Academics
Non nobis, Domine, sed nomini tua da gloriam!
Not to us, O Lord, but to your name give the glory!
Not to us, O Lord, but to your name give the glory!
Each day of classes at Logos begins with morning prayer in the chapel. Students and faculty recite psalms antiphonally, offer prayers, and sing a hymn. In doing so, we offer our minds and hearts to God for the work of the day. We close each day by singing the "Doxology", offering praise and thanks to our Lord.
Education, as it has been practiced since the time of the ancient Greeks, is a turning of the soul away from the trivialities of daily life (what shall we eat? what shall we wear? what is there to watch?) to the enduring and timeless truths about God, man, and the cosmos. This requires disciplining the mind to seek and strive after truth and the will to love what is truly good (and not merely pleasant). The traditional tools for this discipline are the seven liberal arts (skills): grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy (and other natural sciences), and music (as well as other fine arts). Although these skills are necessary to perfect our intellectual abilities, we need more than simply skills: we need rightly ordered loves. Our humanities curriculum, starting with Bible study, is designed to present to children excellent models of virtue. We are not concerned to teach students the latest or most up to date literature. Instead, we present them with classic works, the ones that tell us how to live well as humans in a fallen world.
Our teachers are committed to the moral formation of students: to challenging them to do their best without falling into the trap of perfectionism. Grades are not goals, but merely benchmarks to show how much a student has understood and how much more he needs to learn. We require students to correct every assessment: in this way, the purpose of the assessment is not lost. The student sees what he has yet to learn, and then he learns it through the correction process before proceeding to the next unit.
Latin: some call it dead. Others call it immortal. Latin was the life-blood of Western civilization until the turn of the last century. To be educated, in the West, required competence in Latin because it was the language that held together the various cultures and traditions of the West. This was not strictly a European phenomenon: our founding fathers were all educated at American universities in Latin so that they would have direct access to the founding principles of Western civilization in Latin texts. They also knew Greek. The old maxim, ad fontes, urges us to return to the source: Latin. Our students begin Latin, gently, in 2nd grade progressing to comprehensive grammar-based instruction in 5th grade with a view to beginning translations in high school. We would be remiss if we failed to point out that there are also profound, practical benefits of studying Latin.
Educators today tend to talk about the imagination: this is a novelty. Classical educators have tended to focus on memory training. Why? St Basil the Great (4th century), speaking for that tradition, said that memory is “the cabinet of the imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and the council chamber of thought.” A well-formed memory provides all of the other faculties with materials they need to function well. Accordingly, a classical education seeks to form the memory with what is good, true, and beautiful: texts from Sacred Scripture and beautiful poetry to lists of helping verbs and skip counting. A richly stocked memory will provide the student with the materials he needs for reasoning and creative imagination as well as (and most importantly) with examples on which to form his character. "Something terrible has happened to me: shall I respond like Job or like Achilles?" (These examples provide better resources for deliberation than, say, Iron Man and Thor.) So we take care to provision our students' memories with riches.
Our school anthem is the text from Psalm 115, "Not to us, O Lord, but to your name give the glory." Christians have sung and repeated these words to remind themselves that the great deeds they achieve (like learning Latin or memorizing long passages of Scripture) are for God's glory, not theirs.
Education, as it has been practiced since the time of the ancient Greeks, is a turning of the soul away from the trivialities of daily life (what shall we eat? what shall we wear? what is there to watch?) to the enduring and timeless truths about God, man, and the cosmos. This requires disciplining the mind to seek and strive after truth and the will to love what is truly good (and not merely pleasant). The traditional tools for this discipline are the seven liberal arts (skills): grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy (and other natural sciences), and music (as well as other fine arts). Although these skills are necessary to perfect our intellectual abilities, we need more than simply skills: we need rightly ordered loves. Our humanities curriculum, starting with Bible study, is designed to present to children excellent models of virtue. We are not concerned to teach students the latest or most up to date literature. Instead, we present them with classic works, the ones that tell us how to live well as humans in a fallen world.
Our teachers are committed to the moral formation of students: to challenging them to do their best without falling into the trap of perfectionism. Grades are not goals, but merely benchmarks to show how much a student has understood and how much more he needs to learn. We require students to correct every assessment: in this way, the purpose of the assessment is not lost. The student sees what he has yet to learn, and then he learns it through the correction process before proceeding to the next unit.
Latin: some call it dead. Others call it immortal. Latin was the life-blood of Western civilization until the turn of the last century. To be educated, in the West, required competence in Latin because it was the language that held together the various cultures and traditions of the West. This was not strictly a European phenomenon: our founding fathers were all educated at American universities in Latin so that they would have direct access to the founding principles of Western civilization in Latin texts. They also knew Greek. The old maxim, ad fontes, urges us to return to the source: Latin. Our students begin Latin, gently, in 2nd grade progressing to comprehensive grammar-based instruction in 5th grade with a view to beginning translations in high school. We would be remiss if we failed to point out that there are also profound, practical benefits of studying Latin.
Educators today tend to talk about the imagination: this is a novelty. Classical educators have tended to focus on memory training. Why? St Basil the Great (4th century), speaking for that tradition, said that memory is “the cabinet of the imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and the council chamber of thought.” A well-formed memory provides all of the other faculties with materials they need to function well. Accordingly, a classical education seeks to form the memory with what is good, true, and beautiful: texts from Sacred Scripture and beautiful poetry to lists of helping verbs and skip counting. A richly stocked memory will provide the student with the materials he needs for reasoning and creative imagination as well as (and most importantly) with examples on which to form his character. "Something terrible has happened to me: shall I respond like Job or like Achilles?" (These examples provide better resources for deliberation than, say, Iron Man and Thor.) So we take care to provision our students' memories with riches.
Our school anthem is the text from Psalm 115, "Not to us, O Lord, but to your name give the glory." Christians have sung and repeated these words to remind themselves that the great deeds they achieve (like learning Latin or memorizing long passages of Scripture) are for God's glory, not theirs.