Letter from The Editor In M. Night Shyamalan’s film Lady in the Water, we encounter a character named Reggie who lives in the apartment complex in which the movie’s story takes place. Reggie boasts that he only exercises his right arm: “It’s an experiment,” he says. “It’s science.” The consequence, of course, is that […]
For some thirty years after the United States won World War II, there were islands dotting the Pacific where stray Japanese soldiers still hid in the jungles, unaware that the war was over. Even though the end of a war is a big event, it takes a while for some people to get the memo. American education has experienced […]
As Ariel Castro was being sentenced to 1,000 years in prison without parole for keeping several women hostage in his Cleveland home last year, he unwittingly articulated a view of human responsibility that is championed by many of our intellectuals. Castro insisted he did nothing wrong and blamed his crimes on addiction. This is a […]
People who pay attention to education know that the question of how to teach children to read is a controversial one. But what they may not know is that it only became controversial relatively late, historically speaking. There was a time when there was no phonetic alphabet as we know it. Written language, in fact, […]
How Classical Education Forms and Fills the Mind Introduction: The Importance of Distinctions I am the only person I know who has his own personal metaphysician. Whenever I have a philosophical question I need answered, I consult him. I have had occasion many times, in the middle of a logic class, when one of my […]
Modern educators love to talk about “critical thinking skills,” but not one in a hundred even knows what he means by the term. Every time our country goes through an education reform spasm—which it has undergone about every twenty-five years since the 1920s—the education establishment trots out a set of slogans that always sounds good […]
A couple of years ago, I was sitting down on a Sunday morning reading my local paper. I was reading a story about the “new” things happening in education. One of the “new” things happening, said the story, was that they were going to start getting rid of “rote memorization” and putting more emphasis on […]
Two Views of Education If you were to walk into a public school primary classroom one day, and into the same grade level classroom in, say, a classical Christian school, you would see two entirely different things. And you wouldn’t have to wait to notice some of the differences. There would be certain things evident […]
Our educational establishment is very good at making promises, but not very good at keeping them. Every couple of years, a new initiative is launched to give us hope that things will get better. The initiative is launched amidst great fanfare, agreements are signed, money is exchanged, meetings are held, acronyms are assigned, and for a […]
In the world of education, there are many temptations that would lure us to our destruction, and none greater than the siren song of education technology. The computer is, of course, only one form of education technology, and education technology is anything but new. Those of us educated in the 60s and 70s will remember […]