Education & Liberal Learning 87

“Right now, the main thing I’m taking from this conference is that PowerPoint is destroying the educational process.” The conference, organized around the theme of “Technology and Human Flourishing,” was…

In East Bangor, Pennsylvania (pop. 800), there’s a little diner named for the trolley that used to take people to the once bustling steel town of Bethlehem.  The proprietors have…

The child’s language is melodious.  The words hide and protect themselves in the melody – the words that have come shyly out of the silence.  They almost disappear again in…

I belong to a guild. As such, I'm recognized by its practitioners as a peer, a fellow, even, like them, a master. By this I do not mean anything remotely…

I’ve not yet decided if I’ve succumbed to despair (a sin) or prudence, but I no longer participate in any of the forums at my campus about online education, MOOCs,…

Despite constant speculation about public libraries’ “relevan[ce] in the digital age,” and serious budget cuts caused by the recent recession, the American public library is not in crisis. Local governments…

About a month ago I happened upon a copy of The Concord, student newspaper of Bellarmine University. In particular my eye was caught by a letter to the editor whereby…

An address given to the Ciceronian Society at Mount St. Mary's University, March 3. At the start of each semester, I ask my MBA students, “What are you here for?…

Our dwelling place is the state not of nature but of culture.

Having had a day off last week in honor of the past presidents, I am loathe to disagree with former presidents (in this case, of the American Historical Association). But…

Thee let old men, Thee let young men, Thee let boys in chorus sing; Matrons, virgins, little maidens, With glad voices answering: Let their guileless songs re-echo, And the heart…

In Summa Theologica 2-2.1.4, Aquinas argues that every action can be understood in two ways: according to its order of intention–the goal one has in mind when one acts, and…

Imagine a new father looking into the eyes of his child.  A wisp of blond hair curls about the scalp.  The fingers, wrinkled like those of an old man, curl…

Three articles recently caught my eye, all of which having to do with scholars' fame, only two having to do with their libraries. The bookless one involved a professor of…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] So Glenn Beck has proposed his grandest scheme yet: the construction of separate planned community, literally built around (in terms of architecture and overall design)…

I had not thought that the tsars of education could possibly have come up with another idea as inhuman or stupid as have been their many innovations in the past…

“Yet because the decision will not allow the question to remain silent, and yet sounds an ambiguous note as to how it would be answered in terms of our contemporary…

In my last essay, I took issue with the inescapable computer, that costly thing on the student’s desk in “good” schools, inducing the itch for instant “information” at the expense…

When he was governor of Maine, Angus King made sure that there was a computer on the desk of every middle-school child in the state.  As I write these words,…

This is Part IV of a series of essays. For previous installments of "Life Under Compulsion," see Part I, Part II, and Part III. “Good morning, Mr. Jones,” says the man…

Charlie Chaplin is working on an assembly line.  He tightens bolts with a pair of wrenches.  He does this without stop, over and over, for hours on end.  The repetitive…

April in West Virginia smells like wild leeks: pungent and oniony. In the woods, their slim green leaves look like lilies of the valley, but pull the white bulb from…

“Imagine,” said my friend, “how long it takes the bus to go from Little Anse,” a village at the extreme end of the island where my family and I spend…

As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown, human knowledge is both “tradition-constituted” and “tradition-dependent,” as well as “tradition-transcendent.” And as he suggests in his latest book, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of…