After many years of teaching, writing, and speaking about education—and discussing it with more professional educators than I could ever pretend to remember—I have come to an important conclusion: Most schools do not have a curriculum. This seems like a preposterous thing to say, but it is true. Every school thinks it has a curriculum […]
“Language is a technology, invented to take information in your head and put it in other heads.” It is with this most unromantic premise that I set off with my students to discover the Latin tongue. Worry not that such meager ceremony should christen my charges’ maiden voyage to those Lavinian shores. I do not […]
In Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, which is set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a twelve-year-old girl named Winnie Foster is dissatisfied at home in her little village of Treegap. She is tired of being cooped up and considers running away. One day, while wandering in the woods, she meets a boy named […]
One of the problems in discussing and debating the right way to educate our children is a confusion about what education actually consists of. We talk about education when we mean training; we talk about the importance of STEM subjects like mathematics as if math has nothing to do with the liberal arts; we talk […]
Many years ago the English writer G. K. Chesterton claimed that the “coming peril” facing civilization was “standardization by a low standard.” Today, almost a century later, Chesterton’s words have something of the mark of prophecy about them. This “dumbing down” is exemplified in America’s woefully beleaguered education system. Standards of literacy and numeracy, to […]
We live in the lake community where my husband spent summers as a boy. He and his boyhood friends built forts, acted out The Hobbit with homemade swords, and tested many brave and boyish notions. Once, after reading about regalia wings, the boys hoped to fly winged bicycles by launching them off a big wooden […]
I was recently asked this question at a conference: “What classical music do you recommend I play in the background for my kids?” Answering it is a bit of a delicate dance because I first need to say that any fruitful approach to classical music needs to place it in the foreground. Any serious art […]
If I were tasked with the composition of a Student’s Handbook for Disrupting Class, I would not spend too many words on trifling matters like technological distraction or destruction of property; such barbarism has long been the natural prerogative of the academically obtuse, for which no formal instruction is required. A truly Machiavellian plot must […]
When you reach the end of this year, will you look back with a sense of satisfaction, knowing you did everything you could and should to pour all that is true and good and beautiful into the hearts and souls of your students? It is a grand and glorious privilege you have been given. As […]
A logic teacher often encounters the complaint that logic is not useful, that being so abstract it is detached from the real issues of life. The student must memorize names (in Latin, of course) for basic patterns, and the examples of these patterns all seem to involve Socrates somehow. Students are made to work through […]