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 [...]

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, [...]

The Poison of Subjectivism

Correct thinking will not make good men of bad ones; but a purely theoretical error may remove ordinary checks to evil and deprive good intentions of their natural support. An error of this sort is abroad at present… I am referring to Subjectivism.
After studying his environment man has begun to study himself. Up to that [...]

Solution #4

“A good solution solves more than one problem, and it does not make new problems.”
Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land
It seems characteristic of democracies and market driven cultures to look for one dimensional solutions to three dimensional problems. It may even be that we are so habituated to this pattern of behavior that we [...]

Leadership Qualities

Brett Favre has been named the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year. This article makes for a great study in leadership. Coincidentally, the Packers have just hired a new CEO. This article makes for a nice little case study of what to look for in a leader and what’s required for success. The Packers are [...]

Leadership Flaws

If you’re involved in school, you’re involved in leadership. Here’s an excellent entry from a leadership blog I like to visit on the need for humility among leaders. A checklist is provided of things to watch for in a “flawed CEO,” and it’s worth printing and reviewing every now and again for self-analysis or for [...]

What’s A classical school leader to do?

When a school determines to become a college preparatory school, it has two options. It can either think about the kind of college it is preparing its students for or it can become a silly little meaningless school that has no identity of its own and neglects its duties to its students.
Of course, it will [...]

Good Solution #3

Continuing this theme and wishing I had more time to go into it, here is the third of Berry’s “Good Solutions”:
“A good solution improves the balances, symmetries, or harmonies within a pattern–it is a qualitative solution–rather than enlarging or complicating some part of a pattern at the expense or in neglect of the rest.”
This might [...]