Our vision
Classical Legacy Press was founded to further the revival of Christian classical education, a revival which is transforming Christian homeschools and schools around the world. We provide Christian families and schools with quality curriculum materials which serve the aims of classical education, yet can be used successfully by parents and teachers who were not classically educated themselves.
Latin, logic and rhetoric—the trio of topics known as the "trivium"—lie at the heart of classical education. Classical Legacy Press currently has offerings in Latin and logic: The Great Latin Adventure, Levels I and II, and Logic I: Tools for Thinking.
Our commitment in writing curriculum materials is to set the bar high, and then help students achieve it. Subjects don't need to be "dumbed down" in order to be enjoyable and attainable; our programs feature an orderly topic sequence and a friendly, accessible style which enable students to achieve real skill in Latin and logic—in manageable increments.
But why even study a dead language and an arcane mix of p's and q's? Latin and logic, properly taught, are anything but musty and irrelevant! They are springboards to the love of language and the mastery of clear thought.
And they don't need to be taught as if nothing has changed in two millennia, either. The wisdom of the past can serve the needs of the present.
Please visit our Latin curriculum and Logic curriculum pages to read more about The Great Latin Adventure and Logic I: Tools for Thinking. You'll find a detailed discussion of the curricula, along with user testimonials.
It's a privilege to help open the minds of children to new horizons; we hope to serve you and your family.
A bit of history
Where did today's classical education come from, anyway?
Classical education was born in ancient Greece. It captivated the Greco-Roman world and fueled the immense cultural and political accomplishments of that world.
The Christian educators of late antiquity and the early middle ages sifted the Greek classical legacy through Christian standards to produce a Christian classical education suited to their time. Their successors have continued to adapt and develop this educational heritage. In the hands of Christians the educational legacy of classical antiquity drove the religious, scientific, cultural, and political progress of western civilization from the early middle ages to the nineteenth century.
In the eighteenth century, western culture began to abandon Christianity, and in the nineteenth, it began to abandon classical education—with disastrous consequences. Neither tradition died completely, however, and in recent years, both have shown encouraging signs of revival.
Today's classical Christian education movement is seeking to revive and adapt the heritage of classical education to serve the needs of today's Christian families—and today's world.
Christian classical education "flavors"
As the Christian classical education revival movement matures today, it contains a number of different strands, "flavors" and emphases. One school advocates a strict division of trivium subject areas into three learning "stages": the "grammar stage," the "logic (or dialectic) stage" and the "rhetoric stage." These stages are said to correspond to the stages of children's intellectual development. This school of thought also ties the learning stages to specific instructional methods.
This developmental model originated in an essay of Dorothy Sayers in the 1940s. While this model contains much that is common-sense and helpful, it departs in some important respects from the proven practices of the historic classical tradition.
We also find aspects of the Sayers model unnecessarily limiting.
A more flexible approach
We adopt a more flexible approach to both scheduling questions and subject area divisions. There's no need to box yourself or your child into a tight preordained schedule based on generalizations about child development. Homeschoolers in particular have a wonderful liberty to choose the right time to cover a given subject with a particular child—and you don't need to abandon that liberty in order to pursue classical education! Choose excellent curricula and use them when your child is ready.
As for subject area divisions, naturally our Latin program is about Latin and our logic program is about logic, but we do not hesitate to cross the boundaries separating the subjects of the trivium when it would be helpful to do so. Our Latin program teaches Latin but it also strengthens reasoning skills—logical skills!—and our logic program addresses the interface between logic and language, without which logic is not much help in the real world.
In addition, we've found there's no need to teach all the foundational facts of a subject first, and only later put them to use. We move back and forth from the outset between teaching necessary facts and putting those facts to work.
In short, in our implementation of classical education, we aim to be historically grounded, yet not hidebound; rigorous, yet not rigid.
Who we are
Norman M. Birkett
Norman Birkett attended a Christian school for most of his pre-college years, where he received an academically rigorous and thoroughly Christian education that embodied many elements of what is now called Christian and classical education. He then studied philosophy at Princeton University, earning his A.B. cum laude in 1984. His thesis, on artificial intelligence, won the university’s Dickinson Prize as the best thesis that year in logic and philosophy of mind. After Princeton, he spent fifteen years developing software for the financial industry, gaining a wide exposure to the business world in the process. His work ranged from very technical systems programming to the management of trading systems software teams in a large Wall Street firm. He left Wall Street in 1999 to become a teacher and administrator at the Christian and classical school associated with his church, in Montville, New Jersey. He remained at the school until 2008, teaching a variety of subjects, including logic, rhetoric, literature, history of Western thought, calculus, music appreciation, boys' chorus, and computer programming and robotics. For most of these courses his responsibilities included curriculum development. He also maintained the school's computer network for several years. He is the author of Logic I: Tools for Thinking.
Katharine Birkett
Katharine Birkett majored in Russian language and literature at Princeton. She prepared for college at schools where she was privileged to study French and Latin. After graduating from Princeton, she completed a paralegal degree. More recently, she taught Latin at the same Christian school where Norman taught. She writes poetry, enjoys inventing recipes, and is learning to transform digital photos into artwork using Photoshop. Katharine is her husband's best editor and critic. She is the author of The Great Latin Adventure.
Norman and Katharine
Norman and Katharine have been happily married, under God's care, since 1986. God's plan for the Birketts' lives has not included children of their own, so it is their privilege to serve the children of others through their support for Christian homeschools, co-ops and schools.
They have been blessed by belonging to a wonderful church for over two decades. There they have received the riches of God's word. They hope that their writing labors will serve as an offering of thanks to their heavenly Father for all he has entrusted to them, and that the materials they write will serve your family well.
Molly and Parsnip
The Birketts are capably impeded in their labors by two cats with an extravagant and ever-changing set of names. They turn up in the Birketts' books.
Statement of faith
We hold much in common with Christians from many traditions. Here are some of our central beliefs. In a few places below you will find that our language echoes a historic creed.
We believe in one God who exists in three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit— who is the creator of everything that exists.
We believe that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was born of a virgin, is fully God and fully man, and is the only savior of sinners. We believe the entire human race is in need of salvation from sin—salvation from the power of sin, the guilt of sin, and from God's just judgment for sin. We believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life, took on himself the guilt of sinners, died on the cross under the judgment of God for human sin, and rose again from the grave triumphant over death and sin.
We believe that God invites sinners to turn from their sin to himself in repentance and faith, placing their trust in the sinless Son of God. We believe that sinners who have come to Jesus Christ can and will lead increasingly holy lives by the power of the Holy Spirit.
We believe that outside of Christ, there is no salvation. We believe that Jesus Christ is coming again to judge the world and to take his people to himself forever. We believe in heaven and in hell. We believe in the resurrection of the body.
We believe that the Bible is the inerrant and inspired word of God, and that those who trust in Christ should study and live out that word in the context of a local church.