Feeding Mind, Pursuing Truth
Blog 3 Columns
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- Blog 3 Columns
A source of our anxiety?0
- Culture
- January 6, 2016
Market Watch recently reported that while employment is up, the number of people who can go any length of time without a paycheck is abysmally low. “Approximately 63% of Americans have no emergency savings for things such as a $1,000 emergency room visit or a $500 car repair, according to a survey released Wednesday of
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1st Century Historian: Education is “The One and Essential Thing”0
- Education
- January 6, 2016
The ancient Greek thinker Plutarch (46-120 A.D.) is best known for his historical work Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans and his collection of essays entitled Moralia. This latter collection begins with a wonderful essay (or, at least, it’s attributed to him) on “The Education of Children.” I’ll discuss the rest of the essay
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Waking Up During the Night Used to Be Normal0
- History
- January 5, 2016
For many people today, waking up in the middle of the night is incredibly frustrating, stressful, and is often labeled as insomnia. But apparently, for people in the past, it was part of their normal routine. As Business Insider reports (using excerpts from Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep), Virginia Tech historian Roger Ekrich
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This great inventor only had 5 years of formal schooling0
- Education
- January 5, 2016
If you’re a military-history buff, you’ve probably heard the name Hiram Maxim. If you haven’t, he is credited with inventing the Maxim machine gun in 1884, which substantially changed warfare with its ability to fire 600 rounds per minute. Now, the ingenuity of the Maxim machine gun reveals that odd contradiction of progress. On one
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This Family’s 7 Kids All Enrolled in College by Age 12?!?0
- Education
- January 5, 2016
Today’s students are on a much more delayed educational schedule than in times past. Before the 20th century, students used to enroll in college around the age of 15. The Harding family of Alabama is witnessing to the previously more expedited educations in a remarkable way: their first seven children all enrolled in college by
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The Danger of Executive Action0
- Culture
- January 5, 2016
We’ve come to a place in our political discourse when government action often is perceived as more important than respecting the traditions and institutions upon which that very government derives its authority. Many Americans are impatient with the process required by our system of checks and balances. The recent announcement by President Obama regarding his
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Huxley: Brave New World “Coming True Sooner Than I Thought”0
- History
- January 5, 2016
In 1931, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World—a dystopian novel imagining a future in which people live in a highly organized society that they are conditioned to accept. In 1958, in Brave New World Revisited, he looked back on his novel and reflected on how accurate its predictions of the future had been (you can read the
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Chesterton and the Meaning of Education0
- Education
- January 5, 2016
“It is typical of our time,” Chesterton wrote, “that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it
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What American Education Has in Common with the Dark Ages0
- Education
- January 4, 2016
The period of the “Dark Ages” is synonymous with cultural deterioration in the West. It is typically applied to those centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the 5th century, and is regarded as a time when education dramatically declined. In his classic Education and Culture in the Barbarian West,
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