William C. Michael

If you’re a high school student interested in scoring well on the SAT, you need to get to work ASAP. You need to be ready to take the test in the Spring of your Junior year of high school and you should take it again in the Fall of your Senior year. As a former SAT Prep teacher, I can tell you that there is no easy way to prepare for the test. It’s a great test that’s designed to challenge high school students and sort them into groups for the sake of college admission. It does so very effectively. … Continue

I need to read Plato’s Euthyphro for a class this week, so I prepared a clean copy of Taylor’s translation. The dialogue investigates the question, “What is holiness?” Enjoy.

The lesson below belongs to the Classical Liberal Arts Academy’s Greek Reading I course. In this course, we study the Gospel of St. John in the New Testament. Students wishing to master the lesson below are to complete translation exercises daily from Greek into English and English into Greek, until every Greek word and its English meaning are memorized. Text 46 καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ Ναθαναήλ: ἐκ Ναζαρὲτ δύναταί τι ἀγαθὸν εἶναι; λέγει αὐτῷ ὁ Φίλιππος: ἔρχου καὶ ἴδε. 47 εἶδεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς τὸν Ναθαναὴλ ἐρχόμενον πρὸς αὐτὸν καὶ λέγει περὶ αὐτοῦ: ἴδε ἀληθῶς Ἰσραηλίτης, ἐν ᾧ δόλος οὐκ ἔστιν. 48 … Continue

The world of college education is a mess. There are thousands of colleges, most of which are useless. Anyone, no matter how poor of a student, can “go to college” today because there are colleges that are simply doing the business of granting degrees, but these degrees are relatively meaningless. These colleges offer students none of the benefits of college life. Their interest is in using students to gain access to government funding. That’s their business. When we talk about preparing for college, we should be focused on the best universities. These universities are valuable for the resources they offer … Continue

In modern society, schooling is required by law. It’s unfortunate because no matter what governments wish for, there will always be a few good students and many bad students. The reason is because most students never actually understand what the purpose of schooling is. When new families contact the Academy, I can predict quite accurately whether they will do well or not. I can tell by the questions the parents ask. Parents of bad students will ask the same question: How much time is required for this class? This question makes no sense for anyone seeking to become a good … Continue

When studying in college, high school or (let’s be honest) middle school, we are taught that we must always provide evidence to support claims we make in our writing or speaking. We are taught how to research to find evidence and then to cite the sources where our evidence is found. This is how education works everywhere–well, almost everywhere. In Christian private school circles, claims may be made with no evidence. School leaders and teachers can make claims about the history of Christian education without any fear of their readers or hearers asking them for evidence. The “classical education movement” … Continue

As a Classicist and Lay Dominican, I cringe when I hear Christians today talking about “Classical Education”. What schools are offering is not “classical education”–let’s be clear about that. Any time we speak about classical Greece and Rome, or medieval Christendom, there is only one kind of “education” and that’s a classical liberal arts education directed at philosophy. That’s what “classical education” is. There was no compulsory education before the 1850s. Very few children attended schools and those that did were prepared for learned vocations: law, medicine, politics, religion and philosophy. The education offered to those students was “classical education”. … Continue

When students move on into adult life, they enter into a world of applications and interviews. We live in a competitive, high-tech, capitalistic society and both schools and employers are looking for the best candidates they can find. Many students accomplish little due to time wasted on social media, idle activities, video games, etc., and make excuses for doing so day by day. There’s always an excuse for this and a reason for that. They tell themselves that they are smart and good and know what they’re doing. As long as they are able to be the only judges in … Continue