A Pretty Relevent Application from the Same Essay

If we believed in the absolute reality of elementary moral platitudes, we should value those who solicit our votes by other standards than have recently been in fashion. While we believe that good is somehting to be invented, we demand of our rulers such qualities as ‘vision’, ‘dynamism’, ‘creativity’, and the like. If we returned [...]

The Poison of Subjectivism

Correct thinking will not make good men of bad ones; but a purely theoretical error may remove ordinary checks to evil and deprive good intentions of their natural support. An error of this sort is abroad at present… I am referring to Subjectivism.
After studying his environment man has begun to study himself. Up to that [...]

Classical Rhetoric and the Good Man

“I would, therefore, have a father conceive the highest hopes of his son from the moment of his birth. If he does so, he will be more careful about the groundwork of his education.”
     Quintilian, Institutio Oratio, I, I 
I just returned from Houston, TX, where Kathleen Wrobleske hosted our mid-winter apprentice retreat and Camille Goldston hosted [...]

A Practical Problem With Pragmatism

In an earlier lengthy post, I pointed to an essay by Dewey as the fulcrum on which education has been moved. The Christian classical tradition, to summarize, is about embodied ideas and incarnate words. In Dewey, the idea is nothing. While the Christian classical tradition emphasized contemplation of ideas as embodied in great works of [...]

An Important Distinction

A textbook and a text are two very different things. A textbook is a collection of texts, most of which are abridged, combined in a single binding and usually with the comments of the editor woven throughout. A text, generally speaking, is an individual artifact that stands on its own as a work of art in [...]

Solution #4

“A good solution solves more than one problem, and it does not make new problems.”
Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land
It seems characteristic of democracies and market driven cultures to look for one dimensional solutions to three dimensional problems. It may even be that we are so habituated to this pattern of behavior that we [...]

Grace on YouTube? And can it be?

If you love Christian classical education, you need to see this video from Grace Classical Academy: “Love and laughter is a big part of their day.”

Pushing things to the limit

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit (debt) expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit (debt) expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
Ludwig Von Mises [...]

Cheryl Lowe on Teaching Math

Cheryl Lowe has strong opinions about how math needs to be taught and, unlike so many in the so-called math wars, hers are grounded in her experiences of learning and teaching math. She discusses the history of these math wars and her view on how math should be taught and how it has long been [...]

A few Ideas about Ideas

Without understanding an idea, we cannot have discretion.
Unless we contemplate an idea we cannt understand it.
We contemplate ideas when we see them embodied in paintings, music, stories, lessons, etc.
The structure of a lesson is itself the structure of the idea taught.