Literature

 According to John Senior, in The Restoration of Christian Culture, “The seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas, only grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, romances, adventures – the thousand good books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas, and the rest. Western tradition, taking all that was the best of the Greco-Roman world into itself, has given us a culture in which the faith properly grows.” This statement summarizes the philosophy upon which our literature program is built. 

Classroom reading selections are chosen to increase in difficulty each year and, as much as possible, follow the history period being studied that year. Books are read out loud in class by the students and by the teacher, followed by class discussion. Essays, papers and book reports are assigned for the reading as appropriate. Additionally, students begin keeping a journal in fourth grade with summaries of all the books they read.