Humor and Humility

I’m still not sure if these words have the same etymology or if the first syllable is a coincidence, but the link is quite profound. A healthy sense of humor lives in humility, while a diseased one is grounded in ego. Humor is rooted in the bringing down of the exalted, the humiliation of the proud. It finds its [...]

Stalin’s Russia Remembered

This review of The Whisperers keeps alive the memory that Putin seems to want silenced. But just as we cannot forget what neo-paganism achieved through Hitler’s Holocaust, so we cannot forget what atheism achieved through Stalin’s savagery. We must not forget that we also can kill and be killed. These were human beings at both [...]

Science and Faith

This NY Times op-ed argues for some sort of theism, then chooses panentheism for some reason. I think it is because the writer, Paul Davies, a physicist, recognizes the need for a god, but doesn’t want that god to be free of the universe it made. Read it here, and comment here. I’m interested in [...]

Let me out!

James Taylor argues in Poetic Knowledge that kids need to spend time outside. So bad have things become that The Charlotte Observer wrote an article about parents who try to spend time outside with their kids. This article underscores the real reason education is dying in America.

How Dewey has overcome American Christianity and overthrown America

Not everybody should read the ancient pagan writers, only those who want to be educated.
 John Dewey has such a stranglehold on modern thought that most Christian schools don’t even realize the extent to which he rules over them. This is natural, because his strategy was to insist that philosophy/metaphysics is a waste of time. All [...]

What’s a Teacher To Do?

At least one of the goals of eduacation must be to understand. That seems self-evident to me – bound up in the act of education itself. So I’m always intrigued and part of me is always puzzled by the antipathy among educators and parents for reading and thinking about profound and compelling ideas. American society [...]

What’s A classical school leader to do?

When a school determines to become a college preparatory school, it has two options. It can either think about the kind of college it is preparing its students for or it can become a silly little meaningless school that has no identity of its own and neglects its duties to its students.
Of course, it will [...]

Playing with Dirt: Productive Seeds for Teachers

Continuing my fall garden prep, I was out this morning on one of those Sweater Wearing Days that remind you of childwood walks in the woods and play in the dirt. I felt that energy of childhood surge in me – you know, that desire to be covered from head to toe in dirt!
You don’t get [...]

The role of the lit teacher

Neither Shakespeare nor Homer has an importance bestowed by literature professors and their universities. The true bestowal flows entirely in the other direction. What professors of literature can rightly bestow is honor, because meaningful praise has to come from those who know the excellence of things.
Why Literature Matters, Glenn Arbery
Change professors to teachers and you [...]

Good Solution #3

Continuing this theme and wishing I had more time to go into it, here is the third of Berry’s “Good Solutions”:
“A good solution improves the balances, symmetries, or harmonies within a pattern–it is a qualitative solution–rather than enlarging or complicating some part of a pattern at the expense or in neglect of the rest.”
This might [...]