A couple of years ago, I was sitting down on a Sunday morning reading my local paper. I was reading a story about the “new” things happening in education. One of the “new” things happening, said the story, was that they were going to start getting rid of “rote memorization” and putting more emphasis on […]
Our educational establishment is very good at making promises, but not very good at keeping them. Every couple of years, a new initiative is launched to give us hope that things will get better. The initiative is launched amidst great fanfare, agreements are signed, money is exchanged, meetings are held, acronyms are assigned, and for a […]
In the world of education, there are many temptations that would lure us to our destruction, and none greater than the siren song of education technology. The computer is, of course, only one form of education technology, and education technology is anything but new. Those of us educated in the 60s and 70s will remember […]
In 1969, philosopher Henry Veatch wrote a book called Two Logics: The Conflict Between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy. It scandalized the philosophical establishment of the day. The book challenged the underlying assumptions behind the new logic that had been taught in colleges and universities for over fifty years. The issues addressed in the book were […]
“Get ready for the newest round of permissivist education” It was called the “Best Novel of the Century” by the Library Journal in 1999. Oprah Winfrey, whose good taste in books belies her otherwise mischievous cultural influence, has called it “our national novel.” And it won the recent Publisher’s Weekly poll which asked the question, “What […]
It is not an exaggeration to say that the Greeks invented education as we know it: To them, schooling was a means to pass on their culture. For the Greeks, the primary instrument for this purpose was one book in particular: Homer’s Iliad. It was their national textbook. From it they learned who they were […]
There are two ways to go wrong when it comes to education. The first is to emphasize the intellect over the affections; the second is to emphasize the affections over the intellect. The first we might call the “Rationalistic Fallacy”; the second we might call the “Romantic Fallacy.” These two fallacies plague all modern intellectual […]
The REAL Reason Our Educational Elites Don’t Like Grammar In Leo Tolstoy’s great Christian novel Anna Karenina, an after-dinner conversation turns to the subject of which European nation is more civilized—the English, the French, or the German. Karnenin, Anna’s husband, asserts that that civilization is most influential which is the most “truly educated.” […]
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 […]
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 […]