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"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...

"Why Latin? Why Logic? Why only 'great' books?"  Such are the questions levied at the classicist. They are good questions, but the best answers are not found in pragmatics, a list of the benefits of a classical education. Instead, the reason anyone ultimately prefers a classical approach to education is that she holds to a classical worldview. I say 'ultimately' because pragmatic answers don't count for nothing. One cannot help using them in class to garner support for Latin verb endings. "Throughout history, the best authors were great Latinists" I said the other day. I had in mind one student whose mother had told me that she would like to be a writer. Motivating a student to say 'amō, amās, amat..." thirty times a day is one thing, but adopting a clear reason for committing oneself to the classical project is quite another. To do that, one needs to off one's modern viewpoint and lean into the worldview of a classicist. One ...

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 recently heard a talk about teaching in which a teacher was characterized as someone who pours out information into the minds of students. According to the speaker, this is not a good model for education. In recent years, the idea of a teacher as a dispenser of knowledge to students has become a pariah in education. This is true not only in progressivist circles but also among some classical educators.  It has become so easy to dismiss the idea of a teacher-centered educational model that no argument is needed. In fact, one can dismiss it merely by describing it.  So, let me offer a defense of the dispenser.  Educational models tend to focus on one of three primary realities - ideas, human powers, or the world. Loosely speaking, those who focus on ideas think that the primary reality, the area of most value, is immaterial, immutable, and eternal. Those who focus on human powers are concerned with the proper function of human beings. Those who focus o...

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,...

According to Chomsky, nothing has happened to language in about 50,000 years. Take any child from any place from any time within the last 50,000 years and put him in a family in Boston in 2017 and he will grow up speaking like a Bostonian. Prior to 50,000 years ago, there was no such thing as language. Something happened in a small space of time that gave us language. Some rewiring of the brain occurred and gave rise to a mechanism. The mechanism is like a snowflake - it is the way it is because nature produces it that way. In the same way a snowflake is need of no further explanation, the mechanism that the brain needed for language is in need of no further explanation. The mechanism occurred in one person and that person then had a capacity to think internally - a proto-linguistic thought process. This proliferated over time and at some later point was externalized in utterances. In order externalize the functioning of the mechanism, the mechanism in the head began to match up w...

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...

This election season has produced a lack of trust. This is especially true in the media. In a recent article in WaPo a journalist complained to Alberto Ibargüen, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, "that we no longer have trusted sources in our 21st century, social-media environment." Ibargüen's repose is telling: “How can there be,” he asked, “until we figure out … how to decide what a trusted source is?" What I want to suggest is that we need to re-build an atmosphere of trust. There are two virtues involved in doing so. The first is perhaps quite trivial in principle but we seem to be in an era when it is difficult to practice - telling the truth. I will leave aside the discussion of what we mean by truth and I will assume you think there is such a thing and that you desire, on the most part, to tell the truth. Instead I will focus on the second virtue - trust. This simple virtue entails the following: Give some level of credence to...