Abandoning America’s Founding Ideals
It cannot be disputed that we as a nation have failed to live up to our ideals. But this failure of action does not diminish the value of these ideals; indeed, it only highlights our desperate need for them.
Education
Student Essay: The Value of Foreign Languages
Is it useful to learn languages for any reason other than being able to communicate, or is their value strictly utilitarian? Miss Sophia Theis explains.
Why a “Hard” Education Is Better
It isn’t really possible to make a child love learning; you can only make them learn. Their loves will be their own.
Defending Our Students From Propaganda
The only defense against the worst is a knowledge of the best. By their ignorance people enfranchise their exploiters. —Wendell Berry
The Real Value of an Education
A well-educated person is not someone with a set of credentials that will help them live a materially wealthy and comfortable life, but someone who is spiritually free to know and delight in those goods that make a human life deeply and truly happy.
The Great Conversation: Rhetoric
The techniques of persuasion have been so habitually separated from logic and wisdom, it’s assumed that rhetoric is persuasion through bad reasons for bad purposes. But in truth, the art of persuasion is as necessary for good arguments as it is for bad ones.
Cicero: A Tongue of Gold
Cicero’s formulation of ethics was a major influence on minds as diverse as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Locke, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps we would do wisely to return to a fountain that has watered so many so well.
The Great Conversation: Astronomy
The paradoxes in how gravity, light, and atomic nuclear forces operate have prompted subtle theories about not only nature, but reality as such—bending science back towards its parent discipline of philosophy.
The Great Conversation: Virtue and Vice
“All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.” — Alexander Woollcott
Aesop: Wisdom From Below
Like Tennessee Williams’ Tom Wingfield, Aesop gives us “truth cleverly disguised as fiction,” conveying wisdom imaginatively and indirectly.