Tag: classical education

classroom waiting for students to return

Back to School and Back to Educational Renaissance

Welcome back to a new school year and to a new year of Educational Renaissance! The back-to-school sale shelves are probably already picked over and disheveled, but Jason, Kolby and I are planning a whole series of great posts that will last you the whole school year. Look for our first post to drop next weekend! Welcoming Kolby to the Team We’d like to welcome Kolby, the newest member of the team! You can read more about Kolby on our bio page. After getting to know Kolby over the years, I knew that there was a likemindedness that made him an ideal contributor to

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Plato and Aristotle in the Lyceum

Why Study Western Civilization?

The classical Christian movement has at its core a commitment to teaching Western civilization. Even though we teach Western civ, its distinctive qualities are not always clear. As a result, many educators (even within the classical movement) question why we would teach Western civilization. Here I will lay out what I think are the three key pillars of Western society. My hope is that with greater clarity about what Western civilization means, there will be deeper conviction to instruct our students to promote and defend its values. So what do we mean by Western civilization? Today we equate the “West”

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Review of Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Douglas Wilson

Most people in the classical Christian school movement look upon Dorothy Sayer’s 1947 essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” as something of a founding document. However, the movement as it currently exists in North America stems from the implementation of that essay in the late 1980s, and is best represented in Douglas Wilson’s Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning (Crossway, 1991). Wilson had founded Logos School in Moscow, ID in 1981, a school that forms the backdrop to his book. Wilson would go on to help found the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) in 1993, which currently has over

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Venice, an iconic center of the Renaissance

Renaissance Education: Looking to the Past to Chart a Course for Education Today

Education in the Renaissance centered around a rediscovery of lost ideas leading to a rebirth of civilization. Looking back to Renaissance education provides insight into our own age as we reclaim the great texts and ideas lost over the past decades through waves of progressive educational reform. Rediscovering a World of Ideas Prior to the age of exploration, exploding into life after Columbus’s westward journey across the Atlantic in 1492, a different exploration of an unknown world occurred after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. For well over a millennium, the Byzantine empire was the eastern stronghold of Christendom, paralleling

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The Cathedral of the Liberal Arts Tradition

Review of The Liberal Arts Tradition by Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain

Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain. The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. Classical Academic Press, 2013. In The Liberal Arts Tradition Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain endeavor to set the record straight about what made up the course of study in the classical tradition of education. As two longtime friends and colleagues at the Geneva School–one of the early and well-developed classical Christian schools located outside of Orlando, FL–they combined their talents in rhetoric/philosophy (Kevin) and math/science (Ravi) and their mutual love of theology and the tradition to broaden the focus of the conversation about classical

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