Elizabeth Jetton, Josh Herring, and Winston Brady. Research and Writing, Volume I: Starting to Write and Volume II: Writing with Purpose. Raleigh, NC: Thales Press, 2023. 382 pgs.
After fifteen years in the classical classroom, one of the questions I continually hear most often remains: “How can I teach my students to write classically?” Of course, there are more attempted answers to this question than a teacher might reasonably implement each year. Writing curricula abound, as do training sessions, breakout meetings, and mini-conferences. Each attempts to take the principles behind Aristotle’s Rhetoric and modify them for the modern world. Administrators, teachers, and parents find themselves in an interesting position as a result because the evaluation process almost always hangs on what a curriculum is “missing” as opposed to what it “contains.” The values of the instructor and their familiarity with the classical tradition inevitably influence the selection process.
Thales Press, the publishing arm of the growing classical school network, Thales Academy, has begun producing texts for their classrooms and for others interested in the Thales Way.[1] One of their most recent projects has been to contribute to the conversation on rhetoric, writing, and research. The book text is broken into two volumes with many contributors and three primary editors. Elizabeth Jetton, Josh Herring, and Winston Brady have tackled a big task with vigor and enthusiasm. The introduction boldly asserts,
“Classical education equips students to choose what is good, delight in what is true, and appreciate what is beautiful through the study of the Western canon . . . The goal of [this textbook] is to integrate the intellectual heritage of the Western tradition with the skills needed for all students to become excellent writers, communicators, and thinkers.”[2]
To accomplish this, the two volumes of Research & Writing pair topics with primary sources from within the tradition, such as crafting a thesis statement alongside Plato’s Apology and studying the research process through selections of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. This approach is consistently applied throughout the book, tackling twelve of the most pertinent aspects of writing in a classical school through pointed examples from the past. Though not quite set up in chronological order, it is fitting that the basic outline of the topics does work from the classical past to the beginnings of modernity.
An immediately perceptible aspect of this set of books is that it takes seriously the charge of beauty. The text is laid out with images, colors, and fonts that suggest a proper pursuit, rather than a pragmatic, cost-restrictive approach.[3] I cannot say this is true of all classical writing programs. The books are methodical in how they address topics and assignments, suggesting more than a superficial love of Aristotle’s Categories, and the outline feeds into a natural progression of writing. But perhaps the greatest strength of the books lies in their interdisciplinary approach. There are grammatical lessons, such as reviewing capitalization rules. There are reading comprehension questions, asking students to do more than gloss over the primary sources to demonstrate their understanding. Each unit concludes with exercises aimed at practice—which strikes this reader as the kind of thing that artificial intelligence will have difficulty answering. For example, “Should a writer use persuasion or is that merely manipulation?”[4] Or, “What limitations should we place on scientific knowledge and how ought we to do with it?”[5] Such assignments lead the student towards the good, the true, and the beautiful in ways that are easily adaptable in different school settings without losing any of their dependence upon the Great Tradition. The Appendix does not disappoint, with a helpful glossary and a small, but useful set of examples and forms that a teacher can rejoice in having on hand.
One objection I can already hear from the curriculum committee is that the text heavily leans on modernity for its examples, with Lord Tennyson, Jonathan Swift, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, Adam Smith, William Shakespeare, and Jane Austen proportionally outnumbering classical and medieval sources.[6] I think this is a fair point, though also a misguided one. Volume II of the textbook is firmly anchored in the modern modes of communication, focusing on the kind of things a student is likely to read and write after high school. However, the editors rightly work from facts to imagination. The second volume begins with research, but it concludes with poetry. In short, a modern author might be given the last word, but his art is that of the oldest form of writing. It is a clever and helpful way to conclude a book where practicality will undoubtedly be questioned, as is the case with all classical writing programs. For some classical Christian schools, the lack of immediate and overt engagement with the Scriptures will perhaps be a turn-off, though this does not typically hinder the purchasing of math textbooks. Schools will have to evaluate this aspect on their own, but I would argue that a good rhetoric teacher will be able to make much of this textbook series and still have time to bring in the relevant passages and themes from Scripture.
Overall, the two volumes are a welcome entry into the discussion surrounding classical education and writing instruction. Neither falling into the deficient position of aiming towards practicality alone, nor the excessive position of eschewing more recent developments in writing, these texts should serve as a great help to many in the classical education circle. Other publishers would do well to take note of their layout and teacher supports, and many schools would benefit from a serious discussion about exactly how their writing program is forming students. The folks at Thales Press are asking these same questions and producing sound teaching aids to show that the answers to such questions matter.
Sean C. Hadley is a graduate of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (MDiv, 2017) and Faulkner University's Great Books program (PhD, 2023). His writings have been published in outlets such as The Imaginative Conservative, Touchstone magazine, and The Hemingway Review. He has given conference talks in a variety of settings, such as the annual Repairing the Ruins education conference and the annual Spring conference of the Ciceronian Society. For the last fifteen years, he taught in the classical Christian classroom, and he is currently the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Classical Education Research Lab at the University of Arkansas.
[1] The current offerings from Thales Press can be found here: https://www.thalesacademy.org/resources/thales-press.
[2] Elizabeth Jetton, Josh Herring, and Winston Brady, Research and Writing, Volume I: Starting to Write (Raleigh, NC: Thales Press, 2023), p. 6.
[3] The image of the Temple of Augustus and Livia in Rome seemed an apt reminder before diving into the research process. Elizabeth Jetton, Josh Herring, and Winston Brady, Research and Writing, Volume II: Writing with Purpose (Raleigh, NC: Thales Press, 2023), p. 12.
[4] Vol. I, p. 34.
[5] Vol. II, 73.
[6] Classical thinkers in the text include Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian, while Medieval thinkers include Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccacio, and Niccolo Machiavelli.