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  • A Backward View: Older Books and the Culture of the Now

    A Backward View: Older Books and the Culture of the Now0

    For almost twenty years, I have written book reviews for a weekly newspaper in Western North Carolina. In general, reviewers take an interest only in new books. This makes some sense, as older books have already received their accolades or their slings and arrows. A few critics—Nick Hornby in his collection of reviews Ten Years

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  • A 5th Century Guide to Happiness in a World Full of Pain, Loss, and Injustice

    A 5th Century Guide to Happiness in a World Full of Pain, Loss, and Injustice2

    My mother passed away in August four days short of her 70th birthday. When we lose something we love, it’s easy to feel bitter, resentful, cheated. It’s easy to feel that life is cruel, systematically robbing us of everything good until we are left with nothing. And while these feelings are understandable—forgivable even—they miss far

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  • A 4-Day School Week? Research Shows Possible Benefits.

    A 4-Day School Week? Research Shows Possible Benefits.0

    Could the traditional 5-day school week actually be a drain on students and teachers? That’s a subject explored in a recent study published by MIT Press Journals. A number of schools in Colorado have made the switch from a 5 to a 4-day school week in recent years, largely in an effort to manage budget

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  • A 200 Year-Old Warning about Education in America

    A 200 Year-Old Warning about Education in America3

    • July 20, 2015

    It was 1803, and America was just coming into its own. But Princeton professor Samuel Miller (1769-1850) saw trouble on the horizon in an increasingly utopian attitude toward education. In A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century he wrote: “On the subject of Education, the century under review has given birth to a doctrine, which, though noticed

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  • A 2,500-Year-Old Warning to America

    A 2,500-Year-Old Warning to America0

    Herodotus’ Histories is considered the first work of history produced in the Western world. Written around 450 B.C., it serves as a valuable source of information about the civilizations and cultures of the ancient world, and until recently, has been an important fixture in Western students’ education. The text of the Histories (in English translation)

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  • A 1st-Century Roman Teacher on How to Raise a Genius

    A 1st-Century Roman Teacher on How to Raise a Genius0

    We often marvel at the handful of students who get top ACT scores and land scholarships at Ivy League universities. And with good cause, for it seems the number of geniuses these days are few and far between. But could we have a lot more “geniuses” in this country than we realize? That seems to

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