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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Loving the Truth

For many, the quest to know the truth is a purely rational quest. Thus, for example, Rene Descartes resolution to begin by doubting everything - all that he was told, and everything he perceived with his senses. Only by reasoning could he come to know the truth.
It’s easy to see why we would think this [...]

A Call for Learning Teachers

 
In the world of higher academia, the old adage “publish or perish” is a guiding principle (even if somewhat stereotypical and exaggerated).  Why the emphasis on publishing? 
One could argue, quite easily, that it is the inevitable result of a pragmatic view of education – if the faculty of the university is not “producing,” then [...]

Reflections on Progressivism, Part II

Not only the child and his knowledge are reduced by Progressivism. So are what we used to call virtues. Nietzsche reduced virtues to values to underscore his theory that we all have our own values which are dynamic and relative. No adult has the right to impose values on a child because values themselves are unstable. [...]

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 framework of the science curriculum

This is part two of this post.
In that post, I argued that the reason we aren’t producing the scientists we need is fundamentally because we are teaching science incorrectly: we are teaching the class without the tools, which are the seven liberal arts.
Well, it’s time for me to fulfill my duty and offer some suggestions about what we [...]

Why Our Schools Aren’t Giving us Enough Scientists

Nearly every day I receive another notice or article about the struggles to build a science curriculum that meets the need of the day to produce scientists to keep the economy moving, to cure diseases, and to stay ahead of the enemy technologically.
And no wonder: the power of science to solve physical problems has proven [...]