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 [...]

Grace on YouTube? And can it be?

If you love Christian classical education, you need to see this video from Grace Classical Academy: “Love and laughter is a big part of their day.”

The powers and place of the natural sciences

When Ashley constructs a puzzle on the floor of the living room, she will eventually come to the point where she doesn’t remember which piece comes next and simple observation doesn’t make it obvious. At that point, she enters the realm of nascent scientific thought. She has a gap in her knowledge that prevents her [...]

Let me out!

James Taylor argues in Poetic Knowledge that kids need to spend time outside. So bad have things become that The Charlotte Observer wrote an article about parents who try to spend time outside with their kids. This article underscores the real reason education is dying in America.

Scientific vs. Poetic Modes of Learning

This from James Taylor’s Poetic Knowledge
Unlike the scientific mode of learning that proposes methods and systems for acquiring knowledge, the tradition that has been thus far reviewed [i.e. the tradition of poetic knowledge in the classical and Christian eras] reveals rather a way of knowledge, like a path or winding road, with interesting detours off [...]

Seeing things Latin

I learn from Bill Neal in Gardener’s Latin that Clematideus means “with long climbing branches; like clematis” and I realize once again that the benefits of Latin cannot be enumerated. Across the page I learn that columbinus means, “like a dove; flowers shaped like a group of doves.” One cannot drive past a Columbine Street [...]

Teaching Fairy Tales and Personal Knowledge

I am continually amazed at the power of fairy tales to enliven a boy’s childhood. Fairy tales might be the place where the folly and harm of impersonal knowledge is most easily seen. Here’ Bruno Bettelheim in his magnificent book The Uses of Enchantment:
Like all great art, fairy tales both delight and instruct; their special [...]

Knowledge and Little Children

Charlotte Mason spoke of Living Ideas. James Taylor developed the ideas of John Senior and others under the concept of Poetic Knowledge. Michael Polanyi wrote an important book called Personal Knowledge. Christian de Quincey pushed a lot farther with his book Radical Knowing, looking to eastern mysticism for his foundations.
But in all of these cases, [...]

Piety and Wonder

How are piety and wonder related? Twin sisters? Mother/daughter? Siamese twins? Can one live without the other? Does one give birth to the other?

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 [...]