I can guarantee that we will soon forget the absurd characterization of “KKKolumbus” in the South Bend History Museum. But every time I bring my son to walk through those museum rooms, I will be haunted by the characterization of our white ancestors as ravens who pluck out the eyes of children. My son and [...]
Education is not a question of “rights” to be imposed by the state, but of the “freedom” of parents to choose the sort of education that they believe is best for their children… The late Joseph Sobran (1946-2010) was a journalist who thrived on controversy. He was the sort of writer who did not try [...]
In No One Way to School, Ashley Rogers Berner shows that a variety of schools cultivate civic virtue in students and argues that public schools are inferior to their charter and private counterparts in this endeavor… No One Way to School: Pluralism and the American Public Education by Ashley Rogers Berner (185 pages, Palmgrave Macmillan, 2017) [...]
While hall passes and tardy slips are still used in schools, violations of more important principles seldom have real consequences… Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth by Everett Piper (256 pages, Regnery Publishing, 2017) Dr. Everett Piper’s Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth[1] talks about the political correctness [...]
Many modern observers view the university as little more than an instrument to achieve social and economic objectives, and to the extent that they are successful at corralling universities into these projects, they signal the end of liberal learning… Widely acknowledged as one of the leading British political philosophers of the twentieth century, Michael Oakeshott [...]
Literature is delightful. It’s wondrous, exciting, and often terrifying fun. It offers us escape without the cost of a plane ticket, adventure without deadlines or endpoints. It’s spontaneous and soul-searching, lengthy and pointed, poignant and hilarious... College is full of books: textbooks and biographies, encyclopedias and novels, history books and essays. You finish your Epic of [...]
The students of our college talk to each other without electronic distraction, they look adults in the eye, they laugh often and easily, they exercise wit without reflexive cynicism, they love dancing and singing and playing instruments; they love the classics and the outdoors… When Wyoming Catholic College admitted its first students ten years ago, [...]
The main reason Western civilization, with an emphasis on “Great Books,” deserves a prominent—indeed, the prominent—place in the curriculum of the Christian university is stewardship: This study is how we lay claim to our rightful inheritance of wisdom, nobility, and gracefulness… For many Americans, the onset of fall means pumpkin-spice lattes and cozy sweaters. For [...]
Liberalism is the refuge favored by intellectual cowardice, because the essence of the liberal’s position is that he has no position. There is a saying by William Butler Yeats that a man begins to understand the world by studying the cobwebs in his own corner. My experience has brought home to me the wisdom in [...]
There is a secret to the art of education, but it is an obvious secret. Despite the whirlings of the world, education is straightforward: It engages the good, the true, and the beautiful in the context of basic and natural human interactions and for the sake of human happiness. As an action exercised by one [...]
When imagination works and emotions are properly evoked, an inner enlightenment takes place… While working at a local Catholic High School I couldn’t help observing how the whole enterprise too often focussed on achievement rather than accomplishment. There was a constant race for “good grades” which at worst functioned like votes in a popularity contest. [...]
John of Salisbury exemplifies a practice that we must champion to change our learning systems—to address the failings directly and to see that one educator can transform the world in which he teaches… John of Salisbury not only depicts the thorough and balanced measure of the education of the ideal scholar, but he also points [...]
Just as the good philosopher needs to be a master of the Christian philosophical tradition and adept at the dialectical, analytical, synthetic, and imaginative skills with which his trade is plied, the good Christian college also requires a rigorous and sophisticated curriculum and pedagogy firmly rooted in the Christian philosophical tradition... As Alasdair MacIntyre has [...]
The modern university’s idea of “diversity” excludes all dissident opinions to the one accepted definition of “diversity” which it “values”… We live in strange and ominous times in which coherence and cohesiveness have been replaced by newspeak and doublethink. As readers of George Orwell’s 1984 will know, newspeak is the corruption of language, and therefore [...]