The Boys in the Boat: Winter 2023
In 1965, on the small island of Tonga in the South Pacific, six schoolboys, ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen, “borrowed” a local fisherman’s boat and took it on a joyride that lasted over fourteen months. They were bored, and so they decided to sail for Fiji, another South Pacific island five hundred … Continue reading
One True Sentence: Late Summer 2022
In Ernest Hemingway’s book “A Moveable Feast”, he gives the best advice I have ever read on dealing with writer’s block. He tells you to sit down, take up a pen, and write one true sentence. That’s it. Just one true sentence. For example, I had writer’s block as I sat down to write this article. I have written … Continue reading
Civilization by Candlelight: Spring 2022
The expression “dark ages” refers to the period of time after the fall of Rome in the fourth century A.D. until the resurgence of learning in Western Europe that started in about the eighth century. We call it “dark” because the light of learning that had been ignited by the Greeks and carried on by the Romans was … Continue reading
Knowing Our Story: Winter 2022
In Amor Towles’ new book, “The Lincoln Highway”, we find eight-year-old Billy Watson in a railroad freight car waiting for his brother to get back. It is the 1950s and Billy and his older brother Emmett are riding the rails east to New York from Nebraska. A man drops into the car. The boy … Continue reading
In Natalie Babbitt’s “Tuck Everlasting”, which is set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a twelve-year-old girl named Winnie Foster is dissatisfied at home in her little village of Treegap. She is tired of being cooped up and considers running away … Continue reading
When my wife and I visit my mother and stepfather, we often duck out to go for a walk in nearby Holton, a beautiful old town that lies on the prairie in eastern Kansas. We park along the street, walk the neighborhoods, and then poke around in a few of the shops in the old town square … Continue reading
The Philosophy of Fairyland: Late Summer 2020
In “Orthodoxy” G. K. Chesterton articulates the Christian worldview in a way that will sound odd to the modern ear. Like later writers he influenced (such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien), Chesterton was steeped in the mythology and literature of the West … Continue reading
Of Books and Beasts: Summer 2020
One of the ways we can understand ourselves better is to look at the metaphors our culture uses. Medieval and ancient peoples drew their comparisons from nature. Today we often look at things in terms of machines or computers … Continue reading
How to Ride a Bicycle: Spring 2020
When I was eight years old, my parents bought me a bicycle for Christmas. It wasn’t anything like my old bicycle, which had only one gear; my new bicycle had five. I couldn’t have told you then why five gears were better than one. To me it was like five pancakes being better than one or five toy trains … Continue reading
The Giant and the Mite: Winter 2020
In Eleanor Farjeon’s The Little Bookroom, there is a fairy tale called “The Giant and the Mite.” It is the story of something so big that it cannot be comprehended—and of something too small to be comprehended. The size of the Giant was the first problem … Continue reading
Should Schools Teach History?: Late Summer 2019
My wife and I recently visited my son and daughter-in-law in Philadelphia. My wife had been to Philadelphia when she was in school, but I had never been there. Among other things, we saw the Liberty Bell and Congress Hall, which served as the seat of government for the first years of our republic. The … Continue reading
The Living Order of Education: Summer 2019
One of the many benefits of knowing Latin is that it gives you the ability to know what English words mean even when you have never seen them before. But just as important is the ability it gives you to better understand a word you have seen a thousand times. I was walking through the … Continue reading
In Praise of Accidental Knowledge: Spring 2019
One of the few books we had in our house when I was young was a set of World Book Encyclopedias. When you looked up something in the encyclopedia you first had to find the volume which housed all the words beginning with the first letter of the word you were searching for. If you … Continue reading
Why Books Are Important: Winter 2019
In 1929, children’s book author Anne Parrish was visiting Paris. She left her husband at a cafe to visit one of the city’s many bookstores. There she found a copy of Helen Wood’s Jack Frost and Other Stories, a favorite of hers from childhood. She returned to the cafe, sat down, and showed her husband … Continue reading
What Hath Athens To Do with Jerusalem: Summer 2018
What does reason have to do with faith? What does the intellectual have to do with the spiritual? What does philosophy have to do with Christianity? These are questions that Tertullian, one of the early fathers of the Church, summed up when he asked, “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Tertullian’s question seems to … Continue reading
Villa of the Papyri: Spring 2018
In 79 A.D., the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in eastern Italy covered nearby towns in ash and completely buried many of them. Accounts of the ancient eruption paint a horrific scene: Volcanic pumice rained from the skies and waves of searing hot gas and debris swept over the nearby landscape. Thousands died where they … Continue reading
God blesses some of us with vision and with lives of clear purpose and meaning – and to some of us he adds the time and opportunity to accomplish what we have been given to do. The life of Cheryl Lowe, Publisher at Memoria Press and Headmistress of Highlands Latin School, was this kind of life. … Continue reading
The Well-Stocked Library: Late Summer 2017
In his new book, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, Anthony Esolen contrasts what Western culture was and what it is now by asking us to imagine a library in an old manor house. The lower half of this library would be stocked with books from modern Europe – novels, collections of poetry, histories, biographies, travelogues, … Continue reading
Preserving Our Cultural Topsoil: Summer 2017
Most people think topsoil is just dirt. But it is far more than that. When people lived closer to the land, they knew this, but now farming is mechanized and we have an industrialized food system. To most people, this all seems just fine. Food is easy to get – and cheap. What else matters? What few … Continue reading
The Restoration of Read Education: Spring 2017
I was listening to the radio the other day when I heard a story about scientists who were trying to revive the American Chestnut tree. You may never have heard the sad story of the Chestnut, but it is an interesting one. From Maine to Minnesota, the Chestnut once thrived in America. Not only did … Continue reading
Modern 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 would go away. And since a method is all that is sought, a method is all that is found. Those … Continue reading
Over the last several years, I have planted a number of trees in my yard. I notice that when I plant a tree, it takes a year or two in order for its root system to become established. Only when this happens does it start growing in earnest. A plant has to grow down before it can grow up. … Continue reading
When I was in junior high school, my father began adding on to our house. For the foundation he dug a lot of trenches in the ground, built wood forms to pour the cement in, and hired a cement truck to fill them up. I remember thinking that it seemed like a lot of trouble to take for … Continue reading
My wife and I live on a little hill on a country lane in Kentucky. From my front porch, which is surrounded by trees and flowers, I can see farmland for twenty miles or so. It is my favorite place to be. And my favorite thing to do is to sit there in my oak … Continue reading
In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, Mark Schatzker makes an observation that is at once obvious and seldom thought about: There is a natural connection between the good taste of food and its nutritional value. Decades ago, most foods in stores were locally grown, left on the plant longer, and not only … Continue reading
My wife and I were staying at a little inn in the mountains recently. We woke up one morning and she opened the window blinds. “Oh!” she said. “A tractor!” There was a parking lot for some cabins next to us and there was a tractor parked there. For some reason at first unclear to … Continue reading
About a year ago, Universal Pictures released the movie Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman. It is about a man and a woman (Cruise and Andrea Riseborough) stationed on a post-apocalyptic earth. They are charged with maintaining the drones which protect a number of orbiting installations, mining water for the human encampment now situated … Continue reading
In M. Night Shyamalan’s film Lady in the Water, we encounter a character named Reggie who lives in the apartment complex in which the movie’s story takes place. Reggie boasts that he only exercises his right arm: “It’s an experiment,” he says. “It’s science.” The consequence, of course, is that his right arm is … Continue reading
For some thirty years after the United States won World War II, there were islands dotting the Pacific where stray Japanese soldiers still hid in the jungles, unaware that the war was over. Even though the end of a war is a big event, it takes a while for some people to get the memo. American education has experienced … Continue reading
Two Views of Education: Spring 2014
If you were to walk into a public school primary classroom one day, and into the same grade level classroom in, say, a classical Christian school, you would see two entirely different things. And you wouldn’t have to wait to notice some of the differences. There would be certain things evident immediately. In the classical … Continue reading
I was attending an education conference a while back and decided that I wanted a sandwich for lunch, so I walked into a nearby mall and found a popular sandwich chain store. I ordered a Chipotle Steak and Cheese with Avocado. “What kind of meat would you like?” she asked. “Uh, well, I think this … Continue reading
It is not an exaggeration to say that the Greeks invented education as we know it: To them, schooling was a means to pass on their culture. For the Greeks, the primary instrument for this purpose was one book in particular: Homer’s Iliad. It was their national textbook. From it they learned who they were … Continue reading
I was recently asked to speak to a Chamber of Commerce meeting about classical education. The initial reason for the invitation was to talk about one of our Highlands Latin School campuses in the area. The group was founded as part of an effort by the local Chamber to create a partnership effort between businesses … Continue reading
In 1990, the Kentucky Legislature passed the most sweeping school reform legislation ever attempted by a state. Along with a massive tax increase (don’t you just love those?), the measure promised to shake up the state’s education system and, presumably, improve it. Several years into the reform effort, there was no question about things being … Continue reading
Our educational establishment is very good at making promises, but not very good at keeping them. Every couple of years, a new initiative is launched to give us hope that things will get better. The initiative is launched amidst great fanfare, agreements are signed, money is exchanged, meetings are held, acronyms are assigned, and for a … Continue reading
Responsible mothers once admonished their children to refuse to take candy from people they didn’t know. But the great danger to children today is not candy being offered by strangers they have been warned against, but moral advice being offered by experts we have all been told to trust. A couple of years ago, the now former governor of California was … Continue reading
I have never been a fan of so-called “success” books. You know the kind I mean: They have titles like The Road to Riches, The Eleven Laws of Leadership, Seven Secret Strategies for Success. The titles promise to reveal some secret to you, the knowledge of which could change the course of your life. The titles above are made up, … Continue reading
The Old Testament is replete with examples of God’s people conquering their enemies. They never fled, except as a ruse. When we discuss the issue of how Christians should deal with the writings of the pagans, that is an important thing to remember. Culturally speaking, Christianity conquered Greece and Rome. And when you conquer something, you can do two things with … Continue reading
I am often asked, “What is the ‘classical approach’ to science?” There are a lot of ways to answer this question, but the most important thing is to simply point out that our approach to science ought to take account of what nature is. Unfortunately, we live in a time in which the nature of … Continue reading
My daughter and I recently went out on a date. After missing the movie we wanted to see, we ended up watching The Book of Eli, a movie I had not heard anything about. The movie opens in the future, after some sort of apocalypse. There is little vegetation, water is scarce, the roads are littered with abandoned cars, … Continue reading
In Pearl S. Buck’s short story, “A Field of Rice,” Wang Sun, a Chinese villager in the early 1950s, is in a situation in which he is told to do something he knows won’t work. Mao Tse Tung has taken over China, and he has sent functionaries out to every village to tell the farmers (who … Continue reading
We are often asked, at our school and at Memoria Press, why we use the King James Bible in our program. There are many reasons, but one occurred to me a couple of years ago as I was teaching a young adult Sunday school class on the New Testament book of Mark, which begins with … Continue reading