Help Us Build the Future It’s the last week of our Spring fundraiser! To date, we have raised $9,422. This is $15,578 short of our goal of $25,000. To get us as close to this goal as we can, we are asking for your help in this final week! Any donations, large or small, are […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the struggle to study unfamiliar topics, subjects, texts, and skills—and the necessity of that discomfort Atop my bookcases—visible just over my computer monitors, reminding me of its presence nearly every day—sits a nice four-volume hardcover set titled The World of Mathematics.  This set intimidates me.  Though I have a PhD […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the nature, operations, and training of the memory. “This invention [of writing]”, says the Egyptian King Thamus, in Plato’s Phaedrus, “will produce forgetfulness in the souls who have learned it.”  It perhaps shocks us, slightly at least, to read this condemnation of writing.  But let us consider the rest of […]

Wisdom and Dignity This [ability to know things as they truly are], then, is that dignity of our nature which all naturally possess in equal measure, but which all do not equally understand. For the mind, stupefied by bodily sensations and enticed out of itself by sensuous forms, has forgotten what it was, and, because […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour concerning the problem of universal education: should we educate everyone?  To what extent?  How?  Why (not)? If we look today at the results of universal education, particularly over the past century, we may think that its institution was a mistake.  The results are those of decline.  High test scores in a […]

When we think of a Gothic cathedral, we tend to think upward: the spires of Cologne, the ascendant arches of Reims or Amiens; or the upward-soaring buttresses of Notre Dame de Paris; or the way one’s eyes are drawn along the high vault of a nave to the transepts or chancel. Perhaps we think of […]

To appreciate how Dewey’s “progressive” educational model and Hutchins’ and Adler’s conservative or “classical” educational model were both inadequate responses to the technological environment of the 20th century – namely, the displacement of the print environment by the electric environment – it will be helpful to make a brief detour into the pioneering media analysis […]

If the difficult and polarizing aphorisms of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan might be appreciated, not as provocative and likely misleading pop cultural soundbites, as they were in the 1960s,1 but rather as foundational insights through which to understand, and act in, the present digital world, how might we begin to formulate the contemporary significance […]

A philosophical reflection on the tensions between progress and tradition and their resolution through continuity All too often, the notions of progress and tradition alike are swallowed into the ideologies that make of them principles both absolute and opposed to one another.  Put otherwise, when progressivism and traditionalism come to prevail, we often lose not […]

The Future of Education We are in the midst of institutional collapse, set in motion by endless educational confusions. The places once trusted to lead us to wisdom have become hollow shells—reduced to content delivery and credentialing. Reforming the extant model of education is not enough. We need to build new institutions, institutions capable of […]