Two Ways to Make School Meaningful - Part Two

In asking how to make education meaningful, we’re also asking what the aim of education is. Our last post highlighted the expansive nature of education, mainly that it involves training students in virtue beyond mere assignments, in a word: soulcraft. Those assignments and curricula, however, are necessary parts of education. We must love God with our minds, and our minds must be free and useful, and even assisted. To this end, we’re committed to teaching the liberal arts in the context of the School of Academics, implementing a cyclical curriculum and a commonbox system to give students a tangible classical education. 

Before we can discuss the content and work of academics, we must identify the tools of learning. The seven liberal arts are the educational tradition of the West. The two groupings of the liberal arts are the language arts and the mathematical arts. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric make up the language arts, and the mathematical arts are arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Each of these have a set of habits that are to be practiced and those champions who are worthy of imitation in each field. The student shaped by these is what history has called a “free-thinker,” i.e. trained by the liberal arts. 

Much like photography, however, one can only talk about the art of photography for so long before he has to go and actually take a photo of something; same too with the liberal arts. Aquinas said the liberal arts are practices that produce works of reason. These are ultimately tools that need projects. The overarching project is a four-year cyclical curriculum.

Four Year Cycle

Reasonable students learn data, discern the relationships between data points and create new interlinking webs, and then express their newfound understanding clearly. Adequate understanding doesn’t happen when content has been interacted with once as a very young child; instead, students need to revisit truths over and over again over time. So we follow a curriculum spiral that allows this to happen systematically. This spiral creates an integrated web of knowledge that builds on and reinforces itself. Students experience learning from old data and familiar stories by revisiting them—we’re never quite done with them, and they’re never quite done with us. 

Rose City has three four-year blocks of study: Grammar School, Logic School, and Rhetoric School. The first year of each studies ancient history and literature; the second year studies the medieval era; the third studies the Renaissance and the Reformation; and the final year studies the modern era. What a student is introduced to in his early years, he goes on to study twice over at deeper levels as he grows into a deeper student. The first level of education helps students grasp hold of the narrative and concrete data, then the second allows for them to see the relationships between, motivations for, and consequences of events; and lastly, they learn well to articulate their understanding and their convictions about truth, goodness, and beauty.

	Grammar (Grades 1-4)	Logic (Grades 5-8)	Rhetoric (Grades 9-12)
Year 1 (Grades 1, 5, 9)	Creation to Resurrection	Creation to Resurrection	Creation to Resurrection
Year 2 (Grades 2, 6, 10)	Early Church and Medieval Era	Early Church and Medieval Era	Early Church and Medieval Era
Year 3 (Grades 3, 7, 11)	Renaissance and Reformation	Renaissance and Reformation	Renaissance and Reformation
Year 4 (Grades 4, 8, 12)	Modern Times	Modern Times	Modern Times

Here’s an example of it in action:

First grade students read a few pages about the Trojan War in Mystery of History: Volume One while also memorizing the First Catechism. They age a few years and read a retelling of Troy in The Trojan War at a fifth grade level; they’re also memorizing the Shorter Catechism, grappling with logical fallacies for the first time, and learning how to read the Bible well on their own. As ninth graders, students read English translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, then they are introduced to The Republic and Plato’s conversation about what makes a worthwhile education; and then they write an essay comparing Greek theology, Homer’s commentary on redacting Homer, and the First, Second, and Third Commandments.  

To pair with this history progression, the first six years of RCCA’s science curriculum follows a similar pattern. It is an interactive curriculum that starts with early natural philosophy of creation and the Greeks, then moves to the atomic age in six years of study. Where other approaches may gloss over important figures like Moses, Aristotle, Kepler, Aquinas, Ptolemy, Irenaeus, or Plato, our students have several interactions with them. Some lessons are in history, others in literature or science, then Rhetoric School handles their primary texts in their Humanities class. Literature is similarly paired with the time period assigned for specific grade levels. Students not only read about historical figures and scientific discoveries, they read stories that either emerged from or embody that time period. 

The final experience is a journey through a curriculum that immerses students in all the Great Conversation of human history. They have a firm grasp on where they came from, the most significant events, ideas, and innovations mankind has been party to, and both the mental dexterity and moral imagination to be a virtuous citizen. 

In Part Three, we'll look at how we teach students to integrate new knowledge with the commonbox.