Classical Education Courses for Parents & Classroom Teachers

Course Description

Writing instruction plays a unique role in any curriculum. Whereas other subjects invite children to study certain discrete realms of knowledge, the goal of writing instruction is to render the student capable of knowing. Language is the form of human thought, and as we make children more adept at using the resources of language, we make their minds more adequate to the world around them. The purpose of this course is to explore the ways writing instructors in a classical school can do justice to this fundamental importance of their subject matter.

Classical education seeks to nurture the whole of a child’s intellectual, moral, and aesthetic capacities. A writing program worthy of a classical school should be one that encompasses and strengthens all of these capacities. The approach delineated in this course is one that seeks to do just that. It is one that seeks to expose students to the rich stylistic resources of the language, and to instill a love of linguistic play in them. It is an approach that encourages students to be craftsmen of sentences, while enhancing their powers of discursive reasoning through effective argumentation. Above all, this course eschews the habits of academic writing, which is only designed to teach students how to do further academic writing. Instead, the kind of writing instruction advocated for here is the kind that will open students’ minds to the vast dimensions of the world they inhabit.

Towards this end, the course makes use of the classical rhetorical, poetic, and pedagogical traditions. As classical educators, we stand as inheritors of the riches of these traditions. By appropriating the practices and theoretical commitments of these ancestors for our own times, we can provide our students with a far more meaningful and far more effective training in the arts of language.

Who: Classroom teachers of English or Humanities in grades 6-12 or home educators who are looking for ideas to teach writing more effectively with their children.

Dates: The course will run on Thursday evenings from February 27th to March 20th. 

Time: Thursdays, 6:00pm-7:30pm (CENTRAL TIME)

Recordings: Recording of live meetings will be sent approximately within 24-48 hours after the meeting. They will be available for one month after each class.

Cost: $125/person (non-refundable)

About the Instructor:

Mark Signorelli has been serving on the Beautiful Teaching team since 2023. He has most recently served as Headmaster at Lumen Gentium Academy, a classical Catholic high school located in Boonton, NJ.  Prior to occupying this position, he was the Director for a Classical Studies program within the Chesterton Network of Schools.  In addition to over twenty years of experience as an educator, Mark has also written extensively for a wide variety of journals, including the Imaginative Conservative, Arion, Modern Age, Public Discourse, the University Bookman, and Front Porch Republic.  He currently writes at his own site, The Classical Corner, and has authored several books.