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If we want to be a classical school, what should we
teach?
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Since education is the
cultivation of wisdom and virtue, and since wisdom
and virtue are cultivated when a soul is nourished
on truth, goodness, and beauty, we must teach our
children truth, goodness, and beauty.
The wise person understands the
world he lives in (natural science and history) and
has standards by which to distinguish what is
from what ought to be (ethics and politics).
The wise person knows the causes of things, and
therefore is able to order things rightly and to
judge things justly. Wisdom appears at different
levels and in different kinds.
The virtuous person is
disciplined, purposeful, and focused in his thinking
and behavior. In education we cultivate the moral
virtues, the physical virtues, and the intellectual
virtues. By refining all of them, we are enabled to
bring them into a harmony that we can justly call
integrity.
Young people become wise and
virtuous when their souls feed on truth, goodness,
and beauty. The only way a person can perceive
truth, goodness, and beauty is if these virtues are
embodied or incarnated and he is then disciplined in
their imitation. For this reason, the
classical school is careful to use books and
artifacts that embody the true, the good, and the
beautiful. |
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What does this look like in a curriculum?
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Great books and works of art
are those that most explicitly and vividly embody
truth, goodness, and beauty. Therefore a classical
school uses the great books and works of
art that have been handed down to us.
All learning can be said to
develop one of three things: knowledge of content,
understanding of ideas, and mastery of skills. “The
Paideia Plan” refers to these three objectives as “the
three columns” and has shown that each must be
taught differently.
The foundation of all
learning is what Dr. James Taylor has called “poetic
knowledge,” which is a personal kind of
knowledge, not merely a cognitive form of knowing
with the mind. In other words, you will often have
poetic knowledge without being conscious of it.
The foundation of the
curriculum is the seven liberal arts,
which prepare for the classical sciences and for
life.
The seven liberal arts consist
of the three verbal arts of the trivium (grammar,
logic, and rhetoric) and the four
mathematical arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic,
geometry, music or harmonics, and
astronomy).
The classical sciences are the
natural sciences, the humane sciences, the
philosophical sciences, and the theological
sciences.
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How can I get more information on what to teach?
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Do not fear to ask questions.
You cannot learn about classical education without
asking questions.
To learn about the order of
learning, click
HERE.
To discuss what to teach with
other educators, visit the
CiRCE Institute forum.
Visit the
CiRCE Institute Blog.
To learn about CiRCE in-house
teacher training, click
HERE.
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