Free Republic

These highly skilled parents came together to not just solve their own kids' education needs but offer a high-quality education to families in their glorious Colorado mountain town.Merit Academy of Woodland Park, Colorado, opened on Aug. 23 in a buoyant ceremony featuring American flags and a teenage rider riding a dun horse while waving the school flag. The new public school went from idea to reality in just one year, opening K-8 with plans to grow into high school. As a classical school, it offers a low-screen, high-relationship environment and a focus on creative and critical thinking through careful attention...

Classical education is education; everything else is a modification of the normal. Almost all American educational methods trace their origins to the splendid combination of Athens and Jerusalem. The result of Greek philosophy and Jewish revelation is the incarnation of education in Christendom: fully human and fully divine. There is nothing wrong with modifying a workable system, but good to know the nature of the system one is modifying. You cannot fix the operating system if you do not the language of the program. Here are the basic parameters of all real education. A classical education is Socratic: it begins...

This year will mark the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. His death on April 4, 1968, found my country in the midst of one of its darkest hours, as the one year anniversary of an oppressive military dictatorship neared. With my fellow citizens living under military rule and deprived of the very basic freedoms, I was inspired by the people of Birmingham, Ala., of Memphis and Atlanta, who, in a most dignified way, poured into the streets, standing up for what was rightly theirs. Across the Atlantic, the civil-rights movement reached us in the clarion...

While a "progressive" education highlights perceived societal flaws and teaches what to think, a classical education emphasizes cultural bulwarks and teaches how to think. The Benefits of a Classical Education The New American 25 July 2013 Since the end of the Second World War, and especially since the mid-1960s, America has been deluged with seemingly endless stories of the failure of its educational system. Testing reveals that there exists a significant percentage of high-school graduates who cannot identify the Pacific Ocean on an unlabeled map of the world, who do not know that Abraham Lincoln served as president of...

I wore my high school ring for more than 40 years. --SNIP-- I wore the ring (and will wear it again) because although I have degrees from two Ivy league schools and have taught at U.C. Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Duke, Classical High School (in Providence, RI) is the best and most demanding educational institution I have ever been associated with. The name tells the story. When I attended, offerings and requirements included four years of Latin, three years of French, two years of German, physics, chemistry, biology, algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, English, history, civics, in addition to extra-curricular...

In 1988, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, president of the Modern Language Association, authoritatively stated (as something too obvious to require any evidence) that classic literature was always irrelevant to underprivileged people who were not classically educated. It was, she asserted, an undeniable "fact that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare do not figure significantly in the personal economies of these people, do not perform individual or social functions that gratify their interests, do not have value for them." One should not be too hard on Professor Smith. She was merely echoing what was, at the time, standard academic opinion: that the Western classics...

Students at one of the area's largest Christian schools are reading a controversial booklet that critics say whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves lived "a life of plenty, of simple pleasures." Leaders at Cary Christian School say they are not condoning slavery by using "Southern Slavery, As It Was," a booklet that attempts to provide a biblical justification for slavery and asserts that slaves weren't treated as badly as people think. Principal Larry Stephenson said the school is only exposing students to different ideas, such as how the South justified slavery. He said the booklet is used because...

<p>When children at Marva Collins School misbehave, punishment does not consist of writing sentences on the chalkboard. Instead they find themselves receiving Shakespeare: "Today I will not be what I was" from "Henry IV."</p> <p>When students at the school in Milwaukee receive a test score, they are expected to cite "A Midsummer's Night Dream," exclaiming, "Bless me. I am translated."</p>

A Tocquevillian Perspective on a Charter School’s First Graduating Class One thing we have learned over the last two years at this school is that if you challenge students with meaningful assignments, they will meet and exceed your expectations. Indeed, we adults have often come to realize that these young people are better—more educated, more polished, perhaps even more humane—than we were at that age. The purpose of a classical education, for instance, has always been to make good orators. You have seen that Miss Wilson and Mr. van Maren have indeed become orators—to the extent that they leave their...