Few people know that in the early 1970s a “great books” program, founded by John Senior and two other professors, flourished at a large state university in the midwest. Even fewer know of its slow demise. Editor’s Note: Robert Carlson was a student and friend of John Senior, one of three founders of the [...]
From time to time, there is the need for sentinels of classical learning, individuals who, if one is fortunate to be around them, beckon the meandering intellect back to the pursuit of the truth, the discovery of the good, and the conservation of the beautiful. In the end, the student is invited to the quest [...]
We’ve reached a time when fewer and fewer on the outside know what the liberal arts are, or the value of them to the individual person, an organization, and the marketplace of ideas. In an age when people are so focused on science and technology via “STEM” subjects, we’ve lost our sense of wonder… [...]
Classical educators agree on the ends of liberal education, namely, the possession of the true, good, and beautiful, wisdom, and the development of the intellectual and imaginative powers that enable their attainment. But the pedagogical means to these ends are less obvious. Here is an attempt to set out a set of principles and [...]
Search the web and you will find any number of lofty “purposes of education:” Education enables us to develop to the fullest. Education cultivates the human mind with values and principles. Education teaches us to think and analyze the world. And many more… But even those vapid platitudes greatly exceed the reality of modern American [...]
Trying to put science in a classical paradigm is putting new wine into old wineskins. Modern science just does not easily fit into a classical paradigm… STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and math, is the newest acronym for what is considered a great education, and it often leads to a satisfying and financially rewarding [...]
The classical curriculum remained the educational gold standard in nineteenth-century America. In fact, its influence grew, as women’s academies with a classical curriculum were founded all over the expanding nation… The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States by Carl J. Richard (Harvard University Press, 2009) With [...]
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 [...]
Here is the grand fact that Protestant theologians always overlook. They, in reality, always present nature and grace as two antagonistic powers, and suppose the presence of the one must be the physical destruction of the other. Luther and Calvin, weary of the good works, and shrinking from the efforts to acquire the personal [...]
As the president of an American college with a distinctive approach to liberal learning, I have watched from afar with great interest as curiosity has grown in Europe about liberal, as opposed to specialized, higher education. That curiosity has now culminated in this gathering, where we are sharing our thoughts about grounding an education [...]
I grew up in post-war Britain, at a time when people were beginning to treat the radio as a daily companion, when long-playing records were edging their way on to the market, and when the American songbook and ballroom dancing were rapidly giving way to blues and rock and roll. But the old forms [...]
The traditional ideal of the professor—a vaguely eccentric, impractical seeker of truth always teetering, like the Greek philosopher Thales, on the brink of some well or other—has all but disappeared. Though obviously a caricature, this stereotype at least captured the essence of what a professor should be: someone whose life is passionately consumed with [...]
Before I started writing this essay, I went to University of Colorado library and took out one of the best books in English on education, Albert Jay Nock’s Theory of Education in the United States (1932). It is significant for our topic that, while Nock‘s irritable tirade, Our Enemy, the State, is easily available [...]
How do I define the Natural Law? Taking my cue from Cicero—especially from On the Republic, On Duties, and On the Laws—I can state that Natural Law theory argues that there is a supreme being who holds everything together through his love or his force or his will or whatever it might be that [...]