The debt Wendell Berry described is owed by everyone who has inherited something – a faith, a family, a school, a country – from people who are now gone and who are now responsible for handing it, intact and loved, to people yet to be born. That is the whole of the cultural cycle Berry described. [...]
The solution to the problem of modern elitism is not the elimination of leadership but its reformation—the cultivation of stewardship elitism that positions leaders as servants of civilization rather than its masters. In a recent essay for The Free Press titled "Our elites don't deserve this much hatred," economist Tyler Cowen makes a characteristic defense of [...]
Smoking tobacco is not of necessity one of the permanent things that conservatives should cherish, but it does symbolize an older way of life and a different sensibility. Choosing to smoke makes one immediately recognizable as one who is not “with the times.” The incarnational element of "lighting up" In a recent article for The Free Press, journalist [...]
The currently pervading approach to American history presents America in the worst possible light, distorting the full truth of our past and damaging our political health. Our K-12 schools need a restoration of temporal continuity, the key to revitalizing history and civics education that forms young people who both appreciate the gifts of the past [...]
David M. Steiner argues that American education needs a clear and organized focus on ethics, beauty, and academic rigor to achieve its core purpose of preparing students to seek what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or human flourishing. A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools by David M. Steiner (224 pages, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) [...]
In "Conservatism: A Rediscovery," Yoram Hazony emphasizes the importance of living a conservative life: one in which duty, honor, and a deep respect for family, faith, tradition, and nation are the highest values. The classical purpose of education is about forming young people to be just such kinds of adults. Political philosopher Yoram Hazony’s latest [...]
Pope Pius XI’s "Divini Illius Magistri" is a manifesto for modern parents seeking to reclaim their rights as the primary educators of their children. Families and educators alike would do well to study and heed the pontiff's timeless wisdom. As far back as 1961, English historian Christopher Dawson was diagnosing a “crisis in Western education.”1 [...]
Advocates of patriotic education would do well to embrace the nationalist elements of such an approach to learning. Doing so is fraught with challenges given the negative connotations of the word, but Yoram Hazony’s book, “The Virtue of Nationalism,” may be a useful resource for educators, policymakers, and historians. In response to historical revisionism and [...]
Patriotic education is less about the specific curricular concepts that are featured in American history classes, and more about a philosophical stance that informs our approach, one full of explicit values and assumptions. It involves an audacious faith in America and tells the whole story of our past, which includes the bad with the good. [...]
Critical theory bulldozes all the complexities of history, education, and communities into a world of good guys and bad guys, oppressors and oppressed. And in doing so, it makes it nearly impossible to deal with the actual issues of denied opportunities, prejudiced expectations, and instances of real racism that need to be addressed. Most Americans [...]