narrative story « TeacherLore

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 literature matters

What interests me most is what Arbery says about The Illiad: “Of all the poems in the history of the West, actual Scripture aside, but including the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and all the devotional lyrics ever written, God loves the Iliad most.” . . . → Read More: Why literature matters

Truth and its envious imitators

I think an important question for teachers today is why intellectuals from the mid-twentieth century on have labored so hard to mystify and problematize truth. It’s a real question and I think there are true answers that are worth understanding. The answers are not immediately obvious though to those who have been subjected to years of ideological indoctrination. . . . → Read More: Truth and its envious imitators

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

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

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

Losing the story

The longing for a sense of place is a longing for the cosmos at the scale of home. It’s a longing for meaning and connections that prove that we are alive and that we matter. It’s a powerful longing. It leads people to crave drugs, to join gangs, to get pregnant, to prepare speeches and workshops. . . . . . → Read More: Losing the story

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

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