Education « TeacherLore

Teaching ignobility

It’s harder for teachers now than it once was to get students to consider what Odysseus turns his back upon and what he opens his heart toward. The classics teacher has always faced the intellectual docility of youth, but the work of revealing and naming the ideals that formed this civilization was once backed . . . → Read More: Teaching ignobility

The enchanted cave

Calypso’s island is a familiar place to most people. Many of us reached some island of relative peace and pleasure, compared to other places we’ve experienced. It isn’t what we set out for, but it’s better than it might have been, and who knows if there can be any more? One could settle. . . . → Read More: The enchanted cave, part 1

Why things fall apart

If it is true that paper and pencil tests along with common educational research methods leave out much that should concern us because many important things are difficult to measure simply and efficiently and with high levels of validity and reliability, and if it is further true that our choices of what is in the curriculum is driven by what we test and measure, then it follows logically that the schools we are building will ignore much that should concern us. . . . → Read More: Why things fall apart

On "reading" the great books

In a Marxist reading of Hamlet, the good prince’s spiritual awakening is invisible, and in a Freudian reading, the urgency of his advice to the queen is lost in psychosexual musings. . . . → Read More: On “reading” the great books

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

Could we restore a liberal education?

As we neglect the importance of the soul, our language becomes “more abstract and technical, using words like input when what is really meant is opinion. Language becomes less attuned to the personal longings of the being who loves, dies, and is open to truth about all things.” Without steady replenishment from the ancient writers, who were “all about the soul,” we become a people among whom “poetry, and philosophy will lose ground.” . . . → Read More: Could we restore a liberal education?

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

TeacherLore