September 2025

Dear Friend of Golden View Classical Academy,

According to one widely held view of classical education, teaching the word is the fundamental purpose. “Word” could mean not just a word, like “tree” or “liberty,” but the arts of using words, like grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Furthermore, “word” could take on a much broader meaning so it is something like the order or logic of being as such. All are true, and all are taught simultaneously in an ordered curriculum. Even the First Grade student who learns the word “ziggurat” is learning what it means, how to use it in a sentence in relation to other words, how to ask questions about it, how it relates to the purposes or goals of civilizations, and even how it illustrates something more deeply human. It’s all contained in the word, if not explicit at each age.

Any classical school that takes the word seriously must begin with a concerted and sustained effort to teach children to read. Reading is an unnatural skill and incredibly complex. Take, for instance, the letter /a/. It can be written as a, A, a, or a, and even sideways or upside down. It can even look like other combinations of lines that aren’t letters at all. You may have noticed really young children trying to write what they see in books, and it’s a bunch of scribbles. I wonder if that is actually what it looks like when you’re just starting out, a fuzzy, crazy, upside down adult joke about these things called “books.” For someone first tasked with deciphering a word like “cat,” then, imagine the confusion! What is a child supposed to do with those lines, and how is it that a line could represent a sound?

There is a technical answer about how to do this, and it is through explicit phonics instruction, beginning with phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to distinguish sounds in words, so that if you heard the word “cat” you could say it has the sounds /c/a/t/. And, if you heard the word “fish” you could distinguish the sounds /f/i/sh/. Notice with the last one a new complexity. Even if you could distinguish the sounds, once you write them or read them, there are two letters that work together to make one sound. Or, in a word like “eight,” there are four letters that make one sound. That complexity, derived from the character of English as an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, and French, bedevils students for a long time and points back to the technical way to teach children to read - a hefty dose of phonemic awareness work and an explicit phonics program that explains the wild west of English spelling.

Given all of this, and given the moral urgency we feel in teaching students to read, we have a celebration at Golden View, one of our minor holidays. In January, students have moved from not recognizing letters to reading their own books for the first time. This is such an important milestone, because that whole fascinating world of the word is opened in a new way. They have the power to decipher it, to make meaning, to love stories, and to encounter the deepest thoughts of our civilization. So, we celebrate it with “If you give a kindergartener a book day,” where we read students our favorite children’s books, enjoy some cookies and milk, and congratulate them on their very first, personal encounter with the written word, in a tradition of education that will unfold for them over their time at Golden View.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Dr. Garrow

Principal, Golden View Classical Academy

Board Meeting

The October Board Meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, October 15th at 5:30pm in the Bailey Heritage Library. You can find meeting agendas on Diligent Community prior to the meeting.

Enrollment

If you or a family you know is interested in enrolling at Golden View Classical Academy, please send them to our enrollment page.