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 […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
The Parnassus Prize is Memoria College’s annual literary award given to a recent book that best contributes to the cultivation of the Western liberal arts tradition. Memoria College has released its shortlist of books being considered for the 2026 prize: Galahad and the Grail, by Malcolm Guite Why Literature Still Matters, by Jason M. Baxter […]
Education, Medieval philosophy, Modernity, Reading, Thomas Aquinas, Uncategorized
A Tale of Two Thomases
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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 […]
In Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe, Jeffrey Hart says of the Socratics that they “sought to know ‘actuality,’ which ultimately had to include everything, and do so independently of religion, myth, and received tradition.”1 While the search for knowledge and understanding of science and philosophy is admirable, the attempt to do so independently of religion […]
Every year, when I teach Plato’s Republic, something subtle happens to the students. At first, the students are confident. They are articulate, well-read, informed. They have opinions about justice, politics, freedom, identity. They have listened to podcasts, read articles, absorbed arguments. Their minds are not empty. And yet, somewhere around Book VII, the atmosphere shifts. […]
While stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, I participated in an online reading challenge. I don’t remember the exact requirements, but I recall one prompt in particular standing out; it instructed me to read an author I knew I ought to read but didn’t think I would enjoy. I wasn’t thrilled. That meant it […]
There is a kind of education that chills the soul. It operates with impressive order, produces well-timed outputs, and maintains impeccable discipline—yet something essential is missing. No spark leaps between minds, no encounter lingers after the lecture, no personal memory anchors the learning. The institution runs smoothly, but no one remembers why it began. It […]
“[…] we have seen beauty to result from the highest ideal and must therefore be sought in the most perfect union and equilibrium possible between reality and form.” When Friedrich Schiller published his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in the 1790s, Europe was reeling. The French Revolution had promised liberty, equality, and fraternity—and […]
The first line of A. T. Murray’s 1919 translation of Homer’s Odyssey reads thusly: “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.” The alliteration trips off the tongue: “Tell Me, O Muse, of the Man of Many devices, who Wandered full Many Ways after he had Sacked the Sacred Citadel […]
The world of Till We Have Faces (1956) presents readers with a thoroughly pre-modern and non-Greek religion. In the land of Glome, located somewhere in the mountains to the north of Greece (whether more Scandinavian or Russian, it is hard to tell), the people worship Ungit, a feminine deity and sacred stone, which emerged from […]
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