Classical rhetoric arose as a discipline designed to aid speakers before courts of law and other public settings. By identifying three primary means of persuasion—appeals to authority (ethos), appeals to emotion (pathos), and appeals to reason (logos)—it taught speakers to calculate more precisely which combination of these three would produce the desired effect in an […]
Category Archives: Education
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 […]
“Every true education is education toward freedom,” wrote Edith Stein, the Carmelite nun and Catholic philosopher who was martyred in Auschwitz in 1942. For Stein, freedom did not mean independence from truth—as though liberty consisted in choosing without reference to any objective good—but rather the inner strength to recognize truth and live in accordance with […]
Charlotte Mason, the founder of the PNEU in the nineteenth century, and Cheryl Lowe, the founder of Memoria Press in the twentieth century, were both remarkable women in their time. They were attentive to the educational changes in their respective generations and were determined to fight for the good of children, regardless of educational trends. […]
Suppose that you pick up a textbook in an unfamiliar branch of mathematics and thumb to a random page. You might find a statement such as: if there are injections f: A-> B and g: B -> A, then there is a bijection h: A -> B1 Such statements probably strike you as utterly mystifying. […]
A Meditation upon the Meaning and Purpose of Education All civilized people have a great and healthy respect for the Great Books of civilization, those seminal tomes which have helped define who we are, why we are, and where we are. Our culture would be impoverished without them. Indeed, it would be rendered penurious in […]
The traditional approach to reading and spelling instruction began to change about 150 years ago during the Romantic era. Among other things, Romanticism emphasized imagination, creativity, and individuality. The “whole language” or “look-say” method of reading was advocated by Horace Mann, who wrote about phonics: “It is upon this emptiness, blankness, silence and death, that […]
I teach philosophy, and my students often come into my classes with the expectation that the texts we read will be difficult, dense, and impossible for them to fully comprehend. They’re right. If you can read a text breezily, in a reclining position, with a drink in one hand, and come away with confident assurance […]
For over forty years, the Reading and Writing Project at the Teachers College of Columbia University influenced the way at least one in four American schools taught children how to read. Spearheading this reading initiative was the program’s director, Lucy Calkins, who advocated for an approach called “Balanced Literacy.” It claimed to put an end […]