One of the optical illusions created by the decision to home school or to have your children in a private Christian school is a significant one. It is this. The temptation is to think that in the home school, success or failure is fundamentally a parental matter while in the private school, success or failure …
Skanky Movie III
One trap that parents fall into is the trap of not wanting sin around their kids. But I suppose this requres some explanation. The mistake arises because there are a bunch of sins that parents should keep away from their kids — kidnappers, for starters, and cocaine dealers, and pornographers, and seducers, and Cartesian dualists. …
Get to and Got to
Conservative Christians have standards, and we are going to stick to them, by golly. And that is actually a good thing, so long as we are sticking to them. The problem arises when they start sticking to us, as when cheat grass gets in your socks. The problem I have in mind affects all sorts …
Wind Shepherds
Eric Hoffer described the trajectory this way. First you have a movement, which turns into a business, which then is transformed into a racket. This truth, and truth it is, should be constantly remembered by all those who are involved on the recovery of classical Christian education. We can do this in two ways. First, …
No Comparisons, Darn It
As Buffalo Springfield put it once, something’s happening here. Over the years at Logos School, we have been consistently proud of our students, and of their high level of performance coupled with consistent cheerfulness. All the classes have been remarkable, and some of them have been spooky. I remember one time, a number of years …
You Can’t Put In What God Left Out
Every faithful Christian educator should want to know the truth, and not just the truth about ultimate things. A man can know the truth about Heaven and Hell, about the triune God, and about the vicarious death of Christ on the cross, and still not have the faintest idea about what he ought to be …
How Not to Lower the Net
There is not really a delicate way to get at one of the root problems with modern higher ed without confronting the emotional engine which drives those problems. And when we confront that engine we discover that the problem is caused by the atomosphere we all live in, and not by this or that nefarious …
Holy Ghost Industrial Grade Sandpaper
I have been writing on distance learning, and how, while it provides some important things, like information, it is utterly incapable of providing other things, like how to deal with people. In a learning community, in a school or college, your fellow students are people, your teachers are people, the administration is made up of …
The Case Against Distance Learning
But before anyone gets riled at the title, allow me a few caveats first. The first is that a strong element of distance learning is essential to every form of real education. Every university library is full of distance learning packets called books. When I read Augustine or Calvin, this is because back in the …
The Disease of Pragmatism
On this subject of higher education in the liberal arts, there is much to develop in every direction. And by “develop,” I mean “shoot at.” It is what our military calls a target rich environment. What is a liberal arts education for? Why go to college? Why pay big bucks to go to college? What …