The patrimony of a civilization can be lost at the very moment of that civilization’s material triumph. In any culture worthy of the name, men must be something better than the flies of a summer; generation must link with generation. Some men among us are doing whatever is in their power to preserve and reinvigorate [...]
The author of the best book ever written on America, and the best book ever written on democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, claimed to see almost no higher education in America. I think Tocqueville exaggerated a bit in his day, and he would also be exaggerating in ours. […]
A forthcoming book called Lesson Plan throws cold water on the fear that student debt may stunt the lives of college graduates. […]
Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. —The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot I moved frequently in the later years of my childhood—not just from town to town, state to state, or country to country, but from [...]
A golfer’s long game has nothing to do with the amount of time it takes to play eighteen holes. It’s the part of his game that has to do with distance shots—what he does with a driver or a 3-iron, for example. In football, the long game is about the passes that get the most [...]
When Max Weber suggested in 1917 that the world had been disenchanted, he meant that modernity was best understood by the expansion of “technical means” that controlled “all things through calculation.”[1] The real power of these technical means lay not in the techniques and technologies themselves but in the disposition of those who used them, in [...]
Readers of The Imaginative Conservative will have a great and healthy respect for the Great Books of civilization, those seminal tomes which have helped define who we are, why we are and where we are. Our culture would be impoverished without them. Indeed, it would be rendered penurious in their absence. It is no surprise, [...]
Perhaps there is nothing in the world as truly educative as tragedy. When you have known it, you’ve known the worst, and probably also you have had a glimpse of the mystery of things. And if this is so, we may infer that there is nothing which educates or matures a man or a people [...]
I. History The Roman threw us a road, a road, And sighed and strolled away: The Saxon gave us a raid, a raid, A raid that came to stay; The Dane went west, but the Dane confessed That he went a bit too far; And we all became, by another name, The Imperial race we [...]
Taken in its widest sense education is simply the process by which the new members of a community are initiated into its way of life and thought from the simplest elements of behavior up to the highest tradition of spiritual wisdom. Christian education is therefore an initiation into the Christian way of life and thought, [...]
1c-d. The activity of this higher logos, dialectic itself, is beyond Glaucon’s present reach and no part of the preliminary survey. To set out on the dialectical road would be to see “no longer an image… but the true itself” (533a3); the “most serious matters” are withheld from Glaucon, and so from any mere reader [...]
1a. After the cave image Socrates considers with Glaucon the actual education of the philosophers. He begins significantly: "Would you like now to see in what way such men will come to be born [in the city] and how one will lead them up into the light, just as some [e.g., Heracles[40]] are said to have [...]
“The Child is father of the Man,” wrote William Wordsworth, marveling at the enchantment of the child’s early experience and delight in play. The formative period of childhood cultivates in the young a love of life, a sense of adventure, and an imaginative world filled with wonder. As the child in Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden [...]
In a recent essay, I argued that the ills facing social psychology today are the product of an obsession with method that elevates the standards of the natural sciences to how inquiries ought to unfold in the human sphere. Here I would like to address a related problem that bears on the prototypical education that [...]