The Arts of Freedom

A community can be free only to the extent that it remains committed to being free and defending their freedom. When they choose prosperity, security, or even peace over freedom (i.e. when they renounce Patrick Henry’s declamation), they have inevitably forfeited the right to be free. But commitment to freedom has more to do with [...]

teaching logos

Every created thing has its own logos. So do man made things. The teachers goal is to discover that logos and then enable the student to see it. The most important preparation for every lesson, then, is to identify the logos of the lesson. The second most improtant part is to embody it so the [...]

Which Comes First?

The point for the liberal arts teacher to keep in mind is that the trivium and quadrivium were established before the pragmatic advantages of those disciplines appeared, developed out of the natural desire of man to know, not because they were immediately practical. Marion Montgomery The Truth of Things: Liberal Arts and the Recovery of [...]

A Prayer for Lindsay Lohan

Lindsay Lohan, about whom I know virtually nothing, deserves our prayers. I try to imagine how much pain a life like the one implied in this article (which is not very developed) must include and I can”t do it. So I pray that she will be rescued and find peace. The article also implies a [...]

The Leap of Faith

The leap of faith is a leap into consciousness – a leap into what we already know, not a blind leap into the irrational. The materialist (the aesthetic, as Kierkegaard used the term) is a sadly unconscious person. The ethical person becomes conscious by his engagement in the finite and its realities, but, like finitude, [...]

The Round Pen

Yesterday morning I exchanged replies with a parent who was concerned that my assignment translated into a form of punishment.  The assignment required the students to correct a wrong answer by rewriting it 10 times.  In the next week or so I will ask the questions again to repeat the assessment.  Is this appropriate, and [...]

Trying to Thank

Renee Mathis is completing her second year as a CiRCE Institute apprentice and is one year away from achieving the status of a CiRCE certified master teacher of classical Rhetoric. For two years she has been teaching The Lost Tools of Writing, but that doesn’t begin to describe her work for and on Level II. [...]

Family and State

American society seems to have undergone a fracture down its center, and that center is the family. Here’s Allan Bloom from his The Closing of the American Mind: The immediate and reliable love of one’s own property, wife and children can more effectively counterpoise purely individual selfishness than does the distant and abstract love of [...]

It’s Dumb Everywhere

It’s not so great at Cambridge either. Here’s Mary Beard, a Cambridge prof, complaining about the excessive busywork the Immortal They inflicts on the teaching faculty. Is it a world without trust?

Freedom and Planning

I was in our headmaster coaching meeting this morning when the topic of the span of central planning came up. Yeah, that’s a conversation starter! In his book The Logic of Liberty, Michael Polanyi includes an essay called The Span of Central Direction. He was a chemist before he became a philosopher, so you’ll want to [...]