The Liberal Arts: Take it or Leave it
Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the liberal arts.
Why The Cult of Smart is a Book for Every Parent...
The Cult of Smart is deeply entrenched in most modern systems of public education around the world, and the increasingly clear reality of cognitive and genetic differences between different human beings poses a sharp challenge to liberals whose membership in the Cult makes them want to deny this reality entirely.
Res Idiotica
South Bend, IN
My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their minds are largely empty,...
The Metamorphoses and #MeToo
As difficult as some content is to teach, we have a responsibility to educate our students about the past, good and bad. A curriculum which leaves out the bad would gaslight our students.
Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On
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.
Poor Little Lamb
Colin Phelps is not the first to discover a graced thing in college: it’s the unchosen self-knowledge that is most liberating.
Why Pursue an Education?
The course I am teaching is part of the university’s core curriculum. Core comes from the Latin word for “heart,” I told my students. The same Latin root, cor, gives us the word, courage, I added. Why might the courses at the heart of the university’s curriculum require courage? I inquired. It’s up to us to decide if we have the courage to accept what is challenging, they wrote.
The Face of Education
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.
Working for the Life Beyond Words
In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem there. “That triumph” is the triumph of the way of love, the life of silence.
Why I’m Fasting From Analogies
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.