LOWER SCHOOL

We believe that children deserve to be introduced to the best — most profound, exciting, thought-provoking, character-building, eloquent, and adventuresome — creations of Western literature.

There exists a vast body of exquisite literary texts which have been written by master-writers specifically for children and which were loved by generations of British and American youngsters but which, in the last half century, have been all but forgotten by mainstream American education. While American students may know their Disney renditions, the original versions of such English classics as The Jungle Book, Tom Sawyer, or The Hobbit are seldom read in modern elementary schools. The same goes for adaptations of world classics like The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Arabian Nights. At MLCA, we work to ensure that our students encounter classic texts such as these not as an intimidating challenge but as an exciting adventure.

Beginning with kindergarten, students are exposed to a variety of fairy tales, myths, legends, fables, classic short stories, poems, and biographies of famous historical characters from America, Europe, and classical Antiquity. Our reading list includes Aesop, Brothers Grimm, Andersen, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, the D’Aulaires, and Jack London; and, in older grades, Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe, Austen, Shelley, Brontë, Dickens, Hawthorne, and Yeats.

Woven into these readings are stories of famous historical and Biblical characters and events, which introduce children, in the form of short and simple yet inspiring stories, to such momentous and colorful characters as Samson, King David, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lion Hearted, and Joan of Arc, to name a few. Such encounters help develop young imaginations by opening wide vistas of far-away times and places and of strong and courageous men and women.

Prose readings in literature and history go side-by-side with, and often interconnect with, English poetry. From kindergarten onward, children read, discuss, copy by hand, memorize, and recite progressively longer and more sophisticated selections from Blake, Wordsworth, Rossetti, Cowper, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier, Dickinson, Stevenson, and Frost. These poets remain at the students’ side from year to year, with the selections growing in complexity and length.

Our students are introduced to the “tools” that poets and writers use. Students learn about different meter and rhyme schemes and their aesthetic effects, as well as about such concepts as alliteration, allegory, foreshadowing, simile and metaphor.

Twice a year, at our festive Poetry Nights, students have the opportunity to share their poetry memorization and recitation skills with family and friends. This practice builds far more than literary appreciation: reciting from memory in front of an audience requires clear elocution, controlled pacing, adequate projection, and an interpretive command of tone. These are the same skills of public speaking and self-possession that serve students well beyond the classroom, in settings far removed from poetry itself. Hand-in-hand with our focus on literature and poetry goes our rigorous study of language arts: phonics, spelling, grammar, penmanship, and composition.

From kindergarten onward, students engage with the basics of English grammar and syntax, and they make connections with analogous concepts in their study of French (e.g., noun, verb, adjective, singular, plural). Then, as Latin is introduced in fourth grade, it becomes among other things also a powerful tool for a better understanding and appreciation of the grammatical and syntactical structures of both English and French. Students parse words and diagram sentences in all three languages and discover how Latin, a highly inflected language, achieves its rhetorical and poetic power through case declension, verb conjugation, and meter. At the same time, students acquire a unique perspective on English, which, as a language practically devoid of inflection, achieves elegance and expressivity by altogether different syntactical means. The study of Latin likewise enables students to discern the origins of the reasons for the spelling of many English words, which thereby strengthens spelling and vocabulary skills.

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UPPER SCHOOL

A VOYAGE OF INTELLECT ACROSS EPOCHS AND CONTINENTS

The MLCA Upper School core humanities curriculum for grades 6-8 comprises English, History, French, and Latin. Each of the four subjects is organized each year as a series of trimesters. The program is predicated on the students’ ability to read extensive swaths of text. If the reading list seems unusually ambitious, it is because it is meant to be, and students routinely rise to the occasion.

Our humanities curriculum covers numerous epochs, movements, and genres of the Western tradition with a strong emphasis on literature and poetry. We take pains to emphasize Anglophone (primarily British and American) literature, but we also believe that it is crucial for young minds to receive a thorough education in Ancient Greek, Latin, German, French, and Russian literature in order to be able to listen to and appreciate the polyphony of different epochs and languages conversing with one another across centuries and geography. In parallel with prose and drama, our students engage in in-depth study of English verse, from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Wherever possible, we synchronize English readings with readings in French and Latin. When studying the coming-of-age novel (Bildungsroman), for example, students encounter not only the English and American traditions, but also the German (in translation) and the French (in the original).

Underlying the MLCA Upper School English curriculum is our definition of culture as man’s search for himself. Our students meet this search again and again in the texts themselves: Gregor Samsa, for instance, waking to find himself a stranger in his own life in Kafka's Metamorphosis, and Frankenstein's creature confronting what it means to become a person. In doing so, students ask the same question posed alike by the biblical Job and by Diogenes the Cynic: What is Man? Humans are historical beings, more at home in history than in nature (indeed, human engagement with nature is itself historically determined). Accordingly, our examination of literature proceeds on two levels: first, we examine every literary creation as the authentic manifestation of its Zeitgeist (the spirit of its own time and place); second, we examine the dialogue in which this creation engaged, and continues to engage, thinkers, poets, and writers, across barriers of time, language, and religion. Ultimately, we want our students to see Western culture as an organic whole, aware of its own identity — continually returning to and rethinking its roots in the Greco-Roman world, even as it progresses epoch by epoch and explores neighboring and distant cultures.

Essay writing begins in Lower School and grows in structure and sophistication each year through Upper School. Fourth graders develop a single well-organized paragraph, then move to the traditional five-paragraph essay by fifth. In the Upper School, students build on this foundation to develop increasingly complex analytical essays. They are taught to make a genuine interpretive claim, weigh evidence for it against real alternatives, and explain why the claim matters.