Reviewing or Designing a Curriculum

Reflecting on the previous post, I thought that one great difference between Christian classical education and conventional metrics is that the former is personal and the latter is abstract. The root concept of Christian classical education is that there are wise men and women to whom we should listen and whom we should imitate. In [...]

A Perspective on Accountability

During the Christian classical era in American schooling, say from 1640-1810, the curriculum of an American school was rather straightforward. You learned literacy and numeracy, largely at home and primarily with the Bible and maybe Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or some other important text.
Then when you got older you read a few great books and [...]

Freedom, Scale, and Education

Freedom, having been reduced to the right to do and say whatever you want - with the rapid and empty qualifier “as long as you don’t hurt anybody else” - has gone the same way everything else goes when its nature is changed. It is somewhere between imperiled and nonexistent.
If we reduce freedom to the vacuity [...]

Decline and Fall?

The decline of American education is directly correlated to the rise, expansion, and application of scientific management theory in education and the ever expanding controls placed on education by the “experts.”
Scientific management theory arises in the context of an economic utopianism that finds its clearest expression in education in progressive theories. This economic utopianism raises the [...]

Standardized tests vs. the tradition

The Christian classical educator does not determine his success by measurable academic or developmental outcomes, because he comes at it from a different angle. Those are trivial and inevitable compared to what really matters.
Instead, the Christian classical educator assesses his success by the simple objective of whether he has succeeded in handing on the tradition [...]

Static vs. Dynamic assessment

There are two common reasons for testing. First, the static fashion of determining roughly (and often rather arbitrarily) what students have learned and can repeat from the curriculum. Second, the dynamic fashion of assessing what has been learned so the teacher can adjust to the realities of the students’ experience. A third reason is, of [...]

A good solution

A while ago I posted on an article from Wendell Berry in which he presented a model of thinking that seems to me to be essential to understanding and living with reality. It’s an ancient way of thinking, rooted in accepting our limits and loving wisdom; and it’s a way of thinking that seems to have [...]

Records or wins

Brett Favre tied the all time record for career touchdown passes yesterday and said he didn’t care. He wanted to win.
 He must have been a terrible student in school, where all anybody cares about is records.
More importantly, he demonstrates one of life’s great principles: Care about what matters most and things that matter less follow [...]

SAT and ACT: the Measure of all Things

In II Corinthians 10:12, St. Paul offers a pointed critique of the sophists who were maneuvering to undercut his authority. He says:
For we dare not class ourselves or compare ourselves with those who commend themselves. But they, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themsleves among themselves, are not wise.
Is this not a critique of conventional [...]