Quality in education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending, for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.(( John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down, 2.)) Kepler teachers are part of an independent consortium, unified by a shared vision for Classical Christian Education and student flourishing. Learn more at Kepler Education. …
Category: On Teaching
In John Senior’s The Death of Christian Culture, he compares Matthew Arnold’s evolutionary view of Christianity and culture to the developmental view of the same espoused by Cardinal J. H. Newman. Whereas Arnold saw Christianity and Culture working alongside one another to achieve perfection, a word Arnold redefines not as having become (per facere) but as always becoming (i.e.,evolutionary), Newman saw it as just the opposite. Senior writes, Evolution, Newman insists, is not development. In …
Real learning can only take place when the teacher can identify and lay out the natural sequence of things for the student in his ultimate search for the meaning of things. For example, consider there is a natural sequence in farming, preparing and serving a holiday meal, or writing a poem. There is also a natural sequence to starting a business, making a bed, and studying astronomy. And it almost goes without saying there is …
Education in general, and in every subject, should “draw heavily on direct and vicarious experience that engages and awakens the senses”—poetry, music, “naked wrestling”((James Taylor, in his book, Poetic Knowledge, references Michael Faraday’s remarkable lecture series, The Chemical History of a Candle, and likens “his class closely observing a burning candle before any experiments” to the Ancient Greek concept of gymnasium (from γυμνός meaning naked) in which part of a young man’s education included naked …
In 1996, the College Entrance Exam Board Service conducted a study on all students taking their SAT exams. Students who sang or played a musical instrument scored 51 points higher on the verbal portion of the test and an average of 39 points higher on math.((John Seel, Study Smart, 65)). There have been numerous studies conducted before and after the study mentioned above that confirm its results, each of them suggesting a variety of possible …
I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature, pure theology cannot at all endure, just as heretofore, when letters have declined and lain prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate… Certainly it is my desire that there should be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see by these studies as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truths and for handling it skillfully and …