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 [...]

Books to Read

I’ve been reading in snatches of a page or two at a time a book that fell out of heaven into my lap at the conference this summer. If you are interested in a theological and philosophical understanding of the place of rhetoric in the Christian classical tradition, I don’t think you’ll find a book more [...]

The Best Books On Education

I’m frequently asked what fits the title of this post. When I answer, people usually don’t believe I’m serious, but I’ll tell you my opinion anyway. The best books on education are The Bible, Plato’s Republic, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Unquestionably the worst ever is Rousseau’s Emile.
For a book to be good if it [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Home schoolers opportunity

If you are a home schooler, how would you like to sit at a table with Laura Berquist, author of Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum and collector of The Harp and Laurel Wreath?
Here’s your chance, as Mrs. Berquist will be facilitating a round table discussion for home schoolers at the annual CiRCE conference. You’ll join [...]