Teachers cannot succeed when they are not trusted to do their work while being held to the highest standards of competence and integrity. The integration of those two principles is probably the essential challenge of the head of school (which, as an aside, is why it bothers me so much that heads of school are […]
On Wednesday I went to the SAIS/SACS workshop on accreditation. I always wonder about the philosophy of accreditation these organizations hold to, especially given that accreditation only came into being in the last 60 years or so (SACS began to accredit in 1953). Accreditation, we are told, is necessary because the world we live in […]
Amateurs are in short supply these days, even among classical Christian educators. Amateurism, doing that which one loves because one loves it, is scarce among individuals as well as among their institutions. People don’t live as amateurs, and so their institutions are organized in ways contrary to amateurism, contrary to love itself.
If people […]
Is there a formula to mitigate the chicken and egg problem of teachers salaries and student admissions?
Here is something that needs to be written and studied: A History of Education Management. Much of what we do is derived from the ideas of Frederick Taylor through his followers, one of whom, I was surprised to learn, was Peter Drucker.
Ken Myers Volume 78 included an interview with the author of Me, Myself, […]
[Richard] Weaver… made his reputation as a latter-day Isaiah, bearing admonitory tidings to an inattentive populace. Above all, perhaps, he was an acolyte of what he lovingly called “lost causes.” The fact that a cause had lost, he argued, did not necessarily rob it of nobility; it did not mean that we could not […]
The Enlightenment quest to conquer nature laid the theoretical foundation for thinkers to disregard reality in their speculations. Industrialism provided the resources and the management pattern to apply these speculations. Thus was prepared a greivous quota of human misery.
Because we sentimentalize childhood so much, we seem unaware of the degre of misery that can be […]
Babies are born and reared in a community. Young children learn to speak and write and a host of other things from others in the community. As people mature (within the community) they begin to learn and teach within a network of complex, overlapping roles and relationships.
So what’s the big deal about community? […]
Just about everyone involved in classical Christian education knows the general scheme of the seven liberal arts and that all learning can be said to take place via the three “stages” of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. What about the Trivium in relation to the communities involved, the immediate scholarly community of the faculty and […]
“From one thing, know ten thousand things.” Those are the words of Musashi Miyamoto (1584-1645), arguably the greatest swordsman and military strategist and tactician in Japanese history. This statement from his great work A Book of Five Rings is significant in its parallel to the classical Christian view of design principles in education, […]