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Alternative Schooling Styles : Classical Christian Faith Seeking Understanding This style combines the best of the Classical and the Religious and Cultural styles. It shares with the Classical style the goal of creating competent judges of truth, beauty, and goodness. It shares with the Religious style a way to provide answers to the biggest questions: Where did I come from? Why am I here? and How shall I live? Classical Christian has been the favorite education style of Western Civilization's elite (off and on) for 2000 years. It is the education of the American Founding Fathers, the great men of the Renaissance, and the great Church theologians. It is the ideal, the one that the best men have aspired to. Up until very recently, when someone talked about education, the "Classical Christian" part was implied. Proponents of this style today design their curriculum using an idea called the "trivium." In a nutshell, the trivium breaks up the K-12 curriculum into three main groups or learning phases based on the three main stages in a child's mental development: the grammar phase, the logic phase, and the rhetoric phase. (I won't go into greater detail about it here. I only mention it so that you will be able to recognize it during your search for more information.) This style is teacher-directed and can be used in private or home schools. It is time and labor intensive and requires discipline. It will be challenging for teachers without a Classical Christian background, but good guide books are available. Like the Classical and Religious styles, a Classical Christian education is concerned primarily with making a life, not a living. Older students should to add "practical" or vocational studies to their curriculum. Resources and Curricula Quotes
“The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.” -- Dorothy Sayers, writer, Oxford professor “I have become convinced that of all that human language has produced truly and simply beautiful, I knew nothing before I learned Greek. . . . Without a knowledge of Greek there is no education.” — Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist, author of War and Peace “To seek utility everywhere is most unsuitable to lofty and free natures." -- Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding." -- Proverbs 4:7
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