The Blackboard
One Weird Trick to Getting a Perfect Education
The basic principle of education is that you can’t learn anything you don’t want to learn
More Articles in The Blackboard
Education and Democracy in Disembodied Times: Emerson and Dewey on Humane Technology
In an age of knee-jerk innovation, the warnings articulated by Emerson and Dewey are more needed than ever. They advocated for applied knowledge, but they also insisted such technology must serve human…
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 The Cult of Smart is a Book for Every Parent in 2020 (Whether Anarcho-Socialist or Not)
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…
The Battle Rages On: Eric Adler’s Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today
We all want students to think critically and to reflect on what they have encountered in the course of their education. In order to do that, however, they must have something to…
The Instrumentalization of the Liberal Arts
The liberal arts aren’t for some utilitarian purpose; they’re to free young people to love rightly.
Where Is Our Freedom to Exercise Sympathy?
The same things that happened to the family farms, and to farmers like my father, are now happening to the colleges, and to faculty like me.
Lives at Stake: Education in the Academic Year 2020-2021
Students may return to universities that post a philosophy statement but have no philosophy department. Yet as we look at our country, divided over history and by economics, home to scientific innovation…
The College and the Community: A Strange Saga in Tallahassee
As President John Thrasher alienates Florida State University from segments of the broader Tallahassee, Florida community, a lesson from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is worth considering.
Protestants and Western Civ.
Hillsdale, Michigan. Which is more surprising? To read that a Great Booksy curriculum—which you, a fairly committed Protestant who tries to keep faith under wraps, happen to teach in—turns Protestants into Roman…
Failing in a Pandemic
The whole mode of online education screams that now I must be the source of attraction. But I’m not entertaining. In fact, I’m pretty unentertaining. If you ask most of my students,…
Saint Thinkery University for Unlimited Personalized Execution, or, STUUPE©
In my elder, more invulnerable years, when the Untied States had finally established a formal E. Unibus Pluram, I was appointed by lot to assume the position of SAT (Self-Actualizing Therapist[1]) at…
Wendell Berry and Zoom
While the futurists and transhumanists and purveyors of educational technologies would have us voluntarily cut off our arms so we can enjoy their fancy new prostheses, our priority should be to avoid…
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