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 [...]

An update

If you visit this blog often, you might be interested to know that I have recently updated the What Is Classical Education page. You can read the update by clicking on the tab above. You can also read more on the definition and principles of classical education if you visit our web site at www.circeinstitute.org.

On the Necessity For Long Sentences

We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so somber, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

That is the [...]

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 [...]

The Death of Nature

The fundamental difference between the Christian classical tradition (one might call it The Western Tradition) and the modern mind (the Enlightenment and its unraveling in Romanticism and this twist on modernism that we call Postmodernism) is the concept of nature.
If you perceive this, you will see it everywhere. Here is a paragraph from Richard Weaver’s short [...]

Books to Read

I’ve been reading in snatches of a page or two at a time a book that fell out of heaven into my lap at the conference this summer. If you are interested in a theological and philosophical understanding of the place of rhetoric in the Christian classical tradition, I don’t think you’ll find a book more [...]

The Best Books On Education

I’m frequently asked what fits the title of this post. When I answer, people usually don’t believe I’m serious, but I’ll tell you my opinion anyway. The best books on education are The Bible, Plato’s Republic, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Unquestionably the worst ever is Rousseau’s Emile.
For a book to be good if it [...]

From Christian Love to Progressive Law

The reason for the growth of bureaucracy in American life is a loss of confidence in the spirit of God, al loss of confidence in human dignity, a turning to law from grace. This is a rather obvious historical development that can’t be discussed because we are now a secular nation.  

When grace and spirit are [...]

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 [...]