Please never forget, we Catholics have a great legacy. We’ve been promoting liberal education since the days of St. Paul. Some of our greatest saints were liberally educated, and promoting all that is good and true and beautiful has been one of our greatest causes. The author recently delivered the address below to the Roman [...]
It can be said of Cicero and his role within the West that, in hindsight, he becomes a figure much larger than he himself actually was; he is a touchstone, a fountainhead, a rock upon which we can place our fondest and dearest dreams. How do I define the Natural Law? Taking my cue from [...]
Many academics have forgotten the true and the good and have largely cut themselves loose from all philosophical moorings. Students under the tutelage of such professors are certain to confuse right with wrong, virtue with vice, good with evil, and authority with force, and to have no fixed axioms by which to orient themselves in [...]
For a thousand years, liberal education shaped the moral imagination of succeeding generations, almost unaware that it was freeing them from the coercive obsessions of their political masters. Reading classics like Anne of Green Gables, Farmer Boy, or To Kill a Mockingbird, some parents meditate on the adolescents portrayed—teenagers eager to master the virtues of [...]
For the classical educator, there are many educational goods to be achieved from reading Plato’s "Republic" with students because it is a dialogue that invites us to wonder about the most important questions humans can possibly ask: What is Reality? What is the Good? Does it exist? Can we know it? Why should we care? [...]
The disastrous and destructive consequences of reductionist and relativistic education can be seen in multifarious ways, all of which are made manifest in the decay and decomposition of the modern West. We are no longer able to think outside of narcissistic or ideological boxes; we are no longer able to love self-sacrificially. The following is [...]
I’ve recently returned from my first-ever visit to Australia. In its wake, I am basking in the afterglow of the experience, as well as enduring the jetlag of its aftermath. The purpose of the visit was a speaking tour to promote the need for a restoration of classical education. Its instigator and organizer was Tim [...]
Taken together, Louis Markos' "Passing the Torch" and Michael Ortner and Kimberly Begg's "The Catholic School Playbook" provide invaluable assistance in navigating the turbulent educational waters of our troubled times. They are also a sign of hope and a source of encouragement, and so are the hundreds of newly founded classical academies that are springing [...]
Both free thinking and innovation depend on having the imagination to see alternate ways of being, to envision worlds that we do not yet see before us, to reconsider what is there, and to conceive what could be there in its place. As the president of an American college with a distinctive approach to liberal [...]
Education follows the same law as the physical universe, which is sustained and carried on in dependence on certain centres of power and laws of operation. Education has its history in Christianity, and its doctors or masters in that history. A Benedictine Education, by John Henry Newman (160 pages, Cluny Media) As the physical universe [...]
Eva Brann’s latest book, “Pursuits of Happiness,” is a collection of essays which range from Aeschylus to Austen, with topics spanning the nature of time itself to Sacred Scripture. Interspersed here are two parts constituting the whole of an ideal education. Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested by Eva Brann (640 pages, Paul Dry Books, [...]
To get the most out of your time here, I have some advice: Love to learn, ignore your grades, and learn to love — and then I promise that Thomas Aquinas College will radically change your life. Before I arrived here on campus for the first time 23 years ago, my high school classmates had [...]
Medieval civilization proved the Bible’s power to incorporate all the tales of the pagans. It was never the goal of Augustine, Jerome, and their successors to save classical literature, although that resulted from their efforts. What they wanted to know was Christ in the Scriptures. Despite the current enthusiasm over classical education, there is little [...]
Classical Education as practiced in the United States over the past 30 years is the most up-to-date, cutting edge development in K-12 education. It is also the oldest, most tried-and-true alternative on today’s educational scene. America needs the Classical Tradition. In 1999 the A&E cable network broadcast a list of “The 100 Most Influential People [...]