Public education in the last sixty years has become increasingly meaningless because standards revolve around empty skill sets worked out through bankrupt curricular materials and are driven by a fatally flawed pedagogy. Not only have the public schools lost sight of what an “education” is, they have misused empirical science to criminally reduce the definition [...]
Recent stories concerning the sorry state of American education have focused on problems with the new “Common Core” public school curriculum and retention of clearly incompetent teachers. As a parent who long ago rejected our public school system, these seem to me to be mere symptoms of a much deeper and more critical (one might [...]
Everyone knows what a liberating education is. All of you are no doubt familiar with a typical experience of mine: I am suddenly confronted with a new puzzle, a new question, or a new problem that needs solving. I am pushed out of my comfort zone, and then I discover that the user manual is [...]
As the author of two books laying out a new Catholic philosophy of education based on the traditional liberal arts (Beauty in the Word and Beauty for Truth’s Sake), I have mixed feelings about the Common Core. The Common Core grew out of a report on American education called “Ready or Not: Creating a High [...]
Friends, “I should like to have a word with you, here, on this very spot. We shall be parting soon. Let us agree here that we will never forget one another. And whatever may happen to us later in life, even if we do not meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember” what [...]
Bradley J. Birzer has been appointed the second Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy, the University of Colorado Boulder announced today. Dr. Birzer, a professor of history and the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College in Michigan, will begin his one-year appointment beginning in fall 2014. “Dr. Birzer brings impressive [...]
Bernard Iddings Bell Bernard Iddings Bell (1886-1958) wrote several controversial books examining the American way of life. These fine little books attracted considerable attention, many of them beginning as articles in the New York Times Magazine, Commonweal, and the Atlantic Monthly. By 1950 Bell, an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, was known [...]
The Conservative Movement’s Perpetual Civil War The conflict between advocates of the free market and traditionalist conservatives dates from the beginning of the modern conservative movement. Never have traditionalists and classical liberals comfortably shared the same space. The differences and ensuing conflicts between these two strands within modern American conservatism have been well documented. In [...]
The immense folly of the government run public schools is lost on American citizens blinded by misplaced trust in the false promises of a bankrupt educational system. The utilitarian social utopians who designed the curriculum rejected the original promises of an authentic education based on principles and replaced them with the calculating schemes promising to [...]
Over the years I have gotten into trouble more than a few times for things I have written or said in public, but I suppose the chief cause of my notoriety is a speech I gave to the freshmen of Yale College suggesting that they would be wise to make the study of Western civilization [...]
For the longest time while in graduate school, I simply could not figure out academic writing or the academic culture of writing. Almost every article, review, and book I read left me perplexed. I couldn’t decide if academics were dumb or merely bad at writing. I never presumed, at least as a graduate student, that [...]
A skill is an “ability to do something well; expertise.” Surely we would greatly desire that after 13 years in the custody of the public schools that our children would emerge in possession of the requisite skills to function adequately in civilized society. And while the attainment of skills is a good thing, and our [...]
Many high school seniors are facing one of the most important choices they will confront in their lives: Which college should I attend next fall? In my previous post I wrote about five issues to consider when choosing a college. But then I reflected on my role as a parent of five, remembering the advice I gave [...]
What is an education? What does it mean to be an “educated” human being? Ask a public school teacher or two and the answers may surprise you. Not because they will enlighten you, or give you a new perspective, but because in general there are vast plains of intellectual empty space that lie between the [...]