As important as the joy of a snow day is in and of itself, there are even deeper educational issues at stake in the snow day debate. It raises questions as to what counts as ‘education,’ how school and ordinary life ought to be integrated, and what the student brings to the table in that endeavor. The question of whether a snow day is no more than a ‘wasted opportunity for learning’ is the question of whether a child’s experience in the world outside of the classroom is an essential dimension of education or not.
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The Industrial and Modernist Roots of Grading
“Did Socrates ever have to decide to give Plato an A or A-? Would Plato ever have given an early draft of one of Aristotle’s essays on ethics a 93%? Did a young Tommaso d'Aquino ever have to appeal to Albertus Magnus to overturn a B+? The answer to all of these is an obvious, “No.”
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Blinded by Ideals: Mark Twain’s Wisdom for Classical Schools
The unique situation of the classical school revival in the modern age makes it especially vulnerable to the temptation of ideology.
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Everydayness & the Restless Heart
Education, fundamentally, is about human flourishing, and in order for an education to succeed in engendering flourishing, it is necessary for it to reach the heart. It’s not enough to have a perfect grasp on Augustine, or to write a flawless essay on To Kill a Mockingbird. When I discover that the questions Augustine asks are my questions, or that Atticus Finch and I have something fundamental in common, human flourishing starts to happen.
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Neither Modern nor Post-Modern: Newman on Certitude
Our reasoning might be user-relative, but truth is not itself relative. Our path to truth is only as subjects who seek it out from particular perspectives, but we must reject what C. S. Lewis later called “the poison of subjectivism” which posits that there are only perspectives and no full picture to which those perspectives attach.
