Andrew Kern & Katerina Hamilton Speaking Tour

  • The ACES Curriculum Project – Beginnings

    In late 2023, ACES launched an ambitious project to develop a classical curriculum package suited to our Australian context that could be adopted (and adapted) by schools. As many of you are aware, a number of sample curricula – some quite detailed and practically ready to pick up and use – already exist in the United States. While purchasing these are helpful in the short-term, what we really lack is a comprehensive curriculum that specifically addresses Australian concerns and, more pointedly, that maps on to the Australian Curriculum.

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  • Why Read the Classics?

    Anya Leonard

    Until you read the Classics, you simply don’t know how much of it is around you.

    Sure, there are some things that have survived into popular culture, a herculean task to be sure. A few of the Olympic gods, a reference to a wooden horse, a quote about stepping into a river twice might be surmised without having had the opportunity to read and understand the originals... but this is just a simulacrum, a thin veneer of the wisdom and insight gained from the great texts.

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  • A Treatise On the Education of Poor Mongrels

    Conor Ross

    Old Lady Manning had a dog, so simple and small
    that would sit and pant outside with the family all.
    The Manning family hobby was wholesome and sweet,
    It was to wait for a full moon and hold a porch meet

    And talk with delight of this or of that,
    to smoke a pipe or count passing bats.
    They would play crackajack and stretchy nose
    and games plenty else that nobody knows.

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  • The Core – Reviewing My Progress

    Cheree Harvey

    “When I began teaching my children, I realized that even though the world said I was educated, I found out I was only schooled.”  Leigh Bortins of Classical Conversations fame cuts to the heart of the matter in her book The Core, published in 2010. I am reading this fascinating book for the third time in as many years, as I practice what I preach - spending time thinking deeply with fellow parents about the reasons why and also how I teach my children in the classical, Christian tradition. Is it really the best way? How do I make sure I don’t leave gaps in their education? How will I find a like-minded community? What does it mean to be truly human – a test score or a soul? Slowly, reading one chapter a month has definitely allowed for the truths to be contemplated in a more meaningful, deeper way.

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  • A different kind of language

    Denise O’Hagan

    All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.’

    -- Samuel Beckett

    I never bent my head to tread the short
    flight of stone steps down, carefully, or
    noticed that they were damply uneven,

    dipping in the middle. The silence and
    cool never closed their clammy arms
    around me, nor did my eyes adapt slowly

    to take in the gloom. The single light-bulb,
    wire-looped from the peeling ceiling, and
    suspended in front of her raised portrait,

    never swayed before me. Yet technology
    proves an efficient conduit: I enlarge the photo
    little by little, notice more. On the low-slung

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  • Testimony on “Teaching History Classically”

    Conor Ross

    Early in October, ACES hosted an immersion course in conjunction with Beautiful Teaching, “Teaching History Classically” with Mark Signorelli leading. Mark has over twenty years of experience as an educator and is the headmaster of Lumen Gentium Academy, a classical Catholic secondary school in New Jersey USA.

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