“They [literary critics] had become an interest group battling for a share of influence, seeking to preserve their sense of self-importance by bullying an increasingly disgusted public into extending their mandate for another decade or two. The more they were called to account, the louder did they howl; the more they were asked to explain …
Teaching Disadilities
“If it is our schools which are ‘teaching disabled,’ the symptoms of this lack would still be visible primarily in the students and not necessarily in the schools or teachers. When a doctor is incompetent, it is the patient who dies” (The Paideia of God, p. 17).
Entertained By Decadence
“After that all was chaos, and it was no longer possible to discover just which critics were making the most definitive statements about which Voluptuous Grotesqueries. The incessant gibberish had become one long rumble in the night, and Major Critics bobbed like corks in a sea of splendid horror.” [Bryan F. Griffin, Panic Among the …
One More Clown
“In our postmodern culture, the polytheism inherent in the diverse culture can certainly accommodate one more clown in the circus ring. What they cannot accommodate is a true alternative, which is starting to take shape. Christians have not presented a true cultural alternative until recently, when they began to provide their own children with an …
Literature Spiraling Downward
“The rampant literary sleaziness-and make no mistake about it, we are talking about some pretty tacky humans-was almost accidental, a byproduct of institutionalized vacuity and timidity. Writers with nothing to write about invariably start covering themselves up with sex and gore, if only because they realize, almost instinctively, that those two subjects can be described …
Education and Christian Civilization
“I want to argue here that it is not possible to fully provide ‘the paideia of the Lord’ outside the context of a Christian civilization. If this is the case, then Paul’s command to the Ephesians, when they did not live in a Christian culture, just as we do not, means that he saw, at …
Better Living Through Chemistry
“And this situation illustrates the nature of our dilemma. Suppose for a moment that some prophet had come out of the wilderness in 1958 and predicted that within a generation one-fifth of the children enrolled in our schools would be doped into docility. The prophet would, of course, have been laughed back to his cave. …
The Apologetic for Bad Art
“The first thing we must do is get the smoke out of our eyes. Which is to say that we must start afresh, and concede publicly what most earnest men and women have always conceded privately, that the ancient apology for bad art-“the work is shoddy and disjointed because The Times are shoddy and disjointed”-is …
Garden Hoses and Education
“If we bring this down into the present in order to illustrate what it would mean to us, paideia would include the books on the bestseller lists, the major newspapers, the most popular sitcoms and networks, the songs on the top forty lists, the motion pictures seen by everyone, the architectural layout of most suburban …
School Reform
“When Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning was published in 1991, the government school system was in crisis. Some thought that it could not get any worse, but in the time since then, the unthinkable (even for then) has become commonplace. Still many Christians have not yet come to grips with the foundational nature of …