Classical
Education
Resources

  

 

Welcome to the world of classical education.  Suggested reading lists.

 

Classical liberal education is not only the means necessary to imbue students with the skills to become excellent life-long learners, but also the means to be fully engaged citizens, exercising civic duties from a principled understanding of the issues which confront them daily. These, too, are all qualities shared by free and happy men.  A genuine liberal education requires a study of the greatest books in the Western tradition, ordered not only in its method, but also toward realizing human happiness and wisdom.  
              ~Mortimer J. Adler~

An Old-Fashioned Education - Visit this impressive website for hundreds of links to online out of print books, organized into a K-12 graded curriculum.

The Sophia Project

TextKit.  Free and fully downloadable Greek and Latin grammars and readers.

Ancient History on the Web

Greek Ruins by Tracy Lee Simmons

Find out more about the history of education

Read 19th Century Schoolbooks Online

Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare Online

Our Young Folks' Josephus (Josephus chronicled the history of the Hebrew people)

 

Fifteen Minutes a Day:  The Reading Program for the Harvard Classics.  Enjoy reading the insightful forward by C.W. Eliot.
The Harvard Classics online  |  The Shelf of Fiction

Lectures on the Harvard Classics
Read an editorial on the Harvard Classics here.

For ideas on implementing classical education, read E. Christian Kopff's words on Why We Need the Classical Tradition.

The Tradition of the West by Robert M. Hutchings
The Idea of a College by Robert M. Hutchings

 

Philosophy of Liberal Education - great collection

For a broad overview of classical resources:

 

Collection of Latin Curriculum Reviews

What are the Great Ideas?
Alphabetically and by Category

The Great Ideas Program (online links)
Reading guides in The Great Books

Leading Great Books Discussions

What is the Great Conversation?

Great Books of the Western World

Master Works of Western Civilization

Gateway to the Great Books
These books contain supplements to the Great Books of the Western World series.

The Great Conversation, six course sequence

Mortimer Adler Archive

What is Touchstones?   Programs by Grade Level
The goal of the Touchstones Project is to encourage cooperative learning and discussion as well as to exercise such key individual skills as critical thinking, respect for others, personal responsibility, and self-discipline.

School of Abraham Educational Model

Read Dorothy Sayer's essay:  The Lost Tools of Learning

 

"... Now, good books have been written in all ages by their greatest men, by great readers, great statesmen, and great thinkers.

"These are all at your choice; and life is short. You have heard as much before; yet, have you measured and mapped out this short life and its possibilities? Do you know if you read this you cannot read that--that what you lose today you cannot gain tomorrow? Will you go a gossip with your housemaid or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of your claims to respect, that you jostle with the hungry and common crowd for entree' here, and audience there, when all the while this eternal court is open to you with its society, wide as the world, multitudinous as the days, the chosen and the mighty, of every place and time? 

"Into that you may enter always; in that you may take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once entered into it, you can never be an outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this company of the dead.

"'The place you desire,' and the place you fit yourself for, I must also say; because observe, this court of the past differs from all living aristocracy in this:  it is open to labor and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive the guardian of those Elysian gates. In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar person ever enters there. ... 

"Do you deserve to enter? Pass. Do you ask to be the companion of nobles? Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you long for the conversation of the wise? Learn to understand it, and you shall hear it. But on the other terms? - no. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you. 

"The living lord may assume courtesy, the living philosopher explain his thought to you with considerate pain; but here we neither feign or interpret; you must rise to the level of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, and share our feelings if you would recognize our presence."

From Sesame and Lilies:  Good Books by John Ruskin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great Books Academy

Lowell Lectures from Harvard University

Classical Homeschooling
Return to the proven educational methods of past centuries

Online Classical Tutorials

The Well-Trained Mind

ISI Books: 
Perennial Ideas Shaping Our Age

Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI)

Guides to the Major Disciplines:

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) is your one-stop resource for graduate fellowships, liberal arts study guides, scholarly journals, materials on Western Civilization and free markets, and conservative speakers.

Atheneum School

  • Socratic seminars and use of classic primary texts in middle and high school curricula

  • Summer classes

  • Bulletin

Important Classical Resources:

 

Liberal education, based on the Liberal Arts, takes its name from the Latin word liber, meaning free. Liberal education, traditionally understood, leads men to freedom and happiness. 

Quintilian

Erasmus

Antiquities Graphics