Intended originally to transform a largely agrarian population into efficient industrial workers, the progressive system of education has had its day. In response, over the past forty years, there has been an explosion in homeschooling and classical schools, which propose a variety of ways of moving forward by retrieving the wisdom of the past. This [...]
Our current system of higher education has reached a tipping point. My prediction is that within 20 years’ time, we will be living in a very different reality as far as university education is concerned. Higher education is about to implode. The issues with higher education in America have been mounting for some time now. [...]
The dissolution of Western Civilization has left a vacuum in the college curriculum. Western Civ was once used to tie other disciplines together, to supply a forum for discussion of the Big Questions, and to provide students with a sense of purpose. By joining that great debate, students become part of an ongoing conversation about [...]
Part of Dante’s heroism in the “Divine Comedy” is his enduring pursuit of knowledge—he is full of wonder and longing for the truth. These qualities also make him an exemplary student. I have the great blessing of teaching at a tiny school in Wyoming that is truly devoted to liberal education. But for a few [...]
One of the most encouraging trends among conservatives in recent years has been the increased amount of recognition and discussion they have given to the importance of culture and the arts. There is, on the right, a growing sensitivity to the ways that many of the political and social ills we commonly bemoan have their [...]
Liberal education has as its end the free mind, and the free mind must be its own teacher. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Scott Buchanan as he asks a series of questions to discover the fruit, in individual character and thought, of a liberal arts education. —W. Winston Elliott [...]
Our college, like most others, has adopted the new mode of “distance learning” during the current crisis. What if our students begin to learn a new kind of engagement with the written word precisely because of this momentary break from the habits of life at school and of absence from each other? I can’t help [...]
We were all riding high only recently, and suddenly, there’s not enough on the shelves of the grocery stores. How should we think about it all? The virtue of a curriculum like that at our college is that the sweep of it encompasses the memory of the most extraordinary challenges to human nature. Pandemics or [...]
William Wordsworth’s introspection in “Tintern Abbey” leads him to attempt to answer the question we ask with our curriculum at our college: How does the experience of unforgettable natural beauty in the full vitality of youth affect the moral and spiritual life that follows? As all the world should know, the curriculum at Wyoming Catholic [...]
Many factors have conspired to fuel the crises roiling higher education today. Perhaps the most important, and the reason so few institutions react appropriately when they arise, is that colleges and universities are facing a crisis of purpose and identity. Another day, another campus crisis.[1] And yet the truly urgent problems in higher education—students learning [...]
For most liberal arts colleges, mathematics courses are simply modern math stuck on to a “humanities” program. But if liberal education is not just meant to familiarize students with classics of the humanities, or the polish of culture, but to free the student to find the truth for himself, shouldn’t math be just as emphasized [...]
The Naval Academy is regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the nation, and many attend for that very reason. But what if the Academy’s curriculum does not reflect a true liberal arts education, but a radical distortion of it—a falsehood? The hour is here when midshipmen candidates of the Class of [...]
The Imaginative Conservative’s Senior Contributor Joseph Pearce recently answered questions from students at Benedictine College about his career as a writer and scholar. […]
My progressive friends assure me that they are looking out for children, minorities, and especially minority children. The problem with this conceit is that when it comes to closing the achievement gap between Latino and white children on the one hand, and black and white children on the other, the only progressive cities are conservative. [...]