Author: Traditional Logic, Classical Rhetoric. Editor: Classical Teacher magazine. Provost: Memoria College. Podcast: Classical, Et Cetera. Memoria Press
Kentucky, USA
Joined January 2009
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“...children want a great deal of fine and various moral feeding, from which they draw the ‘lessons’ they require.”
“We labour to produce a human being at his best physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually, with the enthusiasms of religion, the good life, of nature, of knowledge, of art and of manual work; and we do not labour in the dark.”—Charlotte Mason
Precisely because I am a Charlotte Mason guy, I do not think that virtue is the goal of education. She wasn't a proponent of "virtue education" or "classical education."
charlottemasonpoetry.org/whe…
MartinCothran retweeted
It’s a mailbag episode! This week on Classical Et Cetera we answer your questions on how we teach elementary math, whether you can mix curriculum, how to read as a distracted adult, pencils vs. pens, and more: tr.ee/dOT9Kt
MartinCothran retweeted
I am speechless. Thomas Aquinas College just dropped a study on the rigor of the new SAT.
It compares the 1980/87 test with 2026. The findings should terrify every parent and teacher...
Vocabulary has collapsed.
Old SAT: 70.6% of questions tested vocab.
New SAT: 15%.
The old test forced students to know a wide range of words through analogies, antonyms, and sentence completions. The new test abandoned that. Most vocab questions now just ask students to fill in one blank from context.
Reading passages also got radically shorter (average ~97 words vs 300–340).
The new test uses short expository passages and hands you the necessary background knowledge inside the text. The older tests leaned much more heavily on argumentative and persuasive writing, assumed far more historical, scientific, and cultural knowledge, and penalized students who lacked it.
This is a redefinition of what "college readiness" means.
If you believe that kids should develop rigorous vocabulary, be capable of sustained reading, and possess background knowledge, I have bad news for you. The SAT no longer measures these.
If you want a future where children can actually read difficult texts and construct complex arguments, the SAT must be replaced now.
This cannot go on.
We were concerned that the SAT has become a less reliable measure of student preparedness for a rigorous college curriculum.
So, we commissioned a study from Johns Hopkins University. What does this study tell us about the state of higher education?
The results are shocking. thaq.co/4iLThZ0
MartinCothran retweeted
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, [Chinua Achebe argued], had made Africa into little more than a backdrop: a place of darkness and voicelessness against which the European could stage his own moral drama. The accusation was severe...memoriacollege.org/what-shou…
MartinCothran retweeted
The education establishment in America is bankrupt.
5 changes created the perfect storm:
1) In the first half of the 20th century universities slowly abandoned the historical goals of education. They traded human formation and the passing down of a civilizational inheritance for “skills”, credentials, and eventually the deconstruction of a civilizational inheritance.
2) In the 60’s and 70’s universities sounded the alarm about overpopulation and climate hysteria. America listened and the birth rate began to fall and the stage was set for the “demographic cliff” currently rocking college enrollment.
3) The dot com revolution of the 1990’s eliminated a chief value prop for higher education. For centuries universities quite literally owned the books and in doing so access to knowledge. They controlled access to the world’s accumulated wisdom. Then suddenly anyone with a desktop or eventually a smart phone had access to more than the libraries of Harvard or Oxford could ever imagine.
4) The housing market crash of 2008 caused parents to rethink the value prop of a college degree. This, combined with the collapsing birth rate put universities in an arms race to build campuses like resorts in an effort to win over the dwindling pool of students. Tuition soared.
5) 5) The AI revolution delivered the final blow. Universities had already abandoned the formation of human beings in favor of information delivery, credentialing, and job preparation. Now artificial intelligence threatens to outperform them at all three: it can deliver information instantly, teach technical skills on demand, and increasingly prepare people for (or perform) the very jobs universities promise to unlock.
The irony is that universities abandoned what would have made them irreplaceable in pursuit of what technology can now do better.
Their only path to survival is to return to the ancient telos and the timeless work of human formation, enculturation, and civilizational transmission.
If such universes need a fitting entrance exam for such an education I know a guy 😉
memoriapress.com/articles/mo… An article relevant to my discussion with @John_Barach, published in my Classical Teacher magazine. "Stories provide a way of habituating children to virtue."
Who was suggesting that we should?
Are you saying we should treat human action in a novel without taking account of its moral implications? Human action does not take place in a morally sterile universe, either in real life or in a novel.
If a person with a brain that is basically like a termite colony says that human brains are basically like termite colonies, can you believe him?
“How is consciousness possible? Human brains are basically like termite colonies—which are not conscious.
A termite colony is made of maybe even a million termites—mindless little bugs [...] and not a single one of them knows anything about the larger project that they’re about.
Well, your brain is really like a termite colony in that way. It’s composed of several [...] billion little neurons and each one of them is not even as smart as a termite, and yet their action produces Gaudi[’s basilica].
How do you get a Gaudi-type consciousness out of a brain which is like a termite colony?”
—Daniel Dennett on the philosophy of consciousness
Again, I never said the "point" of reading is to get the moral. What I did say is that any narrative is inherently moral. That's just part of the nature of narrative. It is impossible for it not to be moral, regardless of anyone's intent.
If we used your reasoning about stories not giving moral lessons on the act of eating we would have to conclude that, if you did not eat with the aim of gaining nutrition, but only because you were hungry, then you would gain no nourishment. That makes absolutely no sense.
I guess it would be if the only thing I hoped my students would gain from reading a story was pleasure. But it isn't. I hope they gain insight, inspiration, and wisdom (which has all sorts of ethical implications).
I don't know how I can say this more clearly: THE MORAL FORCE OF A STORY IS NOT IN THE AIM OF THE TEACHER: IT IS IN THE STORY ITSELF.