Modestly, without arrogance or triumphalism, our graduates will be the mustard seeds of cultural transformation… Graduation is always a bittersweet time, because we have come to know the students so well, from many different sides. It is not a matter of delving into their privacy, but of seeing them in different contexts—classes, outdoor trips, liturgical [...]
Trying to put science in a classical paradigm is putting new wine into old wineskins. Modern science just does not easily fit into a classical paradigm… STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and math, is the newest acronym for what is considered a great education, and it often leads to a satisfying and financially rewarding career [...]
The philosophy of the liberal arts says that education should train the mind to think. But today teachers are being forced to serve two masters: the old master of good curricula and the new master of standardized testing… In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis writes, “What do they teach them at [...]
If colleges are rapidly increasing the amount of social justice-based material that they feed their students, is it any wonder that they are experiencing a surge in protests…? It seems one can’t open an internet browser these days without seeing some new story on the unrest and chaos prevailing throughout college campuses. One of the [...]
The peculiar conditions of our time and our society demand now, more than ever before, a reinvigoration of truly liberal learning. This hour is favorable to the restoration or establishment of a college with principle… A few years ago, a graduate of New York University brought suit against that institution. He had been induced to enter [...]
The primary purpose of the university is to preserve the great ideas of the past and to introduce the present generation to timeless conversations, thus preserving such wisdom for countless and unknown future generations… Conservatives rarely remember the profound influence Robert A. Nisbet (1913-1996) had on the press, academia, and the public at large in [...]
To recover our social traditions and the cultural knowledge undergirding them will be the job of generations. But we should work to reduce the harm visited on our society by universities increasingly dedicated to identity politics and to indoctrinating students into that politics… The problem with reforms is that they almost always are thinly-veiled programs [...]
The Roman teachers were acutely aware of the role of audience. In its classical sense, rhetoric means the use of language, whether in speech or tex, to persuade an audience… The word rhetoric is thrown about in mostly negative ways—accuse someone of employing rhetoric and you have implied a lack of sincerity or content (which [...]
In the educational world today, we ask the wrong question about how students are to become educated. Instead of asking what they should do, we should ask how students ought to be… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg as he explores how the abandoning of [...]
Even those critics friendly to Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option have failed to take its implications seriously, likely because they are afraid to take the concrete steps he suggests to preserve their Christian way of life in this country… Does the United States need Christianity or at least the conventional morality based on Christianity? Until the [...]
By nixing Latin instruction from our schools, have we knocked the feet out from under generations of students, leaving them to struggle through the fog of schooling and literacy on their own…? A little over a year ago, it was reported that Australian schoolchildren were suddenly making dramatic gains in a number of subjects. The [...]
The tragedy of modern education is that it has left us perilously ignorant of who we are, where we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. We are lost and blissfully unaware that we are heading for the abyss… Many years ago the English writer G.K. Chesterton claimed that the “coming [...]
One of the key components in the overthrow of traditional marriage was the skillful and persistent use of a handful of relatively simple rhetorical strategies by the reformers… The battle the left conducted against the confirmation of Elizabeth DeVos as President Trump’s Secretary of Education attained a level of toxic bitterness that was both stunning [...]
A smart word, an attentive ear, and the quick gift of a book can change a person… I have had the wonderful fortune of writing a weekly essay for The Imaginative Conservative since its founding in the summer of 2010. A lot of words and a lot of ideas. Most of them, I hope, were [...]