Academics | Classical Education | Curriculum | Reading List | Greek & Latin

The Classical Curriculum is not a new curriculum.  We like to say that our school is 3,000 years old.  By this we mean that some of the methods (the Socratic method) and some of the content (Homer’s Iliad for instance) have been around since the days of Ancient Greece.  Naturally, with the passage of time it has taken on more of the best that the Western Tradition can offer.  Concretely this means exposing the students to classics of Western literature:  literary works by Aesop, Homer, and Cicero but also Beatrix Potter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, George McDonald, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare, poetry by Horace, but also A.A. Milne, Lewis Carol, Longfellow, Keats, and Frost.
 
The Classical Curriculum is divided into three distinct stages known as the Trivium.  These stages are meant to follow the natural development of children.  The Grammar Stage (grades K–4) emphasizes math facts, phonics based reading programs, memorization of poetry, and the reading of classic children’s stories.  The goal of this stage is to provide a groundwork for what the child should know as well as to exercise their skills for memorization.  Children at this age are sponges for information, and enjoy reciting the things they have memorized.  The Dialectic or Logic Stage (5–8) builds on the previous stage by adding Critical Thinking exercises and, by eighth grade, formal Logic.  The goal of this stage is to teach the student how to think logically.  Children in these grades tend to develop questions about why and how things are the way they are.  This stage is meant to start giving children the fundamentals for organizing their facts so that they can answer these questions.  The Rhetoric Stage (9–12) builds on the previous two stages by adding training in writing and speaking.  The goal of this stage is to better prepare students how to present in a clear and elegant manner what they know and how they know it.  Teenagers, we know, are more expressive and are eager to talk about what they know.  This stage takes advantage of this natural tendency, as do all the stages.

This Classical Curriculum also includes a mandatory study of Greek and Latin from the earliest ages on.  This practice of reading the ancient languages accomplishes several things at once: it reinforces the students’ understanding of grammar; it teaches the student the roots of well over three-quarters of the English Language; it forces the student to pay close attention to the exact meaning of words; and, because of this, provides the student with a practical and conceptual understanding of language itself.  Isocrates (436-338 B.C.) once said, “The right word is a sure sign of good thinking.”  The training in words through Greek and Latin bears incomparable fruits.  Studies have shown repeatedly that knowledge of these ancient languages improves students’ verbal test scores more than the study of any other languages.

The list of the names of those who have shared in the Classical Curriculum throughout history is a long and lustrous list: St. Augustine, Descartes, Edmund Burke, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Jefferson, C.S. Lewis, Einstein, Winston Churchill were all trained in the Classical Curriculum.  This is what is offered to students and families of Providence Academy.