Education: February 2019 Archives

How to Write a St. John's Paper - Colloquy @ SJC

Geoffrey Young, graduate writing assistant at St. John's College in Annapolis, explains how to write an essay in the school's distinctive Great Books program.

"It is not a summary of the text in question. It is not a 'personal essay' in the sense of the text serving as a means to fly freely and gleefully into the realm of your thoughts on the world. It is not 'a work of specialized research'.... [Y]our essay will not use outside sources that provide academic context or commentary...."

"It is the 'pursuit of a difficult question in dialogue with a great author,"... a conversation... in the open-ended and exploratory mode of a seminar... an attempt, a trial, a try. Consider that you are not answering a question; you are asking one, and then trying out an answer."

How to get started?

"Free write!... Now is the time to write uncritically -- no editing, no crossing out. Write out why a particular text is confusing, or why it is beautiful. Write out why you're having trouble writing. The process of writing -- writing anything at all -- has a funny way of demanding clarification in your thought. A mere 10-15 minutes of free writing will likely take you a long way toward a fruitful opening question."

Piling It On: Why Classical Schools Have Too Many Periods and Teach Too Many Subjects | Inside Classical Education

"It turns out that a buffet can be a marvelous way to eat, but not such a great way to study. To study and learn well, humans have learned that it is important to study a few things deeply, even to mastery, rather than to dabble and sample dozens of things. C.S. Lewis puts it this way in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, while recounting his junior-high education:

"'In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life. Smewgy taught us Latin and Greek, but everything else came in incidentally.'"