Challenging Your Gifted Student

If you’re looking for a serious old-school classical education, of the sort that students entering Harvard or Yale, Oxford or Cambridge had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we may be one of your few genuine options. It doesn’t happen overnight, and you will have to commit to doing it for some years, but I can confidently say that I have sent students from Scholars Online or its predecessor (Scholars Online Academy) with better preparation than I normally saw in students entering graduate study in classics at UCLA, itself a solid program in classics. I know because it was better than mine. We’ve had students leave us with five or six years of preparation in both Greek and Latin.

This is a game-changer. If your student is interested in majoring in classics, of course, the advantage is obvious. One of our students at the beginning of the century went to Hillsdale College and tested out of virtually all the undergraduate courses available, and completed a major in the subject composed chiefly of directed independent studies in authors of special interest. A number of our best-prepared students have gone on to take PhDs in the subject or related fields — about a dozen. Statistically, this is more than most programs, even considerably larger, will have. They have done their undergraduate studies at creditable institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, University of Dallas, UCLA, and Stanford, and graduate work at places like Stanford, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Oxford and Cambridge Universities.

If you aren’t looking to major in classics, however, there is a real advantage to this kind of program as well. The disciplined study of classical language and literature promotes a level of precision of thought that is not found in many other areas, and the students who have completed this kind of exposure are ready to read carefully and in depth. They know how to figure out what something says exactly, and what it doesn’t say. They are well-prepared for exacting studies in a wide range of areas, including the hard sciences, law, and medicine.

Those who have been through our literature program up to and through the Senior English program have been required to learn to write. Almost all of them who have contacted me after the fact have said that the demands of Scholars Online’s Literature and writing programs has enabled them to produce organized and persuasive analytical material on demand. Their fellow students have been panicking about writing a paper; they were taking the job in stride.

This is not about preparing students for the nineteenth century: it’s about preparing the exceptional student for any time and situation.

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