The 1936 Classical Bulletin has a short piece about EFL's elementary Latin approach, by Fr. Frank Moellering SJ of Cleveland. It's a bit blurry, but you should be able to view it here. The same page has a review by Fr. Henle of Sister Mary Immaculate's Latin booklets, which were published by the diocesan teachers' college in Toledo. It's not clear which institution, if any, might have archives of the Toledo elementary Latin program - diocese, parochial schools, whatever became of the now-defunct college? Maybe one of us can look into this at some point, as it seems likely that they were influenced by EFL. Several years into these threads, and AFAIK none of us has even seen the "Orbis Vivus." We have access to more online resources than we had even in 2013, but the Internet certainly has its limits.

I'm trying to build up a collection of links to religiously themed Lent and Easter printables in foreign languages. For instance, this could include worksheets, copywork, games, or coloring pages with text. These could be in any language, ancient or modern. Thank you for any suggestions! ETA: I've found Spanish coloring pages by searching for "dibujos" along with "cuaresma" (Lent), "semana santa" (Holy Week), or "pascua cristiana." Still looking for other types of materials.

FYI, I found part of the 1924 Classical Investigation Report on Google Books, by searching for "Classical Investigation" and "American Classical League." I haven't read it, and don't know if it would be of any practical use, given Father Donnelly's comments. I suppose it might give some idea of what not to do. In chapter 4 of PJEP, Father Donnelly describes the traditional curriculum in terms of the modern educational structure: High school - 4 years - Composition; emphasis is on correctness. Careful selection of authors also develops an implicit understanding of style, which builds up to the college course. Early College - 2 years - Criticism; explicit emphasis on style, with one year focusing on beautiful style & one year on forceful style Later College and University (i.e., graduate study) - Science This adds up to six years for the literary course, which is on the short side in comparison with other systems. I wonder if he thought they could do justice to Latin and Greek in that length of time. Father Henle's simplified, abbreviated Latin curriculum was published a few years after PJEP, and Fathers Schoder and Horrigan wrote their intensive Homeric Greek course shortly after that. I find it hard to imagine large numbers of students going from these books, to studying Cicero and Demosthenes in the original in their second year of college. Of course, the above is more of a historical question than a practical one, as this sort of college curriculum no longer exists. But it would be interesting to know if it ever did work, even if only within a limited group. Getting back to the present day, homeschoolers would have some flexibility with the schedule. It seems as if there are there are several ways of going about it. One approach would be to shift the curriculum a few years, and aim to finish both "college" and the first part of "university" in high school. For instance, we've discussed the idea of starting the secondary curriculum at age 11, studying rhetoric at 16 and science at 17, then applying to university in the usual way. This is theoretically possible, but it raises practical questions about applying to college with all of the science credits taken in senior year. It's also hard to know in advance how a given child would do with all of those courses stuck into one year. I think it would be more prudent to have two "science years." This would also give the student more time to work on research skills and academic writing, and would allow for some electives. Of course, this would require either starting at 10, or graduating at 18. While starting at around age 10-11 is traditional, we might have to rethink the materials for composition and rhetoric. It seems to me that we can't rely on using Model English, as written, with most children of that age, and I also have some doubts about using Persuasive Speech at age 16. So, then what? I think we'd need a new plan, with different materials, and unfortunately Father Donnelly isn't here to provide suggestions. I actually wonder if Father Coppens' books might not be more practical. They were definitely used with younger students, in the old system. Are Father Donnelly's books much more traditional, or are their advantages more just that they're tailored for the modern 4+4 sequence? Another way of arranging things would be to do the classical curriculum at home, then "dual-enroll" for the science year(s), putting together a natural science and philosophy curriculum a la carte from local and online college courses, with additional home-based study as desired. I have no idea what effect this sort of patchwork would have on college admissions, but it seems like a simple enough option for the natural sciences. It's much harder to find philosophy courses that are even somewhat appropriate, but I think CUA and Steubenville might have some available online. A third, more expensive possibility would be to do some of the classical language studies through a college, for credit, and then read Father Donnelly's Cicero and Demosthenes books, along with the other rhetoric materials, as independent study. Of course, all of the above could be combined in various ways. But just writing down these possibilities is making my brain tired enough for now.

In The Imaginative Conservative, E. Christian Kopff goes even farther than Thomas Fleming. It wasn't Dewey who killed classical education; it was those pesky hippies! "After the Civil War, [Carl J.] Richard writes, 'the classics began a gradual decline due to social, economic, and intellectual forces.' I would argue that the decline was very gradual until the cultural catastrophe of the 1960s. (...) In 1900 and 1910 one-half of public high school students were enrolled in Latin classes. As recently as 1962 there were 728,637 students of high school Latin." This argument ignores the fact that Greek enrollments had plummeted to single digits by 1900, and kept on falling, prompting Father Donnelly's famous 1919 article, "Is the Ostracism of Greek Practicable?" Another significant fact is that, by the 1920s, most Latin students only studied the language for two years, often with teachers who also had minimal Latin background. Given the context of the article - a review of a book on the cultural importance of classics in antebellum America - he makes it seem as if substantial numbers of Americans were going around citing Vergil in everyday conversation until 1963. This is actually very funny, because when I think of public references to the classics in the 1960s, I picture RFK first, and then Ramparts. Ramparts, which came to epitomize the turmoil of those years ("a bomb in every issue"), started out as a mild-mannered lay Catholic literary magazine that printed, among other things, Greek poetry in translation. Then the editors decided to run a series that criticized Jesuit universities for neglecting humanistic education in favor of commercial degrees. They reached out to the Jesuits to get their point of view, but were rebuffed. This seems to have been the first step in the magazine's radicalization. Even if we just consider the non-classically-minded campus protesters of that era, I've always had the impression that they were mainly upset about education (and society) being sold out to business interests. Looking at the history of classical education in the last 200 years, it does seem that this is largely what happened. The token amount of Latin in the mid-century high school curriculum looks similar to the current state of the language in neo-classical schools and homeschools. These systems have been around for a generation now, which should be long enough to see some results. Anecdotally, I know quite a few Catholic adults who have been "neo-classically" educated via some form of Sayers/Great Books in translation, and none of them are in the habit of referring to Cicero, Vergil, Aeschylus, or Homer. (They are, however, quite likely to mention Tolkien - whose writings, so I'm told, were very popular with long-haired, granola-eating types in the 1970s. ) RFK went to elite boys' prep schools, but seems to have developed an interest in Greek literature thanks to Jacqueline Kennedy, who gave him a copy of Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way that she'd read many times. Hamilton was the head of a girls' school, and had a Master's in Classics. According to Wikipedia, she went for further study in Germany (to the extent that women were allowed to in those days), but was put off by the dryness of their approach to the texts. In her own writings, she not only tried to share the Greeks' ideas, but also emulated their style. It's also worth noting that, in the 20th century public high schools, the majority of Latin students were girls. By 1910, more girls than boys were studying Latin even in the private schools. This seems to go against the suggestion, which I've seen among some fans of Kopff's writing, that the decline of the classics was closely linked to the "feminization" of education. I think Father Donnelly might have connected it more with "dehumanization."

Here's an observation from So Little For the Mind, by the Canadian historian Hilda Neatby. She was writing about Dewey-inspired progressives and social reconstructionists, who often spoke of believing in the students' ability to solve problems for themselves. "Why do they not open to all, as far as they are able, the best of our civilization in literature, science, mathematics, history, art, and then 'have faith' that they, like their predecessors, will build on that foundation? The faith of our experts is not faith in the ability of all to solve problems but the reverse. The material which would enable the individual to work out his own salvation is practically withheld in order that he may be more receptive to the ready made solutions that are handed out." This seems much like something EFL might have said. And, like EFL, she was accused of all sorts of psychological and personality defects: "My Small War With the Educators" (Maclean's Magazine, 1954)

I had the same thought about studying tweets and memes a while back. I think the more idiosyncratic ones would be in the same category as Carl Sandburg's writing, and modern poetry generally. I do informally point out the better aspects of these sorts of things to my older teens, but I think it's all kinds of wrong to use them as models for student writing. When I was in elementary and high school, we did have to imitate some specific examples of modern poetry, and it just seemed like busywork. That said, if ancient or Renaissance educators saw a tweet that they found particularly inspiring, persuasive, or informative, they would probably seize upon it. They might have the students copy it into a commonplace book, or put it into a compilation for them to use as a reference in preparing their compositions. (Did the Jesuits make much use of these sorts of books? I can't find any references, but it seems as if they must have.) Blog posts tend to be like very short essays, and some schools teach them as such. They don't seem to teach about blog comments, though, which are arguably equally important. Forum posts and e-mails would come under epistolary rhetoric, which has taken various forms in the curriculum over the years. I plan to teach it, but I'm not sure what approach is best. There's quite a jump between the basic "friendly letter" and "business letter" that are still covered in school textbooks, and the letters of Cicero. It seems to me that if we teach "letter, essay, and speech" in a formal way (including examples of narration and description), and discuss interesting examples of other types of discourse, we should be okay. ETA: I was just talking with DH about the current state of conservative advocacy for Classics. Thomas Fleming's name came up, and I ended up looking back at two articles he reposted last December (part 1, part 2), which are an expanded version of an essay that I tried to learn from years ago. He's aware of the traditional imitation-based curriculum, but says it's ridiculous to try to restore the trivium or the methods of Quintilian (my goodness, what else were Catholic educators doing in the Renaissance?). He also implies that K-12 education was in pretty good shape until the period between WWI and WWII, and blames its downfall on Dewey, not even mentioning the changes that happened in the 19th century. So it's not just a neo-classical narrative, but also, oddly enough, one that's coming from some who put a high value on Latin and Greek.

It wasn’t the instructional method itself that was the problem. We weren’t even doing much of that from ages 1-3. It’s just that there wasn’t much advice in Montessori sources about discipline in the early years, or at least none that made sense to me. At the time, I read everything I could find, both from MM and various AMI-trained infant/toddler specialists. MM spoke mostly in generalities, and the other books tended to be heavily materialistic, as if setting up the environment were the key to everything. I needed another advice-giver (or several) to fill in the blanks, but couldn’t find one. Either they were mothers or “child discipline experts” who didn’t think much of Montessori, or they were Montessorians who were vague on the subject of obedience. As an example of the latter, see this video, where one tiny child has two parents devoted to facilitating the perfect Montessori toddlerhood. (We have the full version. It’s all like that. 😂)

This is very interesting; thank you for mentioning Bain. Ironically, I think my earnest attempts to follow Montessori as a new mother might have got in the way of teaching obedience. As a 20th century North American who'd grown up amid shifting and unclear norms for family and social life, I didn't really have a firm base to work from, and took her ideas of the prepared environment and self-direction to be the starting point. But Maria Montessori, as an educated and cultured 19th century Italian, saw obedience and civility as a non-negotiable basis for human activity. Since this was so much a part of her thinking, she rarely talked about it. According to various biographies, she realized over time that many people, especially Americans, were misunderstanding this. In 1920, Sheila Radice, the editor of the Times Educational Supplement, wrote a very interesting book on Montessori which I'm reading now. She addresses this point of underlying values at much greater length than I've seen elsewhere. The New Children: Talks With Dr. Maria Montessori

That's interesting. I was just coming back to say that, after taking another look, they seem a lot more sensationalist than I remember (it's been a few years since I followed them much). They seem to be at least giving lip service to being "balanced," but they're focusing much more on hot-button issues. This is disappointing.

I was going to mention RealClearPolitics, and I'm glad to see it showed up in the chart above. They're a news aggregator that seems to have a pretty good range of articles. Their specialized services, including RealClearEducation, are interesting as well. Sites like these might not appeal to the OP's relatives, but since they cover a lot of stories that are often neglected in the overall din, I wonder if they might be a good resource for learning about current events topics that might bridge the gap. In other words, when the person starts going on about X, one might say: "Oh, hmm. And did you hear about 'Y'? I was really surprised to hear that." So if the relative has some desire for drama or outrage (which seems to be the case for a lot of people), they get an opportunity to satisfy that to some extent, without the polarization. Just a thought!

I think he must be using "college" as it was commonly used in throughout US Protestant history, to mean an institution (or part of an institution) offering a four-year undergraduate program. By the 1930s, American Catholics had long since switched over to that model as well, but the Jesuits called their upper-level institutions "universities." So you had Fordham Prep and Fordham University. It makes sense that they chose the name "university," as graduate education was becoming more important at the time. In addition to the skepticism the Jesuits had faced from non-Catholic arbiters of higher education, they had been involved in a long-term dispute with CUA, which (as a national, papal institution) thought it should be the only Catholic graduate school in the country. Having prevailed, they were keen to defend their status. But it makes things even more confusing, because the first two years of the Jesuit undergraduate university curriculum were supposed to be taught using "college methods." As for the terminology in other countries, it's consistently inconsistent. I think part of this has to do with the fact that much of it goes back to medieval education, which was structured differently from the post-Renaissance kind. For instance, as Greek and rhetoric weren't required subjects, boys in the Middle Ages would go from "grammar school" right into the universities. Even later after the addition of more classical literary studies, UK students would still go from grammar school to university. And going to university in the UK also might involve joining a college, which, into the 20th century, still used "college methods." In mid-1800s US public schools, the "grammar grades" were grade 5-8; this corresponds to the traditional age for the first stage of the classical curriculum. (The French decided to call this stage "college." ). By 1900, though, "grammar grades" referred only to grades 7-8. I think what Father Donnelly calls "high school methods" are meant to apply to the first four years (or so) of the classical curriculum, even if it's started younger than age 14. We definitely could use better terms. It's amazing how much the language obscures things.

It's been months since I started attempting to write about Perceptual Control Theory (aka PCT) in the context of EFL's educational advice, and I don't think waiting longer is going to make my efforts much better. So here goes. Perceptual Control Theory is a model of human behavior that's supposed to supersede the established models of behaviorism and cognitive psychology. It was developed in the 1970s by William T. Powers, and is based on cybernetics, which is the study of control in both living and non-living systems. The theory takes some time to get one's head around, and I can't do it justice here. Powers' own books are currently hard to find, but either the Wikipedia article or this PDF overview would provide a fairly good introduction. (Please feel free to skip any parts that seem overly technical.) This page also has a flowchart diagram that might be helpful. And here's a video of the "rubber band demonstration" that's often used as an illustration. Let me know if you have questions after reading/watching any of those, and I'll try to answer. I think PCT makes a lot of sense, and people have tried applying it to diverse fields with very interesting results. One very big limitation, though, is that its adherents haven't really explored the social aspect of learning. Perceptual Control Theory says that we can't control others' behavior; we can only try to influence them in ways that might make them more likely to change their internal reference models (what they're "controlling for," in PCT terms). One writer, Hugh Petrie, points out that a good teacher is controlling for actual learning on the part of the student, and makes adjustments to his teaching based on his perceptions of the student's learning. This seems reasonable, as far as it goes. But one of the ideas in PCT is that the the changing of internal reference models (aka "reorganization") is a random trial-and-error process, in which the individual unconsciously goes through a lot of options until he finds the one that best resolves the situation. To me, in many types of relationships - parent-child, adolescent peer-peer, master-apprentice, boot camp - there seems to be something much more direct going on. At times, one person appears to be doing much of the controlling for both people. More precisely, it seems that the follower is in some sort of special state where he's "controlling for" the same things that the leader is "controlling for." This reminds me of something EFL wrote about in reference to the very young child. She said that because his will is undeveloped, we have to substitute our own will in its place. Maria Montessori also wrote at length about the development of the child's will, and my impression is that this aspect is often misrepresented in modern accounts of her thinking. I'll post some references about this separately. Getting back to PCT, the application that interests me most is Ed Ford's. He was a social worker who did counseling, wrote self-help books, and developed a system of discipline for schools. After looking into his ideas, I discovered that he was also a Catholic father of eight, who seems to have had very good relationships with his wife and children. Before getting into PCT, he worked as a teacher, then as a counselor using William Glasser's Choice Theory. He also saw connections between PCT and the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas. So his advice was most likely influenced by various aspects of his background. Ed Ford believed that that his approach was still fully in line with PCT, and I think this might be true, but a few people in PCT circles (which tend to skew rather secular and individualistic) saw him as a closet authoritarian who was out to control children. Like Maria Montessori, he was in a hard-to-pigeonhole space. He was often considered too child-centered by educational conservatives, and too strict by progressives. I haven't found any online articles that get into his advice for parents, but here are a couple about his system of school discipline, which is called the Responsible Thinking Process. (He also created the diagram I linked above.) Where Lasting Change Takes Place in Individuals The Idea Behind the RTC He suggested that the basic ideas of RTP would also work in the home, but I find it difficult to see how it would work in a homeschool setting. RTP assumes that the school has a dedicated classroom (the RTC), with a teacher to act as supervisor and counselor. The child is only required to go there during the classes where he or she has been disruptive. The process also isn't meant to deal with problems that aren't disruptive in a classroom context, such as the child forgetting his books or not doing an assignment. So far, I've been trying to take some basic ideas from RTP, modify them to work in the home, and combine them with the advice on family life from his general self-help book Freedom From Stress. One of the most important recommendations in both books is "quality time;" this phrase makes me cringe as a child of the 1980s, but the underlying idea makes sense. He said that shared work and active recreation (walks, sports, board games, etc.) were the best ways to build bonds between people. In PCT terms, these activities seemed to help them to reorganize their control systems in compatible ways. In his experience, "just talking" or "just being together" didn't accomplish this, nor did passive or consumption-oriented activities such as driving or watching TV. In one of his books from the early 80s (which might have been before he got into PCT), he expressed opposition to TV not so much because of the content, but because of his belief that it was destroying children's social skills by replacing traditional, more active pursuits. An essential part of Ed Ford's advice, then, was for the parent to spend daily 1:1 time - ideally, at least half an hour - doing something actively with each child. This, in itself, has been hugely valuable. And challenging! It turns out that a lot of my time spent interacting with the children has been in groups (e.g. "pitching-in" chores), or passive (e.g. driving in the car), or both (e.g. mealtimes). But insofar as I've been able to follow it, it does seem to make a big difference. I'd better stop there; this is getting very long. Please jump in if you'd like me to explain more about any of the above ideas, or - especially - if you'd like to discuss ways in which they seem to relate to EFL's advice.

Several reviews say that there are many errors in the book, some of them serious. If this is the case, do you know if there's an errata sheet? I for one wouldn't be able to identify them reliably.

Also wanted to add that the SAT Subject Tests (formerly called SAT IIs) have just been discontinued. This is unfortunate, as some homeschoolers found them very helpful to validate DIY-ish high school studies. I had been planning on having my older children take several, including the Latin exam. CLEP doesn't offer Latin, and AP Latin (like AP exams generally) is designed around a specific course of study, which doesn't have a lot of overlap with the goals we're discussing here. If AP and/or DE become de facto college entrance requirements -- and there are some signs that things are heading that way -- it's going to be increasingly difficult even for homeschoolers to avoid "university methods" during high school. ETA: link to thread on high school board

Of course, this loses the "finely graded" aspect of the curriculum. The usual approach would be to read through Model English I -> Model English II -> Persuasive Speech. I'm just not sure I have the stamina to do those books separately with each child, let alone to teach them other literature as well. And I don't think the literature selections in those three books are enough for high school, even with some assigned reading on the side.

Although things have been a bit nerve-wracking around here recently, I'm feeling a lot more positive about our prospects for doing something Father Donnelly-ish, at least on the vernacular side. Over Christmas, I shelved my elaborate high school English plans (based on adapting a rather dry modern curriculum), and we just read classic literature aloud with occasional discussion. I think the children were learning just as much with this simple approach as they were before, and I plan to stay with it. To maximize the return on our investment, I'm going to try to choose the most foundational older works, including a few classical authors in translation. For more recent literature, I think I'll just try to choose a representative selection of works that are interesting and broadening. If we continued doing this, incorporating some attention to points of style and rhetorical techniques, and added some writing assignments, frankly I'd be pretty happy. It would be kind of like Robinson, in some ways, but family-style. For the precepts of rhetoric, I'm undecided as to whether to stick with Father Donnelly, or use something shorter. We have The Essential Guide to Rhetoric by Lundberg and Keith [edited to fix info, sorry], which looks as if it might work, though it's rather expensive for what's basically a large booklet. I suppose we could also just print something from the Internet. For the precepts of style, I really have no idea what's a good resource. It doesn't help that the whole idea of aesthetic standards (i.e., "good style") is almost completely absent in education today. [ETA: And when it is present, it's usually very different from the ideals of traditional classical education.] Until I figure this out some more, I'll just continue to read a few bits of literary criticism about each work we're studying. Fortunately, the Internet makes this sort of thing quite accessible as well.

Well, that didn't go as planned (either the reading, or the rhetoric). Reality kept colliding with my intentions. Sorry for the delay. I've now read chapters 1 to 3 of PJEP, though, so at least that's something. His comments on p. 15, just before the part quoted above, are thought-provoking. Starting in the early 1800s, American public K-8 education had a heavy German influence, as did the university system. The secondary gymnasium, though, seems to have been more or less ignored in designing the American high school curriculum. And even the elementary system that the Americans copied was meant as the German vocational track (a point that's also been raised more recently by J. T. Gatto). With some teacher training, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to re-introduce the traditional approach into the current European classical system, as it's described in Ester Maria's posts. In the US, though, we have all these added challenges of a bizarre, cobbled-together structure. I'm still a bit confused even about the terminology. When Father Donnelly refers to "college methods," he doesn't seem to be referring to the entire six-year classical college course that was taught in 19th century US Catholic colleges. I think he's using the phrase "high school methods" to refer to the way authors were taught in the earlier part (focusing on grammar), and "college methods" to refer to the way they were taught in the latter part (focusing on style and rhetoric). And when he uses "secondary education," he means the whole thing. Does this sound right?

Both Model English and Persuasive Speech were still being used in the early 1960s, according to Neil M. Whitney of the Scranton Times. He mentioned this in two columns, on March 11 and June 8, 1963. The latter column was quoted in full in the June 13 Congressional Record. (In looking up that reference, I also found a memorial that mentioned that Father Donnelly, as a boy, had read adventure stories and "the Griffen Writings" until a teacher directed him to more serious literature. After some searching, I think this must be referring to the works of Gerald Griffin, a popular Irish writer I'd never heard of until now. Sadlier published his complete works in 10 volumes in the 1840s. I think that all of his books are on archive.org, but the quality is poor due to browning of the paper. For financial reasons, Griffin's parents moved to Pennsylvania with several family members, and left him behind with his older brother in Ireland. I suppose that would have made him especially appealing to Irish-Americans in PA, and perhaps even more so to Father Donnelly himself, who lost his mother at a young age.) Cicero's letters were an especially important part of the traditional curriculum for the intermediate Latin student. During the fictional entrance examination in Cardinal Newman's Idea of a University, the boy translates the beginning of one of the Epistulae ad Familiares. They do seem to be mostly ignored today, and I've never come across them on school lists of "great books." This is ironic, as Petrarch's rediscovery of these letters -- and, through them, the more human side of classical antiquity -- is often pointed to as the start of the Renaissance. Your description of the typical defense of classical education reminds me of the German Bildung, which has come up a bit in past threads. TWTM seems to be close to this ideal, and although I was never explicitly taught it, it's what I understood in my youth as the higher purpose of education (the alternative being studying "to get a job"). I suppose it makes sense that people would gravitate toward this idea, as it's the basis of the modern university system, and has set the tone for the lower levels as well. It's hard for us to really grasp the traditional reasoning behind of the secondary curriculum, even if we've managed to find out a bit about it. I will keep trying to finish the chapter tomorrow!

I’ve taken another look at Persuasive Speech, and the material seems doable for my high schoolers, so I’m going to take the plunge and start it next week. (The English plan we were following in the fall wasn’t very satisfactory.) I’d prefer to have done more of Model English first, but it’s not a requirement, and I think it’s important for us to keep to the overall schedule and not get bogged down. I’m not at all sure about scheduling and other practicalities. Since we’re starting late in the year, and I’ll be learning as I go, I’ll plan on spreading it out over the next 1.5 years. The passages and assignments will give many opportunities for “limited erudition” in history and literature. I think we’ll also continue doing history as a stand-alone subject. Will try to finish chapter 1 of PJEP tonight or tomorrow.

It's hard to say, as the younger ones are still in the elementary years, and I haven't done heavy academics at that stage with either group. It does seem to me that the older ones were more "prodigious" in the early years, in the sense of voluntarily reading stacks of books, memorizing lists of information, and doing various art and writing projects. On the other hand, the younger ones tend to be more sociable and observant, with more common sense, and spend their free time just playing or hanging out. But some of that could be because they have a built-in crowd to socialize with, and more household activities to observe. It does sometimes bother me that my current elementary children don't read as much. They're able to read well for their ages, but they don't have as much general knowledge as their older siblings did at the same age. I'm not sure this is a problem; they seem to have plenty of knowledge of things they've experienced, or that we've read about together, and I'm sure they'll pick more up in the future. But it does have me wondering if perhaps I should be more intentional about the content subjects.

As for what her system looks like five years down the road, I can't say much from my own experience. For one thing, I've only been able to follow her advice to a limited extent. For another, there have been many other changes in our family situation, and it's hard to know what caused what. I've just been reading some of my own EFL posts from five years ago, and was surprised to see that my current challenges are very similar to the ones I was writing about back then. In particular, I don't think my attempts to implement her methods with the older children had much of an effect. This makes sense, as the advice in her books really isn't tailored to them. She acknowledges this, but it took me until last year to accept it. "After my last post, I re-read Understood Betsy. It was a good reminder about the importance of talking less, and being calm and unflappable. But I've noticed that when I'm successful at that, certain other family members tend to make up the difference. Some of them seem to crave drama, and others are just very verbal. It's hard when they all reinforce each other. I tried making uncluttered "quiet spaces" in remote corners of the house, so those of us who have had enough can retreat, but they tend to follow us in there." Alas, this is still happening. I went into relaxation mode over Christmas - went off caffeine, took up reading light fiction, simplified the cooking - and the drama level seemed to go way up! Or maybe I just noticed it more. The younger ones seem to be doing well overall. I do have a few concerns, most of which seem to relate pretty directly to certain children having been outside my direct supervision during certain crucial periods. As all the old-time writers say, it's much harder to fix these things than to prevent them, but sometimes these situations do happen. (EFL says that she herself started developing bad habits as a child, when her mother was busy with seriously ill siblings.) Now, if you wanted to know about the effects that trying EFL's approach has had on me - that, I could write about. Far too much, probably. But I'll spare you. The bare bones of it can be found in these threads. 🙂

Searching archive.org for "course of study" turns up many examples, but they're usually specific to one subject. I guess English would be a good one to start with. Course of Study in English, Public Schools, Rochester, NY, 1914 This one, for parochial schools, was published in one volume, but it's also organized by subject rather than by grade. Course of Study for the Elementary and Grammar Grades, Archdiocese of San Francisco, 1922 Please feel free to post others.

This is just a simple question that I've been wondering about for a while. EFL, as well as many leaders in the public and Catholic schools of her time, believed that an average pupil who was a native English speaker could easily finish grades 1-8 in 6 years. So what I'd like to understand is: What did the typical American 8th grade curriculum look like, circa 1920? How did it differ from current expectations? I've seen some "can you pass this vintage 8th grade exam?" pages, but nothing that gives a thorough list of the subjects and requirements. I'll post information as I find it. Just wanted to open up the question for discussion.

I think this is a very reasonable expectation. Father Donnelly's books were intended to fit into the educational system of the early 20th century, which was itself in a state of transition, with a lot of experiments going on in both English and classical teaching. Our educational system is different. On the one hand, writing pedagogy is even more firmly oriented toward university methods, college admissions are much more competitive, and really competent teachers and tutors for classical languages are hard to find. On the other hand, as homeschoolers, we have more flexibility in some ways, as well as much more access to published and online language resources, some of which are compatible with of Veterum Sapientia (which is really a very Fr. Donnelly-ish document; I find it interesting that it was published just three years after his death). Something that's often overlooked about the Renaissance humanist educators is that they started by educating themselves. From what I've read, they typically first became interested in the mysterious treasures of the classics ("The wisdom of the ancient world, enshrined in Greek and Roman literature, and the truly memorable teaching of ancient peoples," as John XXIII put it). They endured various hardships to obtain some scarce books, and then met in small groups, not to discuss "classical education," but to try to educate themselves. Of course, they were not attempting to homeschool and raise small children at the same time! Maybe what we need, then, are adult study groups that are oriented toward the realities of homeschooling mothers. It would certainly help if we could get women interested in this while their children are still young. If I had diverted part of my Montessori energy toward studying the traditional humanistic curriculum, we'd be on much firmer footing now. But it's not likely to happen without the supportive social aspect. [deleted random/off-topic thoughts]

A few years ago, I had a thorough and reasonable-looking middle and high school plan worked out along the above lines. But then we got into a vicious cycle where I got more and more burned out, and the children became less and less cooperative. And it turns out that one big problem with trying to follow an old-school plan is that (in my case, anyway) there is zero outside support IRL, whether moral or practical. Literally everyone -- from family, to fellow homeschoolers, to professionals -- told me to that the solution to my problems lay in outsourcing, or (if I unaccountably refused to do that) in using materials that were more basic and less demanding. Well, time has shown that this wasn't the case. The children who balked at the traditional methods have gone on to balk at more mainstream ones as well. [...] So I'm having to rethink my rethinking. Maybe the original plan is possible. But maybe it isn't. There you have my paltry thoughts!