Now is the time of year when students finishing high school have to make a thrilling and at the same time daunting choice: Which college should I attend in the fall? Those who are lucky enough to have multiple options often must choose among schools that are quite different in character. The decisions are difficult [...]
It is been a long winter in the eastern United States, including here in the mid-Atlantic. It’s late March as I write this, and we are just starting to see the tops of daffodils and crocuses that usually appear a month earlier. Delayed spring means delayed renewal. Everyone feels it—the desire to get outside and [...]
This June, I spent a week reading and listening to many conversations about Homer’s Iliad at St. John’s College, Annapolis. The rules of a Summer Classics seminar are simple, explained the legendary tutor Ms. Eva Brann (instructors are addressed formally at the school). To start with, one should have read the book being discussed. Then it’s important [...]
So, the Obama Administration has decided not to deport the Romeike family after all. You may recall that the Romeikes are the Christian family from Germany that sought to homeschool their children in their homeland. The German government sent the equivalent of a SWAT team to “save” the Romeike children from the horrors of Christian [...]
The swindlers who used invisible cloth to clothe the Emperor in Anderson’s timeless tale are small potatoes compared to the swindlers dressing up the minds of our children in the public schools. It is one thing to swindle a foolish and vain king out of his gold and gravitas, but quite another to swindle the [...]
Every week it seems I receive three or four letters from people who are establishing new schools or reforming old ones. These letters are most encouraging, and all of the writers, without exception, are dedicated to restoring what is called a “classical” education. Sometimes that implies the study of the true classics, the literature of ancient [...]
The tragedy of modern education, perceived with such brilliance by G.K. Chesterton, 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. Such is the price we [...]
The present article is a reply to the recent piece in these pages by Timothy Gordon and Stephen Jonathan Rummelsburg, which in turn was a response to an article by Dr. Kevin Brady and me, again in The Imaginative Conservative. I speak here for myself, leaving my co-author to file his own reply if he [...]
It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people, but in a school today the baby submits to a system that is younger than himself. “The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “is…that there is a whole [...]
Respect for the notion of tradition comprises a core element within the paleoconservative bag of ideas. As it should. Respect for tradition constitutes one of those attitudes that separates the paleoconservative from both the neoconservative (for whom tradition begins some 200 years ago at most) and many libertarians (for whom the individual is an end in [...]
by Timothy Gordon and Stephen Jonathan Rummelsburg Mr. Stephen Klugewicz and Mr. Kevin Brady surprised us in their Imaginative Conservative article last week by affixing the epithet “straw men” to arguments against the Common Core’s increasingly centralized approach to education. Precisely speaking, arguments for or against the Common Core doubtless employ at least a few [...]
President Obama has been a strong supporter of programs designed to help families pay for a college education, most notably through the Pell Grant and the Opportunity Tax Credit. However, in the summer of 2013, President Obama announced a new “Plan to Make College More Affordable.” In his speech announcing the plan, the president affirmed that “a [...]
"Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?" — The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, v:3 Two hundred and two years after the foundation of this college, Hampden-Sydney is not yet decadent. That is more than we may say of America's higher learning in general. For the most part, American [...]
The London Daily Telegraph recently ran an article in which a young history graduate recounts the political bias that threaded through all ten years of his education. A major module in his degree course—from a top flight university—was about “the ramblings of John Lennon and Yoko Ono”. The prescribed reading-list of Obama presidency critiques focussed [...]