Recently I attended some out-of-town meetings on parochial education. As I left my hotel room to face the long day ahead of me, prepared but a little hesitant to begin the extended and mind-intensive work, I gathered my name tag and folder. I scanned the hotel room one last time to see if I had […]
With one exception I have never heard anyone speak seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of computer technology, which strikes me as odd. After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A […]
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 […]
In his prophetic essay The Abolition of Man (1944), C. S. Lewis asked whether the triumphs of modern science “may have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price.” Already by the middle of the twentieth century, Lewis had sensed the threat that genetic engineering would pose to mankind, and he called for […]
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. […]
Classical writings possess a distinctly concise wisdom. Rather than distant relics or dusty artifacts, these treasures instruct our children in our own time. When we want to introduce classical literature, Aesop is a good place to start. Aesop’s fables have long been considered “the ideal pedagogical vehicle, second only to the Bible when it comes […]
Memories of graduate school flood my mind these days. Those four years of coursework at the University of North Carolina marked the beginning of my life as a scholar. I had painfully figured out how to study as an undergraduate, but the fervid quest to learn, the burning desire to piece together difficult or obscure […]
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 […]
Aristotle’s Politics, a treatise on political philosophy, explains that language is the defining feature of humanity with the old dictum “and of all the animals, only man has speech.” Unlike the other creatures in the world, man possesses the power of reason and the ability to speak; he is a language animal. As a unique […]
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis summarizes the heart of classical education: “Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like […]