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Students Learn The Classics
Cary Christian stresses memorization, phonics, even diagramming sentences.
By TODD SILBERMAN, Staff Writer
CARY -- Students in Melba Hanson's second-grade class know all about nouns and verbs. They also know about subjects, objects and prepositions. They chant them and sing them, clearly, loudly and in unison. In Sharon Withington's class, third-graders can do all that and more. They recite poems by A.A. Milne, call out the capital of every state in the union and sing songs about Isaac Newton's first law of motion and the planets, each in order from the sun.
Fifth-graders in Debora Robinson's class sit up straight and fire off facts about tornadoes and the nervous system. Together, they repeat a complex jingle about verbs, all from memory, in well-practiced unison.
Lots of schools these days are going back to the basics. Teachers and students at Cary Christian School are reaching into a past when the teacher ruled, students stood before speaking and the knowledge of facts, often just for the sake of knowing facts, was an important educational value.
The school, launched in 1997, is carving a niche for an approach known as "classical education," a specific methodology that has more to do with lessons from the past than the newest classroom vogue.
The schools, many of them with a Christian focus, have their own association of more than 100 members across the country, their own Web site and a firm faith in an educational philosophy they contend has withstood the test of time.
Parents are drawn to the Cary school both for its biblical orientation and the classical approach they see as being especially effective.
"The strong foundation appeals to me the most," said Resa Cross, who has three children at the school, ranging in age from 10 to 15. "It builds upon itself."
Phonics is stressed in the early grades, and so is geography. History lessons focus on Western civilization, and Latin is taught beginning in third grade. High school students read "The Iliad," "The Odyssey" and "The Aeneid" along with American and British classics.
"We follow the tried and the true," said principal Larry Stephenson. "We do a lot of memorization and drills."
By the time children have completed kindergarten, for example, they are expected to be able to recognize three pieces of classical music and name the composer of each and the historical period when each was written. Three more pieces are added in each grade level, so by the time students reach sixth grade, they have memorized 18 pieces.
Students in fifth grade know the periodic table of the elements long before they learn chemistry.
The school's instructional approach follows a three-part structure, called the trivium, intended to best match a child's developmental stage.
Learning in stages
Elementary grades, known as the grammar stage, focus on giving students a foundation of facts in history, science, math, grammar and reading. At almost every elementary grade, every day, students meticulously diagram sentences.
In middle-school grades, students follow a "logic" stage, when they begin to make connections and think critically about information learned in the grammar stage. And in high school, students learn persuasive expression through writing and debate.
"With any type of learning, you have to go from what you know to what you don't," Stephenson said.
The school puts a premium on spoken language, from participating in teacher-led songs, jingles and chants to reciting poems and joining "sound-offs," a fast-paced recitation of facts with each student responsible for his or her own part. For fifth-graders, the topic could be the nervous system or explorers. For third-graders, it's the American colonies.
Students speak clearly and confidently.
"Because it's spoken and done daily, they learn it and don't lose it," said Hanson, one of three second-grade teachers at the school.
Hanson, who has worked in public schools in Wake County and in the Greensboro area, said she believes strongly in the school's approach. Her daughter, now in 10th grade, has attended the school since it opened.
She said the school's heavy emphasis on teacher-directed lessons is out of step with the kind of teaching practice stressed when she was working in the public schools.
" 'Don't do the rote,' we were told," Hanson said. " 'Do the hands-on.' But this works. It's the repetition we use. At this point in a child's development, they love and absorb facts."
A 'common sense' model
Tim McClelland, who helped found the school in the mid-1990s, said the classical education model surfaced as a particularly appealing notion as he and other members at Peace Presbyterian Church began looking at setting up a Christian school. The school is unaffiliated with any particular church, although it rents classroom space at Peace and at Salem Baptist Church in Apex. A new 800-student campus is planned to open in 2004.
"It was very common sense and practical, and the results were becoming well-known," said McClelland, a Cary contractor and landlord. The school is modeled after a school in Moscow, Idaho, founded in 1980 by a pastor there, Doug Wilson, who then wrote a book about the school, helping to popularize the approach.
In developing his school, Wilson drew heavily on a 1947 address by Dorothy L. Sayers, the late British mystery writer and scholar. In her address, "The Lost Tools of Learning," delivered at Oxford University, Sayers urged a return to classical educational methods and outlined the notion of the trivium: A progression from grammar stage to logic stage to rhetoric stage.
Stephenson, who arrived at Cary Christian last year after working at the school in Idaho, underwent a conversion of sorts after reading Wilson's book, "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning."
Stephenson had worked 11 years as a public school administrator and had grown frustrated with what he calls the fragmented approach to curriculum and inconsistent standards from one classroom to another.
"What made so much sense to me," Stephenson said, "was that students need to learn all the tools first -- what's a hammer, what's a cross-cut saw, then when to use those tools, and finally when you make it look beautiful, when you've mastered the skills."
Reprinted by permission of The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina.