I don’t remember the time or the day I heard it. I have no recollection of the person who read it to me or the place in which it was read. I assume it to have been my mother, but I don’t know that. It is one of the many things whose mental origins are […]
After many years of teaching, writing, and speaking about education—and discussing it with more professional educators than I could ever pretend to remember—I have come to an important conclusion: Most schools do not have a curriculum. This seems like a preposterous thing to say, but it is true. Every school thinks it has a curriculum […]
In Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, which is set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a twelve-year-old girl named Winnie Foster is dissatisfied at home in her little village of Treegap. She is tired of being cooped up and considers running away. One day, while wandering in the woods, she meets a boy named […]
One of the problems in discussing and debating the right way to educate our children is a confusion about what education actually consists of. We talk about education when we mean training; we talk about the importance of STEM subjects like mathematics as if math has nothing to do with the liberal arts; we talk […]
Letter from The Editor Winter 2021: Two Stories When my wife and I visit my mother and stepfather, we often duck out to go for a walk in nearby Holton, a beautiful old town that lies on the prairie in eastern Kansas. We park along the street, walk the neighborhoods, and then poke around in […]
One night when our family was together, my six-year-old grandson came up to me (as he often does), grabbed my hand, and asked me to read him a story. So I walked over to the bookshelf where we keep our children’s books; it was getting late, and we needed something fairly short. I glanced around […]
It is not unusual in today’s postmodern world to hear people criticize the idea of “binaries”—the idea that things can be classed into two distinctive groups. The distinction between males and females, right or wrong, beautiful and ugly, true or false—all of these distinctions are now to be interrogated and seen as questionable. And, of […]
In Orthodoxy G. K. Chesterton articulates the Christian worldview in a way that will sound odd to the modern ear. Like later writers he influenced (such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien), Chesterton was steeped in the mythology and literature of the West. His wide reading in the old Western literature gave […]
It has been called “Nature Deficit Disorder”—the problem of people who, partly because they do not have much interaction with nature and partly because they are not educated about it, simply do not know much about the natural world. The first cause of this disorder is simply that we don’t spend much time outside anymore. […]
Using a structure built from several different types of argumentation, the dilemma corners your opponent by presenting him or her with a difficult choice between two unacceptable alternatives. The most sophisticated and yet elegant argument form is the dilemma. If you know how to use the dilemma you have achieved the logical equivalent of a […]