Can we be free without grace?

One thing stood out for me at our conference this year: that education without grace - that human society without grace, cannot be free or healthy.
If education excludes religious discourse, then it cannot include the grace of God as an energizing factor. Yet American education is trying to build a perfect society. Consider what this means:
My goal [...]

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 [...]

How to prepare for a conference

The annual CiRCE Conference is coming up in just a couple of weeks (July 24-26) and every year many teachers, administrators, and homeschooling parents go to conferences, not just ours, in hopes of becoming better - better teachers, better mentors, better parents, better people.  But those kinds of lofty goals are not accomplished by attending [...]

Why conferences matter

I recently met a young man who has been involved in Christian classical education for a few years. One year his school decided not to attend a summer conference because it would not be cost effective. What happened, though, was that the teachers and leaders felt isolated.
 
He told me that summer without a conference took [...]

Is this a once in a lifetime opportunity?

I’m not altogether certain but it might be. How often do you get to spend a weekend with a translator of Dante, a founder of a Christian classical college, and a group of people driven to figure out what Christian classical education is and how to implement it?
I just attended the SCL conference in Charleston, [...]

Warming Up for the Summer Humordays

If you have any good religious jokes that I can despoil at the conference this summer, please let me know them. Here’s a link to one I’ve used in various contexts that is absolutely hysterical: The Best Religious Joke Ever
 Maybe we should have a workshop on whether it’s OK to tell other people’s jokes in [...]

Paideia Prize Winner Announcement

You are the first to know that Dr. Peter Sampo, founder of Thomas More College in New Hampshire, has agreed to accept the Paideia Prize at this summer’s CiRCE conference. I’m anxious to learn more about Dr. Sampo and his work, but I can tell you already that he laboured for years in an extremely [...]

The right use of humor

This summer, we’ll be contemplating humor at the CiRCE conference. It’s easy to struggle with the use of humor because it’s so easy to abuse it, to substitute sarcasm for irony, abuse for satire, cruel pranks for slapstick. Consequently, we can sometimes wonder if maybe humor isn’t destructive. Or maybe it’s even the result of [...]

A Booming Baby Looks at the Ten Commandments

George Carlin is occasionally funny, is above average in his intelligence, and falls far short of anything we can call civilized. In short, he’s a lot like the baby boomers and makes a fairly good spokesman for the more tribal of them.
So when I came across a video of his on YouTube describing how to [...]

Humor and Humility

I’m still not sure if these words have the same etymology or if the first syllable is a coincidence, but the link is quite profound. A healthy sense of humor lives in humility, while a diseased one is grounded in ego. Humor is rooted in the bringing down of the exalted, the humiliation of the proud. It finds its [...]