Classical Education in an Economic Recession

In the continuing gloom of an economic recession, it is possible to continue getting a first-rate classical education on a shoestring. Before redoubling your efforts, it might be a good idea to ask yourself some questions -

1. Why am I doing this? There are many possible answers to this question, but some answers we have arrived at are the opportunity for students to develop their worldview beyond the present. In our view, a classical education offers an unparalleled opportunity to look at human events, religious and secular philosophies, crisis, challenge, and progress without a one-sided perspective of the bias of the present time.


2. What do I what my student to get out of this? Again the answers will vary, but some of our answers include: an ability to think deeply, compare, and analyze information, an ability to make and defend decisions, persuade others, and synthesize new ideas or possibilities. No wonder classical-trained individual go into diverse careers as consultants and analysts in business and tech disciplines, law, medicine, politics, and humanities.

One of the greatest opportunities of classically-educated individuals is to make difficult decisions under changing conditions. The time is ripe.

If you find yourself facing new challenges with the economic recession:

1. Find the blessing in your burden: Cultivate more time with your children, discuss with them how you are making tough and prudent choices with changing conditions and an uncertain future. Model resilience yourself. Read biographies and watch inspiring movies together (Denzel Washington's Great Debaters, Pursuit of Happyness, biographies of Alexander Hamilton, Corrie Ten Boom, Eric Liddell).

2.Use Internet Resources - if you don't have access at home, head to the library!
Examples: Ancient Greek History Course by Donald Kagan (Open Yale Courses)
Physics for Future Presidents (more Conceptual) from UC Berkeley
Lists of more University webcasts / podcasts at Stingy Scholar and
Do It Yourself Scholar
Many AP teachers also post all their lecture notes and Powerpoints on the Internet. Some are also developing blog or wikis to make it more interactive.

For Latin (and any other language for that matter), here are extensive resources available - for instance,

KET Distance Learning Latin Courses
If you need to hear it, check out Wheelock's Latin Pronunciation pages.

Many great books are available for free online:
Project Gutenberg
Online Books at Penn
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
Baldwin Online Childrens Literature Project

Charlotte Mason Classical Education (Ambleside Online)

Used books can be swapped or bought at used book prices at:

Deep discounts on new or used curricula can be found at Amazon.com

Does your child have a print disability? If so, he or she may qualify for the wonderful free resource Bookshare.org

Photo reference: Laocoon struggling with his children.(Wikipedia)

Classical, Visual, and Rhetorical Grammar

"Let no man, therefore, look down on the elements of grammar as
small matters; not because it requires great labor to distinguish
consonants from vowels, and to divide them into the proper
number of semivowels and mutes, but because, to those entering
the recesses, as it were, of this temple, there will appear much
subtlety on points, which may not only sharpen the wits of boys,
but may exercise even the deepest erudition and knowledge."
—Quintilian

I happen to be one of those people who breaks out in a cold sweat with the thought of grammar, but although I have learned more grammar than I thought possible when our kids started learning Latin, I've had to dig even deeper as we have dyslexia running in family.

Happily, we've discovered some wonderful resources for classical and visual approaches to grammar - and it sure beats memorizing all the rules in Warriner's.

If you need to be persuaded of the importance of grammar, check out Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar, but in our case, we needed to troubleshoot some of the Writing problems of visual thinkers, so we wanted something reasonably direct, accessible, and memorable. Thankfully, we seem to have found this in a writer's workshop grammar book, Mechanically Inclined. There are some faults in this book (caveat emptor: some of the content of writing samples are poorly chosen - e.g. violent, tasteless etc.), but it is a very visual approach to grammar (like Image Grammar, but with better organization) and it satisfies a definite need for visual learners struggling with grammar conventions.

For every problem, Mechanically Inclined presents a student mistake, analysis of the mistake, correct examples from literature, and a visual scaffolding exercise that walks a student through correct grammatical writing. For example, in a chapter on dangling modifiers, the author provided examples of participial phrases used as openers, interrupters, and closers:

Wagging its tail, the dog approached me. Opener

The dog, wagging its tail, approached me. Interrupter

The dog approached me, wagging its tail. Closer

This approach is helpful because not because it gives students practice with sentence manipulation, but also because it allows grammatical conventions (like commas) to be naturally internalized through reading and writing, rather than rote memorization of a list of disembodied rules.

For older students, there is Rhetorical Grammar, a probably college-level text that teaches the art of grammar and persuasive writing.

Excerpt from a chapter on Sentence Rhythm:

The word eloquently has shifted the limelight from the topic of the speech to the senator's style of speaking; and, in doing so, it has set up a different expectation in the reader. We would not be surprised if the subject of the next sentence turned out to be he or she (the senator) rather than they (the homeless).

Haven't found many strong visual or rhetorical grammar sites freely available on the Internet, but let us know if you know of good ones. There are excerpts from Image Grammar here and here. We did find this nice link on Elaboration, however.

Institute for Excellence in Writing does have a new series entitled Classical Rhetoric Through Structure and Style. A sample chapter is posted here: here.