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Amber Petrovich argues that too many old people are in charge and that they should stand aside to make way for the young . The point is simple: Older people know less about what life is like now than younger people. Since government is about the present, younger people are better equipped to be in charge: "too many of our politicians are too out of touch to be making crucial policy decisions that affect millions of lives every day...I will never claim to know what adult life was like in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, but I do know what adult life is like now. So why are you still making decisions for people like me who are becoming adults in this century?...The world now is drastically different … so why aren’t our politicians?" Oddly, I have recently been saying exactly the opposite: Older people have had more opportunity to experience life and ought to have gained much wisdom from those experiences. Thus, it is better to be governed by older people than younger. I even th...

"School has to be bigger. It has to mean more than 'I teach my subject.' School has to be about teaching people to change the world for the better. If we believe that, then teaching will always be a political act. We can't be afraid of our students' power. Their power will help them make tomorrow better. But before they can do that, we have to give them chances to practice today. And that practice should start in our schools" (Sydney Chaffee, 2017 CCSSO teacher of the year, TED talk, Nov 2017). According to the Sydney Chaffee, education is a matter of social activism. Teachers are to be facilitators, "thought partners" who let students "grapple with complex, hard issues" without "necessarily giving them the right answers." Students are not formed, informed, or reformed by teachers; instead "students make choices" and the aim of the school is to "encourage students to articulate their own opinions, not to coer...

Perhaps the best defense of the utility of philosophy for Christian ministry is found in Moreland and Craig's  Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview  (16-19). The following is my summary of six benefits: Apologetics  – when an objection is made against Christianity it is almost always a philosophical objection or involves a philosophical assumption. Just consider the following objections: (i) there is no evidence for the existence of God (ii) miracles are impossible (iii) the presence of evil in the world entails that God does not exist (iv) How do we know that the bible is true? (v) How can Christianity be the only way to God? (vi) That might be true for you but not for me (vii) How do you know that Jesus was raised from the dead? All of these objections require philosophical replies. Polemics  – the church is called upon to criticize and refute false views. One important way to refute erroneous views is by philosophical argument. Refuting people ...

No one lies about what happened to their homework anymore. We don't tell teachers that the dog ate it, or that aliens stole it. Instead, contemporary excuses are of two sorts. The nativist excuse suggests that there is some innate deficiency in the student that determines that she is unable to achieve success in some discipline. For example, upon receiving a terrible grade on her math test, a student may remark, "I'm just not a math person." According to the nativist, one's success or failure is determined by an innate ability (or inability) to succeed in a given domain of learning. The excuse implies that failure on a test is no more the fault of the student than it is the fault of a car that it cannot laugh. In contrast, the environment excuse does not presuppose a student's innate ability. Instead the student claims that she is unable to achieve a task due to a deficient environment. "The house was too noisy," "some friends came ...

The following is the manuscript of a speech I gave to my students at the start of term. Enjoy... "They built a school and placed you in the middle of it. Mom got up, made sure you got breakfast, asked you if you have done your homework, and drove you to school. Dad goes to work; he sweats and toils. Then he pays your school fees. For the whole day, the teacher talks to you and looks at you. You might think: "This is all about me." It is common to think this way. And sometimes it seems that way. But it is not true. Your education is not all about you.  Your education involves you, obviously. It is not not about you, but it is not all about you. So, the question I want to answer this morning is: what is education all about? First, education is about grasping great ideas. Ideas, truths, and discoveries do not depend on you in any way. They are no less great if you don’t know about them. The rules of grammar don’t diminish if you sleep during the class....

In Chapter 2 of Gwynne's Grammar, Nevile Gwynne claims that happiness is partly dependent upon good grammar: "If we don't use words rightly, we shall not think rightly" "If we do not think rightly, we cannot reliably decide rightly, because good decisions depend on accurate thinking" "If we do not decide rightly, we shall make a mess of our lives and also of other people's lives to the extent that we have an influence on other people" "If we make a mess of our lives, we shall make ourselves and other people unhappy" Therefore, "Happiness depends at least partly on good grammar" Premise (1) suggests that good grammar is the necessary condition for right thinking. On Gwynne's view, thought and language have a necessary connection. He writes, "Without words...we cannot think. We cannot reason things out, not even the simplest things." In turn, Gwynne suggests that an understanding of vocabulary necess...

I teach formal logic to middle schoolers. This comes as a surprise to many people since formal logic is usually first encountered at college (if it is encountered at all). However, t he more I teach logic, the more convinced I am that we should be teaching formal logic to our children especially during the middle school years. Not everyone agrees with me. Some suggest that formal logic is much too advanced for children of this age. Others suggest that logic is only important for certain subjects and not necessary for everyone to learn. Let's start with the latter objection: why should everyone learn formal logic? Surely logic is useful for philosophers, lawyers, and perhaps computer programmers, but surely an engineer or an English teacher has no need to learn formal logic. This is a good point, one that is often made about liberal arts education in general - what is the point of learning something one is never going to use? But is education only for learning skills th...

To the surprise of anyone who sat next to me in Latin class when we were ten years old, I am now a Latin teacher. My Latin teachers would be especially surprised. One teacher threw a piece  of chalk at me when I was paying no attention (actually, this may have been my French teacher, but my memory fails). I suppose, I couldn't see the point in it. Latin is a ‘dead’ language after all. Why study a language no one uses? Now I teach Latin and I realize how important it is. Here are four reasons for learning Latin: [1]   First, Latin is a precise and highly regular language. Consequently, Latin is an ideal language from which to begin learning how to memorize words and endings, comprehend rules of grammar, and produce translations.  Second, Latin is the language of ancient literature. Homer, Virgil, Cicero, and Augustine all wrote their great books in Latin. Latin was the language of theologians for over a millennium. Our doctrines of the Trinity, incarnation,...

Christian classical education is on the rise in the United States. But what is it? In what follows, I will attempt a sketch of the context of our present educational project, the assumptions of education in the classical period, and how such assumptions fit with a Christian educational model. I hope to demonstrate that a Christian classical school begins with a starting point not only in the hopes of a parent, but the reality of God’s creation and his intentions for our lives lived within it. A Reaction to Pragmatism Perhaps the best way at this topic is a brief sketch of educational theory that removed any vestiges of the classical model from public education in America. The place to start is with the advent of American pragmatism. It is not the source of the transition. That honor belongs to the European cohort of enlightenment philosophers. But as far as changes in educational philosophy within the United States is concerned, pragmatism heralded a new, and all pervasive, educ...

Logical thinking is crucial and we in the West could do with some more of it. So, I teach it to 5th-8th graders at Commission Leadership Academy in Raleigh, NC. It is hard work and I have to get creative especially with 5th graders. Some of the concepts lie just beyond reach of the younger mind and I have to rein them in through stories and illustrations. For example, here is a kind of statement: If A, then C. The statement is called a hypothetical statement and it has two parts joined together by "if...,then..." In the statement above, A is called the Antecedent and C is called the Consequent . We use these kinds of statements all the time: "If I don't get a move on, I'm going to be late," "if there's milk in the fridge, then you can have it." The antecedent is sometimes called the sufficient condition and the consequent is sometimes called the necessary condition. So, how does this kind of statement work in arguments and how can we u...

Civilization is, in large part, indebted to its elders who built a vast mountain of intellectual and practical capital. We all rely on it to some degree. In my studies I am utterly indebted to previous work. And there is a ton of it. Though I have only scratched the surface I am aware of the vast capital of those who went before me. I could barely utter a coherent thought if it wasn't for the hard work of thinkers who blazed the trail. And none of them did it without start up funds from their teachers. The trouble with capital is that you can quickly run out. Dorthy Sayers argued in 1947 that we are quickly spending our capital, an accumulation of learning we inherited from our forbears. As my old man used to say (and, in this case, he said it about money): "you can do what you like with the income, just don't spend the capital." Sayers gracefully argued that one day we'd run out. Dot and Dad would've got on very well: One cannot live on capital for...

For some, education is like running on a treadmill. It is a measurable project, a process, the forming of a rational person, an equipping for industry, an economic machine, a societal organizer. Others see education as a trail run. It is a narrative, a life forming cultural story, an experience about what it is to be in the world, a discovery of passion, of love, of wonder.

As you might have noticed, I have been attempting to explore answers to a perennial question - how the Christian faith is integrated with learning. My interest is sparked not only by the fact that I have children who presently attend a Christian school, but also because of my own experience (okay, and it's also my MA thesis) . In some ways I am seeking to understand what I think to be true in principle - that there is nothing that is not under the sovereign rule of God and that includes every avenue of learning possible - math, science, literature, philosophy etc. Today I want to look at a postmodern approach to the problem.

Christian education, despite growing in the United States, continues to struggle to find its place among the largely secular educational environment. Lanney Mayer suggests that Western education provides an inhospitable home for theology under the "hegemony of naturalistic disciplines." Religious education has either moved to the margins or evolved to suit empirical studies.

Ian Barbour has died. He was 90. Barbour's life was spent attempting to solve one important problem - how science and religion relate to one another. He wrote: If science and religion were totally independent, the possibility of conflict would be avoided, but the possibility of constructive dialogue and mutual enrichment would also be ruled out. We do not experience life as neatly divided into separate compartments; we experience it in wholeness and interconnectedness before we develop particular disciplines to study different aspects of it. There are also biblical grounds for the conviction that God is Lord of our total lives and of nature, rather than of a separate 'religious' sphere.

In my last post I summarized various philosophies of education. I promised to say something about Christian education. The main question for Christian education is: How do Christians integrate faith and learning? This question is about the integral relationships between the content of one's faith and human knowledge found in particular disciplines. There are various schools of thought roughly related to distinctive doctrines held by various denominations. Richard Hughes explains how each relates faith to learning:

When considering what school is best for one's children (or even when one does not have a choice and is merely analyzing the school that one's children are going to attend) one should not only ask what is being taught, but why it is being taught. In other words, one should have a rough idea of the philosophy of a school. A very helpful book is Philosophy and Education by George Knight from which I draw on for a summary of the various schools of thought.

For Van Til, two doctrines are vital for Christian education - creation and providence. God makes all the facts and arranges them according to his own will. No fact is outside the control of God or originates in anyone other than God. Experiences of human beings all originate in the plan of God. For Van Til, all facts are related to God, they are his facts.

After an accumulation of facts, meticulously researched in the most objective way possible, a researcher has the task of presenting the facts in a coherent way. The question is: can he do this without imposing his own political ideology, psychological leanings or scientific paradigm? Historian, Mark Noll, suggests that there are three attitudes available in response to the question. The scientistic attitude requires a scrupulous attention to method. If we get the method right the rest will follow. This attitude is held by positivist scientists and requires the adoption of a verificationist methodology modeled on an "empirical conception of the physical sciences." The ideological attitude suggests that "historical writing exists in order to illustrate the truth of propositions known to be true before the study of the past begins." This attitude is common among nationalistic accounts of history whereby a story is told in order to support the state. The third ...