Imagine yourself a starry-eyed young adult wondering what you ought to do with your life. Perhaps you take your faith seriously, and the question takes this form: “What is God’s plan for my life?” If you were able to consult St. Augustine, what would you think of his advice: “Love, and do what you will”?1 Is […]
In 1975, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe stood before an audience at the University of Massachusetts and took aim at one of the established masterpieces of English literature. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he argued, had made Africa into little more than a backdrop: a place of darkness and voicelessness against which the European could […]
08
Sep
Sep
In The Technology of Teaching, B. F. Skinner at times sounds quite traditional. “A culture,” he tells us, “is no stronger than its capacity to transmit itself. It must impart an accumulation of skills, knowledge, and social and ethical practices to its new members.” This task falls to educational institutions. Could Skinner, a radical behaviorist, […]
03
Sep
Sep
I was not surprised when I heard that Wendell Berry had died. I’d had the opportunity of spending some time with him a couple decades ago, and I know his family and a number of people close to him now and had heard he was failing in health. He made it to the age of […]
05
Aug
Aug
Morris Kline’s book, Why Johnny Can’t Add, is an incisive critique of the pedagogy of the New Math movement. New Math emphasized imposing mathematics upon children in an abstract, axiomatic style. It was widely regarded as a failure and has been dead for almost half a century. It is now widely accepted that students should […]
29
Jun
Jun
In “The Kekulé Problem”, Cormac McCarthy asks why the unconscious communicates with ambiguous images rather than in plain language. Why, when Kekulé was perplexed by the chemical structure of benzene, did the image of an ouroboros come to mind rather than the word “ring”? The answer is straightforward. The unconscious speaks in images because it […]
24
Jun
Jun
The Renaissance polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa defined occult qualities as those whose “causes lie hid, and man’s intellect cannot in any way reach and find them out.”1 Though his Three Books of Occult Philosophy or Magic was condemned by Catholic and Protestant authorities, it remained influential in esoteric circles. The Scientific Revolution dealt the greater […]
11
Jun
Jun
Several weeks ago, I spent a bit of free time learning Italian online in preparation for traveling to Rome for a Memoria College seminar. In fact, I’ve been spending more and more free time online—more than I’d like to admit, if I’m honest with myself. I heard about a free language-learning website, and the animations […]
25
May
May
The term “intellect” is often associated with a narrow sector of human life: the academic. It may even be associated with empty erudition in contrast to the solid realism of common sense. Boethius defined a person as an individual substance of a rational nature. Does that strike you as an impoverished way to think of […]
Having written about education in general and classical education in particular for over 30 years, I have addressed one issue more than any other: what classical education actually is—what it is, what it is for, what it consists of, and how it is conducted. The question of whether someone’s definition of classical education is correct […]