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

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.'"