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? [...]
Charlie Kirk believed that America’s myths were both truths and facts worth cherishing. The story of America, he insisted, was not original sin without redemption, but sin and redemption together—the kind of story that could inspire loyalty, sacrifice, and renewal. Eventually, he would sacrifice himself for it. England could have been thrown into the cauldron [...]
What happened? How did institutions of higher education founded with such clear-eyed Christian missions, centered on moral and academic flourishing, go so far astray? There was once a time when religiously affiliated liberal-arts institutions were just that: havens of the time-honored liberal-arts tradition that sought to shape both students’ minds and hearts in accordance with [...]
The world needs young men who will devote their great energy to meaningful work, who will not follow a whining culture, who will stand out, stand up, and work hard. If you want a meaningful, worthwhile life, you must work hard. This is true for anyone, though my focus here is young men. Our culture [...]
In the long term, the hope is for the Gregory the Great Institute to become a major contributor to the “great conversation,” bringing the wisdom of Christendom to Canada’s beleaguered and floundering culture. We live in exciting times. As a native-born Englishman, I rejoice at the news that St. John Henry Newman is soon to [...]
If a liberal education liberates, one of the constraints from which the student is liberated is the professor. That this occurs from a method exercised by the professor is one of the great powers of Socratic dialectic in the classroom, and one of the paradoxes, perhaps mysteries, of our privileged vocation in the university. Why, [...]
Free citizens are necessarily invited to follow the Delphic injunction, “know thyself,” that is addressed to all mankind; and their success or failure in responding to this invitation is crucial for the preservation or loss of their liberty. Liberal education is the distinctive educational tradition of the West; so, too, is liberty our distinctive political [...]
Sidney Hook believed the university to be a community of scholars bound together by the ties of civility and intellectual respect, pursuing the truths, the goods, and the beauties—multiple visions which inspire the life of the mind. Those who accept this conception, he believed, must dedicate themselves to help those misguided students and their allies [...]
The absence of beauty in education robs students of their natural curiosity, intuition, and creativity. Beauty provides direction, order, and harmony. Humans are made to desire and perceive beauty, which itself is the mystery of God. Professor Margarita Mooney of Princeton Theological Seminary and the Scala Foundation is a dear friend and brilliant academic. Five [...]
If federal spending on wealthy institutions of higher learning can’t be trimmed, where could it be trimmed? If any belt-tightening is impossible for these universities, where in the budget would it be possible? Let’s presume for so the moment we can’t keep running up huge budget deficits and continuing to increase the public debt, which [...]
Saying that government cannot educate is not a partisan political position, but a simple statement of fact: government cannot educate, because government cannot love. Even more bluntly, government should not even try to run institutions of love, because, slowly but surely, its administrators inevitably pervert them in their desire for security or lust for power. [...]
Robert Woods’ “Mortimer Adler: The Paideia Way of Classical Education” embodies the life and educational philosophy of one education reformer. Though intended to be informative, most chapters are akin to an educator’s devotional, leaving the teacher inspired to be a more thoughtful and focused Christian tutor. Mortimer Adler: The Paideia Way of Classical Education, by [...]
Amidst the battered "Veritas" of Harvard, there are a few still heroically walking in the footsteps of their Catholic predecessors. It is ironic and risible in the extreme that the motto of Harvard University is “Veritas” because that once-illustrious institution has long since abandoned any belief in objective verity. It has ceased to seek answers [...]
What kind of education would enable a child to progress in the rational understanding of the world without losing his poetic and artistic appreciation of it? Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education by Stratford Caldecott (178 pages, Angelico Press, 2012) Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty in the Word is like no book in the genre of [...]