Our kids don’t need arguments, they need a childhood. They need to have their healthy imaginations nourished and their innate prejudices in favor of truth, beauty, and goodness affirmed. It’s hard to be a kid these days. Your blue-haired teachers appear on Libs of Tik-Tok videos bragging about selling you into sex slavery, and people [...]
If the twenty-first century is to produce more great men and more great books, it will have to restore a true education; and a true education is an education as if truth mattered. The title of this essay, “Education as if Truth Mattered,” is taken from the subtitle of Christopher Derrick’s book, Escape from Scepticism: [...]
Like prayer and meditation, writing helps make sense of things, to cut through the clutter of life, to find mental clarity and order—both for the writer himself and in turn for the readers. The act of writing helps the writer to know himself and the reader in turn to know himself, to know that he [...]
Now I, too, would like the university to be a safe space, but a safe space for rational argument about the pressing issues of our time. If a university stands for anything, surely it stands for that idea of truth, as a guiding light in our darkness and the source of real knowledge. Free speech [...]
To justify the Classics and Humanities, some have tried to argue that they remain a practical option for students, couching their praise in terms readily amenable to the outcome-focused mentalities of today’s high-achieving students. But does reducing the Classics and Humanities to a series of “practical” stepping-stones do the subjects any justice? Colleges and universities [...]
Teaching at a time when civilization is in such obvious disarray and such marked decline imposes even more stringent and pressing obligations on the teacher. I have reached the conclusion that what American teachers must do is really very basic: Teach young men and women how to read and write, how to imagine beyond themselves, [...]
Nikole Hannah-Jones is right and wrong. Although the first slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, the year and the event carry less significance than she imagines. Although neither deceptive nor careless, she is uninterested in facts in a conventional sense. Her principal objective is not to understand the past but to rebuke the present and, [...]
It has been through books that Americans have been infused with what loosely can be called a “common culture,” a common way of experiencing our world and our place in it. We can at least say that one sign of personal impoverishment is the inability to experience the emotional elevation that comes through reading “real [...]
Tradition! Tradition! Sing it like Tevye. We all know that not all traditions are healthy or good or right. Fiddler on the Roof, much as I find it entertaining, strikes me on every viewing as just a bit too much in the spirit of the 1960s in its glee at razing traditions sensible or no. [...]
A true, life-giving education is an education that recognizes and embraces a world filled with goodness, truth, and beauty. It is also an education that requires virtue from those who undertake it. Editor's Note: The following is an abridged version of the commencement address that Joseph Pearce gave to the graduating class of 2018 at [...]
The “liberal” in “liberal arts” has traditionally and rightly been understood to refer to freedom in several ways. In a classical context the liberal arts rescue us from banal pursuits. In a religious context they deliver us from earthly bonds. And in a modern context they set us free from inherited prejudices. Editor’s Note: This [...]
Sherrard Billings, one of the three founders of Groton School—and the American Mr. Chips—did his part to develop good and wise habits among the “Grotties.” Through his own life of suffering, he taught them to how to live, pursue the truth, love the good, and pass on wisdom. The Groton School The New [...]
Let us offer to the young some clear years for becoming not a this or a that, but for learning to be a human being, whose powers of thought are well exercised, whose imagination is well stocked, whose will has conceived some large human purpose, and whose passions have found some fine object of love [...]
Eva Brann’s contributions to the larger academic community are twofold: She gives her students, colleagues, and readers a sweeping variety of writings and offers herself as a model of one who never shies from thinking, discussing, and seeking knowledge; and she is a tireless defender of the educational practices at St. John’s College, where she [...]