According to the Washington Post, Washington DC’s public school district is planning to close 15 under-enrolled traditional schools: “If we don’t become very serious about marketing and competing with charter schools," [DC Councilman David] Catania said, “traditional public schools, as we know them, will become a thing of the past.” Charter schools have grown quickly [...]
Gerhart Niemeyer In my previous essays about teaching in an age of ideology, I had looked at two teachers–Eric Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz–who sought to clear the ideological rubble in the modern academia so students could study the true, the beautiful, and the good. In his accessible lectures about complicated philosophical topics, Eric [...]
The idea for this essay came from a question posed during a meeting of the National Association of Scholars, where several of the presentations had decried recent academic movements of the sort led by Marxists, feminists, homosexualists, or Black separatists, and complained of these groups having politicized higher education. Subsequently, a panel discussing the idea [...]
E.D. Hirsch (the cultural literacy guy) has, I think, written the most important article on educational "outcomes" in a long time. The great benefit of education, "the key to increasingly upward mobility," is expanding the vocabulary of students. Why is that? Hirsch observes that "vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of [...]
Ellis Sandoz In my previous post about Eric Voegelin, I wrote how Voegelin became a model of thinking devoid of ideological rant in the student’s quest for the true, the beautiful, and the good. One of those students was Ellis Sandoz, who in turn became a master teacher himself in the mold of Eric Voegelin. [...]
American society has long idealized education as the ultimate panacea for every social ill and as the engine of economic progress. Today, however, Americans are abandoning their faith in education. Conservatives, as reflected by the Reagan-Stockman budget and the Proposition 13 movement, are trying to cut back on school spending at all levels; liberals have [...]
In my last post about teaching in an age of ideology, I proposed that one needs to illuminate to students about how to live according to the true, the beautiful, and the good. Now what exactly constitutes these goods has elicited an array of different responses from some of the most prominent thinkers as teachers in this [...]
“The ideal classroom is a student driving an automobile with Russell Kirk in the passenger seat.” —Stephen Masty (I made that up, but it’s what he would say) The EarthBOX is a marvelous invention. In a small, controlled environment one can grow vegetables and flowers in great splendor with very little effort. It’s a plastic container equipped [...]
What does it mean to teach in an age of ideology? At first glance, especially for conservatives, the answer appears to be obvious: to advocate for conservative ideas and principles against the prevailing ideologies of relativism, feminism, multiculturalism, and other “politically correct” dogmas that dominate the institutions of American higher education today. Alternatively, if you [...]
Eric Christiansen in The Spectator had some interesting things to say in a review of The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting (and why it still matters) by Philip Hensher. Enjoy "...something can be done to prepare children for writing beforehand. For example, if you live near a common, poultry market or farm, get them to collect goose feathers. [...]
I was driving into our church parking lot the other day, thinking about a nice essay by Douglas Minson on the 79th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. I’m sure glad it happened about seven years before I was born. Anyway, it occurred to me that I had completed an anniversary just a few months [...]
Among the many dangers for traditional conservatives, and Catholics in particular, as the culture becomes increasingly hostile to us and our way of life, is the view that we always must defend “our” people when they come under criticism—and of course never criticize them ourselves. Such has been especially the case with pizza magnate Tom [...]
My wife is a librarian and daily interacts with children and books. If I were not a Professor, I cannot think of a more appealing calling. We talk daily about the little ones in her school, books, and the relationship between bookish children and their overall demeanor. A picture book that we recently became aware [...]
Digory by Scott Dodge Flying on the back of Fledge (formerly known as Strawberry, the used up cab-pulling horse), on assignment from Aslan, over the newly-created land of Narnia, Digory said to Polly, “I wish we had someone to tell us what all those places are.” Polly responded, “I don’t suppose they’re anywhere [...]