The Blackboard
Crafting the Ideal School: Finding a Balance Between High-Tech and the Hands
it is through the arts alone that the various branches of learning touch human life.
More Articles in The Blackboard
Educating Humans to Subvert Technocracy
Alan Jacobs’s new book, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, traces a fascinating intellectual debate that arose on the Western home front during World War…
Dissecting Hospitality
The virtue of hospitality has enjoyed something of a minor renaissance. Over the last few decades, theologians and ethicists have sought to make a case for its recovery. The renewed interest has…
“Torches of Freedom”: The Anti-Literature of Advertising
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible…
Education and the Quest for Association
Plato remarked in the Republic that if one wanted to know the health of a city, we could simply look at the souls of its citizens. In conjunction with Aristotle, Plato also…
College and its End(s)
“College and its End(s)”---that was the title I had given to the section of senior seminar I taught this past fall. The class was conceived with two animating questions in mind: what…
A Call for a Politically Inclusive Classroom
Teaching Tolerance in a Time of Trump sounds like a short-course a firebrand professor might offer, though I mean it in a more comprehensive way than one might imagine. While the firebrand…
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, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might…
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 (the evangelical one) should not be accredited. His…
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 mere pragmatism is that it doesn’t…
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