grammar
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Trivium: Grammar I – Foundations [Winter 2026]
Announcement of our Winter 2026 Trivium: Art of Grammar course, in which we investigate the foundations of the English language (and language generally) through a rigorous study of syntax and semantics. Description Details This course includes eight weekly readings, lectures, homework assignments and two live class sessions per week. The class sessions are recorded but…
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Trivium Courses (2026)
In 2026, the Lyceum Institute will offer the first three of six courses in our core Trivium curriculum, providing an entryway into a truly “liberal” education: We are also aiming to introduce regular occasions throughout the year for practicing dialectical disputation and rhetorical presentation, though plans for this are still taking shape. The three core…
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Linguistic Signification: A Classical and Semiotic Course in Grammar & Composition
New! The second, greatly expanded edition—for those who seek not mere correctness, but understanding. In a world that ignores education in grammar—first, reducing it to mere “correctness” and, second, outsourcing the verification of that correctness to digital technologies—Linguistic Signification offers something far more substantial: an integrated education in the principles of language itself. This text…
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The Future is Technoclassical: Signs of the McLuhan Century (Part Two)
If the difficult and polarizing aphorisms of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan might be appreciated, not as provocative and likely misleading pop cultural soundbites, as they were in the 1960s,1 but rather as foundational insights through which to understand, and act in, the present digital world, how might we begin to formulate the contemporary significance…
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Art of Grammar II: Composition
Few persons who have completed high school are entirely incapable of writing. But it is one thing to possess an elementary capacity for writing and another to write with skill. Learning the skill of writing—or what we might term the art of composition—requires not only practice, but careful habits of thinking. These habits, in order…
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Art of Rhetoric I: Discovery of Arguments [2024]
“…it is strange if it is a shameful thing not to be able to come to one’s own aid with one’s body but not a shameful thing to do so by means of argument, which is to a greater degree a human being’s own than is the use of the body.” Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric,…
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Language as Craft: Building Blocks for Communication
The following is a reflection authored by Columbanus Fellow Sneha Jain. Language’s fundamental purpose is to communicate the intention of the speaker or writer. By nature, however, language is conventional, which can confuse or obscure the desired message. In other words, language relies upon stipulation, and it is often assumed—whether rightly or wrongly— that the…
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Announcing: Latin 2024
We are delighted to announce our Latin courses available in 2024. But… why Latin? Does the study of Latin—a language spoken by no people, no country, no nation today—offer us anything other than an affectation or the satisfaction of niche reading (or liturgical) interests? Do we gain anything from this language itself, or does it…