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 […]
Category Archives: Education
Lost in the dark forest of his life, standing at the threshold of his cosmos-spanning journey through Hell, Purgatory, and the Paradiso, Dante finds beside him his guide: Virgil. Not an apostle, nor a saint—indeed, not even a Christian—but a pagan poet from ancient Rome, now leading the medieval pilgrim soul toward the vision 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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
02
Oct
Oct
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. […]
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