A Humane Proposal: Grades 11 and 12

The Capstone Cycle for the Rhetoric Stage

I have long thought that a more Idea centric approach to the final two years of high schools would be a great benefit to the American educational system. This is less a radical departure from the norm and more of a return to the sensible educational systems of the recent past. Many school systems in Europe still employ this model in some degree, though it is often just as corrupted from the Industrial model influence as American education has become.¹ Still, Classical schools have a great opportunity to rethink the ends of education, and I think adopting something like the proposal below would better orient students towards life after high school.

The first thing to note is that I still hold to an integrated model. But rather than a simplistic and chronological structure, I suggest focusing on thematic courses that are broken out by semester. These suggestions below do have a sort of chronological aspect, but it might seem counter-intuitive at first. These ideas are specifically drawn from Clark and Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition, but there is an equal influence from Adler’s Syntopicon (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2). Both books are well worth the monetary and time investments.

11th Grade

First Semester: Piety

Genesis
Alcestis, Euripides (trans. Grene)
Odyssey, Homer (trans. Lattimore)
Samson Agonistes, Milton
Apology, Plato
Job
Judith
Coriolanus, Shakespeare
The Divine Comedy, Dante
Till We Have Faces, Lewis

Second Semester: Truth

The Theban Cycle, Sophocles (trans. Grene)
Republic, Plato
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
Summa Theologica, Aquinas
Novum Organum, Book 1, Bacon
Pensées, Pascal
Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Orwell
1 & 2 Corinthians
Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis
Strange New World, Trueman

12th Grade

First Semester: Goodness

Gilgamesh
Hebrews
City of God, Augustine
The Praise of Folly, Erasmus
Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin
The Tempest, Shakespeare
The Faerie Queen, Spenser
Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
Brave New World, Huxley
Perelandra, Lewis

Second Semester: Beauty

Psalms
Poetics, Aristotle
Ars Poetica, Horace
One the Sublime, Longinus
The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius
Twelfth Night, Shakespeare
The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Dunsany
The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway
The Mind of the Maker, Sayers
That Hideous Strength, Lewis²

None of the lists I’ve proposed across these three posts are meant to be complete and settled. Teachers would, naturally, need to add in places, though I hope nothing would need to be removed. I think of these lists as skeletal structures, providing an excellent framework from which to begin, but not a fully fleshed out curriculum. Any school who attempted to follow these groupings would, I believe, find their students to have received a full education.

And I take seriously the idea that the completion of a primary and secondary education should provide the average citizen for life and godliness. The Humane Proposal I’ve put forth aims to do that, decidedly within a Classical Christian framework. Perhaps someday I’ll offer companion pieces weaving in the maths and sciences, but since many schools still need to think long and hard about the purpose of their humanities departments, this is a fine place to close. For now.

1. It is common to refer to government education as “Traditional Public Schools,” which is a nonsensical way of speaking. Classical Schools and homeschooling have a far more legitimate claim to the title of “Traditional.” In my own writing, I’ve tried to consistently use “Industrial Model Schools” to refer to American public schools because, quite frankly, that is a far more accurate term. I doubt my efforts will move the needle much, but there’s always hope.

2. This book is the perfect capstone for a Classical Christian education, regardless of what other classes the students have taken.