Teach me to care and not to care.
“Classical education is growing rapidly, which means the average school has teachers who have been around for ten years, five years, and five months. They’re not all on the same page—there’s no way around this, but it needs to be acknowledged. The way to get them all on the same page isn’t to make them read and discuss the same books—which won’t hurt, but won’t really do all that much, either.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
Amazing.
“A student is not above his teacher.” -Jesus Christ
“A teacher is not above his students.” -Modern educators
Around 1 in 20 humans on planet earth follows Selena Gomez on Instagram.
Proverbs is addressed to “my son.” In fact, “my son” is addressed more than twenty times.
There are nearly fifty questions asked in the book of Proverbs. They are all rhetorical. Every one of them.
“Reading Paradise Lost a second time proves it was read rightly the first time. The second read proves the reader is digging, humble, obedient. It is our need to dig into the book, to be humble and silent before it, which has made it famous.”
-from The Glory Of A Second Read: What If We Taught Some Books Twice?
The latest episode of Proverbial is about dead cats.
It’s my favorite episode of the last couple months.
With John Heers of The First Things Foundation on Why Are We Talking About Rabbits?
Listen to the episode on Spotify here.
“When teachers and parents disagree, it’s rarely goals they disagree on. It’s the means of achieving those goals. St. Paul teaches, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” We all want a harvest of righteousness, but what unpleasant things are we willing to endure that we might get to it?
The dream of a sentimental age—which ours mostly certainly is—is that discipline doesn’t have to be unpleasant. We believe there’s a way around the unpleasantness of discipline. If authority figures are just warm and encouraging and nice enough, they won’t have to make anyone’s life really difficult. The unpleasantness of discipline was a convention of some antiquated cruel and patriarchal age, but we have finally realized that niceness is the real key to righteousness. After all, “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” which means we can reorder affections without hurting feelings, correct without punishment, prune without cutting, operate without incisions, crucify the passions without a cross.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
“The Poetic Age is popularly known as the “ difficult ” age. It is self-centred; it yearns to express itself; it rather specialises in being misunderstood ; it is restless and tries to achieve independence ; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness, a reaching-out towards a synthesis- of what it already”
-from “The Lost Tools of Learning”
And this is the primary reason why classical Christian schools have seniors write theses. Apart from Sayers’s theory of stages, there is no way of justifying a senior thesis project.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.