Schola Grammatica

This course is a reconstruction of the Roman grammaticus's schoolroom — the middle rung of the classical ladder, after a child can read and write and before they are ready to argue. It keeps the grammaticus's exact division of labor. Year One is recte loquendi scientia, the science of speaking and writing correctly: the eight parts of speech, case and agreement, tense, mood, and voice, the well-formed sentence, punctuation, the two classical faults of barbarism and solecism, etymology and diction, and prosody — ending with the first delivery skill, reading a passage aloud well. The method is the Roman one: read aloud, parse, correct.

Year Two is enarratio poetarum, the reading and exposition of the poets — the foundational stories of the West, in translation, read the way the grammaticus expounded them: aloud, explained, and taken to heart. Students work through myth, Homer, Virgil, the fable, lyric and epigram, and history as literature in Livy and Plutarch, learning to ask four questions of a text: what it says, what it means, where it comes from, and what it asks of them. The course closes with imitation as mastery — the student writes in a chosen author's manner on new matter — and a final lesson naming what is carried upward to rhetoric: a hand for sentences, an ear for prose, a stock of great stories, and the habit of imitation.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.