fbpx
Category

Education

Residential undergraduate matriculation may not be worth what is being charged for it now, but if it continues to atrophy and lose its comparative advantages, it may become worth nothing at all.
Civility is an important but secondary virtue. It cannot sustain itself. We can find hope for a healthier culture in a rather surprising place. 
As Rousseau put it, for the inhabitant of bourgeois society, it is necessary “to be or to seem.” AI will hand you the means to seem—at least so long as you are delivering the speech. It will deprive you of the ability to be.
Haidt’s work points us toward reclaiming childhood. Let’s go further and reclaim our humanity.
If anyone older than Homer used the bird’s nest motif in a figurative sense, I have been unable to find it. His evocative imagery may seem familiar to modern readers, but this is deceptive insofar as it makes us think of the changes on the horizon for the parents whose primary child-rearing responsibilities are complete.
Here are our editors' favorite essays on education, liberal arts, the university, and flourishing in college and in life.
The British Conservative Party suffered a landslide election defeat because it abandoned its historic commitments to prudence, moderation, and competence.
Education should rehumanize us. In higher education, with the guidance of professors and mentors and elders, we should move through Homer, Newton, Wordsworth, Du Bois, O’Connor, and be transformed by our love for the good, true, and beautiful, into the person we are meant to be.
So, why should a Christian study the humanities? Because it’s what God made us to do. Because by doing so we do participate in God’s knowing of the world and can thereby come to understand him. Because by study we can better understand scripture and our experience of God. Because it lets us enjoy non-Christian beauty and truth in the light of Christ. Because it can be a means of spiritual growth and shape our experience of the world. And because it can move us to praise God who is the Truth itself.
If we were to adopt Yoram’s call for censorship in areas where I am calling for freedom of speech, I invite him—and you, gentle reader—to consider the following question: Would the result be anything other than the further entrenchment of current campus orthodoxies, and the further weakening of protection for dissent and dissenters?
Give young Americans the story of literature from the Puritans to the Modernists. Make it a tradition and hand it down as an ingredient in their formation as citizens and tell them that they stand in the shadow of American greatness. This is not only a matter of knowledge and skill. It’s for their health. 
Many academics, perhaps recognizing the extreme nature of such boycotts, justify them by caricaturing Israeli policies as comparable to Nazism. It is only by such extreme assertions that boycotts can justify themselves.
Instead of submitting to the “thin” proposal for medical professional identity formation now advocated by the medical educational establishment, we should encourage our learners to lean into the richness of the various religious moral and faith commitments that are already manifest in them as they enter the profession.
There is a case for cursing the darkness. But it is better to light a candle, and better still to light many.
Whatever approach is best for your students at your school, know that you are serving not just the mind but the whole person. To educate the whole person, we must not leave gaps where others may rush in to fill the void. Economics began with the late scholastics and ought to continue today as part of a full classical curriculum. 
As we close out this year and approach the next, we should remember that gratitude is not an incidental or secondary civilizational value. It is the backbone of a free and decent civilization. Those who embrace barbarism love destruction and revolution because they have been trained to detest everything that came before them. But just as the heroic and imperfect Americans who came before us moved history through reflection and choice, we can write the American future by recommitting our educational institutions to gratitude.
Welcoming human imperfection in its manifold expressions is a boon for those of us who lack the privilege of full-time scholarship. It is not in spite of, but thanks to, the inherent inefficiencies of our rich and often chaotic lives that so many of us can enjoy the pursuit of intellectual enrichment.
Lamenting the violations of our past and celebrating the achievements of the present, the ancillary role of DEI would serve to exalt personhood and the communion of culturally rich community without qualification as the life of any institution.
In his book All One in Christ, Edward Feser provides a succinct but comprehensive treatment of Critical Race Theory, its logical flaws and lack of basis in social science, and the Catholic Church’s alternative solution to racism: love for each person as made in God’s image and purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ.
If we love someone, we must be willing to correct his errors. We should fiercely debate, that debate may refine our intellects and help us fiercely seek truth.
Our schools are failing not because of what happens in the classroom, but because of what happens—or more to the point, what doesn’t happen—at the dinner table. If we wish to be a serious people, then we must bolster our institutions with the power to humanize and domesticate the bedlam within us all.
A parallel challenge exists in preparing active participants for life as citizens and as members of church communities. Similar strategies can help both.
Many students may not appreciate the importance of applying themselves rather than using AI, but we must encourage those who do. We should fortify promising students with the assurance that excellence in education is worth pursuing but requires taking a hard road.
A liberal education pursued in good faith, that is, with civility, generosity, humility, and an earnest desire (among teachers and students) to think for oneself and to learn from and with others, tends to render us all more thoughtful, reflective, and humane.