The Blackboard

The imagined student’s intentions are honorable: to promote racial justice. But when the conversation begins, she has already set herself against the teacher and the course. The task of the teacher is to encourage her pursuit of justice while showing that the Great Books are not enemies, but allies. If this can be done, the student and teacher may even realize the same about each other.

Thinking as a practice places a check upon the self. It offers us a way out of our "res idiotica." If our universities are faithful to their missions, they must foster conditions where truth is free to be heard and sought.

The virus has given us many headaches, but it is also giving us an opportunity as we re-evaluate policies and practices and seek to care for one another and for our students.

Alex Sosler compares online and in-person education. Paradoxically, when we embrace the limits of our embodied existence and learn with and from particular classmates in a particular place from a particular teacher, affections develop. Imagination stirs.

Education in the age of COVID is an opportunity for teachers and students to investigate the role of language in an intense real-world situation. Rachel Griffis considers the prevalence of analogies and the deeply troubling ways that irresponsible and unethical language is destroying civic life and communal bonds.

As a new school year begins, Jon Schaff takes stock of the effects of Covid on education. Learning is relationship, and, if the point of college, as the very term “college” implies, is to come together for the enterprise of learning, that coming together has to be more than a name or face on a screen.

Daniel Ritchie explores how the #MeToo movement affects our reading of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. In turn, this comedy with a sad ending offers us a sense of balance for today's sexual politics.

As utopian as "religious education" and "local food tours" may seem, that doesn't mean we can't approach them with a hope for real formation work in mind.

An empathetic approach to the kind of lofty goals named by Princeton’s aspiration to serve “humanity” might empower talented young people to serve their communities rather than selling out for personal financial success. You have to be very smart and very powerful to save the world, but serving your community begins with empathy, which is a trait we can all cultivate.

In a world mediated through technology, the common arts bring us into daily encounters with a material world where we have not made the rules. They orient us to truths outside of ourselves and foster humility as we subject ourselves to realities beyond our control.