The Work of Art and the Student
The Precarious Status of the Arts At the time I took a post at the National Endowment for the Arts in Summer 2003, with a teaching leave granted to me... Read more
Presentations & Papers
The Cave, the Quadrivium, & Classical Education
What place should the study of mathematics have in classical education? Most classical schools rightly emphasize the linguistic arts of the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—but few have thought through (much less... Read more
Quality Matters
After all the bad publicity and spirited criticism of the Common Core ELA Standards, it may surprise people that one of the best defenses of classic literature in the primary... Read more
The Workshop of Humanity: Reading Toward Virtue
Aristotle makes a claim that some of my students find objectionable but which most educators find self-evident. Aristotle asserts in multiple places that the young are not wise and typically fail to possess the... Read more
How Fashionable Scholarship and Serendipity Brought Us Our Western Musical Canon
As Classical educators, we know that history cannot be understood or mastered in isolation. Within the skein of history, every human endeavor is interwoven. One of the great supports for... Read more
Summarizing Epic
From two basic themes—freedom and the knowledge of death–flow all the essential elements of epic: the hero, the quest, the natural man, the fall, the kin struggles, the death–world journey,... Read more
The History of Happiness
A talk on the “history of happiness” is a bound to disappoint. Happiness, after all, is something we would prefer to possess than to study. To consider its history seems to... Read more
A Couple of Do’s: Twenty Major Poetry Projects
Here is something that looks like a kind of poem: No Vote The rocks were true, In the way it is impossible to count The atoms in a sparrow. I... Read more
Teaching Beowulf: From Reception History Back to Form and Intention
I attended graduate school in the wild and crazy 1980s, when the God of Theory overthrew all of the other gods on literary Olympus, conquering and eating its fathers, mothers,... Read more
Stasis Theory: Practical Rhetoric for a Liberal Education… and a Rancorous Republic
Rhetoric as taught in the classical schools tradition has added, or more accurately recalled, a great and powerful tradition to and for 21st-century writing pedagogy, reviving and re-energizing an ancient... Read more
Xenophon on the Purpose of History
Introduction Xenophon is often placed alongside Herodotus and Thucydides as one of the greatest historians of Greek antiquity, but Xenophon is by far the least well-known of the three chief... Read more
Daughters of Memory: The Sibling Rivalry of History and Poetry
The Motive for Story History and poetry grew up in the same family, but what a strange, dysfunctional brood they have become in our era of academic specialization. In our... Read more
Your Syllabus Needs a Story
When I was in graduate school in English at UCLA in the 1980s, one of the hot, cutting-edge books in the discipline was Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report... Read more
Teaching History, Education, and Meaning, With Critical Thinking
Thesis: History is the outworking of the conflict between basic beliefs. Analyzing history gets us into basic questions especially focused on the good. Asking a Philosopher As a philosopher... Read more
