A belief that all that is needed for living or even preaching is the Word of God and the Holy Spirit, has so invaded certain segments of modern American Christianity that an educated man might be looked at with suspicion. J.P. Moreland’s Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the [...]
Perhaps now more than ever the young people in our care need to be guided to read and understand literature that addresses suffering. We educators have the duty to introduce our students to fellow wayfarers, those life-long literary companions who can re-appear with true comfort when it is inevitably needed. As a teacher of literature, [...]
What does courage actually look like? Why is it that many who can face mortal dangers in battle lack the other virtues? How do you account for a man like Cicero, whose voice trembled at the beginning of every speech and who never distinguished himself in battle, yet who stood up to Catiline and saved [...]
Pope Pius XI’s "Divini Illius Magistri" is a manifesto for modern parents seeking to reclaim their rights as the primary educators of their children. Families and educators alike would do well to study and heed the pontiff's timeless wisdom. As far back as 1961, English historian Christopher Dawson was diagnosing a “crisis in Western education.”1 [...]
American history is a subject that has suffered from bad teaching, and public education in general is profoundly deforming in so many ways these days. This is why John Niemann, a veteran teacher at classical schools in the Twin Cities, saw a need several years ago and met it with the Saint John Paul II [...]
Many educators today have fostered a false enlightenment, a so-called "wokeness," that actually closes off inquiry and darkens the mind. But surely a recognition of this spiritual destitution will convince more and more people to look for real alternatives. Last week, a great friend of ours said that “the moment is good” for Wyoming Catholic [...]
True educational reform must re-establish the secondary school as a place for broad learning, vocational training as a highly respected route to respectable work, and college as a place for higher learning. The call for college to be made “free” to all who want it rests on a number of assumptions, most of them self-serving, [...]
Since throughout history, strong and cohesive nations generally have had strong and cohesive historical narratives, how long can America continue to do without one? Do our historians now have an obligation to help us recover one? American history needs to be seen in the context of a larger drama. But there is sharp disagreement over [...]
The study of history in public schools should be conducted with an eye to “fostering good citizenship.” But it should do more than that. It should foster good human beings—human beings with broad minds and contemplative souls who appreciate the power of ideas. “If history be, in truth, the self consciousness of humanity, the ‘self [...]
Is college education a lost cause? We have reason to hope, but only if we know what real education is. Crisis: “decisive point in the progress of a disease,” also “vitally important or decisive state of things, point at which change must come, for better or worse,” from Latinized form of Greek krisis, “turning point in [...]
Apologists for Greek and Latin have lately dwindled. Yet in the past several years there have been some notable attempts to save classical education from utter extinction—one of which is Tracy Lee Simmons’ “Climbing Parnassus.” Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin, by Tracy Lee Simmons (290 pages, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007) As [...]
History lessons, brought to life by primary sources, help students move beyond interpretations of the past to the past as it was. History then no longer appears musty and impersonal, and when excellently taught, reveals an unchanging picture of human nature: one that is deeply personal, surprisingly relatable, and amazingly understandable. History excellently taught needs [...]
What H.L. Mencken thought was the case in his day likely remains the case today: Public schools have “done more harm than good.” How could they not, Mencken asked. Having taken the “care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs,” the politicians of his day had “thrown” the entire [...]
Everybody agrees student loan debt is a large problem, having serious adverse effects on family formation, purchasing of houses, and many other aspects of American life. So, what should we do? Everybody agrees student loan debt is a large problem. In the United States approximately $1.5 trillion is currently owed by around 45 million people [...]