education 148

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…

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…

While the siren call of STEM is still music to most ears and classical schools are educating only a small percentage of American students, classical schools have grown steadily. Joshua…

If we have all the knowledge in the world but have not love, the apostle Paul says, then we’re as annoying as a banging cymbal. It’s no wonder students wouldn’t…

Our educational approach should include the validation of physicality, the imitation of the master, and the celebration of tradition.

As the fall semester looms, the minutia of meetings and syllabi revisions threatens to drain the excitement from my impending return to the classroom. As a way of warding off…

If the institutions that oversee our slow twelve-to-eighteen-year process of education are called our alma-mater (nourishing mother), why can’t the dirt-filled, dung-laden places that convey agrarian lessons taught over 20…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] A week ago I was able to organize a small group of friends to attend a fine, relatively intimate event at Sterling College, a small…

The world wearies of defenses of liberal education and the humanities. What cannot be denied is that all over the country the liberal arts are dying out, with students abandoning…

A common and often valid critique of many families in the homeschooling movement is that, because of a lingering obsession on, and invisible competition with, the thing they are leaving…

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…

So long as gravity obtains, sawing off the branch you’re sitting on is never a good idea.

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; / Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

“Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it.” Plato,…

“Darling, haven’t you ever heard of a delightful little thing called boarding school?” So Baroness Schraeder responds to Max’s inquiry how she will deal with seven children upon wedding Captain…

Earth's the right place for love.

“… but the soul of the hearer must be prepared by good habits to rejoice in the good and hate the evil, just as the soil must be well tilled…

If you want to write worse than the average undergraduate male, consider philosophy.

What can Plato teach us about and in the modern multiversity?

Higher education in America has many challenges, and in many ways has become a rather strange place. The satirical novel, such as Richard Russo’s Straight Man or James Hyne’s The…

There's a computer program called Lexile that purports to measure the complexity of books and thereby determine the grade level for which they are best suited. Here's the description: Lexiles…

Hidden Springs, VA.Last week the Washington Post ran a story titled “Rethinking the Classroom: Obama’s Overhaul of Public Education.” The piece described the various ways Obama has asserted himself into…

On a gorgeous April Wednesday I am filling in as substitute homeschool teacher. We do arithmetic; we do a language lesson about adverbs and Emily Dickinson. Then—did I mention the…

Give me smartassery. Give me a yawning match.