• I command you to be slow to speak, and slow to go to the conversation room.
• Embrace purity of conscience.
• Do not give up spending time in prayer.
• Love spending much time in your cell, if you want to be led into the wine cellar.
• Show yourself amiable to all.
• Do not query at all what others are doing.
• Do not be very familiar with anyone, because familiarity breeds contempt, and provides matter for distracting you from study.
• Do not get involved at all in the discussions and affairs of lay people.
• Avoid conversations about all any and every matter.
• Do not fail to imitate the example of good and holy men.
• Do not consider who the person is you are listening to, but whatever good he says commit to memory.
• Whatever you are doing and hearing try to understand. Resolve doubts, and put whatever you can in the storeroom of your mind, like someone wanting to fill a container.
• Do not spend time on things beyond your grasp.

Following such a path, you will bring forth flowers and produce useful fruit for the vinyard of the Lord of Power and Might, as long as you live. If you follow this, you can reach what you desire.

Contrary to the conventional way the average child learns to read today, Twyla (nearly 4 1/2 years old) has learned to read by first mastering Latin pronunciation (a.k.a., “Latin phonics”) and then pivoting to read English words.

The advantage of Latin phonics is that each Latin letter is the written symbol for just one sound. In other words, there is a one-to-one correspondence between letter and sound. This one-to-one ratio means next to no ambiguity, which as a general rule is the place to start in all areas of education; first one learns the unambiguous material, to be able to process the inevitably more ambiguous higher levels of knowledge.

English, it cannot be overstated, is far from a simple language. Built into it is a tremendous degree of complexity. This owes to its history as a language, with influences from Latin (which absorbed Greek), German, French, and more. Even at the basic level of letters,  consider how the three instances of the letter A in “language” and “father” are each pronounced differently. This is true for the other vowels, in more variations that include times when a vowel, strangely, is silent and non pronounced.

Does this lead to the possibility that English, as expressive and flexible as it is, does not present itself as an ideal first language to learn to read? I have come to the conclusion that not only does that possibility exist, but in fact a child’s first language to read should not be English, at least as far as formal lessons are concerned. (If it happens informally outside of lessons, all the better.) And it is worth remembering that there is ample precedent for this, for even in Shakespeare’s time, English children we never formally taught English. Instruction was to learn to read Latin and Greek, with the student expected to simply pick up knowledge of English along the way, informally at home, from friends and family, and by just living his life.

Latin, by virtue of its still resonant influence upon today’s English language, as well as its phonic unambiguity, presents itself as an ideal first language for formal reading instruction. The amount of “sounds” Latin phonics comprises is more than half of the English “sounds”.

Now, there is another fundamental aspect that must accompany such a strategy. In a word, memorization. The parent must work with the child to build up the child’s repertoire of recitations, whether rhymes, prayers, sayings, or rules. My emphasis on recitations might seem like a non sequitor, but let me help make the connection clear.

Twyla’s Petty School has introduced me to the proper way to understand the relationships between ideas and words. What are ideas? Ideas are images in our mind of what we have sensed (5 senses) or thought about. What are words? Words are symbols we use to share ideas. Of course there are two types of words: spoken words and written words, and here is the crucial principle to understand — written words are symbols that represent spoken words. And not the other way around.

How is that the case, that written words represent spoken words and not the reverse? Reflection discloses that, for one, children learn to use spoken words long before written words; for two, humans as a species learned to communicate with spoken words long before written words; for three, are not the best written words (say a poem, story, or anything) those that, when read aloud, “ring” the best? Where we sense the author’s voice? Well, what do we suppose “author’s voice” to me except for some semblance of how the author would use the spoken word?

Whereas the best spoken words are rarely if ever those that “look” the best written on a page. What looks “good” strictly on the page is often very difficult to make sound good using spoken words. And is not “learning from a book” rightly disparaged as a mode of learning? It is, because we learn person to person, soul to soul, using spoken words. No, quite clearly, the written is subservient to the spoken. After all, did not two of the world’s greatest sages, Socrates and Jesus, write nary a single word down that we know of? Their wisdom comes to us entirely as, first, from their spoken word (and subsequent written reports of those spoken words).

With the primacy of the spoken word established, then reading of words on paper too becomes handmaiden to the speaking of words. Does this mean that I believe, from my experience of teaching Twyla to read, that the first written words she reads should be those she has already learned orally, as spoken words?

Why, yes it does.

Might sound odd, but hold on. Twyla has internalized, and can reproduce using spoken words, upwards of 25 different recitations. Most of these are nursery rhymes of the Mother Goose variety. “Jack and Jill”, “Tom, Tom, the piper’s son”, “Humpty Dumpty”, and more. She has also memorized three recitations in Latin (two prayers, one bit of Scripture). Which recitations to choose are the parent’s discretion, of course. We chose Mother Goose rhymes because these are playful, rhythmic, and central to our cultural imagination. The recitation aspect of our daily lessons always come last, because Twyla so enjoys them and her mood always lightens (the harder stuff of each lesson, from reading, writing and arithmetic, we do first).

How has it worked so far for her first English reading to be that which she has already memorized? It has gone well. And we have thus far avoided giving her a single “rule” or “exception”, which are so prevalent in conventional instruction in English reading (such as the rule of the Silent E). No, nothing of the sort. She reads the English words using clear, unambiguous Latin pronunciation, often finding a discrepancy between the Latin pronunciation off the page and the English pronunciation she knows by heart. What does she do? I think what any reasonable child would do: they reconcile.

Thus when she reads written words, what is happening is that she is recollecting. Is this not what we do, even as adults? If so, then for beginning reading, is that not the process we ought model?

My role as teacher is to help remind her that when reading English, the spoken word (in this case, the English pronunciation) takes precedence over the pronunciation of the written word (in this case, the Latin pronunciation). I coach her that “English is a funny language” and that “English is often spoken differently than it is written”. These bits of coaching help her accept the differences between Latin and English pronunciation, intuitively. And, my guess is that this can lead to the more profound realization, down the line, that no matter the language (and we do plan to instruct her in several more), while the words are spelled differently, the ideas — that which is at the invisible heart of language itself as in fact the purpose of language — are not.

[More to come in the next post.]

More and more I find that unless you are going to talk about music from the perspective of its “science” — its theory, its objective/syntactical/numeric aspects (of which I’m a student of but am not in general suggesting one does in mixed company) — then there is almost no point to talking about music at much length. As an aural art, music is what it is because of pure invisible feeling, no matter what style or level of complexity. Beyond simple statements such as “check this out, I love it!”, discussing music is nothing but chasing after wind. Or, shorter: that whole “like dancing about architecture” thing.

Music, no matter what the style, is comprised of tones; this is the case even with purely percussive music. Tones bind aural-beauty-wisdom of the ages, homeopathically; the wisdom of “what sounds right”. But no one save specialists hears music as tones. Music is the raw feeling of the thing. Yet, even in the background of our mind, the more we allow music to be the “play” of bare tones — “play” of quite obviously infinite variety — the more we can accept people listening to music (or “arrangements of tones”) we don’t happen to enjoy. Because others listen to tones, ultimately I can know that they are listening to the same fundamental beauty-wisdom I am. In a very profound sense, almost impossible to speak of, there is only one music, and we all listen to it whenever we listen to our favorite pieces.

A composition for three voices — soprano, tenor, bass.
Composed April 2003. Recorded September 2004 in Oak Park, Illinois.
Voices: Christine Kelner, Doug Kelner, and Bill Chin.

Text:
I have a body, but I am not my body.
I have desires, but I am not my desires.
I have emotions, but I am not my emotions.
I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts.
So, who am I?

1) But what says Socrates?–”One man finds pleasure in improving his land, another his horses. My pleasure lies in seeing that I myself grow better day by day.”

2) First of all, condemn the life thou art now leading: but when thou hast condemned it, do not despair of thyself–be not like them of mean spirit, who once they have yielded, abandon themselves entirely and as it were allow the torrent to sweep them away. No; learn what the wrestling masters do. Has the boy fallen? “Rise,” they say, “wrestle again, till thy strength come to thee.” Even thus should it be with thee. For know that there is nothing more tractable than the human soul. It needs but to will, and the thing is done; the soul is set upon the right path: as on the contrary it needs but to nod over the task, and all is lost. For ruin and recovery alike are from within.

— from Golden Sayings of Epictetus, CLIII and CLVI

Geoff Smith believes he has come up with the first multicultural acoustic piano – what he has trademarked as a fluid piano – which allows players to alter the tuning of notes either before or during a performance. Instead of a pianist having a fixed sound, 88 notes from 88 keys, Smith’s piano has sliders allowing them access to the different scales that you get in, for example, Indian and Iranian music.

I believe the Fluid Piano could catalyze a revolution in music. I don’t often use language of that sort about anything. Most claims of “revolution!” I believe are pure hype. Abuse of that word debases our language, to be sure. Yet that word is, I think, apt to describe the possibilities of this refurbished piano. (A piano more-realized, perhaps.)

Why could it catalyze a revolution in music? A couple reasons, which are intertwined.

For one, quite literally the instrument offers more external possibilities for the pianist. Certainly as a solo instrument — that is rather obvious. Just start experimenting with the knobs. And also for collaborating with other non-fretted instruments, such as the voice, the string family, brass — those instruments have suffered in combination with the piano because the temperament of the piano restricts sonorities “in between the keys”. Now, there would be opportunities for the pianist and violinist to explore the sonorities between those keys. The pianist can be even more connected, more sonically empathetic, with the singer, the violinist, and so on. All of which can make for one kind of revolution that holds exciting possibilities, to be sure.

Yet the other, more profound reason I believe this instrument could catalyze a revolution in music is what it will require of the musician to fully take advantage of the instrument. I’m talking on the internal front, now. I’m talking improved musicianship. Here I connect this instrument with the kind of singing/listening exercises found in the first 150 or so pages of W.A. Mathieu’s monumental book Harmonic Experience. Mathieu (my teacher and friend) details singing exercises you will find, by my lights, no where else in contemporary Western musical literature. These exercises (informed by his own study of classical North Indian singing for over 30 years, as well as his training in European music and American jazz) provide the student with a felt-experience and internalized wisdom about harmony, about the way music works on levels very deep. These kind of exercises (which in my online writing I have referred to as “Tone Yoga“) provide a number of benefits. But specific to this discussion, they allow one to develop an internal tonal compass, or pitch recognizer, whereby one can sense far more palpably and perfectly subtleties of pitch one didn’t really notice before.

And that kind of awareness is, it seems to me, what would be required to take full advantage of Mr Smith’s Fluid Piano. Sure, anyone could “mess around” with the knobs, and rather haphazardly move around the tuning for each string and come up with something cool/weird/different . . . maybe even beautiful (beauty is, after all, available as a potential to everyone at any time). But to be more purposeful in one’s use of Mr Smith’s piano, to not be entirely intuitive but to adjust the tunings from an educated perspective, seasoned by the kind of tonal experience Mathieu’s exercises cultivate, knowing how the most discreet of pitch adjustments can transform the nasty into the glorious — it is obvious to me that a musician with that kind of internal sensibility (again, which can be trained by singing and listening) is likely to realize far deeper music out of that instrument.

And then, say, that Mr Smith’s instrument is able to be mass-produced, and these eventually are available for purchase and possession in one’s home. That combined with a similar number of musicians exposed to Mathieu’s singing exercises could I think inspire a marked shift in the common music sensibility, shared first within musicians, but soon spread to the general listening public. But nothing of the current piano would be lost: the ability to put the piano in equal temperament is an option among many, but still an option. Because as Mathieu describes in his book, equal temperament allows for beautiful music, as well. It’s main drawback is that it doesn’t remind its player that there is music between the piano’s keys — an incredible amount of music. Guitarists glimpse this world when they bend their strings (and how often they do that!).

So nothing is lost — but what would be gained! Ultimately, through better musicianship, West could collectively rediscover its largely-eroded sense of “resonance”. Even into Haydn’s time, there were instruments with sympathetic strings that only resonated (like the sitar from India) — only “droned”. We don’t really have instruments like that in the West these days. The closest analogue I’ve seen are singer-songwriters who use a great deal of open strings in the way they play the guitar. There is a reason playing the guitar that way sounds so . . . satisfying.

Marshall McLuhan reminds us that technology extends the human body into inanimate form. The wheel extends our feet. The plow extends our hands. Electricity our nervous system. The phone our voice. A house our skin. Thus Mr Smith’s piano, too, extends something of us. In part, the Fluid Piano becomes more of an extension of the human singing voice than the current piano; the voice can (and very often does) capture tones a piano can’t. But the extensions go further: a conventional piano, and thus the Fluid Piano to an even greater extent, extends a music order of polyphony, or many-voices at once. But no in an even more precise, attuned manner. It is up to musicians to make these possibilities musically appealing to the average listener.

The Fluid Piano doesn’t create anything “new” that we didn’t have before, but rather allows us to realize something in a more unnatural, artificial, externalized and examined way (like all technology). Which means Mr Smith’s piano, while seeming exotic, can in fact help us realize and express something we already have. Certainly the piano means a new playing field with a set of rules that include old rules as well as those new. And one of those is a profound challenge to the musician to know more about tones. Call it the a tool for “pitch etymology”.

As a musician, to know tones deeply in the body is, I think, a kind of responsibility, that of intimacy with the raw materials of music that hold a power and magic so crucial to human life. To be a musician means, at the end, that one must by spurts and fits deepen a relationship with nothing less than the enduring human heart. Itself an extension of . . . well, I’ll stop right here.

At this moment, about seven lessons into that course, I have memorized the first 10 verses of the Gospel of John, chapter 1:

In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.

Hoc erat in principio apud Deum.

Omnia per ipsum facta sunt et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est.

In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum, et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.

Fuit homo missus a Deo, cui nomen erat Iohannnes.

Hic venit in testimonium ut testimonium perhiberet de lumine ut omnes crederent per illum.

Non erat ille lux sed ut testimonium perhiberet de lumine.

Erat lux vera, quae inluminat omnem hominem venientem in mundum.

In mundo erat et mundus per ipsum factus est et mundus eum non cognivit.

I just typed that from memory, quietly verbalizing each word with my mouth. I also know the literal English translation of each Latin word, and can reproduce it from memory, as well. In fact, the way I memorize is to (following the instructions in the course) write in my notebook the Latin, and then write underneath the word-for-word translation in English. And then write in my notebook the English, and then write underneath that the word-for-word translation in Latin. Basically, I create my own “inter-linear” study notebook.

Included in my memorization strategy is to speak aloud, recite silently, recite slowly, recite quickly, recite while I’m driving, while I’m falling asleep. And so on and so forth. Honestly, with work it isn’t that difficult. Unless you consider patience difficult (sometimes I do).

I like this overall strategy for learning Latin because it provides me something solid from which to begin to glean and distill all the aspects of grammar. Rather than starting with grammar rules (inflections, declensions) and supplementing those abstract rules with short examples (that is the common method today, the so-called “grammar-translation method”), this course proceeds in the other direction. Through memorization, I internalize actual, real Latin, and from that internalization, the subsequent learning of grammar rules (which is coming down the pipe in future lessons) will seem much less abstract. In other words, I like this strategy because it is a good mix of deductive and inductive approaches.

I highly recommend the Grammar I course from CLAA. Check out the sample lessons. It is very affordable, taboot: $125 for the entire course. And it is all online, entirely at your pace, and allows for limitless review of previous lessons. I gain nothing from this financially; my recommendation is entirely because I think CLAA’s Latin instruction is the way to go.

If you are a poet, a writer, a playwright, and you want to take your craft to the next level, you owe it to yourself to strongly consider learning Latin. Doors open in your own writing that you didn’t realize before were there.

Key moment for me comes near the end, when the author, Terry Teachout, answering a question regarding whether Armstrong liked rock’n'roll, reveals that Armstrong loved just about any music that was (I’m paraphrasing) “for the people, was ‘people music’, was for the ‘folks’.”

It is hard to debate, isn’t it, that the most enduring works of literary and music fine art have unmistakable appeal to everyday people. The Holy Bible, Shakespeare, even Aristotle and Plato, and on the music side, the works of von Bingen, Palestrina, Bach, Ravel, as well as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington (to name just a few) — all of these do not require any specialty kind of education to witness and feel their beauty, wisdom, and truth. The works stand on their own, reward repeated and lifelong exposure, and provide depth from the first read/listen to the last.

That those writers and composers did not compromise their integrity, yet at the same time did not create works for “just writers” and “just musicians” presents a kind of paradox, within which the secrets of creating genuinely enduring works of fine art just might lay. Something to meditate upon, it seems to me. Not “selling out” and “being pure to your artistic ideals” are obviously in the air amongst today’s writers and musicians. Yet most every one wants other people to check out their stuff, and to hopefully enjoy it (and in many cases, purchase it).

I think the paradox can only be solved by traveling the largely private, artist-only path of immersion and education into the nitty gritty workshop aspects of one’s chosen discipline (writing, composing). And over several years and decades, responding to the loneliness of that path by creating works that, quite literally, speak for themselves. Or: speaking things the artist can’t using conventional means of regular conversation.** And that means not just “speaking” about the main message or messages a work might center upon, but speaking all the other stuff involved when two people speak to each other — introductions, catching up on recent activities, teasing of a much longer story about such-and-such recent event, asking questions of the other person, eventual see-ya-laters, and so on. The whole panoply.

Or in other words, by the artist creating in their work a truly full world, full of perfectly chosen details, and the same kind of mysteries we feel on a day to day basis (such as, I wonder what going on around the corner from my house right now?!) — the stuff we take for granted in our lives, but if we were going to recreate for others, we’d have to be skilled practitioners in order to make it all believable.

And that’s the key, isn’t it. “Making it all believable.” Or, “make-believe”. What kids do when they have a whole conversation with their pretend friends, or pretend things inside and outside the house.

And the more we make, in our works, a world with entrance points that regular people — “folks” — can relate to their lives, the more our works are readily digestible and “grokable”. The more our works can first entertain, then educate, and finally enlighten.

**And this is yet another reason why we should be rightly skeptical of any artist who can too easily talk about their work; who can explain their work, either in conversation or in “artist statement”. Frankly (and I’m perhaps a bit of a purist on this matter), I’m skeptical of any artist who can say anything much more than “here’s my work, check it out.” A great example in this regard? None other than Shakespeare, who has left us exactly nothing about his work except the work itself. And we seem to do just fine with that, don’t we.

Doing whatever the hand finds to do, and, if we are pushed in the right direction and a door is opened unto us, as it were, proceeding in that direction, we may have something of the faith of old, which God pours into many a heart, into that of the mean as well as that of the mighty …. Yes, we can observe it, or at least traces of it, in nearly everyone, to a greater or lesser extent. He is not far from every one of us.

— Vincent Van Gogh

So why is the unambiguity between Latin letter and sound important again? I ought of noted yesterday that a main benefit is clarity. Since we’ve started using Latin phonics, Twyla, my eldest who is 4 years old, has been able to focus on getting her mind around one sound at a time for each letter. For example, in her most recent lesson, she read these syllables using Latin pronunciation:

HA  HE  HI  HO  HU
KA  KE  KE  KO  KU

(Pronounced: hah, hay, hee, ho, hoo; kah, kay, kee, ko, koo).  And then she read with the letters flipped: AH, EH, …; AK, EK,….

There is a clarity she can more easily reach when each letter represents just one sound. Or call it a certainty she can come to. English, when she gets there, will add a whole lot of uncertainty. Uncertainties and ambiguities are built into English, and make English so flexible and poetic (and also very difficult to learn for non-native speakers, as my mother, an ESL teacher in Michigan, often reports). And with this clarity, comes the sooner-realized sense of accomplishment that Twyla can experience. Just yesterday I could feel her excitement bubble to a new level at the fact that she so quickly could read those syllables. She insisted to repeat reading them several times. It was Papa who wanted to move on to Writing and Arithmetic, and Twyla who said, “let me read them again!”

Another reason I like Latin phonics is that it acts as a subtle preparation for the learning of other Latin-influenced languages; Spanish, Italian, in particular. Twyla has already indicated she would like to learn Spanish, and she’ll have a bit of a headstart (though not a huge one, of course). This is a good thing.

Yet another reason is that learning Latin phonics will make the reading of Latin all the easier, sooner. One simply cannot ignore long the fact that Latin has been the language of the educated in the West for well over 1500 years, up until maybe 125 years ago. There is so much to learn that was written in Latin originally, one can reasonably call the learning of Latin a “wisdom tradition” all its own. So starting with Latin phonics starts her down that road — indeed, she already can sound out written Latin words such as “oremus” (let us pray) and “Deo gratias” (to God, thanks). I haven’t pushed any more Latin words on her quite yet. All in good time. Those are good ones, though.

I should also add there is a kind of peace of mind, as a parent, that comes with Twyla learning Latin phonics. It has to do, again, with the seasoning involved here: learning Latin simply was the way of the educated for centuries. And yes, it was the way of the wealthy, as well (though not exclusively). These days, with the information explosion, one can be dirt poor and still reap the benefits of the education the most wealthy medieval merchant’s children enjoyed. In other words, there is a palpable sense of anchoring in what works. Classical education is not the only way people attain wisdom, to be sure. It is not required. But do we know of a better way to share the minds of the most wise in the Western tradition? Oughtn’t we be educated in roughly the same way they were? Aren’t their fruits good enough for us to conclude we should graft onto their roots?

Our study of letters and early reading skills are stable now, but did undergo a bit of flux over the spring into the summer. I started out teaching letters using letter-blocks. We’d sit on the floor, pull out our bag of blocks, and work on what letter “said” what. For example, “B says ba”. We did the English letter name as well as the sound it makes. Then we combined letters into two-letter syllables according to the formulation of Noah Webster’s Blue Back Speller, a famous American phonics textbook.

Things changed a bit when I read a fairly recent book called Why Our Children Can’t Read, and What We Can Do About It, by Diane McGuinness. A related book on practical instruction using those methods is Reading Reflex. Couple basic principles I got from these books:

1) The English letter names don’t help in reading, only the sounds and the “pictures” of those sounds (i.e., the letters) help reading. This rendered learning the classic “A-B-C- Song” irrelevant to learning how to read, and possibly distracting.

2) The English alphabet has in many cases a non-one-to-one relationship between letters and sounds. A particular letter (such as “A”) can be pronounced in more than one way, and many sounds can be spelled different ways (“dog” and “father” share the same “aw” sound).

So this changed things. I stopped using letter-blocks, for one. For about six weeks, our lessons morphed into working with the McGuinness principles (it favors lowercase letters first), as well as other principles I’d picked up from various sources, including a good one to work on “ear-training” by saying a word and asking the student to repeat back the first “sound” of that word. “Table” would be sound “t”. Also, asking to repeat back the last sound, and then working towards repeat back all the sounds: “t – a – b – l”. Additionally, sounding out a word “t – a – b – l” and asking the student to point to it in the room was another good exercise.

And then about mid-way through the summer, I had started to look closely at the Petty School curriculum of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. The Petty School offers three courses: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic. In looking at the Reading course, I noticed an approach I had never heard of: learning English phonics through initial study (and mastery) of Latin phonics. At first I thought this was a bit esoteric, I’ll be honest. But that feeling didn’t last for long. Here’s why.

Unlike English, Latin has a one-to-one correspondence between its letters and the sounds the letters represent. (Spanish is also this way.)  There is just one sound for the vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and the same for the consonants. And the letter names are in most cases basically identical to the sounds; in the rest, the letter names are very close. The Latin name for “B” is pronounced “beh”. So basically when one learns the letter name, one learns the sound it represents. I like how streamlined this is, and it struck me as potentially very effective for teaching, before I even tried it with my eldest.

The important principle here: Latin phonics is unambiguous. And is it not just common sense to start basic instruction using not ambiguous material, but unambiguous material? The latter provides a sturdier ground for subsequent moves into more ambiguous territory, which is of course a natural progression. Arithmetic starts by studying simple numbers and quantities; writing starts by mastering simple shapes; why shouldn’t reading start with simple sounds and the letters that without variation represent those sounds? And if you think about it, there is still plenty of residue of Latin phonics within English phonics. “Cafe” is a word pronounced the same whether Latin or English phonics; “Pippi” of Longstocking fame is the same; “papa” likewise. There are not any Latin phonics that aren’t part of contemporary English. What English today does is simply add more variations. Thus Latin phonics is a sturdy foundation for English phonics. And indeed the Petty School Reading course progresses to English phonics after Latin phonics is mastered by the student.

Now, I did a Google search for “learning English through Latin phonics” and found a single article on some teacher in the 1980s who tried this approach with a small group of children, and found empirical success. That article heartened and inspired; I was also a bit curious as to why there was no other Google results to speak of. I think it is basically just another indicator that Latin instruction has lost its centrality to American education. Because from my understanding, schooling say in 16th century England (the school system that produced the bounty of Elizabethan poetry and literature) sought mastery of Latin reading from the first steps in each child’s education. Thus Latin phonics would have been used then, as a matter of course, not some intentional “method”. In fact, “English phonics” was never taught because English itself was never taught, per se: it was viewed that students would pick up all the English they needed from their every day life.

Interesting thought, that. No? Mind you, this is the culture that produced Shakespeare. So perhaps there is something to that.

A very ancient art, practiced at one time by all Christians, is the technique known as lectio divina – a slow, contemplative praying of the Scriptures which enables the Bible, the Word of God, to become a means of union with God. This ancient practice has been kept alive in the Christian monastic tradition, and is one of the precious treasures of Benedictine monastics and oblates. Together with the Liturgy and daily manual labor, time set aside in a special way for lectio divina enables us to discover in our daily life an underlying spiritual rhythm. Within this rhythm we discover an increasing ability to offer more of ourselves and our relationships to the Father, and to accept the embrace that God is continuously extending to us in the person of his Son Jesus Christ.

Or in other words, how Christians meditate. Now, I’m just learning about Lectio Divina, but I’m intrigued. That Christians meditate at all flies against, I would say, the modern narrative. As the modern narrative would put it, only Buddhists meditate; or something like that. But how wrong that notion seems. And how much fuller the stories from the Holy Bible might be if one used them for objects of meditation.

Philosophy means the “love of Wisdom”, pursued by the art of Logic. It is composed of three basic divisions:  Physics (Natural Philosophy), Metaphysics (Philosophy of Causes) and Ethics (Moral Philosophy).  It is generally considered the study of Wisdom by means of Reason.

Theology means the study of God.  Theology–especially Christian theology–is comparable to Metaphysics, but does not depend on Reason alone.  In theology, divine revelation enters in and adds to what may be known of God.  In theology, we seek to gain a systematic knowledge of God.

St. Thomas said Reason tells us what God IS NOT and Revelation tells us what God IS.  That is a helpful way to think of Philosophy and Theology.

— William Michael

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that “great wits have short memories:” and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.

In other words, a kind of private journal in the traditional sense. And a forerunner of today’s “blog”.

What will I blog about now? It will be 100% classical education-centric. I have a perspective on classical education that I did not possess before. This is in part due to my eldest’s education, which has begun in earnest in a classical style; and I myself have dived further into learning Latin as well as about classical education more generally through the history of the approach.

So, in short, this blog will chronicle my journeys through classical education both as a participant and observer. As a student as well as teacher/parent. And I want to continue to persuade others to join me in this path.

I maintain the opinion that I’ve had for some time: the only sturdy means we have to replenish the fine arts (both verbal and nonverbal) is through a reimmersion in our roots, and those roots entangle with classical education so intimately as to be essentially wedded together. To study in a classical education is to return to our origins, which is to open oneself to genuine originality.