Homeschool students get their day in court
Eastville, Virginia – Fourteen 13- and 14-year-old Northampton and Chesapeake County students will be in court in May, and their parents couldn’t be happier. No, they aren’t on trial for truancy or unruly behavior; in fact, many of them will be serving as attorneys and law enforcement officers. Classical Conversations Challenge B classes throughout the state and across the country will be participating in mock trials during April and May.
Mock trial has long been an extracurricular staple of prep schools—and now is a fixture in homeschool communities. Students participate in rehearsed courtroom trials to learn about the legal system in a competitive manner. Classical Conversations (CC), the world’s largest classical homeschool organization, uses mock trial competitions to teach research, grammar, writing, rhetoric, public speaking, debate, and drama skills.
“I believe it is very important for every American to be well informed about how our justice system works,” said Jordan Dail, Challenge B director for the Classical Conversations of the Eastern Shore. “Classical Conversations is a program that encourages good citizenship, understanding of the law, and a fair defense. While these young people have studied this faux court case they’ve learned about our justice system. They had the opportunity to tour the Eastville Courthouse and they sat through traffic court. We are honored that Judge Celia Burge was gracious to host the trial here, in Northampton, where the kids will “act out” the case against a sister campus from Chesapeake. We are all looking forward to the event on May 1st.’
These eighth-grade students have spent the entire spring semester experiencing all three stages of the classical model of education: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. They spent weeks learning the facts of the case and many more weeks wrestling with what they learned, determining what facts were missing, finding logical errors, and building cases both for and against the defendant.
Founded by Leigh Bortins in 1997, Classical Conversations® is a leading classical Christian curriculum tailored to homeschool education, serving more than 50,000 families in 52 countries. The curriculum supports a home-centered educational community that equips parents to provide their children with timeless tools of learning so they can discover nature’s order and beauty while enabling others to do the same. The curriculum offers a Christ-centered worldview while honing students’ academic and classical skills of recitation, logical thinking, and rhetoric.
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