Classical rhetoric arose as a discipline designed to aid speakers before courts of law and other public settings. By identifying three primary means of persuasion—appeals to authority (ethos), appeals to emotion (pathos), and appeals to reason (logos)—it taught speakers to calculate more precisely which combination of these three would produce the desired effect in an […]
Author Archives: Lesley-Anne Williams
Charlotte Mason, the founder of the PNEU in the nineteenth century, and Cheryl Lowe, the founder of Memoria Press in the twentieth century, were both remarkable women in their time. They were attentive to the educational changes in their respective generations and were determined to fight for the good of children, regardless of educational trends. […]
The world of Till We Have Faces (1956) presents readers with a thoroughly pre-modern and non-Greek religion. In the land of Glome, located somewhere in the mountains to the north of Greece (whether more Scandinavian or Russian, it is hard to tell), the people worship Ungit, a feminine deity and sacred stone, which emerged from […]
About 25 years before writing Till We Have Faces, an unconverted C.S. Lewis met with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson for dinner in his rooms at Magdalen College, followed by a stroll together on Addison’s Walk. He recounted this conversation later in a letter to Arthur Greeves. Tolkien and Dyson had helped Lewis to see […]
What is at stake with Common Core mathematics and why is it so potentially harmful if it is just a minimum standard? In Part I of this series, I addressed commonly held beliefs concerning math education prior to the “reforms” of the early twentieth century that led to the math wars. In this post, I […]
“Math is math. I just don’t understand why my kid needs to know five different ways to solve a simple division problem!” Most parents attempting to help their children with math homework over the past decade have expressed this sentiment. In reply, education experts remind everyone that parents said something similar when “New Math” was […]
The traditional approach to reading and spelling instruction began to change about 150 years ago during the Romantic era. Among other things, Romanticism emphasized imagination, creativity, and individuality. The “whole language” or “look-say” method of reading was advocated by Horace Mann, who wrote about phonics: “It is upon this emptiness, blankness, silence and death, that […]
For over forty years, the Reading and Writing Project at the Teachers College of Columbia University influenced the way at least one in four American schools taught children how to read. Spearheading this reading initiative was the program’s director, Lucy Calkins, who advocated for an approach called “Balanced Literacy.” It claimed to put an end […]