My daughter and I recently went out on a date. After missing the movie we wanted to see, we ended up watching The Book of Eli, a movie I had not heard anything about. The movie opens in the future, after some sort of apocalypse. There is little vegetation, water is scarce, the roads are littered with abandoned cars, […]
Category Archives: Subjects
A few years ago, a vandal seized some forty or fifty thousand books from my college’s library. He didn’t want to read them, or even to sell them. He wanted simply to get rid of them, on the grounds that nobody would read them anyway. Some of the volumes he had branded for destruction were […]
G. K. Chesterton once said that the “whole modern world is at war with reason.” “The tower,” he added, “already reels.” In what sense can this be true? When we think of ourselves in all of our modern glory—unadulterated by the myths and superstitions of the past, don’t we think of ourselves as more informed, more enlightened, more rational than we […]
This meant that, in his education, a great man must not only study the rules and principles of eloquent expression, but he must know and do the good; he must not only have mastered certain techniques, but he must be familiar with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The discipline that taught a man […]
Progressive education began its destructive march through schools at the turn of the century, and the first thing it corrupted was Latin. In his book The Teaching of Latin and Greek, published in 1911, Dr. Charles Edwin Bennett describes the changes in Latin textbooks that had occurred over the previous two decades and contrasts them with the successful classical methods […]
Many who are attracted to the idea of a classical education don’t know exactly why, nor do they understand the necessity for Latin, or at least so much of it. A little bit of Latin is a good thing, but every year? Spinach is a good thing, but every day? I think five decades of […]
“Hands-on learning” is one of those buzz words that educators like to use a lot. It implies that students are doing something concrete, real, useful, engaging—that they are using all of their senses. Hands-on learning suggests that students are using what they have learned rather than just memorizing and regurgitating. Schools love to provide pictures […]
In Pearl S. Buck’s short story, “A Field of Rice,” Wang Sun, a Chinese villager in the early 1950s, is in a situation in which he is told to do something he knows won’t work. Mao Tse Tung has taken over China, and he has sent functionaries out to every village to tell the farmers (who […]
Have you ever found yourself having a hard time responding to someone in an argument and not exactly knowing what the problem is? Many times, the problem is that your opponent is making an assumption that you have not identified. And many times, it is this very assumption that is at issue. If you knew what it was, you could attack it and […]
The 5 Little Lashbrooks And How They Grew by Martin Cothran Once upon a time, in a beautiful valley in central Pennsylvania, there lived two young girls who loved animals, flowers, cooking, gardening, painting—and books. And writing. And music. Oh, and also sitting around having deep conversations with friends and going on walks in the countryside. At least […]