The misery will have to become more sharply unbearable, the suffering personal and yet wide-spread, before people begin to run after a real teacher, seize him by the hem of his overcoat, and beg him to take charge of their children. Let us not say that then it will be too late. It may be [...]
While the common-sense approach to early childhood education was standard practice for centuries, it has been abandoned in recent years. Shunning rote learning, we have instead told young children to draw on their own (limited) experience or feelings when completing school assignments... We all want the best for our kids. Because of this desire, it’s [...]
The university is not a center for the display of adolescent tempers, nor yet a fulcrum for turning society upside down. It is simply this: a place for the cultivation of right reason and moral imagination. Already the reaction is upon us. Political leaders, college presidents, and syndicated columnists join in condemnation of violence on [...]
Ideologues have been manipulating the idea of equality for two centuries now. Still, it is equality that has provided the dynamism, the moving force that has energized modern history. The great liberal and leftist revolutions of the past two centuries have all been made in the name of equality… After we began the walk [...]
Those colleges that neglect the heritage of their benefactors should cease living off their munificent endowments and chart their own course, which, if history gives witness, is the straight and narrow path to oblivion… With sonorous tones on the annual Founder’s Day in my school, the Reverend Sub-Dean clad in his academicals would slowly recite the long [...]
According to Sir Roger Scruton, traditions and attachments to place and home are precious as they give order and meaning to life. They fill a basic human need. Once destroyed, they cannot be brought back. G.K. Chesterton famously wrote “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at [...]
Are the humanities worth studying? Art, literature, and philosophy don’t do anything. They simply are… In the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote: “All art is quite useless.” Wilde meant this not in a disparaging way but rather as a compliment to all things beautiful. He didn’t want to assign any [...]
Genuine education is rooted in the kind of timeless perspective which modern society arrogantly abjures. Such education provides depth and breadth… We are born and live in a certain location and in a certain time. By what appears to be the caprice of geography and chronology, we are thus, in a sense, “locked into” a particular [...]
The college student needs the virtue that enables him to see the origins, the first principles. He will do this by reading and conversing—even by prayer and fasting. Even students in religious-founded institutions can lose their faith, while others find God at Ohio State University. Some students mold themselves to the prevailing campus ideology, while [...]
In a groundbreaking study, researchers have shown that handwriting is better than typing as a means of retaining information precisely because handwriting is slow, whereas typing is fast… We all know Aesop’s fable about the Tortoise and the Hare but few of us really believe, in the real world, that slowcoaches like the tortoise have [...]
In freeing the student in his studies and liberating man socially through education and through every sort of technique and social institution, John Dewey remains an interesting and commanding philosopher… We will first mention decisive influences on John Dewey and then give a résumé of his philosophy of education. It is only within such a [...]
The university is ultimately designed to give students what is needed, rather than what is wanted or merely useful. University administrators should remember the fundamental link among tenure, the possibility of great teaching, and the keeping intact the whole that is the university… University of South Carolina philosopher Dr. Jennifer Frey recently penned an excellent [...]
The mystery is how one person whom I never met, through recountings down the ages of how many others whom I also have never met, could shed light on each other, eventually to enlighten me. In The Apology, Socrates brought up the question of whether he was paid for being a teacher, like the Sophists, who were paid [...]
“Forgetfulness of being”—perhaps we could also call it “forgetfulness of givenness”—underlies most of the problems that we face… Final exams (of blessed memory at this point) are always a way of getting students to pull together what they’ve read and thought about during the semester, but the best exams take that knowledge and guide it [...]