Blog Status

An update: I have been travelling a lot the past few weeks so have had few opportunities to write. I’ll be away again from Wednesday to Friday this week, so I don’t know if I’ll have an opportunity to blog until next week. You might want to check back on Monday, March 3.
Furthermore, I purchased [...]

Enlightenment and the Goals of the Science Curriculum

As the Academic Dean of the Regent Schools of the Carolinas, I have been assigned the task of developing a curriculum for a pre-school on the notoriously disadvantaged west side of Charlotte.
In discussion, my associate and friend, Nick Gennett proposed a wonderful phrase to describe the driving force behind the science program. We want our graduates [...]

How dead is England?

So far as I can tell, this article is entirely serious. The use of the acronym NICE is somewhere between hilarious and terrifying. The story of Leslie Burke is what made the article worth posting.
I am opposed to health care as it is presently structured for one basic reason: it puts too much power in [...]

Can Everyone Be a Writer

The art of writing is a great mystery. Does the story come from some external source, like the muses or the Holy Spirit? Or does it come from discipline and experience and reflection? The Times of India ran this article, which is worth holding on to as a collocation of different (sometimes contradictory) views on what [...]

Let’s All Be the Same

This article, posted in Teacher Magazine, movingly shows how standardization undercuts what matters most in education. Our Lord warned us against causing little ones to stumble. It seems we need to spend more time thinking about what causes them to do so in this Age of Procrustus.
The modern school seems to be inherently hostile, systemically, to human [...]

The Simplified Curriculum

When we think of curricula, we tend to think of classes or subjects and materials to read or study in those subjects. That’s a very fine thing to do and we should keep doing it. I want to suggest that there might be more to think about and it’s one of those “mores” that make things [...]

The right use of humor

This summer, we’ll be contemplating humor at the CiRCE conference. It’s easy to struggle with the use of humor because it’s so easy to abuse it, to substitute sarcasm for irony, abuse for satire, cruel pranks for slapstick. Consequently, we can sometimes wonder if maybe humor isn’t destructive. Or maybe it’s even the result of [...]

A Booming Baby Looks at the Ten Commandments

George Carlin is occasionally funny, is above average in his intelligence, and falls far short of anything we can call civilized. In short, he’s a lot like the baby boomers and makes a fairly good spokesman for the more tribal of them.
So when I came across a video of his on YouTube describing how to [...]