By E. D. Hirsch Jr. The Disney Corporation’s Celebration School sounded like yet another fairytale from the creators of The Little Mermaid and The Lion King. It was supposed to be the ideal school, set in Disney’s newly created Florida community, Celebration. According to The New York Times, the school was to follow the “most advanced” progressive educational methods. […]
Yearly Archives: 2007
G.K. Chesterton once said that superstitions are most prevalent in rationalistic ages like our own. One of these superstitions is evident in the answer you often hear to the question, “What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction?” When asked to distinguish between the two, some people say that, while nonfiction is true, fiction is […]
We all know that memorization is a keystone of classical education. Yet somehow this is an area where we sometimes lose our discipline. Maybe it’s because we feel silly reciting out loud or we get more gratification from completing a tangible worksheet. Maybe we relegate memory work to the last item on the agenda because […]
By Russell Kirk Our term “liberal education” is far older than the use of the word “liberal” as a term of politics. What we now call “liberal studies” go back to classical times, while political liberalism commences only in the first decade of the nineteenth century. By “liberal education” we mean an ordering and integrating […]
By Andrew Campbell The ancients did not press practical arguments too far. As Aristotle said, “To seek utility everywhere is most unsuitable to lofty and free natures.” Yet the pragmatic benefits of classical education are the ones our modern society is likely to look for first. Fortunately, they are abundantly available to answer some of […]