Teaching « TeacherLore

The culture of public schools

Rather than our schools acting in the light of the best of our cultural and intellectual heritage, the schools themselves have been transformed into purveyers of pop culture. Pop psychology, cable news journalism, politically correct posturing, junk science and low-grade social activism provide the basis of much of the discourse in the hallways, the classrooms, and the board room. . . . → Read More: The culture of public schools

A new counterculture: beyond the dead zone

It’s been disheartening to watch the humanities, which one could easily imagine would have been home to those least easily fooled by the deadening dissolutions of all the twentieth century’s ideologies, to witness it becoming so badly confused and self-contradictory, following a dead end road of modernity and post-modernity, a way marred with thousands of road signs bearing only slogans and pointing nowhere real. . . . → Read More: A new counterculture: beyond the dead zone

Teaching amid time, change and the invisible world

The most powerful education is not driven by markets or election cycles. Instead, it aims passing on cultural knowledge that has taken centuries to build and that will remain useful even after our business partners change and our transportation systems are re-invented. It’s okay that cultural mores and institutional practices change more slowly than markets. That’s their job. “Don’t hurry,” should be the motto inscribed over every schoolroom door. But also, “Don’t stop. Don’t waste time.” Schools should primarily be caretakers of the slow knowledge we call wisdom. . . . → Read More: Teaching amid time, change and the invisible world

The Moral Confusion of Young People

We need to regain the standards of truth that are embodied in the great works of our own tradition. “Our task,” Signorelli says, “is simply the revival of humanist scholarship, in the schools especially, but in the broader culture also. We must become regular readers again of Sophocles, Thucydides, Petrarch, Cervantes, Racine, Johnson, and Tolstoy, because a mind that is acquainted with their works will find it absolutely ridiculous to suppose that such authors do not state truth.” . . . → Read More: The moral confusion of young people

I could not have imagined this

Young people, and not only they, “have studied and practiced a crippled eros that can no longer take wing, and does not contain within it the longing for eternity and the divination of one’s relatedness to being.” This eroticism is sated, sterile, lame, and “is not the divine madness that Socrates praised.” . . . → Read More: I could not have imagined this

Toward a New Story for Schooling

Any community that gathers and preserves its own stories is contributing, in the most fundamental way possible, to the world’s educational value, and students are learning how the world works, how things come into existence and how they pass away. The sense of historical inevitability so common in textbooks–that things turned out as they had to or as they were supposed to–is replaced by an understanding of the freedom of characters to act and react. They learn better how much our destiny is in our hands, which is, after all, why education matters. . . . → Read More: Toward a New Story for Schooling

Robert E. Lee on honesty

If you have any fault to find with any one, tell him, not others, of what you complain; there is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man’s face and another behind his back. We should live, act, and say nothing to the injury of any one. It is not only best as a matter of principle, but it is the path to peace and honor. . . . → Read More: Robert E. Lee on honesty: a companion text to Machiavelli

The truth about dragons

The primary mission of dragons is simply to keep people from the truth, particularly those truths that lead most directly and surely to joy. This is mainly because dragons are not themselves happy, having once hoped joy could be theirs as an entitlement rather than as what it always has been and always will be–a complex balance requiring constant care. So now they wander the dark regions, trying to vindicate themselves by blocking the way of others to rather simple moments that unaccountably add up to eternity. . . . → Read More: The truth about dragons

Constructing a point of view

The experience of the young is, increasingly, that every human attachment is basically voluntary. Life is all about designing oneself according to an ever-expanding menu of choices provided by an increasingly free, prosperous, and globalizing society. A choice, they’ve been told, is nothing more or less than a preference, and nobody can tell an . . . → Read More: Constructing a point of view

What's wrong with these kids

The Roman soldiers who killed a teacher two thousand years ago killed people often–mostly rebels, robbers, and thugs. The system of which they were a part, the Roman state, had taught them to take honor in their work defending the order. They knew little or nothing of the dirty, bloodied commoner, or what he . . . → Read More: What’s wrong with these kids? 2/24

TeacherLore