Can you discuss progressive, pragmatic, and classical education and why classical education is a valuable option? Each of these sees the purpose of education differently. Progressivism is the idea that education is a means to accomplish the end of changing a culture. Pragmatism does not want to change culture by using students, like progressivism; rather, […]
One of the many benefits of knowing Latin is that it gives you the ability to know what English words mean even when you have never seen them before. But just as important is the ability it gives you to better understand a word you have seen a thousand times. I was walking through the […]
Can you explain what it is you do? Reading about you makes me think of Indiana Jones, except maybe without the chase scenes. Yes, well, certainly these things can sound more glamorous than they really are! As a computer scientist and a computer vision imaging specialist, I am interested in both increasing access to and […]
I was at a meeting of private educators in our state a couple of years ago, and afterwards an acquaintance, who was the superintendent of a local private school system, came up to me. He was very excited. He had gotten a grant to provide students in his schools with iPads. I didn’t have the […]
There is one argument today that seems able to trump all others. It is not really an argument, though we tend to treat it as one, and it is one that is often considered definitive: “A study has found …” This phrase seems to many people to have an almost religious gravity to it, lending […]
One of the few books we had in our house when I was young was a set of World Book Encyclopedias. When you looked up something in the encyclopedia you first had to find the volume which housed all the words beginning with the first letter of the word you were searching for. If you […]
It goes without saying that the greatest pleasure of books is in the reading of them. The reader who has learned to appreciate the exhilaration and heartbreak of Charles Dickens; the vibrancy of life and sweeping human vision of Leo Tolstoy; the human drama and poetic insight of Shakespeare; the whimsical humor of P. G. […]
There are some questions we ask of science that it is ill-equipped to answer. The question of how human beings are different from animals is one. I thought about this when I read Kevin Laland’s article in a recent issue of Scientific American. “[H]ard scientific data have been amassed across fields ranging from ecology to […]
In 1929, children’s book author Anne Parrish was visiting Paris. She left her husband at a cafe to visit one of the city’s many bookstores. There she found a copy of Helen Wood’s Jack Frost and Other Stories, a favorite of hers from childhood. She returned to the cafe, sat down, and showed her husband […]
There are people who believe that the story at the center of Christmas—that a virgin conceived and bore the Son of God—is a myth or a fairy tale. And they are right. It is. In his book The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton points out that the ancients (at least those who were not privy […]