“Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.” – Neil Postman By now few are unaware of the campus unrest sweeping across the country’s institutions of higher learning. The chancellor and president of the University of Missouri have resigned amid [...]
Above all other twentieth-century men, the late Christopher Dawson took seriously the two theses developed by Newman over a century ago. Newman’s theses were that only the liberally educated are really educated and that a person without an introduction to theological lore lacks an ingredient necessary for liberal education. Dawson wanted to know what, given our situation, [...]
The aim of liberal education is to help people become free. It tries to educate people who are free to search out knowledge on their own, people who are not dependent on others to tell them what they need to know, and ultimately, people who are the best judges of their own needs. It tries [...]
(Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Andrew Seeley as he examines how The Dot and the Line can help teach us virtue as a concept key in Christian education. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher) In the cultural wasteland of the ’70s, where peace and love had degenerated into [...]
“College professors are overwhelmingly liberal. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.” This statement was not made by a conservative academic, columnist, or businessman. It was made by sometime professor and left-wing commentator Damon Linker. There is some good news in the fact of Mr. Linker’s acknowledgement of the obvious—but not much. American [...]
The people of the United States spend annually upon higher learning more money, probably, than did all the nations of the world combined, from the foundation of the ancient universities down to the beginning of the Second World War. In the United States, ever since the Second World War and especially during the past two [...]
Many mistakenly believe this is a literate age. But in reality there is a literacy crisis the world over. The vast majority of people are in possession of literacy skills that constitute the mere shadow of true literacy. As a people, we are no longer able to detect the tones of reality or perceive their [...]
"Aeneas flees burning Troy," Federico Barocci, 1598 Defenders of liberty assume that speech understood as “threatening” is speech misunderstood. They suggest that ideas and words are best scrubbed clean of such pesky side effects as troubling connotations and that weird feeling you get when characters in fantasy books don’t consider love potions date [...]
Over the past year, good Americans have been fighting the changes that the Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History standardized tests have made and are in the process of making. Most fights have been highly localized, generally at the county level. While some of these conflicts have made national news, most have stayed isolated and reported [...]
At first glance, there would seem to be much work awaiting the teacher and scholar of language in the twenty-first century. The powers that be are obsessed with the industrial pollution of water, land, and air. The case seems to be clearer, or foggier, for pollution of language. Useful old words are no longer part [...]
The modern system of public education has been, for the most part, a miserable failure. Our current educational crisis has been eroding the moral and intellectual fabric of the American Experiment for too many generations to count. Yet the occupiers of the Ivory Towers openly aver that our public schools are doing a fantastic job, [...]
“Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one, made him a patron saint of teachers.” —Ignatius Reilly, in John Kennedy Toole’s, A [...]
In many American high schools, the teaching of literature is in the sere and yellow leaf. One reason for this decay is the unsatisfactory quality of many programs of reading; another is the limited knowledge of humane letters possessed by some well-intentioned teachers, uncertain of what books they ought to select for their students to [...]
What Mortimer Adler has to say in “Reforming Education” is worth listening to and reflecting on. He may at times seem like a humorless Puritan, but he is certainly preferable to the many clowns that have cluttered up the road to education in recent years. Reforming Education: The Schooling of a People and Their Education [...]