What makes the classical approach to LA rigorous?

[8filltheheart]

5 minutes ago, xahm said:

Very true. I was giving that as one example of the results I saw. I don't think that all students of the classics would be as arrogant as many of those I saw were, and I think that other types of education that promote themselves as The Best and Most Proper will lead to the same flaw.

Thus made me laugh. Guess every Ivy/elite grad would then fall into that category. 😉

[Little Green Leaves]

26 minutes ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

It begs the question, why 3? And what about incorporating counterpoints that dont support your thesis that need to be acknowledged and addressed?

For a younger student or a struggling student, it can be a simple model for development, but it is far from a good example of academic writing.

FWIW, I think the 5 paragraph essay took root in high school bc of standardized testing. My siblings, my dh, and I were never taught the 5 paragraph essay. 

Why 3 pieces of supporting evidence? It's a form, like any other. Why does a sonnet have 14 lines? 

I agree that it's a very limited form, and I guess it's often taught in a very rigid, reductionist way. But it can be a useful tool when it's taught well. I'm still a little puzzled about why I see it attacked so often. 

 

[maize]

1 hour ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

It begs the question, why 3? And what about incorporating counterpoints that dont support your thesis that need to be acknowledged and addressed?

For a younger student or a struggling student, it can be a simple model for development, but it is far from a good example of academic writing.

FWIW, I think the 5 paragraph essay took root in high school bc of standardized testing. My siblings, my dh, and I were never taught the 5 paragraph essay. 

 

I was taught the five paragraph form in my IB classes in high school. It was definitely used for exam preparation--and honestly it makes for an easy way to structure essays when exams are all in essay form and you don't know the prompt until you get to the exam and you have limited time to work with and have to write multiple essay responses.

I actually think we were taught something similar in France, where exams were also essay form; I don't remember well. It isn't a particularly sophisticated form of writing but it works for organizing information and arguments quickly.

Edited December 22, 2019 by maize

[Xahm]

31 minutes ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

Thus made me laugh. Guess every Ivy/elite grad would then fall into that category. 😉

If someone managed to graduate from Princeton and actually thought that all those who graduated from Yale were idiots, then yes. 

[8filltheheart]

1 minute ago, mms said:

But I think here there would be something to be elitist about?  The problem I've seen with many neo-classical school grads is that they think they possess something which they in fact do not actually possess.

The OP stated, "I don't think that all students of the classics would be as arrogant as many of those I saw were, and I think that other types of education that promote themselves as The Best and Most Proper will lead to the same flaw." What she is describing is a character flaw, not an educational outcome, based on the perception of the quality of education.  

1 hour ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

It begs the question, why 3? And what about incorporating counterpoints that dont support your thesis that need to be acknowledged and addressed?

For a younger student or a struggling student, it can be a simple model for development, but it is far from a good example of academic writing.

FWIW, I think the 5 paragraph essay took root in high school bc of standardized testing. My siblings, my dh, and I were never taught the 5 paragraph essay. 

What part of standardized testing would require the 5 paragraph essay?  My oldest is still in high school so I am probably a bit younger than you, but we did use the five paragraph essay in high school and in the late 80s neither the ACT nor the SAT had a writing section. I guess AP exams would qualify as standardized tests with an essay. My British Lit teacher was probably past retirement age (she taught Paul from Peter, Paul, and Mary in the early 1950s) when I had her in 1989 and she didn’t strike me as the type to be on board with too much new.  I think some of the rationale for three supporting paragraphs comes from making sure you are picking a strong thesis for your paper.  If after reading a novel, if you can’t think of three things to say about your thesis then maybe you should refine your thesis until you can.  Too many points and the teacher is going to be sick of grading your paper.

 

[8filltheheart]

16 minutes ago, Mom2mthj said:

What part of standardized testing would require the 5 paragraph essay?  My oldest is still in high school so I am probably a bit younger than you, but we did use the five paragraph essay in high school and in the late 80s neither the ACT nor the SAT had a writing section. I guess AP exams would qualify as standardized tests with an essay. My British Lit teacher was probably past retirement age (she taught Paul from Peter, Paul, and Mary in the early 1950s) when I had her in 1989 and she didn’t strike me as the type to be on board with too much new.  I think some of the rationale for three supporting paragraphs comes from making sure you are picking a strong thesis for your paper.  If after reading a novel, if you can’t think of three things to say about your thesis then maybe you should refine your thesis until you can.  Too many points and the teacher is going to be sick of grading your paper.

 

The SAT and ACT both have essays, were required but now optional. 

In college, word limit is how length is controlled, not 3 pts and 5 paragraphs. I have never had a child asked to write a 5 paragraph essay. 

This is a good article on why I dont teach my kids the 5 paragraph essay as anything other than a crutch for cranking out something quickly (like a timed exam, not an out of class assignment):

https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/college-writing/

[lewelma]

3 hours ago, lewelma said:

So the problem with the 5 paragraph essay is that it ignores purpose and audience, and focuses only only on form. 

If the purpose is to argue an issue for a test and the audience is a teacher giving you a grade, then purpose and audience of the traditional 5-paragraph essay matches the genre.  You have written an appropriate essay.

But if you are writing for any other genre, you need to study an example of great writing in that field and mimic that.  The 5 paragraph essay is never published because it is a school form. If you want to learn how to write, you need to find published examples to mimic.

I'm quoting myself because the above is why the 5-paragraph essay is maligned.  It suits ONE purpose - a school exam.  Learning to write for only one purpose is not learning to write.  It is learning to take exams.

To be a good writer means that you can adapt your writing to the purpose and audience at hand, and that means embracing the structure and style of the genre you wish to write.  If you cannot do that, you are not a good writer. 

Edited December 22, 2019 by lewelma

[Farrar]

11 minutes ago, lewelma said:

I'm quoting myself because the above is why the 5-paragraph essay is maligned.  It suits ONE purpose - a school exam.  Learning to write for only one purpose is not learning to write.  It is learning to take exams.

To be a good writer means that you can adapt your writing to the purpose and audience at hand, and that means embracing the structure and style of the genre you wish to write.  If you cannot do that, you are not a good writer. 

The purpose of a prefab essay format is not to test whether one is a good writer or not. It's to serve as a stepping stone to better writing. I agree that if you can't adapt your writing for different purposes, then you're lacking as writer. But that says nothing about how writers get to be good writers and how they learn to adapt. Like I said above - in my experience, this is a good building block for writers new to writing multi-paragraph non-fiction.

I totally get why this particular formula is deeply maligned. I don't like the way it's typically taught in schools and I totally agree that it's not great as a real world type of writing. But there are many non-real world things about school. 90%+ of the math I did in high school was also not at all real world applicable - it was all academic. The history, the science, etc. were also academic. Lab reports are academic. None of them were directly applicable to the real world. And even if some had been, they would have been applicable for some and not others - since, after all, what the real world looks like is super diverse.

I get it. Schools do a cruddy job of teaching writing. But this format was usually presented by the best teachers to me as a student as a more flexible format than the experience that most people have of it. It does not have to be five paragraphs, for example. It's really just a misnomer. It can have more or less. The three thing is a starting point - in part because three actually is a good number for the number of examples that make a good set in arguments and stories. Three is a magic number, yes it is, etc. But, of course you can have more or less, depending on the argument or the topic. And most of these "rules" for it that I've heard vary from teacher to teacher. Put the thesis at the top, put it at the end of the introduction, restate it in exactly the same words in the conclusion. All dumb rules. None of them actually rules.

I had a weird conversation about this the other day where a woman was ranting about writing in schools and I was just sort of nodding along, like, yeah, I feel ya, so true. And then she was all slamming the whole passive voice thing. She's like, "oh, and the whole passive voice thing, that's terrible advice, that's not a real writing rule!" and I may not have been able to stop my jaw from dropping. Like, no. Eliminating too much passive voice does make one's writing better. Hands down. Using passive voice in specific instances (to highlight the victim of an action, to keep a sentence from being awkward, in dialogue, to build repetition... whatever) is great. Sometimes these computer algorithms seeking it are terrible. But it's not a random rule that creates bad writing. I was just flummoxed. I realized... oh, she can't tell the difference between the good guidelines and the bad ones.

Because there's a lot of good in there too in terms of helping kids who simply have zero sense of organization have that sense of organization. I sat with a student the other day - a 15 yo. He turned in all his papers with no paragraphs. He did this despite having read and discussed some very complex literature. You'd think the fact that everything we read - fiction and nonfiction - had paragraphs would have sunk in for him that this was a thing to emulate. But nope. We literally did the sort of analysis of writing in that class... it did not transfer to his writing. And so I gave him the gift of an outline for a paper in a simple format. And that was essentially a five paragraph essay. And he did it was like, oh, I see, I had no idea where to begin before. He wrote something that wasn't amazing, but also made sense and was a starting point to build on - and that was missing before.

[Roadrunner]

I am not sure where to put this, but I ran into this a while back (still haven’t read the entire thing) and it’s an interesting read (agree or disagree with the piece). Fits into EM ideas and debates.

https://mises.org/library/theory-education-united-states

[Xahm]

1 hour ago, Farrar said:

 

I had a weird conversation about this the other day where a woman was ranting about writing in schools and I was just sort of nodding along, like, yeah, I feel ya, so true. And then she was all slamming the whole passive voice thing. She's like, "oh, and the whole passive voice thing, that's terrible advice, that's not a real writing rule!" and I may not have been able to stop my jaw from dropping. Like, no. Eliminating too much passive voice does make one's writing better. Hands down. Using passive voice in specific instances (to highlight the victim of an action, to keep a sentence from being awkward, in dialogue, to build repetition... whatever) is great. Sometimes these computer algorithms seeking it are terrible. But it's not a random rule that creates bad writing. I was just flummoxed. I realized... oh, she can't tell the difference between the good guidelines and the bad ones.

Did she clarify what she meant by "the whole passive voice thing"? I've met lots of people who believe it is a firm rule that you should never use passive voice, that it is simply wrong. My husband has even met someone who argued with him that sentences such as "The man was eating lunch" are passive due to the presence of the word "was" and so are also not allowed. If she has run into that, I sympathize with her.

[lewelma]

3 hours ago, Farrar said:

The purpose of a prefab essay format is not to test whether one is a good writer or not. It's to serve as a stepping stone to better writing. I agree that if you can't adapt your writing for different purposes, then you're lacking as writer. But that says nothing about how writers get to be good writers and how they learn to adapt. Like I said above - in my experience, this is a good building block for writers new to writing multi-paragraph non-fiction.

I totally get why this particular formula is deeply maligned. I don't like the way it's typically taught in schools and I totally agree that it's not great as a real world type of writing. But there are many non-real world things about school. 90%+ of the math I did in high school was also not at all real world applicable - it was all academic. The history, the science, etc. were also academic. Lab reports are academic. None of them were directly applicable to the real world. And even if some had been, they would have been applicable for some and not others - since, after all, what the real world looks like is super diverse.

I get it. Schools do a cruddy job of teaching writing. But this format was usually presented by the best teachers to me as a student as a more flexible format than the experience that most people have of it. It does not have to be five paragraphs, for example. It's really just a misnomer. It can have more or less. The three thing is a starting point - in part because three actually is a good number for the number of examples that make a good set in arguments and stories. Three is a magic number, yes it is, etc. But, of course you can have more or less, depending on the argument or the topic. And most of these "rules" for it that I've heard vary from teacher to teacher. Put the thesis at the top, put it at the end of the introduction, restate it in exactly the same words in the conclusion. All dumb rules. None of them actually rules.

I had a weird conversation about this the other day where a woman was ranting about writing in schools and I was just sort of nodding along, like, yeah, I feel ya, so true. And then she was all slamming the whole passive voice thing. She's like, "oh, and the whole passive voice thing, that's terrible advice, that's not a real writing rule!" and I may not have been able to stop my jaw from dropping. Like, no. Eliminating too much passive voice does make one's writing better. Hands down. Using passive voice in specific instances (to highlight the victim of an action, to keep a sentence from being awkward, in dialogue, to build repetition... whatever) is great. Sometimes these computer algorithms seeking it are terrible. But it's not a random rule that creates bad writing. I was just flummoxed. I realized... oh, she can't tell the difference between the good guidelines and the bad ones.

Because there's a lot of good in there too in terms of helping kids who simply have zero sense of organization have that sense of organization. I sat with a student the other day - a 15 yo. He turned in all his papers with no paragraphs. He did this despite having read and discussed some very complex literature. You'd think the fact that everything we read - fiction and nonfiction - had paragraphs would have sunk in for him that this was a thing to emulate. But nope. We literally did the sort of analysis of writing in that class... it did not transfer to his writing. And so I gave him the gift of an outline for a paper in a simple format. And that was essentially a five paragraph essay. And he did it was like, oh, I see, I had no idea where to begin before. He wrote something that wasn't amazing, but also made sense and was a starting point to build on - and that was missing before.

I completely agree that it can be a good starting point, and definitely good for remediation. But the question was asked as to why it is much maligned.  Seems to me it is maligned because it is not only the starting point but also the ending point in writing education for many students. There in lies the problem.

I would assume that many people here have been educated with the 5-paragraph essay as the total of their writing instruction.  And often people teach the way they were taught. Given that writing is so much more rich than this specific school form, I would suggest that newbie homeschoolers take a look at the true scope of writing, and if they choose to use the 5-paragraph essay, that they only use it and allow it for about 3 months.  Then it is time to move on.

Also, I would like to mention that NZ has a very strong, writing-based, school system.  Students are required to regularly write 8 page typed reports in many subjects - Biology, Statistics, Economics, Geography, Agribusiness, Digital technology, Classics, Art History, and many many more. Each of these genres has a different form for students to explore and master.  I'm not suggesting that there will ever be a change in the American School system, but I am saying that as homeschoolers we can teach writing in a much more expansive way. 

Here is a list of actual specific questions you can write your 8 page papers on to earn your writing credits in NZ. Notice the scale. It is huge!

https://www.nzqa.govt.nz/assets/qualifications-and-standards/Awards/University-Entrance/2019/UE-lit-list-from-1-April-2019-FINAL-v2.pdf

Edited December 23, 2019 by lewelma

[Little Green Leaves]

13 hours ago, square_25 said:

 

People hate it because the form becomes the product. In high school, I was graded on matching this form: if my concluding sentences for paragraphs weren't quite "conclude-y" enough, I'd get marked off. If I had an extra paragraph, I would absolutely get marked off. It's extremely formulaic. 

I can imagine that this can be a useful format if you're remediating someone's writing, although I think one would get far better results by continuing a conversation with the student and providing feedback on their writing throughout their schooling. However, this is not how I see this format used. If you were supposed to write a five-paragraph essay, you would not get a good grade unless you wrote a five-paragraph essay, no matter how good your writing, how lovely your phrasing, or how clear your argument. That seems completely unacceptable to me. 

Ugh, that's terrible. Talk about counter-productive teaching! I think I must have been very lucky with my teachers, because that wasn't at all my experience. 

 

[Lori D.]

20 hours ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

This is a good article on why I dont teach my kids the 5 paragraph essay as anything other than a crutch for cranking out something quickly (like a timed exam, not an out of class assignment): https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/college-writing/

Thanks so much for that link!

Just for the benefit of others reading this thread: When you follow other links within this article, you get a series of articles, which, all together make a very helpful quick tutorial on how to write a paper for college. Super helpful for guiding a high school student towards the type and quality of writing that will be needed in college. The links are to "how to" articles on topics such as:

Understanding Assignments
Brainstorming
Thesis Statement
Introduction
Conclusion
Paragraphs
Transitions
Reorganizing Drafts
Argument
Evidence
Quotations
Summary: Using it Wisely


PS -- Here is the "site map" list that lists all of their handouts, with links. These articles would be good to pair up with the OWL at Purdue's articles on the technical aspects of writing.

Edited December 23, 2019 by Lori D.

[Corraleno]

2 hours ago, lewelma said:

I'm quoting myself because the above is why the 5-paragraph essay is maligned.  It suits ONE purpose - a school exam.  Learning to write for only one purpose is not learning to write.  It is learning to take exams.

I think one of the biggest problems with the way the 5 paragraph essay is taught in HS is that, not only is the format quite artificial, the acceptable theses and supporting arguments are generally prepackaged. So students learn a specific interpretation of a specific work of literature, and then they write an essay that does little more than take that "content" out of the teacher's package and put it in their own package. Maybe in history or social science they may get "some scholars think X for these reasons, but others think Y for those reasons" and then they write an essay where they repeat either the X arguments or the Y arguments. It's not designed to teach thinking and analysis at all, it's designed to assess whether the product that was distributed to you is still in your box (at least for another week or two). And that product was specifically designed to fit into that little box, even if the actual literature/history/ideas/etc. are far bigger and messier and less box-shaped. It teaches kids that "education" is little more than standing in front of an assembly line, taking shrink-wrapped packets of "knowledge" off the line, repackaging them, and putting them back on the conveyor belt.

I think a lot of kids who are taught to write that way get to college and are paralyzed when no one hands them the preselected components they're used to plugging into the format. Sometimes there might be 2 supporting arguments or 12, and lots of counterarguments, and you're expected to pick those up from your own reading, not copy them off a powerpoint slide. So you can end up with essays where the student tries to take one coherent argument and break it up into 3 mini-arguments to get "required" 3 paragraphs and they end up with one decent idea totally buried in the verbal equivalent of packing peanuts. Other students will write the first three arguments that come to mind and leave out the most important one, and all of the counter-arguments, because "you can only have 3." And it breaks down even further when you have to write a research paper, because sometimes you really have no idea what the thesis should be or what the arguments are until you've actually done a good chunk of the research.

That's why I'd argue that lots and lots of discussion is actually one of the best ways to prepare for college-level writing. In a discussion, it's OK to  start in the middle, with incomplete information, and back up, go look up additional information, consider the other person's POV, change your mind, follow other trails, etc. And for a lot of kids I think discussion can be far less intimidating than handing them a blank piece of paper and expecting them to know exactly what they want to say about a topic before they start, and where messiness and incomplete information and changes of direction are seen as mistakes to be marked off, instead of the key components of learning and thinking and growing that they are!

I realize that this thread is supposed to be about the "classical" approach to LA, and the 5 paragraph essay is not exactly classical. But the truth is that every "classical writing" curriculum I have looked at was really just a much more elaborate version of formula-based-writing. Socrates, on the other hand, was all about the discussion. 😉

[lewelma]

1 hour ago, Corraleno said:

 It's not designed to teach thinking and analysis at all, it's designed to assess whether the product that was distributed to you is still in your box (at least for another week or two). And that product was specifically designed to fit into that little box, even if the actual literature/history/ideas/etc. are far bigger and messier and less box-shaped. It teaches kids that "education" is little more than standing in front of an assembly line, taking shrink-wrapped packets of "knowledge" off the line, repackaging them, and putting them back on the conveyor belt.

Your whole post was beautifully articulated, but I found this part particularly insightful.  I never thought of it exactly in that way, but for many teachers the purpose of the 5PE (ooh, can an coin a new acronym?!?) is to assess knowledge taught and understood. It is not a writing form; it is a testing form. 

I also think you make a fascinating point that it teaches students that arguments are always logical and can be stated in a tight linear way. When you read my boy's essay above you can see that he completely rejected that idea, and had to because his thesis was that there is hope for the Mackensie.  His thesis was hope -- not really possible to use a 5PE or any similar alternate form to persuade the reader to an emotion. The approach and style are not academic, but yet it was a very academic paper, requiring a lot of research and analytical skill to pull off. 

So I'm thinking about all the writing my kids have done, and I sorted a lot of their pieces into 3 categories:

1) I have used writing to teach my kids about purpose, audience, and rhetoric. This is about writing published genres that are recognized as good writing. 

A Scientific American policy argument essay,

An Economist informational essay,

A Chemistry textbook entry on explaining fracking to an educated audience,

Scientific research papers in proper form,

National Geographic essay

Short stories - creative writing

2) I have used writing to teach deep thinking - analysis and evaluation 

Synthesis essays for Geography 

Analytical essays comparing perspectives on genetic engineering (going to the original sources like EU policy documents, Monsanto website, etc)

Comparison/Contrast essays comparing the impact of leadership (Mobutu vs Khama) to the economic and social development in the DRC vs Botswana

Evaluation essays assessing the assumptions behind qualitative and quantitative economic indicators

3) I have used writing to test for engagement and learning :

Response papers on literature and philosophy,

5PE for literary analysis on exams, 

Comprehension/explanation essays for physics and chemistry

-----

The key to understanding teaching writing is to understand that we use writing for these three separate purposes, and that the 5PE has a place, but boy oh boy is it small.  

Edited December 23, 2019 by lewelma

[lewelma]

36 minutes ago, mms said:

not working through an English curriculum really bothers me. 

My younger boy will not do ANY written literary analysis, which is typically what the American's think of when they think of English.  He thinks deeply about books and has NO interest in writing about them. We have a powerful writing program here because this boy is dysgraphic and yet wants to be a geographer.  So we work on writing for 2 hours each day.  But there no English curriculum to be seen, and no literary analysis.  Just saying.

Some of the best work we have done is to STUDY and ANALYZE beautifully written forms by sitting on the sofa together and just *talking*.

[Murphy101]

1 hour ago, mms said:

Jackie, what you are saying really resonates this year. We’ve got a medically high needs baby and the only things my eldest does consistently are math and Latin. And that kind of scares me to be honest. It is not how I had planned this year. But, she’s been reading tons and there are lots of discussions going on. She is writing a biography of her grandmother, translating the Chronicles of Prydain into Russian, and corresponding with her friends via snail mail. Yet, the fact that she is eleven and not working through an English curriculum really bothers me. Maybe I should get some Great Courses while they are on sale.
 

btw, this is what I have in a prominent place to read and reread:

Anyway, I really appreciate this discussion.

I forgot all about that from 6 years ago. Wow.

I am a LOT more relaxed with my younger ones nowadays. LOL

[annegables]

On 12/21/2019 at 9:44 AM, Corraleno said:

DS had to take a basic English comp class last year, which included a lot of "peer review" (don't even get me started on how useless I think peer review is in freshman comp!), and he was astonished, not only at how poorly most students wrote, but how formulaic their critiques were of his own papers. He would write a really excellent 2-page essay — well thought out, well argued, varied sentence structure, good transitions, etc. — and the critiques would be things like "you have too many supporting arguments, you should only have 3" or "the first sentence of your conclusion should be the same as the last sentence of your introduction." Oy.

I think the one thing that DS did as a homeschooler that contributed most to his understanding of what a good essay sounds like was watching tons of Great Courses lectures. Each lecture has the same basic structure as an essay: introduce the topic you're going to discuss, add some background, provide supporting evidence for your agruments, present and refute the counter arguments, mention questions or topics for further research, and summarize your conclusions. After watching hundreds of lectures, he totally internalized that structure, as well as learning a lot about academic style and vocabulary. That plus reading a lot of scholarly books (not standard HS textbooks) meant he entered college writing like an advanced college student, not a PS high school student. As an aside, as I mentioned in another thread, I do not think classical language study helped his writing at all, because his primary weakness as a writer is that he tends to write loooooong sentences full of clauses — exactly like all those Greek & Latin sentences he spent years translating. 

Thank you so much for all of this. My son loves Great COurses lectures and I never thought of how the lecture format has the same structure as an essay. This post is helping me understand how to teach my son better writing. He has internalized that structure when it comes to oral presentations, but not to his writing. I am getting all verklempt just thinking of the possibilities!

[Penelope]

On 12/20/2019 at 10:18 PM, lewelma said:

I get the impression that classical education uses certain methods to teach language arts. What makes this approach rigorous?  The other thread kept referring to reading literature from the 'cannon' and to engaging with the best thinkers. Well, I can do that. But then I kept reading that to be a classical educator requires a high-level of education and perhaps training, that you could not just co-learn at a high level because it is not the same.  What specific methods do they use and why are they considered by some to be so good?  I'm not interested in content as much as teaching techniques and methods. Thoughts?

It’s an interesting question. Do online and physical classical schools, and resources recommended for homeschoolers, even recommend or use the same methods? It doesn’t seem like there is a lot of uniformity. I personally like Susan Wise Bauer’s approach. 
 

Discussions of any aspect of classical education always have that problem of several thousand years. But a common factor seems to be that the composition was primarily done in Latin. And for many years and many students, this would have been an acquired language. Perhaps the modern equivalent would be educating students to a high level in an inflected language, and then requiring them to compose in that language.  Even imitative, or “in the style of” assignments would be a mental workout and probably result in stronger writers.

According  to  this book, British schools such as Westminster, Eton and Harrow used greater or lesser amounts of various methods over the years, but primarily in Latin. Assignments would have included letter writing, themes (progym), declamations (sort of like debate format from what I remember), and practice with copia. Later on, more verse writing in Latin was hugely popular. and students did a lot of it. Even reading a book like this, it’s difficult to understand just how the teaching was done and what was involved in assignments like this, but to my eyes it seems rigorous. Teaching composition in one’s native language isn’t the same thing. It does reinforce the idea that today’s classical education movement does or should have more in common with Charlotte Mason; she also was wanting a broader education for all, and a rigorous one, but not limited to the study of Latin and Greek, and not attaining anywhere near the same level in those languages. 

[Penelope]

On 12/21/2019 at 8:01 PM, lewelma said:

I think this is the key. To do a true classical education, you would need a masters degree in the Classics and in English. 

So basically, a classical education has 2 pieces:

1) Content: Latin, Greek, English cannon (classic poetry, drama, history, philosophy, novel), logic, and rhetoric

2) Method: top-down, teacher-driven.  The 'sage on the stage' model with a single teacher leading students on an intellectual journey through specific exercises designed to improve certain skills. 

So on this board, we have some people who do #1 (with some outsourcing) and some who do #2 (with different content), but no one who can pull off both at home on their own. 

It seems that is right, but the English Canon part would have been a much later addition. And I would disagree that a degree in English in today’s universities, in America at least, necessarily gives an advantage in teaching the Western Canon to K-12 students.

[Penelope]

On 12/21/2019 at 12:04 PM, domestic_engineer said:

 

 Also, Socratic discussion is another key element of classical education.  (...as in using Socratic discussion rather than regurgitation or fill-in-the-blanks learning methods.)

I don’t know if this is historically true, though. Anyone know?

On 12/21/2019 at 4:10 PM, lewelma said:

So I kind of assumed classical education in LA would be at an equally high level to what I have been trying to do. But what 8 listed is pretty low level stuff.

 But in Latin, and sometimes Greek. Not in their native language. 

[Penelope]

https://www.bc.edu/sites/libraries/ratio/ratio1599.pdf
A translation of the Ratio. Looks like interesting reading, most of which will be after the holidays, for me. But from a skim, it looks like the quote from earlier in the thread was for one of the lower grammar classes. The descriptions from rhetoric and humanities classes look more rigorous. Compositions in Latin and in Greek. Then there were classes in philosophy and theology. I don’t know when these occurred in the structure of the early Jesuit schools, but other things I’ve read on classical education led me to understand that these courses would have been the culmination of the education either prior to university or concluding in university.