Classical School — Traditional Curriculum What do classical and traditional suggest or liberal education? By Steven Cortright Preliminaries The present-day movement toward recovering genuinely human, fundamental education[1] is—if
Classical School — Traditional Curriculum What do classical and traditional suggest or liberal education? By Steven Cortright Preliminaries The present-day movement toward recovering genuinely human, fundamental education[1] is—if
I’m a pain in the neck about classrooms. Like most smaller colleges, classroom space is at a premium at my school, and there is something
Things truly are not so ill with us as they might have been if we did not have ordinary people doing ordinary things and finding their contentment and joy in that.
In my previous Magnus Article, “A Great Books Education: Origin, Content, and Pedagogy,” I offered a survey of the Great Books education approach. The Great
Publisher’s Forward: The following is the beginning of a multi-author anthology of essays aimed at informing an inexhaustible question: what does the Eucharist have to
Does the famous “Divided Line” at the end of Book VI of the Republic express the truth of things? Yes, and most profoundly. Plato’s understanding can be summed up by the word participation. Everything that exists participates in being. What this means is that nothing that exists is the fullness of being, is perfectly self-sufficient, is self-grounded. Everything is and is not, in some respect and to some extent. That which is not subject to these limitations and contingency doesn’t exist, as a being, but is being itself, so to speak, or as Plato puts it in Book VI, is “beyond being.” It does not participate, but is that which is participated.
Today’s typical students live in an intellectual climate where sound-bytes, superficiality, and sentimentality are what passes for rational discourse, and where anomie suffuses the air their souls breathe. To combat this, students must be deeply immersed in the works of the Catholic intellectual tradition. Above all, they need teachers who have made these works their own in that unique, irreplaceable infusing of personal, concrete experience and universal, abstract truth that alone renders the fruitful transmission of ideas possible.
Though man is a naming animal, what reasons does man have for giving particular names to particular things? Are the names we give things arbitrary? Or do they—ought they—reflect the nature of the named things themselves?
“As the hart panteth after the fountains of water; so my soul panteth after thee, O God.” Across cultures and centuries, men have testified to a longing for something beyond ordinary pleasures and loves. But can desire show the existence of some ultimate satisfaction for it— none other than knowing He Whom by faith we believe to be God?
In our modern ideals, we have come to a strange and dissonant place where we innately intuit and relish the monarchical system but have retired it in light of our democratic and republican values.
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Newman’s Idea of a University stands as one of the greatest works on the nature of education. It arose from his efforts to found a
The Republic is the most complete attempt by Plato to articulate and answer the question, “What is the best way of life for a human
What happens to the university when students no longer need to do the work of thinking? For years, higher education has drifted away from its
In the fourth century, serious Christians often aspired to the ascetical life. Many even delayed Baptism until they were ready to embrace it, seeing Baptism
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