Ad hoc arrangements like “pandemic pods” have proven to be important for many children and their families this school year. Policies that push back against bullying public school systems and teacher unions are important, but for educational choice to truly become a feature of America’s K-12 educational landscape—and not a novelty—requires not only political encouragement, [...]
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 [...]
The California State University system is long overdue for a revision to its general education program. But why not leave politics out of it and work at cultivating a rigorous and coherent core and a free and open marketplace of ideas—so that graduates are prepared for career success, for informed citizenship, and to participate productively [...]
Other university presidents, provosts, and deans need to support and emulate President Morton Schapiro of Northwestern University. If they can find the courage to support somebody else standing up against the mob, they might find that they have the courage to stand up to their own mobs and discover that when there is no pursuit [...]
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. [...]
If we know what music is, we have a duty to help young people to understand it, regardless of its “relevance.” We should do this as it has always been done, through encouraging our students to make music together. How many writers, educators, and opinion formers, urgently wishing to convey the thoughts and feelings that [...]
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 [...]
Classical education is in a unique position to acknowledge in humility that every person is a sinner, and that some people and institutions in the West have been monstrously evil. Yet the Western heritage includes that which can never itself be complicit in evil: the true and the good, those inexhaustible resources that set us [...]
At a time in our nation’s history when the civil-military divide is widening, a Teach for America's Warriors project would close that gap and restore a more transparent understanding of the military by our civilian counterparts. But more crucially, the unseen needs of our service members’ souls would be addressed in the hopes of an [...]
According to Dorothy Sayers, classical education is not as much an orthodox literary corpus as it is a mindset and a methodology. It is not merely the content of the Great Books, but the tools used in learning any book, which modern education has lost and needs to recover. In the ideal classical form, the [...]
John Colet’s life and learning represent Catholic humanism at its finest. He advocated for such reforms in education as the soundest minds of his day also desired. He knew the value of learning and—unlike more than a few intellectuals—he knew also the limits of its advantages. To play about carelessly with the words “humanist” and [...]
Today we are not inclined to ask who said something, but to ask to which identity group the person who said it belongs. This is profoundly opposed to the spirit of inquiry that classical education proposes to students—a spirit that seeks truth, beauty, and goodness. Though classical learning is gaining steam again in many parts [...]
In order to reap the full rewards of a classical education, schools should prize the classical languages as highly as they do the mathematical arts. The qualitative and the quantitative are essential aspects of human understanding, without which no one may be fully educated. Every rule has a story. Perhaps you have read an old [...]
Too often foundations support particular political causes rather than supporting the even greater need for a citizenry schooled in the Constitution. But if we really want to make a difference in our nation, I suggest funding courses on the Constitution and the Founding documents in every high school, college, and university in the country. The [...]