Adler on the Education Options

A badly stated issue calls for false or extreme solutions. It is important, therefore, to correct the impression that th issue in American education today is between classicism and progressivism. Both of these names signify undesirable extremes which have exagerrated and distorted some sound elements of educational policy. Classicism names the arid and empty formalism [...]

Sympathetic Identification or Critical Analysis?

All learning is imitation, if only we understand what imitation is. All teaching, then, is either exemplifying or presenting what the student will imitate. This can apply to the classroom, but the truth is, we spend most of our active time teaching and learning anyway – or at least attempting to do so - so it would be [...]

The Path to A Smaller Government: Get Involved

Here’s an irony: the solution to too much government involvement is more involvement in government. Here’s a contrast: Image 1: In Colonial New England, because the American colonies were not a priority to the English parliament and king, every local community was locally run. It seems as if virtually everybody was involved in politics, but the politics were [...]

Inside, Outside, Upside Down

You can live from the inside, or you can live from the outside. You can think from the inside, or you can think from the outside. You can read from the inside, or you can read from the outside. You can teach from the inside – but only if you live, think, and read from [...]

Amazed by America

Every act of teaching rests on the implicit or explicit assumption of authority and trust. Student, parent, and community always assume the teacher knows what he is talking about and is therefore trustworthy. When this is not the case, as in every form of coerced schooling, the end cannot be anything other than cynicism. Such cynicism [...]

Susan Wise Bauer on Medieval History

Every class at school is dominated by either a skill set (the arts, liberal and fine) or ideas (history, theology, etc.). In either case, the content learned will serve the idea or the skill. To avoid confusion, ideas classses also develop skills and skills classes also think about ideas. They cannot be laid into air [...]

Blurry Minds and Fuzzy Habits

At the same time as they foster he blurred mind, then, the elementary and secondary schools postpone and finaly make unpalatable the ancient discipline of work. …. no way has yet been found to teach him how to write. The sole magic that could make freshman composition succeed would be the belief on the part [...]

Do we Face Our Final Curtain?

Mark Steyn is an amusing and insightful writer who thinks we are facing our final curtain. Here’s an article he wrote, responding to the truly eery Audi SuperBowl commerical, in which he coins the term “conformo-radicalism” that sums up the vacuousness of pop and political thought today. Do you think he’s exagerrating? Does the contradictory term conformo-radicalism draw parallels in your [...]

Preparing the way for Hitler (part III of a series)

In my previous post in this series, I said I would discuss why Germany was so ready for Hitler and why they supported him so enthusiastically. To understand this, you must understand that Hitler came to power in a Germany that had been preparing for him for a long time. An evil on the scale of Nazism, or [...]

Germany, Austria, and the Beginnings of Hitler (Part II of a series)

I mentioned in my previous post that my great-grandfather came from southeastern Austria (actually, as my brother Nate reminded me, the Austro-Hungarian empire) in 1910, 100 years ago this year, and that my mother came from Germany a couple generations later. Austria and Germany are both Germanic people’s, but their history and their characters are very different [...]