Grounded in the Good Things

“Our greatest inheritance, the very foundation of our civilization, is a marvel to behold and consider. If I tried to describe its rich legacy with utmost brevity, I should take the Latin word humanitas. It represents in the widest sense, the accumulated harvest of the ages, the fine flower of a long discipline of Christian thought. It is the Western mind of which we ought to turn our attentions to careful study.

“The now frivolously disregarded Trivium — emphasizing the basic classical scholastic categories of grammar, logic, and rhetoric — once equipped untold generations of young pupils with the essential tack and apparatus for a lifetime of learning. These are the very notions that once set acourse the great cultural flowering of Christendom over the past thousand years.

“Indeed, this sort of educational philosophy and methodology is that which steadfastly affirms that every student, every family, every community, and every nation needs to be grounded in the good things, the great things, the true things in order to do the right things.”

John Buchan (1875-1940)