Winter: A Time for Noble Joy

Winter: A Time for Noble Joy

What does it take to form virtue—or to ‘educate’ in the most important sense? This perennial question concerns all of us, at all stages of life. Aristotle offers a simple but surprising principle that should focus us on what we’re doing at home in these winter days....
Learning from Trees like St. Bernard

Learning from Trees like St. Bernard

“He has no other teachers besides the oaks and beeches.” Words we might expect about Thoreau in fact are about one of the great Christian intellectuals of the Middle Ages. Today when a focus on trees too often betokens a turning away from the Creator of trees, we can...
Losing Sleep Over ‘Educating’ Our Children

Losing Sleep Over ‘Educating’ Our Children

My father-in-law once explained why he wanted to ‘homeschool’ when almost no one else in the state was doing so. “I wanted my children to be like their mother rather than like the teachers in the schools.” Whether this was or is the best practical conclusion, it in...
Manners: A Lost Key in Raising Children

Manners: A Lost Key in Raising Children

Although the lack of manners today is generally noted with disapproval, we often do not think of manners as a central feature of how we raise our children. But manners are arguably the major instance of a concrete, tangible thing we are failing to pass on, to the...
The Pain of Being Raised Different

The Pain of Being Raised Different

Educating or forming the young is arduous in any time or place. But given our social nature, human formation is especially difficult in a decadent society. Since education is preparation to be a good member of the community, what happens when society itself is...

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