Philosophy is many things to many people, but to me it is the art of questioning. If we can learn to ask the right questions in the right spirit, then the answers for which our hearts yearn will be given to us… “What are you majoring in?” “Philosophy.” “Oh…” Translation: “You’re one of those weird [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Eric Voegelin as he explores the importance of studying the classics. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher A reflection on classical studies, their purpose and prospects, will properly start from Wolf’s definition of classic philology as the study of man’s nature as it has become [...]
There’s a chilling image from my youth that I’ve never been able to scrub out of my mind. It might not seem at first glance to amount to much. It was a blue spiral spray-painted on our street, a sort of insect with enormous eyes, with a caption suggesting LSD. In those days, the newspapers [...]
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 work. —G.K. Chesterton What is education? I emphasize “is” because I am not here asking what education is thought to be, or what [...]
Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. —The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot I moved frequently in the later years of my childhood—not just from town to town, state to state, or country to country, but from [...]
“College professors are overwhelmingly liberal. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.” This statement was not made by a conservative academic, columnist, or businessman. It was made by sometime professor and left-wing commentator Damon Linker. There is some good news in the fact of Mr. Linker’s acknowledgement of the obvious—but not much. American [...]
So there was a decent article in the WSJ calling upon conservatives to stop trashing the liberal arts. The argument: Conservatives respect the wisdom of our Founders, and Jefferson and the others really thought that liberal education as bookish civic education, at least, was indispensable for self-governing citizens. We need to be educated to be [...]
You asked me to speak about “Intellect and Intuition,” an enormous topic and yet an intimate one—enormous because the title encompasses the two most distinctively human activities, and intimate because I have, after all, no way to come to terms with it but to look into myself. But it is a congenial inquiry you’ve chosen [...]
At an earlier session I spoke about Socrates as a model for imitating heroes, because he shows us how to use the lives of extraordinary people to help us make and remake a life worth living for ourselves. Now I’d like to speak about Socrates as a model for teachers to emulate. Teachers have chosen [...]
Higher education should expend all its efforts to place self-development at the center of its activities, relegating other activities to the ancillary roles for which they are suited. In doing so, it can find no better model than Socrates, the master of intelligent imitation, and the most imitation-worthy practitioner of the Imitation of Heroes. Imitation, [...]
As the author of two books laying out a new Catholic philosophy of education based on the traditional liberal arts (Beauty in the Word and Beauty for Truth’s Sake), I have mixed feelings about the Common Core. The Common Core grew out of a report on American education called “Ready or Not: Creating a High [...]
A skill is an “ability to do something well; expertise.” Surely we would greatly desire that after 13 years in the custody of the public schools that our children would emerge in possession of the requisite skills to function adequately in civilized society. And while the attainment of skills is a good thing, and our [...]
Every week it seems I receive three or four letters from people who are establishing new schools or reforming old ones. These letters are most encouraging, and all of the writers, without exception, are dedicated to restoring what is called a “classical” education. Sometimes that implies the study of the true classics, the literature of ancient [...]
The present article is a reply to the recent piece in these pages by Timothy Gordon and Stephen Jonathan Rummelsburg, which in turn was a response to an article by Dr. Kevin Brady and me, again in The Imaginative Conservative. I speak here for myself, leaving my co-author to file his own reply if he [...]