Among the most profound mistakes of our era, I am convinced we would have to list the shift from the liberal arts to subjects in our schools. If you teach subjects, one of the many unfortunate things that happens is that students quickly catch on that there is content (i.e. information to be remembered) in […]
If you want to learn a foreign language, the first thing you should do is start when you are under four years old, when everything is new and you just take it for granted that this is so. I had the great good fortune of living in a small town outside Salzburg, Austria until I
I answered a question very badly today so I’m going to try to answer it better here. I was asked, given the nefarious effect of moralizing, how is teaching mimetically different from that. Briefly, here’s mimetic teaching: Christ is the form of truth because He is Truth. Among other things, that means that He is
If what follows sounds familiar, it is because a while back, when I was in a cranky, self-righteous mood, I wrote about one of my biggest concerns–both for myself and others–which is that we don’t have the faith to follow our Lord and to seek His “well done.” Instead, we seek the formalized, narrow well-dones
The hardest thing about being a classical teacher is that, since you are always oriented toward wisdom and virtue, you cannot be overly interested in mere “academic performance” even though that is what children are supposed to excel in. Let me rephrase the problem: the hardest thing about being a classical teacher is that everything
Modern progressive education produces slaves. It does so by remembering the following principles. 1. A slave’s education is coercive 2. The slave is not told why he is being forced to be educated 3. A slave’s education keeps the slave dependent on the thoughts of others 4. A slave’s education keeps the slave weak 5.
The holy grail of classical education is the integrated curriculum. What a chalice that would be! Two things have kept us from finding it. The first is that we’ve been looking in the wrong place. The second is that there hasn’t been an integrating tool. First, we’ve been looking in the wrong place. Put simply,
I got to meet a neighbor today and we struck up a conversation about his business and what we do at CiRCE. When I started to talk about education and how we don’t focus on wisdom and virtue, I expected him to tune out. Instead he described how one of his employees didn’t know what
Yesterday launched the greatest week in human history. It was Palm Sunday and the children lined the streets with their palm branches and people sang, “Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord,” while our Lord passed between them. This is the week He is glorified. This is the week He conquers
Plato Meno has set the pattern for us of how to teach virtue: Every second you spend reading this short dialogue to see how he does it will make you a better teacher, parent, or statesman.
The heart of the difference between classical and conventional education is not in curriculum or teaching methods, though those are affected. The heart of the issue is in goals and beliefs. Our practices often entangle us so much that we can’t get back to the things that matter most. The biggest difference is theological. Conventional
What is the Difference between Classical and Conventional Education? Read More »
The more I reflect on it the more convinced I am that the parable of the prodigal son lays out a great deal more than just a narrative (common to humans) of wandering from home, coming to ourselves, and returning, but that it shows us something essential to the narrative structure of our souls and
