Articles

Articles by Jesse

Don’t Waste Your Educational Wealth:

“You are being given this wealth so that you can make more wealth. Don’t bury this wealth in the ground. Give it away to others. You have not received this educational wealth rightly until you have made the next generation even wealthier. That is the whole point of this educational process. If this knowledge and wealth stops with you, then we have all failed at this project. You are not the end product. The next generation is the product we are shooting for. And every generation after that. While I love educating this generation, I am even more excited to see what the next generation will do as it begins Classical Education 3.0. The goal of this education is for each generation to faithfully hand this wealth to the next generation.”

On The Imaginative Conservative, Dorothy Sayers is the Answer to John Dewey

“As we look back at the last century, it can seem that the Liberal Arts model deteriorated through factors like neglect, laziness, or mission creep. But the reality was strikingly different. This older model of education was not misplaced; it suffered a planned and deliberate attack. The leading educators of the last century turned on the Liberal Arts program and tried to gut it. The central voice in this attack was John Dewey, but other educators, like the Developmentalists, joined him in that work. Their primary criticism was that the older Liberal Arts model could not accommodate new research done in child development. Into the middle of this pedagogical revolution, Dorothy Sayers stepped up in 1947 and defended the Liberal Arts program in her work The Lost Tools of Learning. In her defense of the liberal arts, Sayers both acknowledged the factor of childhood development and offered a way for Classical education to deal with these criticisms. In this way, Sayers did not merely defend the Liberal Arts program but also, and more importantly, offered a way for Classical education to disarm Dewey’s project.” Read more here.

On Kuyperian Commentary, The Not So Clean Sea Breeze of the Centuries

“There is a glorious reformation happening right now in education called Classical and Christian Education. As a teacher in a Classical and Christian school, I am thankful to be a part of this important work. But at the same time, I see temptations that the movement is prone to. One of those dangers is what I would call reverse chronological snobbery. C.S. Lewis (whom I will talk about in a moment) coined the term chronological snobbery and he used it to talk about the fallacious argument which claims that something from an earlier time (e.g. philosophy, literature, etc) is inherently worse than that of the present, simply because it is from the past. There is also an inverse version of this fallacy (some would call it by the same name) which would claim that something from the past (e.g. philosophy, literature, etc) is inherently better than that of the present, simple because it is from the past. Both claims are incredibly dangerous but it is this second error that is particularly tempting to Classical and Christian schools. This error is tempting because the movement has purposefully shifted its gaze back to the past and is trying to bring the best of the past forward. The difficulty lies then in recovering the best of the past without bringing the worst along with it.” Read more here.

Jane Austen: Love & Responsibility

“One of the lies of our culture is the idea that you cannot have love and responsibility at the same time. You have to pick one or the other, but not both. We are told that it is better to focus our energy on love and let responsibilities worry about themselves. The heart is the king of the mind.” Read more here.