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, […]
Author Archives: Thomas Cothran
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 […]
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 […]
Education, Medieval philosophy, Modernity, Reading, Thomas Aquinas, Uncategorized
A Tale of Two Thomases
13
May
May
In Knowledge Worthily Received, we considered the paradox that Socrates considered himself “barren of wisdom”—yet was able to help bring forth knowledge in his students. We considered the temptation of “easy knowledge,” of the illusion of learning without struggle. We recalled St. Thomas’ claim that truth, properly speaking, is in the mind—with the peculiar result […]
01
May
May
In the Theaetetus, Socrates describes himself as a midwife of the mind: The difference is that I attend men and not women, and that I watch over the labor of their souls, not of their bodies. Theaetetus 150b. Socrates, however, declared himself “barren of wisdom” (150c). Yet he is one of the greatest teachers in […]
15
Apr
Apr
The mathematician Israel Gelfand once said: “The most important thing a student can get from the study of mathematics is the attainment of a higher intellectual level.”1 We might twist this slightly to say that “the most important thing a human being can get from the study of mathematics is an understanding of oneself as […]
The difference between atheism and theism is fundamentally a difference between mythic and scientific thinking. That is to say, it is a difference between those who insist that reality is what is revealed by rational procedures, and those who retreat from the demands of critical thinking to the cover provided by imaginative storytelling. Which camp […]
To be a teacher, you must have some level of mastery of the subject matter to be taught. Perhaps you have volunteered as a substitute teacher and scrambled to learn the material. Perhaps you have homeschooled a child and found the need to brush up on a subject you barely remember. Or perhaps you have […]
- 1
- 2