Category: Science

“The U.S. is running short of people who can tell the forest from the trees.” So says a recent Wall Street Journal article that is at least partly indicative of the fate of science education in the U.S. in recent years. It tells of the growing problem of “plant blindness,” the term used among botanists …

My father was an aerospace engineer. When I was growing up, I never really knew what he did, since his job involved mostly top-secret projects. In fact, I never once visited his office, which required a high-security clearance even to enter. But over the years, I did manage to piece together a few facts about what he did. One day, when …

In the old natural philosophy, the purpose of inquiry into nature was to better know what creation is. It taught nomenclature (the names of things), taxonomy (how the thing fits in with other things), morphology (how things are internally structured), and scientific method (how to investigate natural things). It was focused on the wonder and …

  Science education sometimes creates a quandary for classical educators. Its origins in the West are from Greek philosophy (for example, Aristotle developed genera and species and other classifications for plants and animals), but with the possible exception of astronomy, science is not explicitly included in the seven liberal arts and therefore has been considered …

Manifestum est enim quod homo per intellectum cognoscere potest naturas omnium corporum, said St. Thomas Aquinas: “For it is manifest that man is able to know physical things through the intellect.” The truth that the human mind is able to know the natures of all bodily things may indeed be manifest, as St. Thomas Aquinas …

  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 his right arm is …

“The Next Generation Science Standards attempt to teach science without nature,” says Martin Cothran in an op-ed in today’s Louisville Courier-Journal. You can also read his article in the Lexington Herald-Leader on the science standards. You can watch Martin debate this issue with state education officials in Kentucky on statewide television. Watch the whole video here. You can …

I was recently asked to speak to a Chamber of Commerce meeting about classical education. The initial reason for the invitation was to talk about one of our Highlands Latin School campuses in the area. The group was founded as part of an effort by the local Chamber to create a partnership effort between businesses …

Does a natural explanation always disprove a supernatural one? It is said that for many years the Abbey National Building Society employed a full-time secretary at 221B Baker Street in London to answer mail that was addressed to Sherlock Holmes, the legendary but fictional detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle. So real did Holmes seem …

Reason #3: Science In the last two issues of the Classical Teacher, I gave several reasons why Christians should read the pagans. I talked about their contributions to architecture and discussed what they knew about virtue from the natural world which God created. These were some of the more obvious reasons. But there is another …