Category: Education
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How you spend your days
Rachel Ringenberg on homeschooling and raising children: This brings me to wonder how I reflect on the person who in 2019 homeschooled a 2nd grader and a kindergartener, and had a three year old, and a baby. Was that easier? It was definitely not easier; but time was different to her. More expansive when it…
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On learning and vibes
Experimental psychologist Adam Mastroianni wrote an interesting (if long) consideration of why we forget most of what we learn, and how “vibes” are more important than knowledge in that learning process. That sounds a lot more woo-woo than it really is. An example he gives: Here are things I don’t remember from high school: –…
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Literacy as a religious act
From the remarkable book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill: “Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act. In a land where literacy had previously been unknown, in a world where the old literate civilizations were sinking fast beneath successive waves of barbarism, the white Gospel page,…
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Wendell Berry on education in the presence of fear
In a speech given right after September 11, Wendell Berry kept his focus on the long-term concerns of a society and the principles of a proper education: The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its…
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Want to Read (∞): on becoming a good reader
I’ve officially become a Reader. Reading books is built into my life, to the point where if I haven’t read anything for a while (a while being a few days) I feel anxious. It didn’t used to be this way. Regularly reading for fun outside of schoolwork wasn’t a concept I grokked until the end…
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Raising Kings, pt. 1
Loved the first episode of “Raising Kings”, a three-part series from NPR’s Code Switch podcast on a new boys-only public school in Washington, D.C., filled only with freshmen students of color: All are determined to change the narrative. In Washington, and the rest of the country, that narrative says too many young black men are below-average…
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The Vanishing American Adult
I can’t believe it. I think I may have just found a Republican U.S. senator I’d actually vote for. I’m as surprised as anyone that I read, let alone greatly enjoyed, Ben Sasse’s The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance by Ben Sasse, Republican (but, phew, #NeverTrump) senator from Nebraska.…
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Saint Benedict in Technopoly
Perhaps it was because I had just finished reading Neil Postman’s 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology when I started in on Rod Dreher’s latest, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, but I was detecting a subtle yet strong Postmanian vibe throughout the book. Then, when Dreher actually quoted Technopoly, I realized that…
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Crunchy Cons
In Station Eleven, survivors of a global pandemic and subsequent post-apocalyptic chaos decamp to an abandoned airport in Michigan and eventually establish a Museum of Civilization, comprised of assorted artifacts from life before “year zero,” when the pandemic paralyzed the world and rendered much of the stuff that had comprised their lives useless. The Museum…
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Wherein I Missed Third-Grade Field Day and Encountered Cosmic Futility
In third grade I was on a three-strike system at school. Three infractions and I’d miss a fun class event. I was an absent-minded kid, prone to forget things at home like homework or a slip needing a signature or an extra pair of shoes to wear at school during winter. (I remember at least…