Catholic,
Great Books, Classical
HOMESCHOOL PROGRAM
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| Some
of the Angelicum Academy's Great Books Program moderators
with the Holy Father (Rome, January 16, 2008). Left
to right: His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI; Patrick
Carmack, J.D. (USA); Prof. Pior Jaroszynski [in back]
(Poland); James Taylor, Ph.D.(USA); Stephen Bertucci,
Director of our online classes(USA); Peter Redpath,
Ph.D. (USA). |
The
Angelicum Homeschool Program is a nursery-though-12th-grade
curriculum for home education. It is complete –
including all subjects, books, guides and tests needed,
for all grades. Optional services for enrolled students
include grading, transcript maintenance, online literature
discussion classes and the finest online resources (such
as Encyclopaedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster Unabridged
Dictionary, Britannica Original Sources, Britannica’s
Annals of American History).
The
Angelicum Homeschool Program is easy to follow. Because
it is complete, it is a one-stop home education provider.
The 13 courses (subjects) allow parents to offer their
children more options than any private school offers.
Because it is flexible, it allows parents to select only
those courses they wish, when they wish, and to take as
long (or as little) as they wish to complete a course.
Most of our students are doing six or seven subjects,
in two or three different grade levels – they have
excelled in some, taken more time in others – this
is a common sense approach to education, not a one-pace-fits-all
approach to unique human beings.
LESS
EXPENSIVE PER COURSE
THAN OTHER HOMESCHOOL PROGRAMS
We
offer a lot of course options - 13 - more than any other
program (most programs offer only six). This is because
some parents want to emphasize, for example, art instead
of music, or science instead of philosophy, etc. That
is a parental decision. But we do not recommend that any
student take more than six or seven subjects at any one
time. If one compares costs for any six of our courses
with other homeschool programs, one will find that the
Angelicum Homeschool Program is either less expensive
or comparable in cost, and, we believe, far superior in
content and quality. We strive to offer only the very
best educational books and materials.
Our
entire curriculum - consisting of books, lesson plans
and tests for each course, and Great Books study guides
[for high school levels] - are organized in our bookstore
by subject, and grade level. Only books used in our courses
are carried by our bookstore. What one sees in the bookstore
is our entire curriculum. We have available free placement
tests we can email, for optional guidance in selecting
grade levels, for each course. Testing may be done using
our optional quarterly tests, or parents may grade as
they wish (parentally-provided grading is accepted, and
is simply footnoted as such on the transcript).
Our
nursery through 8th grade curriculum is conventionally
organized, with a superb classics literature base (such
as Aesop's Fables, Mother Goose, the Little House books,
Little Women, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield,
etc.), but is far more challenging than the public school
curricula and exceeds the academic standards of private
and parochial schools as well. Being oriented to home
education, it allows the parents to set the pace. The
literature component was carefully selected for integration
with the entire curriculum, good moral example, including
in the supplemental lives of the Saints offered, and to
prepare students, in graduated steps, to read the world’s
finest and most influential literature in several fields
collected in our Great Books program.
Our
9th-12th grade integrated-literature program was designed
primarily by the late Dr. Mortimer Adler (with minor changes)
who called these works the Great Books. Having learned
the arts of learning (i.e., the liberal arts: grammar,
reading, writing, calculating, etc.) in the elementary
levels, students here begin to study the substance of
a liberal education – the works of the great authors
of Western civilization – masterpieces by Homer,
Plato, Aristotle, St. John, St. Augustine, Ven. Bede,
St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and many
others, in literature, poetry, drama, history, science
and philosophy. These works constitute an on-going dialogue
about the truths of man's nature and his relationship
with the rest of reality, called the Great Conversation.
In giving your children the opportunity to grasp this
wisdom from the past, they cannot help but be led to a
greater appreciation and understanding of virtue and the
wonder and beauty of life, and the ability to participate
in the intellectual life of the Church and culture. The
American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation
Service (ACE CREDIT) has evaluated and recommended college
credit for 8 courses (totaling 48 credit hours - 6 per
semester) of the Western Civilization Foundations's Great
Books Program. The American
Council on Education, the major coordinating body
for all the nation's higher education institutions, seeks
to provide leadership and a unifying voice on key higher
education issues and to influence public policy through
advocacy, research, and program initiatives. For more
information, visit the ACE CREDIT website at http://www.acenet.edu/acecredit.
Our
view is that we are here to help parents and students
by reviewing, selecting, organizing, assembling and in
some cases publishing, the very best materials and curriculum
organization for the finest educational experience possible.
This program allows parents and students to establish
their own individuals schedules and course selections.
This website has hundreds of pages of additional information,
and articles to view, then enjoy your visit to our Bookstore/Curriculum.
All you need to begin is to select the books and materials
you wish. Anyone may purchase our materials. Enrollment,
online classes and enrollment services are optional. Welcome
to the Angelicum Homeschool Program!
We look forward to assisting you. We promptly answer
all emails, faxes and letters, which we encourage
(phone messages must be answered selectively as the
call-back process is cumbersome and quite inefficient
in an international program – TA students are
now in over 30 countries in numerous time zones; therefore,
to assure a prompt reply, please try to email or fax
[see contact page].
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