From my “Letter From the Editor” in the new Winter issue of Memoria Press’ Classical Teacher magazine:

ct_winter2016Modern education is all about technique. The prevailing thought is that if only the right “method” could be found, the problems would be solved; if a methodological magic bullet could be employed, all the problems go away.

And since a method is all that is sought, a method is all that is found.

Those in Christian education circles talk about the “Charlotte Mason Method,” the “Eclectic Method,” the “Waldorf Method,” and “Unit Studies.” And those of us engaged in classical Christian education do our part to encourage this view of education. We have Dorothy Sayers trivium “method.” We talk indifferently about what should be learned, as long as we use Sayers’ method to do it, which is why classical education so often finds a place on these lists, just one educational method among many.

The reason we do this, I think, is that we are all living in the wake of the Great Education Shipwreck, which occurred roughly in the early twentieth century. The coherent vision of what education was for—the intellectual, moral and cultural formation of human beings—was lost, along with the body of knowledge, ideals, and values that reflected those goals, and which was called Western civilization.

Read the rest here.

Categories: Exordium

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