Leigh Bortins Quotes

Families are designed to nurture the minds, wills, and emotions of its members so that the barriers created by fear of the unknown can be replaced by the confidence that comes from knowing you are loved whether you succeed or fail.

Education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, and it is accomplished by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty.

An educated person is not someone who knows something, but someone who can explain what they know to others.

The classical model emphasizes that learning feeds the soul and edifies the person rather than producing employees to work an assembly line. The goal of a classical education is to instill wisdom and virtue in people. We see learning as a continuing

The classical approach trains the student to become a thorough and capable learner, rather than focusing on training for a single job skill.

The same thing is true in all fields: an over-practiced skill eventually becomes a delightful art to be shared.

With the growing budget crisis in public education, it’s cheaper for schools to not have to construct and maintain buildings for students. Machines are less expensive than real teachers.

The foundation of a classical education begins with parents teaching children the art of memorization and grammar studies. Some educators might dismiss rote memorization, but I argue that it is beneficial because it trains your brain to hold information. It is the most organic way of learning ever devised and goes hand in hand with the way we naturally relate to our children.

C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, said, “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come .

Some of the terms I use need to be defined. I refer to today’s education as “factory education”because, historically, the industrial age coincided with a national mandate to provide public education for the masses. In order to take on this enormous task, school systems replicated some of the efficiencies built into a large factory, as if they could ignore the fact that the “components”coming down the “assembly line”were children. Some educators envision computers

I am criticizing the professionalization of teaching children because these young human beings are not cogs in a machine, And I am trying to identify the root of the problem for all those wonderful adults who went into teaching thinking that they could commit to nurturing the lives of many children only to end up having the system squash their excellent motives. Our current school system replicates factories and requires classroom managers more than teachers. Teachers are appreciably frustrated.

One thing that has turned some families away from the classical approach is its emphasis on language, logic, and literature instead of job skills . It doesn’t seem very practical to study a “dead” language, and formal logic sounds like a difficult college course.

The proliferation of technology has coincided with overall lower levels of literacy.

information to your home and even provide access to great teachers through audio and video, but it is onesided.

As much as I love technology and think it has value in education, most real learning comes from wrestling with big ideas and arguing with another person.

Classical education emphasizes using the classical skills to study classical content.

One of the challenges of home-centered education is building a new relationship with your children.

In order to teach your children classically, you may have to teach them to respect you in a different way, and you may have to become worthy of their respect. Adding the role of teacher to your parental repertoire can be done, however, and may lead to wonderful developments in your family. Contrary to popular culture, it is natural for children to recognize that parents are wiser than themselves and for young adults to want to be personally responsible. Let’s resolve to be adults whom children like to spend time with, not because we are “fun,”but because our kids know that we think it is a great privilege and pleasure to be with them. Let’s show them that when we learn something new, we can’t wait to share our discovery with them. Where there is a vision, parents will find a way. My sons know that the following is

Yet somehow, in recent years educational theory has come to reject repetition as a good educational tool when it comes to mastering our multiplication tables or identifying geographic locations or learning the correct spelling of words. We accept that to be good at sports or music you must practice over and over until your fine motor skills become your gross motor skills, meaning that you can play Tchaikovsky in your sleep! Over-practice implies enough repetition to make new skills seem easy and natural. Yet contemporary educational philosophies consider large amounts of rote practice to be unnecessary in academics. And so our modern educational system is weak. The purpose of a classical education is to strengthen one’s mind, body, and character in order to develop the ability to learn anything.

Educators often refer to communication skills as rhetorical skills. Scholars focus on both oral and written rhetoric. Oral skills are often taught through speech and debate classes, and are sometimes called forensics. Forensics, derived from the Latin word “forum,”as in court of law, actually means pertaining to legal proceedings or argumentation. Popular television shows have changed the meaning to something related exclusively to scientific investigation, as by a forensic pathologist. The term is actually much broader, as forensics implies researching an idea and then comparing it to things known by the audience in order to persuade them to one side of an argument or the other. Hence, the term “rhetoric”is closely tied to the idea of oral, documented, or physical evidence explained to the appropriate audience.

Everyone says parents are children’s first and best teachers. I really believe it. As a minimum before high school,

We have even distorted a famous colonial praise, “Jack of all trades” to derogatorily mean “master of none.” Originally , the intent was to honor a person who could meet whatever challenges arise. For

The purpose of a classical education is to equip students to discover the way our universe works.

The model works for those who work the model.

Adults know that children who choose to work hard learn to appreciate those who have to work hard. A culture of rigorous learning destroys a culture of fear of the different or the unknown. A culture of families learning together allows experienced parents to teach immature children to accept and admire different types of people. Home-centered

Yet the structure we have built to protect and nurture these children actually does the opposite. Imagine an impoverished six-year-old boy who rarely gets a healthy meal and rarely has parental supervision. He finally goes to school and falls in love with the first person who has ever been there every day for him—his first-grade teacher. She loves and encourages and teaches him. She won’t let the kids bully one another, and she makes sure he gets a good breakfast, lunch, and an after-school snack. Only the weekends are scary. The sixyear-old has a daily routine that includes a committed relationship for the very first time. Life is good; hope is learned. Then the school year ends, and this wonderful teacher says, “Good-bye. You will have a great teacher in second grade.” So the seven-year-old survives the short summer and begins the process all over. But now he has a homeroom teacher, a math and science teacher, a language arts teacher, and a music teacher. Which one is he to fall in love with? Who will fall in love with him? Each of these teachers has dozens of students to care for an hour at a time. And so, at the end of second grade it’s a little less painful to part with his teachers because he never really got to know them. But at least he was physically safe and was fed every day. And so, by the end of third grade, he hardly notices his teacher because he has formed a strong attachment to the friends who move along from class to class with him. They share multiple hours together daily. Instead of taking his signals of proper behavior from a committed adult, since he has none at home or school, he models his life after the future football captain, just as the girls in his class likely emulate the future prom queen. This child from an impoverished culture was taught, in effect, that no adult cares enough to hang out and teach him for more than the 150 hours required to complete a credit. And as he got older, he also learned that the teachers were not quite as able to physically protect him as when he and his classmates were small, and it’s humiliating to have to eat the government-provided free lunch. Even our elementary

The goal of education is to teach children to become adults who can handle complex ideas, in uncertain situations , with confidence. We feel confident when we can competently manage words and ideas. Successful education ought to propel a

Instead, we put children in a situation where they are consistently molded to depend on their peers . Children are taught to value the other students more than their teachers, for at least their classmates follow them on the age-graded conveyor belt from class to class, year after year, whereas teachers come and go.

An advantage of a classical education is that our competencies define us more than our job title. Parents recognize that the world has changed and that their children need to acquire basic skills that enable them to function anywhere in a variety of careers. We need to offer children a broad, freeing education that allows them to think well and to be lifelong learners. Children need to be prepared for any challenge, even for job opportunities that may not exist until well into the future.