Millions of children today are raised, by default, to be slaves to group-think, addicted to endorphins released from a digital device, burdened with neural pathways so obliterated that nary a logical thought might pass from brain to lips... In The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald casts both an unlikely hero and an unlikely weapon [...]
While graduation should be a time of celebration, it should also be a time when young people are encouraged to ponder, discern, and “graduate” to that higher calling that corresponds to the desires of their restless hearts. It is that time of the year again when students graduate from their high schools and colleges. The [...]
By ending the year with an awards ceremony, the school shows that education is more than knowledge transfer; education involves forming the human person to have the capacities to value what should be valued… Grades are in, lockers clean, report cards sent home. But, in the words of Aladdin’s Genie, “We’re not through yet!” The [...]
By utilizing new technologies, it is now possible to reduce the cost of disseminating degree programs from current high levels that drive parents and college students into extreme indebtedness… On Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 13, The New York Times published a negative report on Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The report, titled “Education Department Unwinds Unit [...]
Do facts and data back up the anecdotes of old-timers—namely, that the eighth-grade education of the past was just as challenging academically, if not more so, than that which happens in today’s college classrooms?… Today’s education system has a myriad of advantages that earlier generations never would have dreamed about. Smartboards. Tablets. Advanced science labs. [...]
Increasingly, the university becomes the servant of the public desires of the hour, and correspondingly neglects its old duty of waking the moral imagination and disciplining the liberal intellect. The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going by Jacques Barzun (356 pages, University of Chicago Press, 1993) As C.E.M. Joad put it, “decadence is [...]
Your education has made you a more finely tuned and honed instrument of mercy and consolation for your neighbor, and a more potent weapon against the formidable enemies of love that hate the Logos and seek the ruin and destruction of souls, by co-opting us into this hate under various counterfeit guises. Dear Graduating Seniors: As [...]
There now exists a general dissatisfaction with the present sunk condition of higher learning; complacency having trickled away, reform is conceivable… For a quarter of a century, the higher education in America has been sinking lower. Agreement on this subject is so widespread that I need not labor the point: others will offer you melancholy [...]
I agree with George Weigel that “the answer must be the conversion of culture by well-educated men and women who know what the West owes to Catholicism as a civilizing force.” The problem is that we need the well-educated men and women before any such conversion can take place… “We were always arguing but we [...]
To the extent that I am a human person, Homer’s Iliad speaks to me, but my particular circumstances are my own. As a result, a great question will help all people, including me, and so might be applicable to my peculiar place in space and time without being exhausted by it. In one week I’m teaching [...]
Young Socrates needed to learn how to clarify and defend an argument. He had to learn to push tirelessly against convention, if convention had no defense. As parents none of us are Mary or Joseph, so educating a young Jesus is beyond our skill set, but what about a young Socrates? If you were his [...]
As the rising generation is left ignorant of our civilization’s dogmas—or is encouraged to discard them—strange new dogmas rush in to fill the spiritual vacuum… All societies, in all times, have lived by dogmas. When dogmas are abandoned, the social bonds dissolve—swiftly or slowly; and the “open” society ceases to be a society at all, [...]
A great books education exposes students to the best “inquirers” in the Western Tradition. Scientists and mathematicians are certainly inquirers. The best of them seek wisdom about nature, God, human beings, and the relationship among them. However, there are other ways of inquiring into these realities. The great poets, philosophers, historians, and theologians, for example, [...]
The violation of conscience is not a denominational issue. The issue here is not who gets baptized or when or how, or who may take communion. The problem is violation of the human conscience which God has given to each of us, something that we are born with, no matter what our ancestry… My hometown [...]