Education & Liberal Learning

A Burke for Our Times

Edmund Burke was the greatest master of the English language, not even excepting Shakespeare.  It is no doubt a startling claim, but one that...

Life Under Compulsion: Play and No Play

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...

Everywhere at Once, Nowhere at All

“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...

The Uselessness of Liberal Education: An Apology

It is necessary for the perfection of human society that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation. --St. Thomas Aquinas  The trouble with...

The Liberal Arts and the Educational Technology of Language

THE PRESIDENT HAS AN ASSIGNMENT FOR YOU: This is what the bold text on the whitehouse.gov website tells us as it proudly heralds a new...

Public Schools, Local Schools, Family Schools

Yesterday was the final day of the school year at Peterson Elementary School, the public school which three of our four daughters have attended....

Are Evangelical Colleges Parochial?

Hillsdale, Michigan. Readers may recall the dustup earlier in the summer when Peter Conn prompted pious gasps for suggesting that institutions like Wheaton College...

Anarchism, Global Citites, and a Confucian Cosmopolitan Education

I recently attended a conference in Nanjing, China, hosted by the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and organized our fellow Porcher, Adam Webb. You can read a...

Marginalizing Care: What Happens when Healthcare and Education become Industries

Spring Arbor, MI In our age of austerity and cost-cutting, the two industries currently under the microscope are healthcare and education. The gains in productivity...