Category: Education
Contemplative Pedagogy: Notes on Educating Screen-Addled Students
Not long ago I taught a summer class in creative writing to middle schoolers. On one sun-drenched day, I took the class outside to wander through our campus and down to our stretch of shoreline on Narragansett Bay. Their task...
On Unlearning
Come now, O Lord my God. Teach my heart where and how to seek you, where and how to find you. Lord, if you are not here, where shall I seek you, since you are absent? But if you are...
An Appeal from a Christian Liberal Arts University President
According to legend, thousands of years ago the mighty King Croesus of Lydia consulted with the oracle of Delphi to determine whether he should battle the great Persian Empire. The oracle famously replied, “If Croesus goes to war he will...
The Market Made Me Do It: The Scandal of the Evangelical College
Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind turned twenty-five last year. If we know a classic by its ability to speak across eras, one single event from this past summer is enough to assure everyone of the continuing tragic...
Against Textbooks: Why We Need Bigger Stories
“But Mom, how do you know I’m learning?” This was a frequent query to my poor mother during her tenure homeschooling me. As a type A, achievement oriented child, I was exasperated with my mother’s refusal to do homeschooling like...
Contemplating the Covid-19 Classroom: Pandemic as Our Sacred Present
The county in which I teach just released its tentative plan for reopening schools in August 2020. Scanning it, I saw my previous daily routine of leading children through learning, singing, and creating replaced with a new routine—one of taking...
Cats and Sixty Foot Whales: Reflections on Children’s Books
The most expensive preschools in America bear a pine-scented resemblance to those senna-tinted photographs of a world before plastics, albeit with no unseemly hint of poverty. Within the world of Waldorf, Montessori and Wild Forest schools the hand dominates the...
Rise of the Scops: Wonder After the Pandemic
It was Virginia Woolf who wryly observed, “On or about December 1910, human character changed.”[1] I had no idea what this meant, until I stumbled into a fairy wood where a gilded volume by W.B. Yeats waited patiently for my...
Violent Schools in a Violent World
The Hunt, a series from the creators of Planet Earth, provides a vivid depiction of the brutal predator/prey chase. The series reveals a violent world where crocs mimic floating logs before lunging toward a herd of slurping wildebeest and a...
Latin for Politics: When the World of Spoken Latin Goes Woke
Up until recently, the spoken Latin community has been preserved from the relentless focus on ideology that characterizes much of the academy. Enthusiasts have gathered at small conferences called “conventicula” (a pretty comprehensive list of events in summer 2018 can...