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 [...]

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 [...]

ISI and the Great Tradition

Jeremy Beers over at ISI generously advanced me a review copy of The Great Tradition. Now they have generously quoted my response on their web site. Take a look - especially at the book!
Warning! The contents of this link will change every month or so.

Authority and memorizing

Modern thought resides in the realm of fantasy, perhaps nowhere moreso than on the question of authority. The Middle Ages are mocked for their constant appeal to authority, an appeal that Francis Bacon is supposed to have freed the human race from with his Novum Organon, an appeal to use the nascent scientific method of [...]

How to Teach the Iliad as a Living Text with Living Ideas

You want to start by getting students involved in THE QUESTION that drives the text or as close as you are able to do so. The Iliad puts it right on the first line: Why is Achilles so angry? I convert the question to a judicial issue: Should Achilles have been so angry?
Before starting the [...]

teaching living ideas

At the heart of the Christian classical curriculum and methodology is the presentation of living ideas. The soul feeds on ideas, and its health is determined by the quality of those ideas and the life found in them.
When we teach children about butterflies, we do not begin by showing them dead butterflies pinned to a board. [...]

Charlotte Mason on Neuroscience

She was up on the latest before most people even knew the lastest was up! Wisdom like Charlotte Mason’s is our only hope as we progress into a biotechnological future.
There is no more interesting subject of inquiry open just now than that of the interaction between the thoughts of the mind and the configuration of [...]