One Saturday many years ago, when even my oldest children were young, we had a visit from two friends of ours. They were not quite my parents’ age, but they were old enough that they had just become grandparents. We invited them in, and, as happened when anyone entered our home at that time, they […]
There is a passage in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in which Aragorn asks for some leaves of athelas, a healing herb brought by the Men of the West into Middle Earth, and which is now called “kingsfoil.” Minas Tirith, the chief city of Gondor, is celebrating its successful defense against the […]
Responsible mothers once admonished their children to refuse to take candy from people they didn’t know. But the great danger to children today is not candy being offered by strangers they have been warned against, but moral advice being offered by experts we have all been told to trust. A couple of years ago, the now former governor of California was […]
Reason #2: Virtue In the last article, we learned that the Greeks established the first principles of architecture by studying nature. The proportions that are most pleasing to the human eye are those of nature’s greatest work of art—the human body. We learned that God gave man reason and the desire to know, but he […]
If you wanted to learn to be a mathematician, you wouldn’t want to just read about mathematics; you would want to actually do math. If you wanted to learn how to write, you wouldn’t settle for just reading about writing; you would want instruction that involved actually writing yourself. The same thing goes for music […]
Why Telling Stories to Our Children is the Best Kind of Character Education … In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre observes that in all classical and heroic societies, “the chief means of moral education is the telling of stories.” In a real sense the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey were the moral tutors of […]
The harder the reformers try, the worse they make the American school. They just can’t seem to get it right. Their errors are so fundamental that only a complete rebooting will help. Conventional education is based on three principles and one application. 1. There is no Truth. 2. If there is Truth, you can’t know […]
Most critics of American education today have a good grasp of one part of the problem: our children don’t have enough knowledge. They cite poor test scores and the general lack of awareness of important events in history as proof of this. And they are right. But although this analysis is correct, it is not […]
Modern languages are taught by the conversational method. If I understand this method correctly, it involves an emphasis on oral and written conversation in the classroom, supplemented with a secondary focus on grammar. Ideally this conversational instruction is augmented by travel and an immersion experience with native speakers. It could also be called the natural […]
The liberal arts are traditionally intended to develop the faculties of the human mind, those powers of intelligence and imagination without which no intellectual work can be accomplished. Liberal education is not tied to certain academic subjects, such as philosophy, history, literature, music, art, and other so-called “humanities.” In the liberal-arts tradition, scientific disciplines, such […]