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. 

Commonbox

A free and useful mind has its limits. An experience we have all had is learning something great… but at the wrong time. Schools have to prioritize revisiting the previous year’s material because of the “summer slide,” where students simply forget what they learned the year prior. Fortunately, humanity has a long history of thinking on paper. It may be an exaggeration and too strong a statement to say that if you’re not writing, you’re not thinking, but not by too much. Our minds have limitations, but we can use tools to expand our capacity for learning. The project our students build on every year is called a commonbox. It has a place for a historical timeline, critical thinking exercises, notes from books, and a catalog of virtue; then students then have the ability to add sections as they see fit.

A commonbox is no more than index cards and dividers. Organized, bite-sized notes serve as a type of scaffolding for Rose City’s education. Here are a few ways it is implemented: 

1. Historical Timeline - Our students will learn the breadth of human history several times over. Some events are covered in just a few pages in the early grades, and then they consume multiple chapters in later years. The first time a student encounters the event or the person, they create a note card that identifies the person, where he lived, when he lived, and why they are significant. Grammar School students will create over 350 of these cards in their four year history sequence. The Logic School students will start to expand on their understanding of those events as they read Famous Men of Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times, so they’re able to add depth to the initial card notes. Their knowledge of history grows in a very tangible way.
   

2. Socratic Teaching Exercises - Rose City teachers have accumulated a bank of critical thinking assignments that can be implemented across the board in literature, composition, theology, logic, history, and most of our other classes. These are as simple as summarizing ideas in increasingly tighter boundaries (200 words to 50 words to 10 words) or as complex as giving three answers to the same question from three different perspectives, then three replies to each answer from three different perspectives. These serve as the basis for some of the most fruitful conversations on campus and are stored in the commonbox for future reference.
   

3. Bibliography Notes - One of the best ways to keep the contents of a book fresh in one’s mind is to make an annotated card for it. This can be summaries of specific sections, an outline for the whole book, an index of important quotes (with page numbers) or a mind map of main ideas. The goal is to create a companion to that book that allows the student to revisit it without having to reread several hundred pages.
   

4. Virtue Catalog - Our students read a lot. As they read, they’re prompted to identify virtue and vice in what they learn about, whether it is historical fact or literary fiction. The Classical Christian Virtues text provides a template for students to understand how each virtue is the balance between two vices; so students arrange their catalog in those terms and add illustrations accordingly. This framework helps students to judge the decisions, actions, and events and to learn from them. Lives of great men remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and this process helps students rightly acknowledge those who are worth emulating. These become memories and artifacts that shape the moral imagination.

We prize the commonbox system as a way for students to intake, evaluate, and organize information. The small act of summarizing a little historical bit each day in their younger years is stretching their ability to think in abstracts. Index cards are limited in size, so it challenges students to weigh the importance of data points—asking which are most important and need to be remembered? The physical representation of history helps students see the correlations and congruence between events across time and space. Moral evaluations of stories and history prepare students for their own daily lives way earlier and more effectively than honors-level ethics classes. The size also allows for students to distill entire books or lectures and review them in a few minutes instead of re-reading the whole text.

The work of academics is often simplified to assignments and tests, rubrics and report cards, but it is much more about creating a structure within a students’ own mind and challenging their thought processes. Our task is to teach them how to think while giving them fodder about what to think; there are objectively right and wrong answers, but we want to have students grow into their own personal understanding and appreciation for what is true, good, and beautiful.