A review of Bradley G. Green’s The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life (Crossway Books, 2011) and Houston Baptist Univeristy’s new Core Curriculum I am in my 22nd year as an English professor at Houston Baptist University, and I have never been so excited! In 2011, we unveiled our new Liberal Arts [...]
A Summer 2013 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, (“Saying No to Teach for America”) provides yet another indication of why our children are becoming ever-less educated despite the billions we put into their education. The story tells of Teach for America’s travails in the People’s Republic of Minnesota. Teach for America is a [...]
[The following are responses by Brad Birzer, Robert Woods, Lou Markos and Andrew Seeley to a New York Times op-ed by David Brooks. Mr. Brooks offered a heartfelt quasi-eulogy for the liberal arts. The original essay may be found here.] Brad Birzer For those of us who have been blessed to be a [...]
Our society, indeed what remains of Western civilization, seems to many people to be falling apart. The economic crisis, the moral crisis, the ecological crisis, and the political crisis combine to create a “perfect storm”. But they all stem from one fundamental error. As a society, we have abandoned a sense of cosmic and moral [...]
Raphael’s School of Athens The humanities in American higher education are in deep crisis, and the cry of alarm released on June 18 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences will probably contribute little to a renaissance. How deep is the crisis? Here a few warning signals. According to the New York [...]
As a professor of political science, I can’t help but be concerned with all the enthusiasm about “civic engagement” as some radically transformative, disruptive, “Copernican” revolution in higher education. All the literature that makes such bogus claims is rife with management-speak barely masking progressive ideology. It makes the agenda-driven proclamation that the point of higher [...]
Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”, remains a kind of liberation, an intellectually adventurous work written with a kind of boldness and even recklessness rarely to be found in today’s more politically correct and cramped age. But it rejected conservative impulses. One crisp morning 26 years ago I was walking across the campus [...]
Generally speaking, there are two major philosophies of education: an older model which addresses moral and spiritual concerns of the mind and heart of man, and a newer one which trains us to manipulate and control the material world for the good of the body. The older model prevailed in higher education from around 400 [...]
Harvey Mansfield In my last post, I wrote about Leo Strauss’ defense of liberal education as a possible antidote to the narrowness of specialization of knowledge and the moral aimlessness of positivist ideology. One way to teach liberal education is to have students read the great thinkers of one’s tradition. In his chapter [...]
Education by poetry is education by metaphor. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. “Education by Poetry” was a talk delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly of February 1931. [...]
Catholics in the Public Square is a lecture series by Dr. Bradley J. Birzer, offered by Catholic Courses. In Rudyard Kipling’s classic work The Jungle Book, one of the stories is Kaa’s Hunting. This tale is of how the young Mowgli, who is being instructed in Jungle Law by his tutor Baloo the bear, falls [...]
Leo Strauss So far I have examined a set of thinkers that could be classified in the same school of thought as “Voegelinian”: Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, Gerhart Niemeyer, and John H. Hallowell. In their different styles and approaches to teaching, each of them sought to show their students the true, the beautiful, [...]
In my last essay I wrote about Gerhart Niemeyer who sought to avoid indoctrinating his students in order for them to pursue the true, the beautiful, and the good. In this post I want to do the same thing but look at one of Niemeyer’s students, John H. Hallowell, as a teacher. Spending almost forty [...]
Before I started writing this essay, I went to University of Colorado library and took out one of the best books in English on education, Albert Jay Nock’s Theory of Education in the United States (1932). It is significant for our topic that, while Nock‘s irritable tirade, Our Enemy, the State, is easily available in [...]