A Piece of Work

To prepare for the 2011 conference, may I suggest you read Hamlet and watch at least two versions of it. I like Brannagh, but it has useless and gratuitous and utterly distracting pornographic shots thrown in. Don’t watch it without some means to avert your gaze from their shame, as any gentleman or lady does [...]

A Review? More of an Homage.

The new year begins for our Apprenticeship on Monday and because of a late cancellation we have one difficult to fill seat remaining. While I would invite you to pray that the seat fills, that is not the real purpose of this post, which is to comment on David Hicks book Norms and Nobility. I [...]

Another Sign of Renewal

I love education and I distinguish it from training, but here is an idea that fits our circumstances and that I hope will set an example for other colleges to emulate. COLLEGE LAUNCHES CATHOLIC MEDIEVAL GUILDS It’s the mindset behind this idea that needs to spread.

Halting Notes on Rest

I have found myself engaged in discussions about rest quite a few times over the past few days. A couple things have become clearer to me in these discussions. First, one has to distinguish between two sorts of anxiety: the anxiety that arises appropriately from work that needs to be done and the anxiety that [...]

Smart, Humble, and Natural: And Our Last Best Hope

Andrew Pudewa invited me to address his Writer’s Symposium this week at Wake Forest University. The attendees were devoted users of the IEW materials, especially his Institute on Structure and Style. People told me nice things about the sessions I delivered (which will be made available by IEW in their catalogue if I rightly understood [...]

Contrasts

To the Christian mind, the cosmos is a symphony. To the post-human, it is an unending meaningless experiment.

Testing

How did testing and accountability become the main levers of school reform? How did our elected officials become convinced that measurement and data would fix the schools? Somehow our nation got off track in its efforts to improve education.  What once was the standards movement was replaced by the accountability movement. What once was an [...]

The Place of Logic and the Place of Philosophy

My pocket Aristotle includes these words in the introduction by Justin Kaplan: [Aristotle] devoted his life to codifying and rationalizing what was then the sum of human knowledge. Kaplan goes on to list some of Aristotle’s accomplishments and the obstacles he had to overcome to achieve them. Then this: And underlying all these achievements was [...]

I’m Singing This Note ‘Cause It Fits In Well

Education is not a specialized subject. If you try to understand it by isolating it and studying it as a specialized activity, you will have guaranteed that you will never understand what you are studying. Yet, to a large extent, teachers’ colleges and even educators conferences treat it as such a specialized subject. They seem to [...]

What is man? Who knows?

Darwinism was the lynchpin of Naturalistic Materialism.  Since Darwinism is not accepted by many scientists anymore, that role has been replaced by the neo-Darwinist synthesis built on genetics and DNA. Is the theory of the evolution of species separable from naturalistic materialism? Is the principle of adaptation sufficient in its explanatory power to bring about consciousness? [...]