Education for individualism is education for goodness. The unfreeman cannot be good because virtue is a state of character concerned with choice. The moment we judge the smallest action in terms of right and wrong, we are stepping up to a plane where the good is felt as an imperative. The greatest school that ever [...]
A good slogan, whether it’s comical or serious, catches your attention. Slogans satisfy our innate desire for simplicity and pith. Sometimes they even rhyme, which implants them deeply into our minds—rhyme and music being powerful aids to memory. (Remember the rhyme “Thirty days hath September, / April, June, and November”? How could you forget it?) [...]
My first and last care is not politics (a late-learned duty) but education (an abiding passion). Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought…. But education is also inherently imaginative, because from pre-school to graduate school, it consists, or should consist, primarily [...]
Today, to be “well-educated” is to be ignorant of theology, philosophy, history, and the great books of civilization. It is to believe that we have nothing to learn from the Great Conversation that has animated human discourse for three millennia. On more than one occasion my essays for The Imaginative Conservative have been inspired by bumper [...]
The separation of knowledge into categories frustrates the human desire for unity. Each of us is a student of the world, a whole individual trying to make integral sense of the world, and striving to make that world our own. Settling in to college life this fall, students seem to be following a drumbeat toward [...]
The annual Cardinal Winning Lecture on Catholic Education, sponsored by the St. Andrew’s Foundation, was delivered on February 6, 2016, at the University of Glasgow in Scotland by Tracey Rowland, the Australian theologian and Director of the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne. Rowland is the author of two books on Benedict XVI and of [...]
Teach us almighty father, to consider this solemn truth, as we should do, that we may feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes, and earnestly strive to make a better use of what thy goodness may yet bestow on us, than we have done of the time past. — from Jane [...]
The quest for elements is the best way we humans have of getting to the roots of things and making sense of our experience. And working at this together, in a community dedicated to learning, is one of the best services we can do, both for our own souls and for those of our fellow [...]
The liberal arts college is a place to learn the values of community and communal learning. But today we promote, through online courses and career-focused curricula, a culture of individualism that is anathema to the liberal democratic project. College, for me, has always been something of an interstitial space: an oasis between adolescence and adulthood, [...]
The subtitle of my talk might be “Liberal Education: Program and/or Pedagogy?” The reason is that I think of Jacob Klein’s life as being an embodiment of that slash, “and/or” and therefore an occasion for asking what seems to me a question the answer to which determines the success—I mean the lively and secure survival—of [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to explore the nature of education and its relation to the permanent things, lest we become a class of barbarians. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Education and the Permanent Things If we are going to transmit the permanent things, we will have to [...]
We are still spirited in the West, but the modern spirit is based on egoistic ambition and self-referencing subjectivism. A spirit of relativism today leads us into the desert of self-determination, where we are encouraged to build our own castles on shifting sands. Our grip on revealed truth about the ontological realities of God the [...]
Long used as a justification for affirmative action, diversity is in many ways more useful and sustainable as a freestanding program of action for those hostile to our inherited traditions. It sounds self-justifying. Who could be against diversity in a polyglot society such as ours? The Supreme Court currently is considering the case of Fisher [...]
Welcome to St. John’s College. To our returning students, faculty and staff, welcome back. To our freshmen and their families, we are very happy to have you joining us. In the next few days, you freshmen will begin working your way through a book that I think, more than any other, serves as an exemplar [...]