The Book of Judges and American Life

In the middle of the main section of the book of Judges is the famous story of Gideon who defeated the Midianites with 300 soldiers. The layers of wisdom contained in this story call for repeated readings, but right now I want to focus on the aftermath to Gideon’s triumph.
What happens, in a word, is [...]

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 [...]

1901 - The Cat Escapes the Bag

From Diane Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (essential reading for anybody who wants to understand American education - and that must include teachers! Doesn’t it?):
In 1901, sociologist Edward A. Ross… explained that free public schooling was “an engine of soical control.” It was the job of schools, he wrote, “to collect [...]

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 [...]

Blessedness, Learning, and Purity of Heart

The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body also is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness. Therefore, take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness. If then your whole body is full [...]

Life Lessons from a One-year-old

A little over one year ago, I became blessed and immersed into fatherhood.  From what I have been told, it is always this way – overwhelmed by joy and terror, hope and responsibility.  The thought of all I must teach and instill in my daughter regularly traipses across my mind.  Yet, in the midst of [...]

Reflections on Progressive Education

For the Progressive theorist, education is one great, extended experiment for which society is bound to pay. Here in America the progressive experiments (it would not be just to call it a single experiment) have continued for nearly 100 years, during which the inevitable resistance and the internal contradictions of progressive theory have convinced many [...]

The growth of an ideal

By the time a child turns 15 or so he has formed a very strong sense of his ideals. In fact, the foundation of those ideals was laid 15 years earlier.
Some children become so confused over their early ideals (by experience, hypocricy, etc.) that they have become cynical by the teen years. Regrettably, that happens [...]

Oops!

Guess who said this (first to guess gets a free autographed copy of Classical Education, The Movement Sweeping America, by Dr. Gene Edward Veith and Andrew Kern (I’m the second guy and I’m the only autography you’ll get)):

We have reared a generation of brats. Parents aren’t firm enough with their children for fear of losing [...]

That Shriveled Grind (on teaching reading)

“During the past five years we’ve heard from parents again and again how difficult it has been to get children who have read nothing but pap to focus when the books assigned in class get more complicated.
You wouldn’t belive someone who said it didn’t matter what your child ate as long as they ate something, [...]