students for a rigorous classical education.

The format of the Primers is my attempt to meet own need for daily structure, routine, and accountability. I wanted to write these books before my youngest child outgrew the need for them—and I did, though just barely.

Over the next week or two, I plan to write a few blog posts with ideas to help you implement some of these gentle methods in your home school. But for now, I thought you might enjoy seeing this:

“On my list of maladaptive practices that make writing harder, Not Outlining is pretty high–just above Typing With Scratchy Wool Mittens, and just below Training My Dog to Take Dictation. Outlining is writing, not a prelude to “real writing.” Writers who complain about “writer’s block” are writers who don’t outline. After trying to write blindly, they feel frustated and complain about how hard it is to generate words. No surprise–you can’t write an article if you don’t know what to write.”

This short passage was taken from “How to Write a Lot, a Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing” by Paul J. Silva. American Psychological Association, 2007 ISBN 978-1-4338-0481-6, electronic version.

Lene Jaqua