Category: Education
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Crafting a Literature Program
The liberal arts are, to great measure, founded on written remains, from the earliest times to our own. Literature (broadly construed to take in both fiction and non-fiction) encompasses a bewildering variety of texts, genres, attitudes, belief systems, and just about everything else. Like history (which can reasonably be construed to cover everything we know,…
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Autonomy of Means Again: “Best Practices”
When our kids were younger and living at home, they also frequently had dishwashing duty. Even today we haven’t gotten around to buying a mechanical dishwasher, but when five people were living (and eating) at home, it was good not to have to do all that by ourselves. But as anyone who has ever enlisted…
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Socrates’ Argumentation — Method, Madness, or Something Else?
Many in the field of classical education tout the use of the Socratic Method, by which they seem to mean a process that draws the student to the correct conclusion by means of a sequence of leading questions. Whether it’s valid pedagogically or not, however, we mustn’t claim that it’s Socratic.