Category: Summer 2014

Today I heard my daughter approaching in the darkness, too early for a Saturday morning. I asked her to tell me what happened. “An episode.” With schizophrenia, this means threatening voices and shivering in bed with a paralyzing terror. In the stillness just before dawn, we talked until her fears lifted. She breathed a sigh. “I need to write something down.” …

The Traditional Method It’s either feast or famine. When I was teaching my children to read, there were so few phonics programs available, I didn’t know where to find one. Phonics instruction nearly disappeared in the 1930s and only started making a comeback in the 1970s. Now there are so many phonics programs to choose …

For some thirty years after the United States won World War II, there were islands dotting the Pacific where stray Japanese soldiers still hid in the jungles, unaware that the war was over. Even though the end of a war is a big event, it takes a while for some people to get the memo. American education has experienced …

How Poetry Helps Us Fathom the Unfathomable You’ve probably noticed that it can be difficult to explain why some things are true or obvious—like common sense, your grandmother’s wisdom, the distinct feeling of Sunday mornings, that you have a soul, or why your child should play outside rather than stare at a screen. This is so because …

Reason #9: Human Condition When it comes to the human condition, we may think that Scripture is all we need. After all, Scripture does show us our true human condition in a way that the Greeks did not and could not: our relationship to God, that we are sinners, that we are a fallen race in …

As Ariel Castro was being sentenced to 1,000 years in prison without parole for keeping several women hostage in his Cleveland home last year, he unwittingly articulated a view of human responsibility that is championed by many of our intellectuals. Castro insisted he did nothing wrong and blamed his crimes on addiction. This is a …

People who pay attention to education know that the question of how to teach children to read is a controversial one. But what they may not know is that it only became controversial relatively late, historically speaking. There was a time when there was no phonetic alphabet as we know it. Written language, in fact, …