Skip to Main Content

Education

Blog

July 22, 2021

The Other F Bomb: Our Education Crisis

By Jeff Minick

Since a majority of students in Baltimore are either failing their classes or barely scraping by, they will likely fail or barely scrape by in life as well.
Read more
Blog

July 20, 2021

Hoisting Critical Race Theory With its Own Petard

By Robert Weissberg

Forget about discussing the opportunity costs of teaching CRT; ideologues are hardly deterred by terrible outcomes, in education or otherwise.
Read more
Blog

July 13, 2021

The Agenda Worse Than Critical Race Theory

By Robert Weissberg

Even as Critical Race Theory continues to infiltrate schools, there is a more pernicious and subtle transformation of education affecting American children.
Read more
Blog

June 23, 2021

Four Signs Parents Won’t Be Sending Their Kids Back to Public School This Fall

By Kerry McDonald

Public school enrollment fell by an average of 2.6 percent across 41 states last fall. These enrollment declines far exceeded any anticipated demographic changes.
Read more
Blog

June 14, 2021

Let’s Aim High: Our Kids and Their Education

By Jeff Minick

Our kids were made to fulfill their potential, not to settle for mediocrity. We need to do a better job of helping them get there.
Read more
Blog

June 3, 2021

Drinking the Kool-Aid From the Cult of Science

By Annie Holmquist

Science has become almost a cult-like religion which individuals follow with little understanding and few questions.
Read more
Blog

May 28, 2021

Free College Doesn’t Go Far Enough for the Left

By Anders Koskinen

Higher education’s bureaucrats are increasingly eager to enmesh themselves in the student experience, to the point that a student’s personal agency and initiative are not requirements for college success.
Read more
Blog

May 25, 2021

The Next Great Scandal: Photoshopped Modesty

By Annie Holmquist

A new censorship scandal in a high school yearbook suggests that modesty is sexual exploitation.
Read more
Blog

May 19, 2021

Free Community College Will Only Make Things Worse

By Robert Weissberg

Biden's solution to economic woes and an unqualified work force is typical of a government careerist who never ran a business in his life.
Read more
Blog

May 4, 2021

Innocence Lost: Our Children and Pornography

By Jeff Minick

Pornography is an epidemic which ensnares young children, keeps them addicted, and inflicts long-term harm on them as they transition to adulthood.
Read more
Blog

May 3, 2021

A Memo From Privilege University’s Diversity Offices

By Alexander Riley

As colleges across the country sink further into diversity madness, the penitential displays may get ever more ridiculous as time goes on.
Read more
Blog

May 3, 2021

It’s Time to ‘Decolonize’ Government Schools

By Annie Holmquist

Government schools are practicing the very colonization they decry by taking children away from their parents and indoctrinating them at ever greater levels.
Read more
Blog

April 7, 2021

Looking Beyond Headlines to Outsmart the Propagandists

By Annie Holmquist

The trial of officer Derek Chauvin has revealed an enormous gulf between what is happening, and what is actually being reported on by the mainstream media.
Read more
View

April/May 2021

The Coming Counter-Coup Against the GOP

By Stephen Baskerville

The left’s new monopoly cannot be resisted without breaking free of ossified conservatism. Here are three areas of reform.
Read more
Society & Culture

April/May 2021

Deconstructing the Decolonizers

By Anthony Esolen

Those who command our schools and colleges behave like colonial powers in the land they occupy. They exercise power for their own ends, ostensibly for the good of their subjects, who mostly suffer their rule with grudging timorousness.
Read more
View

April/May 2021

Rejecting the 'Proposition Nation'

By Brion McClanahan

The left’s ‘1619 Project’ and the conservative 1776 Commission both rely on a distorted picture of the American founding.
Read more
Blog

March 29, 2021

Teaching History Without Identity Politics

By Annie Holmquist

American students simply don't understand civics, but attempts to fix public education will only make things worse if these reforms focus on identity politics.
Read more
Blog

March 23, 2021

Ending Critical Race Theory for the Children’s Sake

By Jeff Minick

As Critical Race Theory continues to infiltrate public school districts across the country, parents will have to decided how to ensure their children are properly educated.
Read more
Blog

March 16, 2021

How to Tell the Difference Between Real Education and Propaganda

By Annie Holmquist

It doesn’t matter if our children have prestigious jobs or run with the elite. What matters is whether their eyes are able to discern propaganda parading itself as education.
Read more
Blog

March 15, 2021

Group Conformity Holds Back Black Achievers

By Lipton Matthews

While the Biden administration investigates reparations for African Americans, the true issues holding blacks back lie in education and group conformity.
Read more
Blog

March 11, 2021

Leave Dr. Seuss for Dead

By Edward Welsch

Dr. Seuss was one of his era's greatest cancelers of conservatives, a warmongering propagandist, radical leftist, and a writer of subversive books directed at children. No one should lament his apparent cancellation.
Read more
Blog

March 9, 2021

An Unleashed Feminine Mystique is Destroying Higher Education

By Lipton Matthews

If masculine values were still dominant in academia, the personal views of eccentric professors would be irrelevant, only the quality of their research would matter.
Read more
Blog

March 2, 2021

The Brave New World of Children’s Propaganda

By Annie Holmquist

From library books, to school programs, to television shows, today's children are inundated with woke propaganda from all angles. It's time for parents to push back.
Read more
Reviews

March 2021

The Life of the Mind

By John M. DeJak

The cultivation of the intellectual life begins in silence and reflection, Zena Hitz writes in Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.
Read more
Blog

February 26, 2021

The Problem Is Systemic Victimhood, Not Systemic Racism

By Annie Holmquist

While much is made of systemic racism, we hear little about how to address systemic victimhood, an affliction in which people drag down members of their own community.
Read more
Blog

February 23, 2021

Recognizing Three Elements of True Learning

By Annie Holmquist

As students return to in-person classrooms, parents would do well to ensure their kids are actually learning, instead of just sitting in a chair.
Read more
Blog

February 22, 2021

Fighting Schools to Save Education

By Jeff Minick

Today's schools are becoming increasingly liberal centers of indoctrination, rather than places of learning passing on timeless truths.
Read more
Blog

February 19, 2021

Arming Children for the Battle of Prepackaged Thinking

By Annie Holmquist

As kids begin to return to classrooms during COVID, so-called education experts are pushing new woke catch up measures to make up for lost time.
Read more
Blog

February 15, 2021

Teaching About Riots and Democracy

By Alexander Riley

The left's hypocritical outrage over the Capitol riot provokes a college student to question his woke professor. A hilarious dialogue ensues...
Read more
Blog

February 3, 2021

The Curious Warnings of Kipling’s ‘Copybook Headings’

By Annie Holmquist

Rudyard Kipling is more prescient today than ever. His poetry is rich with wisdom that should not go ignored.
Read more
Blog

February 1, 2021

Teaching Children To Be Unbiased Is Impossible

By Annie Holmquist

Every parent is biased. This fact should not make us retreat into a neutral void of nothingness, unwilling to influence or train our children in certain directions.
Read more
Remembering the Right

February 2021

Remembering Booker T. Washington

By Jack Trotter

Booker T. Washington argued Southern blacks should pursue the dignity of useful labor and become indispensable members of their communities. He has been pilloried by the black intelligentsia for his efforts.
Read more
Blog

January 25, 2021

Freeing Parents From the Anxious, Helicopter Lifestyle

By Annie Holmquist

Parents are pressured into keeping their children on a leash by a throng of supposed experts. This is no way to raise children.
Read more
Blog

January 18, 2021

Common App Letter Showcases Politics as Educational Endgame

By Jeff Minick

The Common App organization, which millions of students use, put out a statement regarding events at the Capitol which call its goals into question vis à vis politics.
Read more
Blog

January 8, 2021

Our Words Matter: Writing in the Age of Communication

By Jeff Minick

Practically anyone can learn to write clear, concise English, but they must be taught. This is where so many of our schools and teachers fail our young people.
Read more
Blog

January 5, 2021

Ivory Towers Only Come in Blue

By Alexander Riley

The Trump presidency provided abundant opportunities for us to see the left professoriate in its true, disturbing colors.
Read more
Blog

December 31, 2020

Pandemic Exposes Flaws of Education System, Educator Says

By Annie Holmquist

COVID protocols have exposed education myths that we've been living with according to Erika Christakis in her recent article for The Atlantic.
Read more
Blog

December 18, 2020

Voltaire Was Right (About Elementary School Pickup Procedures)

By Lenore Skenazy

Rules created to protect kids from imaginary or inflated dangers give bureaucrats a bayonet ... and instructions on how to aim for the heart.
Read more
Blog

December 14, 2020

Thinking Students Rank Last on the Government School Agenda

By Annie Holmquist

Government education has declined during the COVID shutdowns and caused many families to embrace homeschooling. Would Americans be better off walking away from government schools?
Read more
Blog

December 14, 2020

Children’s Mental Health Declined 'Substantially' During Lockdowns, Study Finds

By Kerry McDonald

Mental health deterioration during COVID government-imposed lockdowns was common among young adults and children this past year according to researchers at the University of Cambridge.
Read more
Blog

December 11, 2020

How to Help Kids Hate Reading

By Lenore Skenazy

Reading logs turned a fun, self-directed activity into a top-down chore that frustrates children. It might be time to fall off the log.
Read more
Blog

December 9, 2020

Costs Must Be Weighed Against Benefits

By Walter E. Williams

COVID policy discussions must consider costs. Every action has a cost and this basic economic rule applies to COVID policies as it does to any other.
Read more
Blog

December 4, 2020

Homeschooling More Than Doubled During the Pandemic

By Kerry McDonald

The number of homeschoolers in the U.S. has increased by nearly three million children since the pandemic started, with parents fleeing hybrid and virtual schooling.
Read more
Blog

December 3, 2020

Many Children Left Behind During COVID

By Jeff Minick

The psychological blows of government imposed COVID-19 restrictions upon children are becoming quite evident. The cure has become worse than the disease.
Read more
Society & Culture

December 2020

Vipers in Ivory

By Anthony Esolen

Reflections on three decades of teaching and defending Western civilization while its academic enemies gained power.
Read more
Society & Culture

September 2020

Ressentiment: He Hates, Therefore He Is

By Anthony Esolen

"Ressentiment" festers in the mind of a person until it manifests itself as a false sense of moral righteousness. This concept stems from a feeling of inferiority, and perfectly describes the mindset of today's violent rioters.
Read more
Blog

August 18, 2020

The Progressive Racism of the Ivy League

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Progressive elites continue to defend anti-white racism in the Ivy Leagues while trying to alter state laws in order to advance it on the West Coast. This will lead to racial tribalism, and conservatives deserve blame for doing nothing to stop it.
Read more
Columns

August 2020

Don't Know Much About History

By Tom Piatak

The left has used its growing cultural power to paint the darkest possible picture of the history of our country and our civilization, seeking nothing less than the abolition of America. We need to once again insist on the superiority of the West.
Read more
Blog

July 16, 2020

Roger Stone's Case Shows the Left's Control of U.S. Courts

By Richard J. Bishirjian

The contrived conviction of Roger Stone showed that America has a serious problem with its legal system. The problem lies in the politicization of American justice which began in the Progressive Era when legal education was politicized.
Read more
Blog

July 4, 2020

Which Revolution Are We Celebrating?

By Robert L. Paquette

On Independence Day more than 200 years ago, a member of America's founding generation warned against the encroaching spirit of the French Revolution, of extreme equality dissolving “manner, order, and virtue” and turning liberty into license.
Read more
View

June 2020

Learning From Our Hard Corona Days

By Christopher DeGroot

The world has reached a new level of boredom, it seems. “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room,” wrote Blaise Pascal. That sentence, like others from the Pensées (1670), is deservedly famous.
Read more
Society & Culture

June 2020

The Theatrical Tradition of Dorothy Sayers

By Crystal Downing

In 1941, bestselling novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) ignited a religious controversy that reverberated throughout England. Ironically, Sayers was motivated not by a defiance of tradition but by an intense desire to preserve it.
Read more
Blog

May 13, 2020

Free Speech and the End of the Old Rules

By Boyd Cathey

Free speech, open inquiry, and serious academic discussion are now being construed as the fruits of of racism, white supremacy, sexism, or homophobia in my state of North Carolina.
Read more
Remembering the Right

April/May 2020

Remembering Willmoore Kendall

By David Frisk

Among the 20th-century conservative movement’s legendary leaders, Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967) stands out as the one who most effectively offered a grounding in a specifically American philosophy. There is also a timeliness in this remarkable...
Read more
Blog

March 4, 2020

Two Ways of Changing Our Minds About History

By Paul Gottfried

For more than 60 years, I’ve been interested in both the historical past and in how historical interpretations are created. I’ve also written a great deal on both subjects, but particularly on how public and scholarly opinions about past events...
Read more
View

February 2020

Deconstructing the 1619 Project

By Brion McClanahan

Several years ago, I purchased a used copy of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), one of the five most important books on American slavery that have appeared in the last 50 years....
Read more
Remembering the Right

February 2020

Remembering Richard Weaver

By Jay Langdale

Native Southerner and traditionalist conservative, Richard Weaver (1910-1963) was a unique figure in the rise of the modern American right. Weaver, a longtime professor at the University of Chicago, was an historian, literary critic, and...
Read more
Columns

February 2020

Jackson and the American Indians

By Roger D. McGrath

Everyone knows that Andrew Jackson wanted American Indians annihilated, defied the Supreme Court in a famous challenge to Chief Justice John Marshall, and forcibly removed the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast to lands west of the...
Read more
Society & Culture

October 2019

Hope in Little Platoons

By Jeff Minick

For 26 years, I taught hundreds of home-educated students, including my own children. My checkered teaching career also includes a semester in a university, two years at a prison, and two years in a public high school. During my last 15 years of...
Read more
Correspondence

August 2019

Silicon Valley Is Dumbing Down Kids

By Tim Cavanaugh

When I caught a seventh student in the classroom trying to bury his Chromebook in his crotch, clumsily angling the screen below the desk to hide the networked game he was playing, I wondered whether there’s any evidence that Chromebooks actually...
Read more
Reviews

June 2019

College Admissions and Other Rites of Fragility

By Mark G. Brennan

Think of the angst the recent college admissions scandal has caused in wealthy households from Greenwich to La Jolla, and nowhere in between, except maybe Winnetka.
Read more
Society & Culture

October 2018

Double-Blind in Academia

By Mark G. Brennan

There are many ways to commit suicide in academia today. Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College, opted not to take part in the school’s annual “Day of Absence” celebration.
Read more
Columns

February 2018

Campus Utopias

By Justin Raimondo

As we gathered in the gazebo, sitting on the hard white benches with the paint peeling off in strips, nursing Marlboros—the girls wielding cigarette-holders, like scepters—we decided then and there who and what was the main obstacle to our goal.
Read more
Editorials

February 2018

Feds: Stop “Helping”

By The Hon. John J. Duncan, Jr.

Student-loan debt in the United States is now $1.48 trillion. That incredible sum is a heavy drag on the economy and a burden on young people. And federal intervention in education is the cause.
Read more
Correspondence

October 2017

The Brave Professor

By Mark Wegierski

At the University of Toronto, one man has shown us just how uphill the climb is against political correctness, and what sort of reaction we may expect if we fight it. He may also have shown us how to win.
Read more
Society & Culture

July 2017

A Free Ride to Clown College

By Mark G. Brennan

Not content to suffer quietly under a $352 billion state debt, a crumbling post-World War II infrastructure, and a $65 billion unfunded pension liability in its largest city, the state of New York hastened its impending financial devastation this...
Read more
Columns

July 2017

The Discarded Image

By Aaron D. Wolf

Mitch Landrieu and his growing coalition of disgruntled minorities and public-school-educated leftists give us an idea of where a divided, majority-ruled America is heading.
Read more
Columns

July 2017

The Wrong War

By Philip Jenkins

The assault on American history continues apace, with the further removal of Confederate monuments and symbols, and the expunging of anything relating to slavery or slaveholders.
Read more
Polemics & Exchanges

July 2017

If It Can Happen Here . . .

As a Texas resident and an alumnus of the University of Texas, I can attest that Jon Cassidy’s dreary assessment of the situation there is totally accurate.
Read more
View

July 2017

Devil Take the Hindmost

By Jack Trotter

Hell is a meritocracy. Yet in America the meritocratic ideal is universally applauded. Everyone agrees—or pretends to agree—that the angel of justice smiles upon the triumph of merit.
Read more
Society & Culture

July 2017

Farewell to P.C.

By Anthony Esolen

Here is the foul truth of American higher education: Most professors outside of the straight and narrow sciences do not pursue the truth. They do not pursue it because they do not believe in it.
Read more
Correspondence

June 2017

Scandalous Education: UT’s War on Standards

By Jon Cassidy

In 2003, the Supreme Court expected “that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary” in university admissions. That was the conventional wisdom of the time.
Read more
View

April 2017

Ut Plures Sint

By Anthony Esolen

For the last three months I have been asking people at my college what the phrase cultural diversity means, if it does not mean “a diversity of cultures thriving all over the world” or “the study of a broad diversity of cultures spanning four...
Read more
Columns

March 2017

Don’t Just Wound It: Kill It

By Aaron D. Wolf

The Department of Education must be destroyed. This holdover from the Carter administration costs us $80 billion per year, for which we have received in return a centralized educational bureaucracy beholden to wildly leftist teachers’ unions and...
Read more
Society & Culture

February 2017

Delenda Est Academia

By Jason Michael Morgan

[U]niversities are not akin to ships, moving through uncharted waters toward horizons of higher truth. No, American institutes of higher learning are plagues of locusts. Firing a single shot at them is as effective as squishing one insect in...
Read more
Correspondence

November 2016

Success and Failure in Higher Education

By Jerry D. Salyer

Nelson County, Marion County, and Washington County are collectively referred to by their inhabitants as the Kentucky Holy Land, and I don’t think the expression is meant to be entirely whimsical.
Read more
Correspondence

September 2016

Adventures in Education

By Jonathan D. Brand

Last spring, students at Chelsea Academy performed A Man for All Seasons. Among the play’s many memorable scenes, the exchange in which Sir Thomas More advises Richard Rich to choose teaching over the pursuit of power, wealth, and fame...
Read more
Editorials

July 2016

A Big Beautiful Horse

By Scott P. Richert

Decades of “funding reforms” have replaced local funding with state funding, and greater and greater federal regulation of local public schools has led to school consolidation and the loss of local control in anything but name.
Read more
Correspondence

June 2016

Student and Teacher Benefits

By Jeff Minick

It’s nine o’clock on Tuesday. First into the classroom today are my Advanced Placement European History students. I begin the class, as I always do, with a prayer, and then deliver a lecture on such Enlightenment luminaries as Montesquieu,...
Read more
Society & Culture

June 2016

A Monumental Proposal

By James O. Tate

I was recently perplexed to see in the news that Harvard, the oldest institution of higher learning in the nation, had declared that, though master has no etymological relation to slavery (but rather to magister), the word would nevertheless be...
Read more
Editorials

June 2016

Sometimes a Flower

By Scott P. Richert

A substitute teacher in a public school in what is, by today’s standards, still a relatively socially conservative part of the country uses “an anatomical word during a teaching lesson.” She is fired, and the story goes viral.
Read more
Correspondence

May 2016

Sharia, Not Shakespeare

By Frank Brownlow

When Allardyce Nicholl, then professor of English at Birmingham University, founded the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1951, he intended from the beginning that it should have an international flavor.
Read more
Columns

February 2016

Rhodes to Hell

By Taki Theodoracopulos

Here’s some more good stuff from the “academy” to get 2016 rolling. It concerns Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder who left an Oxford college more than 50 million big ones in today’s money.
Read more
Columns

January 2016

Protest Too Much

By Taki Theodoracopulos

On the campuses of America, fascism lives, although these modern fascists lack the sartorial brilliance of Benito’s mobs.
Read more
View

September 2015

Is the Game Worth the Candle?

By Douglas Wilson

Our Lord taught us all about bad bargains. To lose your own soul and to receive in exchange that mere pittance called “the whole world” should be counted as one of those bad bargains.
Read more
View

September 2015

College, Diversity, and the Middle Class

By Nancy Derr Polin

When my father died, I was eight years old, the third of four children. Mother repeatedly made it clear that if we wanted to go to college like our parents—and we must—we would have to study hard to obtain scholarships.
Read more
View

December 2014

Why Christians Need the Classical Tradition

By E. Christian Kopff

One of the most intriguing paradoxes of Dante’s Divine Comedy is the pervasive presence of pagan classical antiquity in what was meant to be (and is) Europe’s greatest Christian poem.
Read more
Columns

December 2014

The Golden State’s Lavender Jacobins

By Justin Raimondo

You knew it would come to this. So did I. And yet one is still surprised by the sheer boldness of it all.
Read more
Reviews

December 2014

4.0 and You’re Out!

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

When I was a junior at the Trinity School in New York, Mr. Clarence Bruner-Smith, head of the Upper School, assured me that I had an excellent chance of being accepted at Yale if I accepted the editorship of the school literary magazine.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

December 2014

It’s a Drag

By Christopher Sandford

That characteristic feature of our age, the impressively feckless adolescent indulged by a craven and cynical media, reared its head this past October 15 in the rural community of Randle, Washington.
Read more
View

October 2014

Homeschooling: Fortifying the Family Castle

By John C. Seiler, Jr.

Amid the disasters happening in America today, there’s some excellent news. Homeschooling has won a solid place among roughly 1.5 million children and is mostly protected by law.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

October 2014

Hush! It Is General Lee

By Clyde Wilson

The Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University is the final resting place of Gen. Robert E. Lee, one of the most beloved of all Americans, and his family. It has been a place of pilgrimage and a quiet and dignified memorial to the lost Second...
Read more
View

September 2014

The Left’s Long March

By Frank Brownlow

On June 2, FOX News’s The Five were discussing the Harvard commencement speech of ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which he pointed out that something like 95 percent of the faculty had supported Obama.
Read more
View

September 2014

Conservative Education: Caveat Emptor!

By Jack Trotter

Much of the blame for the deplorable state of higher education in America today must be traced back to the baneful influence of America’s most revolutionary educationist, John Dewey.
Read more
View

September 2014

Last of the Romans

By E. Christian Kopff

Andrew Crocker did not attend his commencement exercises at Michigan State University in East Lansing on May 2. He was home dealing with family matters. So he missed the awarding of two honorary doctorates.
Read more
Perspective

September 2014

Thinking Outside the Boxes

By Thomas Fleming

In all these little boxes of the mind, the poor kids are immunized against nonconformity and carefully shielded from all those dangerous thoughts of Aristotle and Shakespeare and Vergil that might lead them to question the assumptions with which...
Read more
News

September 2014

Subgroup Strife in the Golden State

By John C. Seiler, Jr.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. We were all going to “get along” in a diverse, multicultural paradise, led by our brilliant universities. But in a pattern sure to spread across America, the ethnic strife in California is increasing, not...
Read more
Reviews

August 2014

Diversity Where It Counts

By Clyde Wilson

A work of genuine scholarship tells us what we did not know before and does so felicitously—it is a contribution to the world’s body of knowledge.
Read more
June 2014

Digital Enthusiasm

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

At a recent dinner party someone remarked that the two secure careers remaining in America are business and science.
Read more
Columns

June 2014

The Way to Translate

By Philip Jenkins

There are people who think the classics are a dated luxury. Anyone who believes that should stay far away from the Christian Bible.
Read more
Columns

April 2014

Memories: Glimpses of Notables

By Clyde Wilson

In my senior year I was editor of the high-school newspaper. (We even won a prize from the Columbia University School of Journalism.) What I remember most is the literary progeny on my staff.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

April 2014

Bathroom Break

By John C. Seiler, Jr.

On January 1, the state imposed on children Assembly Bill 1266, mandating that all bathrooms, gym showers, and sports teams in public schools be open to everyone, regardless of sex. The bill’s official title is the School Success and Opportunity...
Read more
View

November 2013

Moderate Islam?

By Claude Polin

“Teachers who teach Western education? We will kill them! We will kill them in front of their students and tell the students to henceforth [sic] study the Koran,” declared Abubakar Shekau, leader of the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram,...
Read more
Columns

November 2013

The Academic Industrial Complex

By Tom Piatak

In his farewell address, Dwight Eisenhower warned against a military-industrial complex that would seek to enrich itself through false appeals to the common good. Today, it is higher education that is growing rich by convincing the public that...
Read more
View

September 2013

The College Bubble

By Mark G. Brennan

The university graduation season this past spring dumped another seven million job seekers onto the sputtering economy. A June headline in the New York Times painted a dismal picture of their likelihood of finding employment: “Degrees but No...
Read more
View

September 2013

Strong State, Strong Schools? The German System

By Ronald J. Granieri

Anglo-Americans habitually disparage the “socialist” Europeans, as if it were just or fair to lump all Continental economies under one pejorative label. Rather than relying on epithets, however, would-be economic and educational reformers should...
Read more
Perspective

September 2013

The Best Schooling Money Can Buy

By Thomas Fleming

Poor Rachel Jeantel has been ridiculed for her diction, elocution, and irrationality, but in her interview with Piers Morgan she makes a valid point in contrasting “old-school people” who “see their facts” with her own “new-school generation” for...
Read more
European Diary

April 2013

Professions and Professors

By Andrei Navrozov

You know what you hardly see around anymore? Professions. Professors—hell, yes, one sees professors around, even in backward Italy, pinched, untidy, jealous of beauty, suspicious as cuckolds in Molière, speaking with the forked tongues of p.c....
Read more
View

September 2012

Boyhood and Single-Sex Education

By Christopher Sandford

In Britain, the late 1940’s and early 50’s were probably the hardest years of the 20th century. For millions of people, the postwar decade was one of icy nights in gaslit rooms, interminable queues, and meals composed of whale fat and tinned...
Read more
Correspondence

September 2012

The End of Innocence

By Michael McMahon

Alas for the generation born to these infantilized adults! Alas for their children’s children, too! The sins of their absent fathers’ absent fathers have been visited on generation after generation now.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 2012

To Reach the Limits of Virtue

By Adam C. Wolfe

Commencement speech to the Class of 2012, Veritas Preparatory Academy, Phoenix, Arizona
Read more
Columns

June 2012

Looks Can Be Deceiving

By Scott P. Richert

Whoever came up with the liberal platitude that “Children have to be taught to hate” was either a liar or a fool, or both. He certainly never had children of his own, and, if it weren’t impossible, I’d say he must never have been a child himself.
Read more
Reviews

February 2012

The End of Education

By John C. Chalberg

“Crazy U?” Or “Crazy Me?” A self-deprecating Andrew Ferguson must at least have been tempted by such a title. His self-absorbed son (and what 17-year-old isn’t?) would surely have agreed, had he been remotely aware of the grief that the whole...
Read more
Columns

January 2012

The Christian in the Cave

By Philip Jenkins

Given contemporary cultural debates, it is scarcely surprising that such myths commonly focus on religious themes, usually to the massive disadvantage of religion, in general, and Christianity, in particular.
Read more
Vital Signs

December 2011

Duty

By Jeff Minick

“For Lee,” I said, summing up, “duty was a sort of eighth virtue. This concept was a driving force in his life—perhaps the driving force. He once called duty ‘the most sublime word in our language.’”
Read more
Reviews

November 2011

Immodest Proposals

By Jason Jewell

Why does the institution of the university exist? The university, uniquely among social institutions, exists for the scholar.
Read more
Columns

October 2011

The Betsy Ross of California

By Roger D. McGrath

Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed legislation requiring public schools to teach students about the contributions of “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.”
Read more
Reviews

October 2011

A Sentimental Education

By H.A. Scott Trask

Many Americans probably think that the Pledge of Allegiance dates to the time of the American Revolution, but it was written more than a century later, in 1892.
Read more
Columns

October 2011

Wisdom and Science

By Philip Jenkins

Societies live by their mythologies, which become so passionately held that it’s usually risky to challenge them. Having said that, one major component of contemporary secularist mythology really has to be confronted, because it is so...
Read more
View

September 2011

U No What I Meen: Technology and Illiteracy

By R. Clay Reynolds

Most college and university professors know that even though students may successfully complete remedial courses and even a full slate of freshman and sophomore classes, many will still be unable to use proper language mechanics or to work with...
Read more
View

September 2011

Tarzan's Way

By Andrei Navrozov

Last night we watched from the hotel terrace as a giant cargo ship cast anchor in the Tyrrhenian indigo and proceeded to unload fresh water for the whole of our sunburnt island, an enterprise which from that vantage point seemed a triumph of...
Read more
Beyond the Revolution

September 2011

Deforming Education

By Thomas Fleming

Inspired by a PBS special, Miss Rhee enlisted in Teach for America, a tax-consuming conspiracy of do-gooders that sends graduates of elite colleges out to enlighten the squalid masses of the ghetto.
Read more
Columns

May 2011

The Education of W

By Taki Theodoracopulos

The great secret they kept from the boss was not a very complex one. The Middle East is a place dominated by the bitter, bloody feud between two branches of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shiites, and this feud has gone on for centuries, long before...
Read more
News

January 2011

A Linguistic Dilemma

By Tom Landess

I taught college English for 24 years, and I still search newspapers and blogs for signs of the Beast, which, these days, attacks us mostly through language—errors of agreement, misplaced modifiers, and non sequiturs. That’s how you tear down a...
Read more
Reviews

January 2011

A Holy Craft

By James O. Tate

The opportunity for a reconsideration, indeed a reconstruction, of literary history is, in the case of William Gilmore Simms’ poetry, both enticing and rewarding. In Matthew Brennan’s analytical volume, we find the basis, fully elaborated, for...
Read more
Vital Signs

December 2010

Top—Heavy Schools

By William Murchison

It was another day, you know—back when President James A. Garfield could define a university as “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.”
Read more
Vital Signs

October 2010

Collegiate Bread and Circuses

By William Murchison

Ah, the good ol’ days! If only they were as frolicsome and fulfilling as they commonly seem in the rearview mirror! All that notwithstanding, the shaky balance that, in university settings, once seemed to prevail between academics and athletics...
Read more
View

September 2010

Academic Sins

By John Willson

A graduate student asked if he could take a reading course; sitting at my feet, I thought, talking with the rabbi. He was in his early 30’s, a little older than I was, and he had taught in a private school for boys for ten years.
Read more
View

September 2010

The Uses of a Liberal Education

By Catharine Savage Brosman

On September 1, 1939, an Englishman named Harry Hinsley, walking between two lines of Nazi soldiers, crossed slowly and nervously the bridge connecting Kehl in Germany with Strasbourg in France. He made it to the French side before the border...
Read more
Perspective

September 2010

Break out the Booze?

By Thomas Fleming

No healthy boy has ever wanted to go to school. I know I did not. Parents who are confronted with a son who has played hooky or feigned a stomachache will sometimes try to reason with him, explaining why it is important to get a good education....
Read more
Columns

September 2010

Who'll Stop the Rain?

By Scott P. Richert

Rebekah wants to be an algebra teacher. She announced this a few months ago, about the time she turned 15. “You do know,” I said, “to be an algebra teacher, you can’t just study algebra. You’ll have to be proficient in math at all levels,...
Read more
Columns

August 2010

Sex and Post—Christian Arithmetic

By Aaron D. Wolf

What is a school? Today, we think of school as an institution or even as a building. But school comes from the Greek skhole, “leisure”—i.e., clear your schedule of mundane tasks and make time to contemplate what matters.
Read more
Columns

June 2010

You Say Ásátru, I Say Shoresh

By Scott P. Richert

In these days of political correctness and multiculturalism, the surprising thing is that there was so little controversy when the board of School District 205 awarded a $40,000 contract to revisionist historian Michael Hoffman.
Read more
Columns

March 2010

Too Good To Be Untrue

By Aaron D. Wolf

The amoeba. You remember it from biology class; it’s your long-lost relative. Don’t believe it? Well, you’re probably one of those pro-life Christian homeschooling losers. You don’t play nice with others. You are socially maladjusted.
Read more
Correspondence

March 2010

Ave Maria

By Sean Scallon

Tammy Ormson gave much of herself to Catholic education, both as a student and as a teacher. And yet so much was taken from her.
Read more
Reviews

February 2010

Don't Worry, Be Happy

By Clark Stooksbury

Empire is a scattershot look at a variety of topics ranging from the porn industry to elite education. Chris Hedges believes that Americans have forsaken reality for a world of lies and empty entertainment.
Read more
American Proscenium

February 2010

Bad Whitey 101, Second Semester

By R. Cort Kirkwood

The University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development has declared that all prospective teachers must be taught that some teachers are too white, too rich, too privileged, and too oppressive.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

February 2010

Mommy's Eco-Scold

By Nicole M. King

The scene opens with children at a playground, laughing and yelling as they swing and jump rope. The camera zooms in on a dark-haired little girl, seven or eight years old, running her finger through a dirty puddle. Suddenly, thunder tears...
Read more
Correspondence

January 2010

Letter From the Classroom: Mashie Niblicks of the World, Unite!

By Carey Harrison

My charming, patient Post-War British Fiction-studying undergraduates are currently becalmed in the brackish waters of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, the first novel of his Alexandria Quartet.
Read more
Vital Signs

October 2009

Campus Rebellion

By Egon Richard Tausch

It’s a story told regularly in the conservative media. A student pleads for advice: The professors at his college or university are left-wing, and he must choose between regurgitating the leftist propaganda in class discussions, term papers,...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

October 2009

Alex Dragnich, R.I.P.

By Srdja Trifkovic

The death at age 97 of Prof. Alex N. Dragnich, a leading American expert on Serbian and Yugoslav history, marks the departure of one of the last witnesses to an era in which this country’s involvement in Southeastern Europe was neither contrary...
Read more
View

September 2009

Deconstructing Miss Dixie

By Michael Hill

College-football season has begun again in the South. Here in Alabama, football is more like a religion than a sport. Having both attended and taught at The University of Alabama from the 1970’s through the 1990’s, I was at ground zero of...
Read more
Perspective

September 2009

Stepping Backward

By Thomas Fleming

When Jefferson Davis was a boy, he told his father that he did not wish to go to school. The Yankee schoolmaster, although a kindly man, demanded a great deal of memory work and threatened to punish young Jeff for his failure.
Read more
View

September 2009

The School of History

By Fr. Hugh Barbour

The seven founders of the abbey had fled their native kingdom of Hungary in 1950 when the anti-Christian reprisals and “land-reform” initiatives of the new communist regime finally moved to close down their 660-year-old mother abbey of Csorna...
Read more
View

September 2009

Educating for Faith and Community

By Thomas J. Korcok

Few realize that the largest Protestant school system in the United States is operated by the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. With 1,018 elementary schools and 102 high schools sharing a combined enrollment of 149,201 students, it is an...
Read more
Correspondence

September 2009

The Walk Up Cemetery Ridge

By Brian Kirkpatrick

The private-school league’s middle-school basketball playoffs were home games for Prep. Prep is the town’s most expensive private school, and their gym is beautiful: spacious, air conditioned, the wall by the entrance made of plastic so the new,...
Read more
Correspondence

September 2009

History and Nature

By Jonathan Chaves

Thanks for your response. I enjoyed it immensely, and I believe you will understand that this is debate as it should be, not the invective that often substitutes for intellectual vibrancy these sad days.
Read more
View

June 2009

Mandating Failure: Federal Insistence on Multilingualism

English-language proficiency is one of the best indicators of a person’s likelihood to succeed in the United States. Poor language skills are often associated with poverty, inadequate healthcare, depression, and—most obviously—alienation from...
Read more
Vital Signs

May 2009

A Teacher Complains

By Carey Harrison

November, and my undergraduates’ glazed expressions are as good as a calendar. They’re limping through to Thanksgiving. So am I, and perhaps my eyes, too, are glazed. I find myself uneasy about teaching, for the first time in a while.
Read more
News

March 2009

School of Rape: From Health Class to Hotties

By Beverly K. Eakman

America’s educational landscape is being transformed under the cover of “health.” This transformation began with sex education, which once was relegated to a subunit of physiology that addressed the science of human reproduction.
Read more
Vital Signs

December 2008

Homeschooling as Mental Illness

By Beverly K. Eakman

On March 10, California’s 2nd Appellate Court virtually banned homeschooling. Then on March 11, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene of the Centers for Disease Control announced epidemic levels of sexually transmitted diseases among...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 2008

Britain's Fiery Furnace

By William J. Watkins Jr.

Last month, two brave British schoolboys were given detention because they refused to kneel down and pray to Allah during a religious-education lesson. The boys attend classes at Alsager High School near Stoke-on-Trent, situated approximately...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

August 2008

Bad Whitey 101

By R. Cort Kirkwood

In this space in the June issue, readers learned about a flock of students from the American Studies program at Randolph College who flapped off to the Chicken Ranch Brothel in Nevada to study the profundities of the cathouse.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

June 2008

A.B.S. In Brothelology

By R. Cort Kirkwood

When I read about the carnal and scatological monkeyshines at American universities, I wonder where the American professoriate gets the nerve to call what they impart “higher education.”
Read more
Perspective

May 2008

Beastie Boys

By Thomas Fleming

After the recent shootings on the campus of Northern Illinois University, network-news programs were filled with helpful proposals for dealing with the growing problem of school violence.
Read more
Reviews

April 2008

Robert Frost: The Definitive Work

By Tom Landess

During much of the 20th century, Robert Frost was widely regarded as our greatest living poet. Yet the Frost poems that students used to read in college English classes were those more easily accessible: “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “Stopping by...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

April 2008

Cross Kerfuffle

By R. Cort Kirkwood

If you want know what’s wrong with higher education, look no further than Gene Nichol, the recently ousted president of Virginia’s College of William and Mary.
Read more
News

March 2008

Facts? Who Needs ’Em!

By William Lutz

In 2006, lawmakers in the Lone Star State were horrified that a large percentage of Texas high-school graduates required remedial courses to gain the skills needed to succeed in college.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

February 2008

Thoughts on Brown People

By Nicole M. King

A nine-year-old boy in Phoenix earned a three-day suspension from the Abraham Lincoln Traditional School for committing a “hate crime,” reports the Arizona Republic.
Read more
Perspective

December 2007

Freedom of Conscience

By Thomas Fleming

The Illinois legislature recently overrode Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto of what the newspapers are describing as mandatory-school-prayer legislation.
Read more
News

December 2007

Clueless in the Congress: The Reauthorization of a Reckless Bill

By Beverly K. Eakman

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the No Child Left Behind Act are up for reauthorization again. This process typically entails legislators tweaking the bill—a caveat here, a zinger there. Almost always, it translates into more money.
Read more
View

September 2007

Sex, Propaganda, and Higher Education

By Tom Landess

Over the past few years, college administrators and faculty committees have been tackling a relatively new ethical question raised on campuses across the nation: What about sex between faculty members and students?
Read more
View

September 2007

The Faces of Men: Education and Masculinity

By Jack Trotter

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Calder Willingham’s End as a Man. Chances are, most readers today have never heard of the book, as I had not until quite recently.
Read more
Correspondence

September 2007

The Year of Teaching Dangerously

By Harry Nicolaides

Somewhere in the Arabian Desert, a Rolls Royce Silver Spirit rockets along the highway under a smuggler’s moon. The driver is a Saville Row bespoke-suited expatriate.
Read more
Perspective

September 2007

Counting People and People Who Count

By Thomas Fleming

My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education.
Read more
View

September 2007

Virtual Education Reality

In his book Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning (1978), Russell Kirk wrote of the “personal and social danger” caused by sham schooling in American colleges.
Read more
Columns

September 2007

Trusting Whitey

By Scott P. Richert

And on June 28, 2007, by a five-to-four vote, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that most of what Rockford had endured had been unnecessary. In fact, it had violated the Constitution of the United States.
Read more
Correspondence

September 2007

Left Implosion

By Jason Jewell

A debate I attended at the Oxford Literary Festival highlighted growing tensions between classical Enlightenment thought and postmodernism—tensions that threaten to cause a fissure on the British left.
Read more
View

August 2007

Liberality, the Basis of Culture

By Fr. Hugh Barbour

“Go day, come day. Lord, send Sunday.” My paternal grandmother could be counted on to say these words at least once per week.
Read more
American Proscenium

March 2007

Shooting Elephants With Our Man in Baghdad

By Leon Hadar

A college professor who is planning to teach a course on imperialism contacted me recently, asking for my recommendations for the course’s reading list.
Read more
View

January 2007

Harry Jaffa and the Historical Imagination

By Tom Landess

In the 1970’s, Mel Bradford and I were teaching at the University of Dallas, which offered a doctoral program in politics and literature. Students took courses in both disciplines. It was a well-designed curriculum and produced some first-rate...
Read more
Columns

January 2007

Are the Good Times Really Over?

By Scott P. Richert

In mid-September, the original campus of Rockford’s Barber-Colman Company was named an historic district and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a fitting end to one of Rockford’s best-known manufacturing sites.
Read more
View

September 2006

Education to the Rescue

By Troy Kickler

In the early 1900’s, Reconstruction studies (excluding the work of W.E.B. DuBois) approved quick restoration of states, Andrew Johnson’s strict constitutionalism, and white Southerners’ revolt against military and Republican rule (which consisted...
Read more
View

September 2006

Too Much Monkey Business

By James O. Tate

Watching a disaster or beholding a disintegration is inherently destructive, but there is also an element of morbid fascination. Might there be, as well, a redemptive element in tracking the entropic parabola of the great fall of yet another...
Read more
Perspective

September 2006

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

By Thomas Fleming

It has been many decades since American professors were scholars or scientists who could take an intelligent interest in a wide range of subjects, but they doggedly persist in repeating the opinions they have picked up like so much lint.
Read more
View

September 2006

Educated at Home

By Fr. Hugh Barbour

This has been a happy time: I’ve spent all day with my family, eaten a fine meal, played with my grandchildren, been to a baptism, and I went to communion.” These were the words of my uncle—with their telling rhetorical climax—on leaving his...
Read more
Columns

September 2006

Shades of Blue

By Scott P. Richert

The Rockford Public Schools, as longtime readers of Chronicles know, have seen more than their fair share of troubles.
Read more
Correspondence

September 2006

Tax Credits and Education Reform: No Simple Task

By Tim Sifert

Over the last decade, the state of Arizona has made ground-breaking attempts at K-12 education reform.
Read more
Letters to the Bishop

August 2006

The I-Word

By Joe Ecclesia

This past May, I attended commencement ceremonies at Christendom College, where James, the oldest son of my oldest friend, was graduating with a degree in philosophy. Some of our fellow countrymen would declare such a degree about as useful as...
Read more
Columns

July 2006

The Saint of the Sourdoughs

By Roger D. McGrath

More than 20 years ago, I presented a paper on the Old West at an historical conference and was surprised to find that I upset several female professors in the audience.
Read more
Columns

March 2006

Profiling and Spying: A Necessary Evil

By Srdja Trifkovic

Gary S. Becker, a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a 1992 Nobel Prize winner, cannot be accused of “racism.”
Read more
Vital Signs

February 2006

The Real Crisis of Higher Education

By R. Clay Reynolds

The current debate about the state and future of higher education seems to center on the question of whether a college degree is a “privilege” or a “right.”
Read more
Perspective

November 2005

Agrarianism From Hesiod to Bradford

By Thomas Fleming

What does it mean to be an “agrarian”? In reading Southern literary journals, I get the impression that the “agrarians” were an isolated group of writers who, nostalgic for the preindustrial South, celebrated in prose and verse the bygone...
Read more
View

September 2005

I’m Just a Travelin’ Man

By Derek Turner

“Education begins with life,” said Benjamin Franklin somewhere. That was how it always seemed to me when I was growing up in Southern Ireland in the 1970’s and 80’s.
Read more
View

September 2005

Confessions of an Autodidact

By David Gordon

In what follows, I shall recommend a few books that I have found valuable and then offer some suggestions on how to analyze critically what you are reading.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 2005

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

By Nicole M. King

My meeting with the college dean was a disillusioning experience. I had figured that it would take about ten minutes to fill out the required paperwork to transfer from this private college to a state university, but, when I emerged a half-hour...
Read more
Columns

August 2005

The Wrong War

By Philip Jenkins

I am nervous about the course I am teaching, this coming fall, about World War II. As I will explain to the class from the outset, there are a few things I do not know about the topic—namely, when the war began, when it ended, where it happened,...
Read more
News

April 2005

Final Solution

By Beverly K. Eakman

Public education exacerbates today’s toxic youth subculture. The combined forces of advertisers, television, teen magazines, and internet spammers have lured our nation’s youth into lives of promiscuity.
Read more
View

March 2005

The Abolition of Learning

By Michael McMahon

In 1997, the headmaster of the English secondary school in which I was teaching ordered a bibliocaust. The inspectors were coming, and he wanted our library to look up-to-date.
Read more
Correspondence

March 2005

Everybody Hans Küng Tonight!

By Michael J. Sauter

“If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?” This old bit of black humor popped into my mind as I drove home from a local college after attending a lecture, entitled “My Long Road to a Global Ethic,” delivered by dissident...
Read more
View

January 2005

Education and Authority

By Michael McMahon

I had taught in private schools for years, but I hesitated before entering the classroom to teach my first lesson in the state sector. I stopped a colleague in the corridor and asked him for advice.
Read more
View

September 2004

There’s No Place Like Home

By Michael McMahon

Every school has a playground for its pupils; English schools provide a playground for politicians, too. Children seek security, regularity, and continuity: The games they play in the schoolyard observe rules that do not change.
Read more
Perspective

September 2004

Fighting Among the Hedgerows

By Thomas Fleming

As a young college student, I accepted implicitly all the goals of the Civil Rights revolution.
Read more
Columns

September 2004

One Moment in Time

By Scott P. Richert

For in Turner School, as in Balgrummo Lodging, unspeakable horrors—indeed, ritual murders—have taken place, and the closer we come, the more strongly I feel the possibility of unavenged souls trapped in the place of their bodies’ destruction—and...
Read more
Reviews

July 2004

Why Johnny Shouldn’t Vouch

By Laurence M. Vance

For some time now, the panacea offered by conservatives and libertarians for improving the education of American youth has been vouchers. There is no question that government schools are failing miserably.
Read more
Vital Signs

June 2004

Trust(s) in the Media

By Scott P. Richert

Back when I was in college, a sociology professor assigned our class Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality for reading and review.
Read more
Vital Signs

January 2004

Terms of Empowerment

By Beverly K. Eakman

Imagine, if you can, thousands of parents last January insisting that the Fairfax County, Virginia, school board distribute a 169-question sex survey to their 13-, 15-, and 17-year-olds.
Read more
Reviews

December 2003

Naked in the Public Square

By Fr. Michael P. Orsi

The recent battle over the removal of a 5,280-pound monument to the Ten Commandments placed in the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court by Chief Justice Roy Moore has deep religious and civil roots stemming from the Protestant Reformation and...
Read more
Vital Signs

October 2003

Michigan’s Race Factor

By Greg Kaza

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 23 decision striking down the University of Michigan’s race-based undergraduate admissions policy ended a decade-long struggle started by university administrators and finished by conservative legislators and their...
Read more
View

September 2003

Notes on American Education

By Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones

The great American universities are, on the whole, the best in the world, and any European who comes to teach in them is sure to be impressed by the liveliness and enthusiasm of many American students.
Read more
View

September 2003

Classical Education Redivivus

By Douglas Wilson

No one really owns the copyright to the word classical. Even in the realm of education, many are pursuing distinct objectives, and all with a legitimate claim to that word. From neoclassicists to Thomists to classical Protestants, the word...
Read more
Correspondence

September 2003

Children in the Hellmouth

By Michael McMahon

In the week before English schools closed for the summer, three educational news items grabbed the national headlines. This is not especially remarkable in itself: English education has been in a state of revolution for years, and unsettling...
Read more
Correspondence

September 2003

Trick or Treat?

By Sarah Weber

During my first semester as a graduate teaching assistant, I was fired from my job at a coffee shop for mv inability to act phony. Anyway, this is what I suspected my particularly phony employer meant by a "bad attitude."
Read more
Vital Signs

September 2003

Real Education Reform

By Beverly K. Eakman

Over the years, the NEA has amassed some 300 policy positions, itemized as annual resolutions and set out in a published legislative agenda. The publication purportedly reflects all educators’ beliefs on assorted issues, from homosexual advocacy...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 2003

The Heart's Own Instinct

By R.C. Sproul Jr.

Presbyterians have a particular reputation. We are a rather staid bunch, more comfortable in the environs of the country club than those of the chicken farm, more atuned to the hoity-toity, less to hoi polloi.
Read more
Reviews

June 2003

Long Day’s Journey Into Ignorance

By E. Christian Kopff

In Céline’s nightmarish masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night, the hero reaches America in a slave ship. He escapes, but the rest of the crew refuses to go with him. They have their reasons.
Read more
View

September 2002

Education, Schooling, Learning

By John Lukacs

I do not like the word education—especially when it is not only confused with but mistaken for learning.
Read more
View

September 2002

A “Communist” Education Remembered

By Srdja Trifkovic

Belgrade’s Tenth Gymnasium was a well-proportioned neoclassical building in a leafy park three miles from the city center. Built by King Alexander shortly before his ill-fated trip to Marseilles, it bore his name until the Partisans’ victory in...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 2002

Bushwhacking Johnny

By Beverly K. Eakman

At dinner, ten-year-old Johnny is sullen and uncommunicative. It has been a bad day. His parents pass off his ill humor as “going through a phase.” Actually, it was an easy day—taken up with “another stupid school assembly.”
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

August 2002

Taking God Out of School

By Stephen B. Presser

The Pledge of Allegiance, as this issue goes to press, is illegal for children in the public schools of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington state to recite, because it contains the words “under God.”
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

August 2002

The Pledge of Allegiance

By Clyde Wilson

The Pledge of Allegiance’s ban by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will probably have been reversed and the public furor will have faded away by the time this issue of your favorite journal reaches you.
Read more
Correspondence

July 2002

Educating for Jeopardy

By Mary Berry Smith

In 1986, I enrolled my oldest daughter in the same public school that my husband and I had attended. I knew from my experience in public education that there were problems, but I was hopeful that, with our participation in her schooling, she...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

July 2002

A Topic of Concern

By William Murchison

Public-school finance, as a topic of concern, reminds us that the egalitarian impulse lives on imperishably. Mankind must be hard-wired to scratch the ears of the perceived—generally self-defined—underdog, before siccing him on the perceived top...
Read more
View

May 2002

“Think of the Children!”

By Scott P. Richert

“School cuts would hurt neediest kids,” the headline in the local Gannett paper proclaimed. With the spring primary just days away, the administration of Rockford School District 205 was urging the public to pass the third education referendum...
Read more
View

May 2002

Cowboys and Indians

By George Garrett

This little piece requires a head note. Oddly, it is the only thing I have ever written that was honest-to-God censored. I was asked by the Chronicle of Higher Education to write a short opinion piece on the subject of contemporary creative...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

May 2002

A Politically Incorrect University

By William Murchison

Texas A & M, founded in 1876, is one of those educational entities a certain kind of Texan recoils from praising too lavishly—the kind of Texan who went to the rival University of Texas and grew up deriding the Aggies as abrasive bumpkins.
Read more
Columns

April 2002

Through A Glass, Darkly

By Scott P. Richert

Rockford, as the local Gannett paper never ceases to remind us, is stubbornly average—in population, ethnic composition, income level—with a few notable exceptions, particularly astronomic property taxes and abysmal public-school test scores.
Read more
Columns

March 2002

Robbing Paul to Pay Paul

By Scott P. Richert

After 12 years under federal rule, Rockfordians are looking forward to the end of the People Who Care school-desegregation lawsuit on June 30, 2002. If the district administration and the school board have their way, however, the fat...
Read more
Vital Signs

December 2001

Happy Holidays? Bah! Humbug!

By Tom Piatak

In 1938, Whittaker Chambers broke with the Communist Party. In Witness, Chambers describes his Christmas that year as one of great joy, in which he first told his children the Christmas story.
Read more
View

September 2001

Sic et Non?

By Harold O.J. Brown

A number of years ago, when I was teaching a ninth-grade religion class (in Switzerland, where religion is taught in public schools), one of the boys said to me, "All religions teach the same thing."
Read more
Columns

September 2001

Breakin' Up Is Hard To Do

By Scott P. Richert

After the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals officially declared that the Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit would come to an end on June 30, 2002, many Rockfordians simply assumed that a return to local control would solve all of our problems.
Read more
Reviews

September 2001

Waking Up to Dumbing Down

By Derek Turner

Chronicles readers may be rather tired of hearing about "dumbing down," but the ugly term is just now starting to attain cliché status in Britain.
Read more
Correspondence

September 2001

Credit Where Credit's Due

By Michael McMahon

Tony Blair's promised target before being elected to his first term in office was "Education, education, education"; some months into his second term, it is clear that his promise has been honored, and that his target has been hit—clean between...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 2001

Who's Slave and Who's Massa?

By Robert Weissberg

Of all the strange bedfellows that politics attracts, one of the oddest is the enduring liaison between the black civil-rights establishment and white liberal academics.
Read more
Vital Signs

August 2001

Calculated Acts of Goodness

By David B. Schock

How could this be? In a Catholic school? Here? This is what they're teaching our kids? I stopped, transfixed.
Read more
Columns

June 2001

Free at Last

By Scott P. Richert

The Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit is finally over—or at least it will be, on Sunday, June 30, 2002.
Read more
Vital Signs

May 2001

A Confederacy of Dunces

By Philip Jenkins, Paul Lake

The death of a social movement is an instructive and sobering phenomenon. After years of greatness and influence, an idea eventually sickens and dies, until its adherents are reduced to a pathetic handful.
Read more
Vital Signs

January 2001

School Days

By Beverly K. Eakman

No one could see where the floor began and the rubbish ended. A window down the hall shattered. and I could hear the tinkle and clatter as the last broken pieces hit the ones that had preceded them.
Read more
Vital Signs

January 2001

Can American Legal Education Be Fixed?

By Stephen B. Presser

For about a decade now, the loudest wailing over the state of affairs has come from Chief Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who wrote a landmark article in the Michigan Law Review in 1992.
Read more
Vital Signs

October 2000

The Life of the Mind in Glitter Gulch

By Francis J. Beckwith

For seven years (1989-96), I was a full time faculty member at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). I grew up in Las Vegas, earning a B.A. in philosophy from UNLV in 1983 before going to graduate school.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

October 2000

Rockford School Case

By Scott P. Richert

The Rockford school case continues, and, as the most recent ruling by Magistrate P. Michael Mahoney makes clear, there is no end in sight.
Read more
View

September 2000

After the Avalanche

By Dr. James Patrick

When C.S. Lewis wrote that there was more distance between us and Jane Austen than between Jane Austen and Plato, he was remarking on a cataclysm that colleges and universities had not escaped.
Read more
View

September 2000

Going the Distance

By Mary Pride

Homeschooling parents are all too aware of the hazards they face in signing up a beloved child for four years at Ivy U, Good Old State U, or even Used-to-be Christian College.
Read more
View

September 2000

Barbecue Shacks, Palmetto Groves, and Other Schools

By Donald Livingston

The smog of political correctness hangs heavily over most American colleges and universities.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 2000

Uncle Sam's Classroom

By Beverly K. Eakman

Yolanda and Raul Salazar of Miami, Florida, naturalized citizens who escaped Castro's Cuba, are finding out the hard way that Uncle Sam's classrooms are not about proficiency at anything, or literacy, or basics.
Read more
Vital Signs

June 2000

Adam Smith University: A Modest Proposal

By Richard D. Lamm

Fellow investors: Here is our business plan. The route to big profits is to find an industry that is oversized, inefficient, smug, and self-satisfied and then give it an injection of good old-fashioned business competition.
Read more
Vital Signs

May 2000

Out of the Closet and Into the Schools

By Mark Tooley

Relying upon federal legislation intended to allow Bible clubs equal access in high schools, a student homosexual group is demanding not only meeting space but official approval at a Salt Lake City high school.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

May 2000

BJU, R.I.P.

By Aaron D. Wolf

Although the Greenville, South Carolina, haven of fundamentalism is still holding classes, the New World Order's steamroller has flattened the life out of Bob Jones University.
Read more
Vital Signs

April 2000

Public Schools: The Medium Is the Message

By William H. Peterson

The shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, are still reverberating—accentuating some of the enormous problems with public education.
Read more
Round Table Discussion

January 2000

Virtual Education

By Paul Gottfried

Having observed and worked for over 30 years in what is euphemistically called American higher education, it seems to me that what is worst about it is not what it teaches but how it misrepresents itself.
Read more
Vital Signs

December 1999

Schools Under Siege

By Donald Gruber Ed.D.

American public education is under siege, but not by kids with guns, as the somber reporters of the six o'clock news would have us believe.
Read more
Vital Signs

November 1999

Computer Cult

By Marian Kester Coombs

Forget Back to Basics, language immersion. New (and newer and newer Math, the seven types of intelligence. Learn by Doing, the Great Books, discovery learning, arts-based education.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

November 1999

The Teaching Evolution

By Stephen B. Presser

The teaching evolution is back in the news, in a case that the media—with their usual sensationalism—are comparing to the Scopes trial of 75 years ago.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

October 1999

On Mental Illness and the Frankfurt School

Teachers in kindergarten and the early elementary grades are now at work applying drugs like Ritalin and Prozac to children and young people. Almost nothing has been said about the fact that most of those involved in violent school crime were...
Read more
C.I.A. Confidential

September 1999

What Are We Willing to Settle For?

By Joyce B. Haws

For nearly half a century, hundreds of school districts across the nation have battled exorbitantly expensive social engineering schemes forced upon them by federal courts under the guise of "desegregation remedial orders."
Read more
Correspondence

September 1999

State Education in England, or English Education in a State

By Michael McMahon

Those who read my "Letter From Banausia" in the June Chronicles will perhaps recall that it described the studied destruction of the tradition of learning in English schools and its replacement by politicized, centrist, authoritarian,...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1999

Teaching the "Unteachable"

By Tim Roberts

On the last day of the school year, I sat at my desk. My students had not yet arrived, and I was considering making a decision that would affect the rest of my life.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1999

Getting With the Program

By Jeff Minick

Suppose that you are one of five owners of a professional football team, which has just come off a losing season. You and the other disgruntled owners have gathered at a conference table to discuss plans for the next year.
Read more
Principalities & Powers

August 1999

I Was a Teenage Werewolf

By Samuel Francis

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school . . . ," Paul Simon mused in a popular song some years ago. Simon, of course, was in high school long before multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, Outcome-Based Education, bilingual education.
Read more
Correspondence

June 1999

The 21st-century Doctorate

By John N. Frary

On April 1, the Litcritological Subcommittee of the multiracial, multicultural, multidisciplinary Re/Visioning Committee for a 21st-century Doctorate presented the English Department with a plan that will make Lagado University the first in the...
Read more
Vital Signs

June 1999

Yes, California, There Is a Right Answer

By Marian Kester Coombs

They say you can't fight city hall—but a group of California parents calling itself Mathematically Correct (MC) has taken on the statehouse and won the right to restore a rigorous math curriculum to public education.
Read more
Vital Signs

February 1999

The Success of Direct Instruction

By Marian Kester Coombs

What if the federal government spent a billion tax dollars over nearly three decades to study thoroughly the question of which teaching method best instills knowledge, sharpens cognitive skills, and enhances self-esteem in young children?
Read more
Vital Signs

February 1999

Bondage Boy Goes to School

By Morgan N. Knull

In a state where the rock 'n' roll hit "Louie, Louie" was banned from the airwaves after the governor deemed it subversive, Indiana University (IU) is no stranger to controversy.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

February 1999

The Education Cartel

By David Hartman

The education cartel in Texas, and the Texas Education Agency (TEA) in particular, have raised the bureaucratic art to new heights by congratulating themselves for failing to attain their mediocre objectives.
Read more
View

September 1998

The Takeover of Our Schools

By Joyce B. Haws

The survival of representative government depends on the courage and determination of elected officials to defend our freedoms and of citizens to hold these officials accountable.
Read more
View

September 1998

Funding Public Schools

By Greg Kaza

The most telling moment in The Agenda, Bob Woodward's book on the Clinton presidency, occurs when the President-elect first realizes that Wall Street's bond markets wield more power than he does as Commander in Chief of the lone remaining...
Read more
View

September 1998

Market-Driven Solutions to Public Education

By Lisa Graham Keegan

"If we elect new school board members or run for the board A ourselves, we can expect improved schools." This is our national misunderstanding.
Read more
View

September 1998

Flies in the Ointment

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Supporters of school vouchers are jumping for joy over a Wisconsin Supreme Court verdict, handed down this summer, that permits tax dollars to be used at religious schools.
Read more
Perspective

September 1998

It Takes a Village

By Thomas Fleming

One of the most popular fads in public education is the reintroduction of school uniforms. In some American burgs, the proposal is greeted with general approval.
Read more
Correspondence

September 1998

The Asphalt League

By Robert Berman

In his 1942 swan song, The New Leviathan, dying British philosopher-historian R.G. Collingwood called the life of the mind "a magic journey." Remarkably free of illusions regarding the life of the university, however, Collingwood argued for...
Read more
Reviews

September 1998

Low-End Education

By James Hill

Not too far from my house in Phoenix, Arizona, stands a Christian school that may just say everything about the educational reform debate in this country—and why it is so often impossible to make any sense of it, in particular.
Read more
Correspondence

September 1998

Old Testament, Yes; New Testament, No

By Jacob Neusner

U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth Kovachevich here in Tampa ruled in January that it is all right to teach the Old Testament but not the New Testament in public high schools.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1998

Globaloney in the Classroom

By Marian Kester Coombs

The longer one observes American public schools today, the more comprehensive and deep-rooted the globalist infection appears. The erstwhile revolutionary-leftist underground has become the establishment, in public education and every other...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1998

More Power to the Faculty?

By Paul Gottfried

"More power to the faculty" is the current rallying cry of academic reformers. This idea pops up with a persistence that goes beyond ideological divides, appealing even to self-described academic traditionalists, who view professional...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1998

Why Evangelical Colleges Aren't

By Douglas Wilson

Two separate educational movements exist within the evangelical world, one old and one new, and they are clearly on a collision course. One thing does lead to another, and he who says A must say B.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

July 1998

Back in the News

By Thomas Molnar

School uniforms are back in the news. The school board of the nation's largest school system, that of New York City, voted unanimously this March to recommend uniforms for elementary school students.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

July 1998

Rockford Schools Controversy

By Scott P. Richert

The Rockford schools controversy, approaching its tenth anniversary, is taking on the mythic stature of the Little Rock, Cleveland, and Kansas City cases.
Read more
Vital Signs

December 1997

Harkness Road High School

By Isabel Lyman

Hillary Clinton would love Amherst, Massachusetts, a town aptly nicknamed "The People's Republic of Amherst." A stroll down Main Street quickly reveals that Birkenstocks and Volvos dominate the landscape.
Read more
Vital Signs

October 1997

One Nation Indivisible

By Donald Livingston, Thomas Naylor

There is irony in the fact that although prayer has been banned in our public schools, millions of American schoolkids are required to recite the pledge to the flag each day whether they believe it or understand its implications.
Read more
Vital Signs

October 1997

Dumb and Number

By Marian Kester Coombs

Girls mature physically and socially earlier than boys, God's way of bettering the survival odds for female children.
Read more
Vital Signs

October 1997

The Liechtenstein Academy

By Peter Laurie

"Courage," said the Philosopher, "is the prime philosophical virtue" (by which he meant the moral kind) "lacking which all the others become irrelevancies one has no nerve to bring oneself to put into practice."
Read more
View

September 1997

To Hell With College

By John Lukacs

I ask my readers not to be shocked by the title of this essay. "To Hell With Culture" was the title of my last essay published in Chronicles, in September 1994. Readers of it saw that I was not an enemy of culture; and now I am not an enemy of...
Read more
View

September 1997

In Praise of Elites

By George Watson

Being a lifelong elitist myself, I have long had a sneaking sympathy for a Trollope character, Sir Timothy Beeswax. In The Dune's Children (1880), Beeswax is a dignified old politician who lives not for power but, quite unashamedly, for the...
Read more
Correspondence

September 1997

Johnny Bull Can't Read

By Jeremy Black

Education has long been a political hot potato in Britain. For decades it has been the central issue that links national politics to the politics of the localities, the politics of class, and the politics of party.
Read more
View

September 1997

Popular Front U.

By James O. Tate

How well I remember, 40 years ago, prowling in the stacks of a college library and reading the books, observing museum pieces in the halls of that library, and attending concerts in the auditorium next door.
Read more
View

September 1997

Parietals Then and Now

By Herbert London

As a Columbia University undergraduate in 1956, I resided in Hartley Hall, a stately building on the Morningside campus. During my orientation week I was introduced to my floor counselor who said in an unambiguous way that hijinks would not be...
Read more
View

September 1997

Good Manners, Good Literature

By Richard Wilbur

For this very welcome and unexpected award, I thank The Ingersoll Foundation and all concerned. When I was in high school, there were certain books that I carried around in order to impress people with my literariness.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1997

The Forced Funding of Student Radicalism

By Scott Southworth

I happen to be a conservative, a Christian, and white. I am also in the military, and I disapprove of homosexuality. At the University of Wisconsin, there is little tolerance for this combination of characteristics.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1997

Homegrown

By Katherine Dalton

I try not to put on airs about what I do for a living. I would never tell you that writing is dignified enough to be called a profession, like being a doctor or an architect. Writing is a trade, or to use a better word, a craft.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

July 1997

"Racial Balance"

By Scott P. Richert

The Rockford schools case continues, but for the first time since the "People Who Care" lawsuit was filed in 1989, there are signs of hope.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

June 1997

Today's Political Buzzword

By Scott P. Richert

Education is today's political buzzword, and, like any issue involving children, it is quickly becoming a trump card. Following President Clinton's cue, Jesse Jackson is traveling the country, raising support for an "education summit."
Read more
Vital Signs

May 1997

Rose Hill College

By Clyde Wilson

Historians of the future who look back at us, assuming the survival of critical intelligence in the future, will characterize our times as the Age of Bureaucracy.
Read more
Correspondence

April 1997

University The New Overseas Campus

By John N. Frary

The inauguration of Lagado University's new campus in Plagho-Plaguo, the capital of Dismailia, is generating great excitement throughout the Diversity Community. As President Bleatley has said, LU's "Semester in Dismailia" is guaranteed to...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

March 1997

Afrocentric "Education"

By Michael Washburn

Leon Todd is the bravest man in Milwaukee. While Afrocentric "education" has always had its white conservative critics, Todd is perhaps the first black school official to seek to cut the explicitly Afrocentric content from his district's curriculum.
Read more
Correspondence

March 1997

The War on White Teachers

By Nicholas Stix

There have been problems all along with people who have deeply resented that white teachers teach black children. That there are people like myself who had black teachers seems to be of little consequence to them."
Read more
Perspective

September 1996

Battles of the Books

By Thomas Fleming

Ours is not the first age to have experienced a struggle for curriculum. On the contrary. There has never been a time in the past 150 years when the progressives have not been chipping away and undermining what had been a coherent classical...
Read more
Correspondence

September 1996

Resourcemammal Eroticism

By John N. Frary

Readers who have been attentive to the slashing edge of the Postmodernist Project will be aware of Lagado University's vanguard role at the Modern Language Association's 1995 meeting.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1996

Affirmative Action and the Academy

By Philip Jenkins

While most of us would deny that the United States has an official ideology, much of our daily life is profoundly shaped by a body of principles that are manifested in policies known as affirmative action, multiculturalism, and "diversity."
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1996

Abolishing Compulsory School Attendance Laws

By Aaron Steelman

Last November, Republican State Representative Russ George introduced an amendment to Colorado's "Children Code" that would have abolished that state's compulsory school attendance laws.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1996

Busing and Its Consequences

By William J. Watkins Jr.

Ten years ago, federal district judge Leonard B. Sand ordered the city of Yonkers, New York, to integrate its public schools. Sand accused the city of 40 years of discrimination by concentrating public housing projects in southwest Yonkers.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1996

The Dirty Fact About College Admissions

By Daniel J. Flynn

Pitting the state of Texas against four students who had been denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law because of their skin color, the recent Hopwood v. Texas case could spell doom for racial preferences in public education if...
Read more
Vital Signs

June 1996

Refuge

By Peter Laurie

When still relatively small, I sang in a church choir whose quality was the envy of our whole capital city diocese, so that its members, who included a chorus of boy sopranos like myself, were recruited, auditioned, trained, and paid.
Read more
Correspondence

April 1996

State-Sponsored Prayer

By Jacob Neusner

For practicing Christians, Judaists, and Muslims, what is at stake in state-sponsored prayer in public schools is whether the particularities that make us what we are make a difference.
Read more
Vital Signs

April 1996

Colleges Against Christ

By Sanford Pinsker

Do Christian sensitivities on college campuses count? Apparently they do not—at least at Franklin and Marshall, where I teach.
Read more
Vital Signs

January 1996

Whatever Happened to the New Math?

By Ralph A. Raimi

School math textbooks 50 years ago were not written by mathematicians. The typical author was the chairman of a school science department somewhere, in a district large enough to make writing a textbook remunerative even if nobody else in the...
Read more
View

December 1995

Child Abuse at Waco

By David B. Kopel

"For the sake of the children" has emerged as one of the most dangerous phrases in American politics.
Read more
Vital Signs

December 1995

The War on Homeschoolers

By Christopher Check

Homeschooling is one of the many fronts in the state's war against the citizen. Despite the efforts of organizations such as the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Rutherford Institute, and Eagle Forum, as well as longstanding laws that...
Read more
View

September 1995

When West Meets East

By Jonathan Chaves

When Virginia Governor George Allen recently attempted to return the curriculum of his state's public school system to a solid grounding in Western and American history, his plan, greeted with howls of indignation from the National Educational...
Read more
View

September 1995

Not Out of Africa

By Mary Lefkowitz

If radical Afrocentrists have their way, soon all schoolchildren will learn—as some are now learning—a version of ancient Mediterranean history that gives credit for the Greek achievement to the ancient Egyptians.
Read more
View

September 1995

Multiculturalism in Theory and Practice

By Charles L. King

I came by my lifelong interest in foreign languages and cultures honestly. Mv grandfather, Andrew Jackson King, Jr., migrated to a Hispanic-populated area of the Territory of New Mexico in 1906.
Read more
Correspondence

September 1995

Our Mr. Brooks

By Eugene Narrett

Hometown of John F. Kennedy, Brookline, Massachusetts, blends small-scale charm with a shabby urbanity. Plugged like a weak rib into Boston's west edge, Brookline is laced with picturesque trolleys and dotted with quaint buildings.
Read more
Perspective

September 1995

Caliban in the Classroom

By Thomas Fleming

What do black Americans think of whites? What do they want from them? The questions are almost as baffling as "What do women want?"—the question we raised a few months ago.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1995

Humanities and the Cutting Edge

By Sanford Pinsker

There are whole afternoons when a part of me wishes I had paid more attention in Bio 100 because then I might have ended up in cancer research, where being on the cutting edge makes sense.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1995

The Music of Chance—An APA Diary

By John E. MacKinnon

Any young philosopher who aspires to an academic career must, especially in these days of fiscal restraint and feminized privilege, include in his plans a trip to the annual American Philosophical Association (APA) Convention, a curious hybrid of...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1995

Remembering Christopher Lasch

By Ralph A. Raimi

Christopher Lasch died in March 1994 at the age of 61. Those who knew him only through his printed works knew one sort of person, and those who had personal dealings with him knew another.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1995

Eccentricity as Education

By Geoffrey Wagner

Universities are, or should be, the last refuge of great eccentrics who emphasize our humdrum norms. Such I discovered when I went up to Henry VIII's 1545 refounding of Wolsey's Cardinal College.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1995

In Praise of Inexcellence

By Clinton W. Trowbridge

All that talk about being the best is Olympic fever, ad hype. If everyone were the best, where would the rest of us be? In sports this is obvious. Perhaps not so much so in advanced nuclear physics.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1995

Under Fire

By Herbert London

If one reads through the pompous prof-speak in this committee report, it is clear what the Connecticut Advisory Committee is proposing: faculty members should not be permitted to resist the multicultural agenda.
Read more
View

July 1995

Our Classical Roots

By E. Christian Kopff

On January 6, 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his state legislator, Colonel Charles Yancey. As we might expect, Jefferson's letter contains reflections of general interest on many topics, ranging in this case from the dangers of a large...
Read more
Vital Signs

June 1995

University of Michigan

By Aaron Steelman

Nowhere is the right of free expression more hotly debated than on our nation's campuses. The recent controversy at my school, the University of Michigan, is a prime example.
Read more
Vital Signs

June 1995

Columbia University

By Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Most of us recognize that cries for "tolerance" have become the left's weapon of choice in its erosion of those few civilized norms that remain in American life.
Read more
Vital Signs

June 1995

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

By Michael Kent

At the heart of the most recent political correctness controversy at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where I am a graduate student, is the proposed "Great Books Certificate Program."
Read more
Vital Signs

June 1995

Elizabethtown College

By Timothy Richardson

Elizabethtown College, the liberal arts school which I attend, now has both a radical feminist group called Womenspeak and a homosexual advocacy group called Allies, the latter, of course, filled with sympathetic heterosexuals, primarily women.
Read more
Vital Signs

May 1995

Socialization as Schooling

By Beverly K. Eakman

For 30 years, elementary and secondary education has been taking on a new orientation, away from substantive subject matter toward a mental health agenda. Personality development—i.e., the "whole child" concept of education—has become the primary...
Read more
View

May 1995

Sexual Harassment and the Academy

By R. Clay Reynolds

The current situation involving sexual harassment cases seems to underscore the correctness of this bleak vision. But regardless of what status universities may enjoy in the future, the most tragic result of this drama may be its negative impact...
Read more
Vital Signs

March 1995

The Creativity Profession

By R. Clay Reynolds

It has always been my impression that people who talk and write most about the creative process are not usually very creative. It's sort of like a corollary to that old maxim, "Those who can't do, teach"; those who can't create, analyze creativity.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

December 1994

Virulent Propaganda

By Nicholas Stix

"There is no God, and if there was. She made a mistake." That statement came from a colleague of mine during a class in philosophy. That is also the extent to which most public college students will hear the "G" word mentioned during their years...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1994

Thicker-Skinned

By Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Four years at Harvard have made me much thicker-skinned than I used to be. To be sure, it was more than a little unsettling when my freshman dormitory held a mandatory sensitivity session at which each student was forced to say: "Hello, my name...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1994

Site of Cultural Conflict

By Nathan

Stanford is adding to its fame as a site of cultural conflict. When a disturbance broke out during the showing on campus last May of a short film about grape pickers and the perils of insecticide, local print media played up the claim that...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1994

Student Radical Activity

By Herbert London

What a college needs is an administration capable of asserting and defending the principles on which the academy rests. Anything less weakens the foundation of a structure already eroded and sets the stage for the thoroughgoing radicalization of...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1994

Becoming Clients

By Nicholas Stix

Students are becoming clients at an increasing number of public colleges. Indeed, staff members consider them "caseloads." Programs such as "Economic Opportunity Funds" (EOFs) exist as pork barrels, doling out patronage to middle- and...
Read more
View

September 1994

The Politics of Education and the Metaphysics of Emptiness

By Stephen A. Erickson

The president of a prominent liberal arts college recently conveyed to its philosophy department (and to other constituencies) that regulations may soon be in place which would influence, if not altogether control, the conferring of bachelor's...
Read more
Correspondence

September 1994

On Campus With the National AIDS Quilt

By Luther M. Boggs

It was a sleepy Sunday afternoon when a section of the national AIDS quilt visited Winthrop University. The sun, slipping low into the tops of the pines, shown red across the sparsely populated campus.
Read more
Correspondence

September 1994

Back to Basics

By Edward L. Lederman

The day after last year's election that torpedoed our nation's most advanced experiment in "Outcome Based Education" (OBE), a pleasant-faced teacher appeared on the evening news. "Shocked and depressed," she said she was.
Read more
Perspective

September 1994

On Liberal Education

By Thomas Fleming

My definition of liberal education as the education of liberals no longer sounds provocative. Liberalism, having failed and failed disastrously in all its political experiments from church disestablishment to women's suffrage to food stamps,...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1994

Hire Education

By Mary Pride

Technology as Reform Higher education has become hire education. That is the message of a series of recent books by Richard Mitchell, Charles Sykes, Thomas Sowell, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza, and Richard Huber.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

July 1994

Academic Charlatanism

By Jacob Neusner

Academic charlatanism these days includes not only defenses of plagiarism and violent campaigns of intimidation against proscribed opinion. These symptoms of the bankruptcy of humanistic learning worry some and find celebration among others.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

March 1994

Follow the Money

By Jim Christie

The California Teachers Association (CTA) and its allies raised $17 million to defeat Proposition 174, California's school voucher initiative, which proposed granting parents a voucher worth as much as $2,600 that could be applied to tuition at...
Read more
Vital Signs

February 1994

Governor William Weld's Manly Agenda

By Martin Mawyer

Does Massachusetts Governor William Weld want to "Empower America" or "Empower Queer Nation"? Social conservatives who hold out an inkling of hope that "Empower America" might actually pay attention to their issues should take a closer look at...
Read more
Correspondence

November 1993

Academia Abroad

By Christine Haynes

Many alumni of a junior year abroad summarize their experience as "enjoyable," "enlightening," or even "empowering." Others rely on their senses in recalling the niceties of life in another country.
Read more
Vital Signs

October 1993

Academic Snobbery

By Jacob Neusner

"Different strokes for different folks" means, in academic language, "We have our own culture, so bug off." Europeans tell this to Americans who are curious about native habits.
Read more
Perspective

September 1993

Jesting With Pilate

By Thomas Fleming

Americans pretend to be shocked whenever one of their national celebrities gets caught out in a lie. Is it really so surprising that Michael Jordan should attempt to conceal his gambling or that Bill Clinton should hide his cochonnerie?
Read more
View

September 1993

The Myths of the Social Sciences

By Jack D. Douglas

Several years ago one of my former roommates at Harvard, now an economist with the United Nations, dropped by for a visit. We drifted into an informal review of the social science courses we had taken at Harvard in the late 1950's.
Read more
View

September 1993

Mimesis and Perjury

By E. Christian Kopff

A tidal wave of intellectual, and sometimes financial, fraud is hanging above the happy tropical village of American academia, threatening to crash down on it and sweep it away into the off-shore reefs.
Read more
Correspondence

September 1993

On Buffalo and Bias

By Gregory Pavlik

Sheldon Hackney, president of the University of Pennsylvania, was recently chosen to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Hackney has been described by the Chronicle of Higher Education as something of a moderate with a passion for...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1993

Taboos and Blasphemies

By Daniel R. Vining, Jr.

When I first read that the now late Ayatollah Khomeini had sentenced Salman Rushdie to death, I, like most of you, reacted with both horror and disgust. The leader of Iran sent out an order to kill a citizen of the United Kingdom for something he...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1993

Outcome-Based Education

By Robert G. Holland

Outcome-Based Education, which has been around awhile under other names, has gradually become Big Education's main answer to the chorus of cries for "reform" that followed the Department of Education's publication of the A Nation at Risk report...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1993

The Real Target of Public Schools

By Betsy Clarke

Last school year, my son—who was a fourth grader at a public school— came home with a red piece of paper entitled "Family Call to Action."
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1993

Trends to Come

By Jacob Neusner

The American Academy of Religion should change its name to the American Unacademy of Ethno-Religio-Secular Fashions, if its call for papers for its annual meeting in Washington this autumn is any indication of trends to come.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

June 1993

A Dangerous Mindset

By Christine Haynes

Offering Norplant in on-site clinics at public schools in Baltimore might seem like one of those evils that is necessary or even inevitable: this is, after all, a city where one in ten girls between the ages of 15 and 17 gave birth in 1990.
Read more
Correspondence

June 1993

Passing the Bottle

By John Shelton Reed

In the aftermath of a conference not long ago, a dozen of us spent a night in downtown Little Rock. (No, this wasn't the Economic Summit. It was a gathering of poets, novelists, and essayists to discuss Southern autobiography, and the talk was a...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

January 1993

The Last Battleground

By Theodore Pappas

The breakfast table is the latest battleground in the war against the family. School-based breakfast programs have been tried at the local level for years, and the idea goes back at least as far as the Black Panthers in the 1960's. The big push...
Read more
View

September 1992

Notes From the Abyss

By Robert Weissberg

How are we-the campus conservatives-to think of ourselves in the sea of political correctness? Perhaps we adopt the attitude of the left, and view ourselves as the real but unacknowledged victims of oppression, casualties in the war for diversity...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1992

The Greatest Error of the Homeschool

By Anita Evangelista

There is little question or doubt in the public mind about the value of the homeschool. Homeschooled kids better behaved than children from public schools. homeschooled youngsters seldom become involved in gangs, seldom use drugs to excess, and...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1992

Petty Squabbles

By Bryce J. Christensen

Political Correctness continues on many of the nation's campuses. Many Americans still regard the whole affair as a petty squabble among eggheads, unrelated to their daily lives. However, a recent skirmish in the PC wars illustrates only too well...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1992

Who Will Make a Difference?

By Jacob Neusner

As the academic year commences, students wonder which professors will make a difference, and which won't. Here is the story of a professor who made a difference-someone who believed that education is for the courageous, that striving to surpass...
Read more
Perspective

September 1992

Literature and the Curriculum

By Thomas Fleming

The controversy over the humanities curricula is a struggle over definition, and what is at issue is not so much the nature or purposes of the American university as the identity of the American people.
Read more
View

September 1992

Ignorance and Freedom

By E. Christian Kopff

Important educators, including Benjamin Rush, attacked the traditional classical education, but the example and precept of Jefferson and other Founders kept America's leaders educated for freedom and creativity by maintaining their direct contact...
Read more
View

September 1992

Sensitivity-The Only Requirement

By Gerald Russello, Michael Washburn, Raymond Gentry

Edward Gibson tells us that, about 250 A.D., the Goths came down from the Ukraine and took the city of Marcianopolis. To save their lives and property, the people of the city gave the Gothic warriors "a large sum of money."
Read more
Correspondence

September 1992

The Yard as Barnyard

By Thomas White

Harvard University publishes a glossy magazine called, of course, Harvard Magazine. It is sent free once in a while to all graduates, and bimonthly to those who send in some annual amount.
Read more
Reviews

September 1992

Rubber Hands and Iron Triangles

By Lawrence A. Uzzell

After a decade of "reform," the public schools are at best stagnant. The College Board reports that SAT scores for college-hound 12th-graders have dropped for the fourth consecutive year, with the average score on the verbal section reaching an...
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1992

In Loco Parentis, Part II

By Laura Rogers

My ten years of research have finally paid off. My article in the February 1991 Chronicles, "In Loco Parentis: The Brave New Family in Missouri," has led to nationwide opposition to the Parents as Teachers (PAT) program that began here in Missouri.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

April 1992

Signed Into Law

By Theodore Pappas

National Education Day was signed into law by President Bush and Congress last March 20. At first sight this new holiday looks like the President's bid to be taken seriously as the "education President." In fact, educators nationwide celebrated...
Read more
Reviews

April 1992

Cultural Commodities

By Gregory McNamee

The "free and open exchange of ideas" lies at the very heart of what was once called, in more innocent times, liberal education. These days, the American university is the last place to look for that unhindered flow of thought.
Read more
Correspondence

March 1992

Seeing the Wizard Off

By John Shelton Reed

A historical sense can be a wonderful thing to have. Not long ago, for instance, someone reminded me that when Christianity was as old as Islam is now, the Inquisition was going full tilt.
Read more
Reviews

March 1992

A World Safe for Democratists

By C. Winsor Wheeler

From one point of view, Who Owns the Children? is a manifesto of educational freedom, an exhaustively researched broadside aimed at the pseudo-academic pretensions of our federal and state governments.
Read more
Correspondence

December 1991

Academic Apathy Beyond the Rhine

By Jacob Neusner

We're not supposed to like Germans or Germany, but I do—a lot. I found out just how much when, coming back to Frankfurt after a week of lecturing in Madrid, I found myself glad to be "home," and happy to babble away in my pitiful German, after a,...
Read more
Reviews

October 1991

Intermediate Frisbee

By James P. Degnan

Jacques Barzun, for nearly half a century, has been telling us what is wrong with our schools and what we might do to improve them. This he continues to do in his most recent book, Begin Here.
Read more
Reviews

September 1991

Business as Usual

By Frank Brownlow

Shortly before Christmas last, I heard a college president say, gesturing toward a copy of Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals, "That book is making my job very difficult."
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1991

Mason v. Mason

By Matthew Hoffman

The members of George Mason University's Sigma Chi fraternity had little reason to believe their annual "Dress a Sig" fundraising event was politically incorrect. To those present last April 4, the proceedings seemed innocuous if a bit raucous.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1991

The Weight of Bricks

By Janet Scott Barlow

Are we all going crazy? A few months ago, I read a newspaper column containing information so shocking yet unsurprising, so awful yet predictable, that I was overcome by emotional vertigo.
Read more
Correspondence

September 1991

Life Lessons

By Murray N. Rothbard

Academics have no more human frailties, I suppose, than are rampant in any other occupation. But those frailties are far more repellent, and far funnier, in a profession ostensibly dedicated to the disinterested search for truth.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

August 1991

Circumlocutions & Obfuscations

By Gerald Russello

Georgetown University, the foremost Jesuit institution in the United States, one that was called the "alma mater of Catholic colleges in America" by Pope Pius IX, and a university that boasts of a renowned Bioethics Institute, has recently...
Read more
Correspondence

August 1991

Southern Spies in the Ivy League

By John Shelton Reed

Several recent letters from readers outside the South have contained clippings and firsthand reports about the progress of Our Nation's cause. I hope my correspondents don't mind, but I've come to think of them as a sort of intelligence service,...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

July 1991

Making Its Way Into Our Education

By Theodore Pappas

Political correctness has finally made its way from our universities to our junior high schools.
Read more
Vital Signs

March 1991

Sociology and Common Sense

By Steven Goldberg

The "Common-Sense Sociology Test" made its first appearance in the mid-1960's. The test is now a familiar fixture in introductory sociology courses and textbooks, but in the beginning its exciting novelty instantly captured the hearts and minds...
Read more
Vital Signs

March 1991

Buzzards and Dodos

By George Garrett

George Core (Editor of the Sewanee Review) Talks With George Garrett About the Quarterlies
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

March 1991

Gerrymandering

By Robert G. Holland

Washington's gerrymandering of job seekers' test scores to comport with egalitarian fantasy has given us a glimpse of the testing center of the future. On university campuses, the proctors will be apostles of Political Correctness.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

March 1991

A One-Sided Debate

By Katherine Dalton

At the Univ. of Texas, in answer to criticism that he has turned a freshman English composition class into a one-sided debate on political correctness, English department chairman Joseph Kruppa has made several strongly worded replies.
Read more
View

February 1991

On the Study of History

By Forrest McDonald

American society is in trouble, and not only because our traditional values and institutions are under siege. The nuclear family is crumbling as a result of government policies that are ruthless when they are not mindless.
Read more
Vital Signs

February 1991

In Loco Parentis: The Brave New Family in Missouri

By Laura Rogers

Many people are concerned about the problems that face our nation today, and the good folks at the Missouri Department of Education are no exception. In an attempt to reverse the decline in enrollment and the high dropout rate, and to win back...
Read more
Vital Signs

February 1991

Education in an Age of Haste

By Leo Raditsa

Not much more than 24 hours ago, one of many of you who could get away with it asked me to speak to you on Class Day. It hit me that for a tutor who insists on students meeting deadlines, the situation has the best of comic myth: you got yours...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

February 1991

Bureaucratized Education

By Jack D. Douglas

American education is today so bureaucratized that every increase in tax monies poured into the system produces less real learning.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

January 1991

A Pest-House

By Jacob Neusner

No major city in this country concedes that its major hospital is a pest-house, or that its museums display junk, or that its symphony orchestra squeaks. Nor are cities satisfied with inadequate schools.
Read more
Reviews

January 1991

Phonic Booms

By James B. Graves

In Forked Tongue, her important new public policy study-cum-expose whose proposals seem as likely to create new problems as to solve some old ones, Rosalie Pedalino Porter doesn't get down to root causes.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

December 1990

Raptures of High-Mindedness

By Frank Brownlow

Barnard College's "First Year Seminar Committee" has decided to use a grant from the Ford Foundation to encourage the faculty to use the works of "minority women" in their courses.
Read more
Reviews

December 1990

The Wonder of Academe

By William H. Nolte

While being interviewed on William Buckley's Firing Line, Harry Ashmore remarked that he had allowed the subject of his Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins to tell the story of his life and work through the numerous...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

November 1990

Changing Mottos

By Harold O.J. Brown

Harvard University, in 1959, refused more than $350,000 in money offered for student loans by the National Defense Education Act in the wake of the Soviets' Sputnik shock because of the requirement that students submit to an oath and an affidavit...
Read more
View

November 1990

Tragedy, Comedy, and Modern Times

By James Bond Stockdale

This essay grew out of a request that I conduct a reprise of "The Bull's Eye of Disaster," my wrap-up conclusions on the Vietnam War that appeared in the August 1989 Chronicles, in light of what's happened in the post-Cold War world since that...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

October 1990

Unconstitutionally Vague

By Christine Haynes

The Univ. of Michigan has not given up. Federal District Court Judge Avern Cohn's August 1989 ruling that Michigan's anti-discrimination and discriminatory harassment policy was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad merely sent administrators...
Read more
Perspective

September 1990

Revolution and Tradition in the Humanities Curriculum

By Thomas Fleming

A few years ago I found myself in the belly of the beast. To be more accurate, I was actually in the appendix of the beast, the Department of Education, giving a paper on curriculum reform.
Read more
View

September 1990

Academics, Therapists, and the German Connection

By Paul Gottfried

For several years now a heated debate has been going on over Western civilization and humanities requirements at some distinguished universities, most notably Stanford. The debate has brought up the question of a justification—or lack thereof—for...
Read more
View

September 1990

The Teaching of Humanities and Other Trivia

By Thomas Molnar

"Humanities" is Western society's name for the academic expression of its fundamental values. There are other branches of learning—medicine, law, engineering, and business, all of which benefit from the humanities—but only the "liberal arts"...
Read more
Reviews

September 1990

Education and Community

By James B. Graves

Poet, critic, and teacher Marion Montgomery is known to have taken a fortnight's break from a book project in order to write another book!
Read more
Correspondence

September 1990

An Academic Remnant

By John Shelton Reed

As a rule I don't use this letter for academic shoptalk. Most of you aren't college professors, and few things are more tedious than another profession's gossip.
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1990

Whose Women's Studies?

By Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Women's studies has emerged and, in large measure, won its place in the academy as an unabashedly political undertaking. "Teaching," according to Florence Howe, a path breaker in women's studies, "is a political act."
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1990

Exclusive Institutions

By Harold O.J. Brown

Mills College recently repulsed the male invasion invited by the college's board of trustees, and it will remain all female, for the immediate future at any rate.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1990

A Considerable Presence

By Jacob Neusner

Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man's former colleague, a Jew and, while not a scholar in Judaic studies, nonetheless a considerable presence in Jewish scholarship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America,...
Read more
Vital Signs

July 1990

Religion and Critical Theory

By Stephen L. Tanner

In his 1935 essay "Religion and Literature," T.S. Eliot argued that modern literature had become progressively secularized. In response he proposed that "literary criticism should be complemented by criticism from a definite ethical and...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

July 1990

Early Form

By Katherine Dalton

For most of its 150-year history The Yale Literary Magazine was an independent, privately funded magazine edited by and for Yale undergrads.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

June 1990

Academic Freedom

By Jacob Neusner

When IAS (the institute for Advanced Study), the research center that takes pride in having housed Einstein, told the National Endowment for the Humanities last December to take its money and shove it, the New York Times responded with a...
Read more
View

June 1990

Want To Reform Public Education?

By Lawrence A. Uzzell

By now it should be obvious that "education reform" is a fraud. Its primary goal has not been to rescue children from public school malpractice, but to rescue the schools from angry parents and taxpayers.
Read more
Vital Signs

April 1990

The Ignorance of the Doctors

By George Watson

Montaigne in his Essays called it ignorance doctorale (1.54). Four hundred years later an American journalist called it "educated incompetence." It means the sort of nonknowledge, or anti-knowledge, that can follow upon higher learning,...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

April 1990

An Endless Quest

By Samuel Francis

The Dept. of Education, in its seemingly endless quest to discover new ways for students and teachers to waste their time, has approved a high-school course on the holocaust.
Read more
Reviews

March 1990

An Education in Imagination

By John Gray

For a conservative, no engagement can be more important than edu cation. A conservative is one who distinguishes his outlook from others—socialist and liberal, for example—by his concern, not with the standpoint of here and now, but with the...
Read more
Vital Signs

March 1990

Not Free to Choose

By Sheldon L. Richman

The Bush administration has doomed true educational reform for the foreseeable future. It has done so in a deceptively simple way: it changed the subject.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

February 1990

A Disaster

K-12 education in America is, nationally, a disaster—that is something everyone seems to agree on. But on the local level, the parents of schoolchildren are hearing a different story.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

February 1990

Can't Institutionalize Genius

By Jacob Neusner

The Institute for Advanced Study, the research center in Princeton, New Jersey, was founded 60 years ago around the figure of Albert Einstein. When I was named member (1989-1990) the inestimable William Safire said to me, "Oh, Jack! That's where...
Read more
Vital Signs

January 1990

Racism at Stanford?

By Jared Taylor

The resurgence of campus racism has been a big topic in the news for nearly a year now. According to the often-cited National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence in Baltimore, the number grows all the time.
Read more
Vital Signs

January 1990

On Inequality: A Platonic Dialogue

By Halmuth Schaefer

Why is it, Socrates, that so many of our young, and even we ourselves, know so little, when we are being taught so much?
Read more
Correspondence

November 1989

Not a Smashing Success

By Jane Greer

It's the little things—not the front-page disclosures—that suggest to us that we've been had. Take, for instance, a 1987-88 study by the Oregon Department of Transportation.
Read more
View

October 1989

When the Schoolhouse Is Our House

By Mary Pride

Somebody recently did a "study" purporting to discover that at-home mothers spend hardly any more time daily with their children than mothers who work full-time outside the home.
Read more
Vital Signs

October 1989

Wimin's Work

By Theodore Pappas

The women's movement is in considerable disarray. While most self-described feminists are concerned mainly with job prospects, equal pay, and abortion rights, the radical wing of the movement is busy advocating everything from witchcraft to...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

October 1989

Flag Amendment

A Flag Amendment—what would be the effect? In one school of thought that goes back through Acton to Jefferson to Plato, the health of a society is inversely proportional to the amount of written law (and the number of lawyers) it has.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

October 1989

Bias in the Questions

Girl's SAT scores are lower than boys because of bias in the questions, charges a Center for Women Policy Studies report. Nationally, boys score higher on 4 of the verbal questions and 17 of the math, and the fact that they do better is alone...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

September 1989

Raising a Ruckus

By E. Christian Kopff

I remember sitting in an airport bar with a few bemused travelers listening to the ads on TV. "America's ignored crisis," Tom Brokaw blared at us. "Children in poverty. Most people below the poverty line are children."
Read more
Vital Signs

September 1989

Why Are Universities Different From All Other Centers of Learning?

By Jacob Neusner

The oldest university in the West, the University of Bologna, has celebrated its nine hundredth anniversary; but much that is studied there sustains an intellectual tradition of scholarship that is thousands of years old.
Read more
View

September 1989

Taking the King's Shilling

By John A. Howard

Historically, the primary function of schooling has been to teach the young how to live responsibly and productively in their own society. In our day, the notions of civic, familial, and vocational obligations have been virtually banished from...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

August 1989

"Affirmative Action Curriculum" Returns

By Herbert London

The "Affirmative Action curriculum" returns east: T. Edward Hollander, New Jersey's higher education chancellor, has argued that college teachers should "rethink what they teach and . . . seek ways of bridging the gaps between their areas of...
Read more
Reviews

June 1989

Those Who Can't Do . . .

By Jacob Neusner

I wanted to hate this sustained attack on the academy, which condemns everything to which I have dedicated my life, but I loved every word. This man is a truth-teller, therefore he is shrill, obnoxious, abusive, aggressive, offensive, and...
Read more
Correspondence

June 1989

Doctoring Honor

By Odie B. Faulk

Commencement has come and gone, and with it another crop of eager graduates. Yet given far more of the spotlight at any of these commencements than bachelors', masters', and doctoral candidates were those being awarded honorific degrees and...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

May 1989

A Free-For-All

By E. Christian Kopff

A lot of Americans are worried about the way universities are teaching our children. During the second weekend of November 1988, equally concerned members of the National Association of Scholars gathered at the old Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.
Read more
Reviews

May 1989

The Way We Do It

By Leo Raditsa

This book gathers important information on the politicization of the schools, even the elementary schools, at the cost of facts—and flight from the world.
Read more
Correspondence

May 1989

Talkin' Freedom Blues

By John Shelton Reed

I was sitting here listening to the University of North Carolina's student radio station play "Hotrod to Hell," a cut from Elvis Hitler's new album Disgraceland, and somehow the time seemed right for another round-up of Southern news that they've...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

April 1989

Continuing Legal Education

By Betsy Clarke

Continuing legal education is imposed on lawyers by the Missouri Bar Association and the Missouri Supreme Court, and right before the November election I took a day to fulfill the requirements.
Read more
Vital Signs

April 1989

Postwar Oxford

By Geoffrey Wagner

It was an interesting time. The Second World War had gone on two years longer than the First, with resultant fatigue in England's industrial north, which gave the Labour government its 1945 landslide.
Read more
View

April 1989

Dead Souls in the Classroom

By Bryce J. Christensen

"Thanatology" or "death education" now competes with driver's ed and "social problems" for the attention of the nation's high schoolers.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

March 1989

Practical Items

School decentralization was one of the few practical items on the New Left's agenda of the 1960's. It was a genuinely radical idea, since the entire history of public education in the US has been the steady progress of consolidation and...
Read more
View

March 1989

Education for a Conquered Nation

By John Chodes

Declining test scores. Illiterate, spiritless, and passive graduates who have little motivation to find a job or succeed. Youngsters with no skills to compete in the marketplace. This is the tragic record of American public education, after...
Read more
Reviews

March 1989

Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic and War

By Michael W. Albin

Twenty-five years ago when I was a schoolteacher in an Afghan mountain valley I came across a book by an English pedagogue called Teaching English Under Difficult Circumstances.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

January 1989

Come to a Close

The Bennett interregnum has come to a close at the Department of Education. The former secretary of education had his shortcomings, but the vice with which he was most frequently charged—being "confrontational," failing to "build coalitions with...
Read more
Vital Signs

January 1989

Who Is Pete Schaub?

By Nicholas Davidson

When Pete Schaub, a business major in his senior year at the University of Washington at Seattle, couldn't get into an overenrolled business course for the first quarter of 1988, he signed up for "Women 200: Introduction to Women Studies" instead.
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

January 1989

Our Conception of the World

By Jacob Neusner

When we argue about what should be taught in schools and colleges, at stake is our conception of the world. Our theory of the world tells us what we should teach, and whom we may ignore.
Read more
View

December 1988

What Ails the Historical Profession?

By Paul Gottfried

Academic historians are too uncritically receptive to Utopian thinking. Too many believe in what Kari Mannheim described as the striving for a new world order, an order which "would shatter all existing reality."
Read more
Reviews

December 1988

Surviving College 101

By Les Csorba III

Hugh Hewitt's First Principles is a 125-page manual on how to handle the cacophony of illiberal thought that flourishes in our universities.
Read more
Correspondence

November 1988

The New Racism on Campus

By William Hawkins

Having done four years of graduate work at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, I was distressed to learn that there, as elsewhere, a few radical activists can rout a weak administration and faculty by crying "racism."
Read more
Reviews

November 1988

Phi Beta Kappa Fake

By Jane Greer

When I was 11, I saw a photo of the Radcliffe campus in fall, with a beautiful long-haired blonde in a plaid wool skirt sitting on a flight of leaf-covered steps in front of a red brick building.
Read more
Correspondence

September 1988

The Academic Blues

By S. Steven Powell

When I left the University of Chicago a few years ago, I felt the whole world lay ahead and that every opportunity was open to me. I decided to go on with graduate school but took some time off to work as a research associate for a think tank in...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

August 1988

Staging A Takeover

By Herbert London

Four black students, representing the Union of African Student Organizations, staged a "takeover" at a recent Rutgers University conference on race relations. They grabbed the microphone and proceeded to criticize the audience for its...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

August 1988

A Bizarre Psychotic

Laurie Dann, a bizarre psychotic who sent poisoned food to acquaintances and former employers and once stabbed her husband with an ice pick, shot up a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Illinois, murdering one child and wounding several others...
Read more
Vital Signs

August 1988

Schools Then and Now

By Thomas Molnar

The present agitation around Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind, reminds me of the many similar debates I have witnessed in this country during the last four decades.
Read more
View

July 1988

Learning Goodness

By James Bond Stockdale

The best education, the best preparation for a full and successful life surely entails a proper blend of classical and contemporary studies.
Read more
Correspondence

June 1988

And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day

By Jane Greer

Deborah Epstein Popper is a graduate student in geography at Rutgers University, and Frank J. Popper chairs the university's urban studies department there: in New Brunswick, New Jersey, about as far away from the Great Plains, in every way, as...
Read more
View

May 1988

The Color of Culture

By Sidney Hook

As an observer of the educational scene at Stanford University during the last 14 years, I am taking the liberty of offering some comments on the proposed reforms in the course on Western culture.
Read more
Correspondence

February 1988

Dulce et Decorum

By John Shelton Reed

One of the most moving war memorials I know is on a wall outside the reading room of the British Museum. It is a simple plaque with the names of a hundred or so librarians killed in the Great War. Librarians. Think about it.
Read more
Correspondence

February 1988

Swan Song

By James L. Sauer

Tucked away in the residential area along suburban Philadelphia's main line lies the idyllic campus of Eastern College. For the last four years this Christian academic institution has sponsored the Evangelical Roundtable: an attempt to find...
Read more
Cultural Revolutions

January 1988

Glasnost American Style

Glasnost American style is all the rage among the nation's literati. At over a dozen universities, American academics are now waking up to the Soviet equivalents of Good Morning America and Richard Simmons.
Read more
View

January 1988

Stopping the Long March Through the University

By Arnold Beichman

Substitute "professor" for "Leninist" and the quotation would appear almost a cliche to many American academicians. Yet such corollary Leninist themes and variations have become a commonplace in the American university.
Read more
View

January 1988

Academic Afterword: On the Occasion of My Retirement From the Academy

By Marion Montgomery

In my institution I have been sharply critical of the public relations attempts at self-justification and self-elevation in the interest of the community's largess, the larger grants of public money to support a larger and larger institution.
Read more
Correspondence

December 1987

It's 10 A.M. on a School Day—Do You Know Who Has Your Child?

By Jane Greer

Americans generally agree that our public schools are not what they should be, but the strongest resistance to improvement comes from the jokes some people refer to as "teachers' unions."
Read more
Reviews

October 1987

Gimme That Ol'Time Education

By Carl C. Curtis

Liberals in the United States have lately gathered around the standard of pluralism in the hope of stalling the movement toward private Christian education. Yet Americans, historically indifferent to such objections, have been the last to censure...
Read more
View

September 1987

A (Pardon the Expression) Baccalaureate Address

By George Garrett

The irrepressible John Towne tells us what he really thinks of higher education. Something to offend nearly everyone. I want you to know I share your disappointment that nobody you really care about and wanted could be here to make this speech....
Read more
View

September 1987

Advice to a Postulant-Professor

By Jacob Neusner

If I could tell every first-year graduate student in America one thing, it is this: The campus is not a calling, it is just another career.
Read more
View

August 1987

Between Two Worlds

By Geoffrey Wagner

Reflecting on his upbringing in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul denies cultural identity to his part of the Caribbean: "Nothing bound us together except this common residence." Indeed, the area called Caribbean is constantly redefining itself.
Read more
Correspondence

August 1987

Universities and Students of South America

By Thomas Molnar

By 1921, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, students at Argentine universities had begun to agitate for equal rights with professors and were demanding the same rights for the cleaning staff.
Read more
Correspondence

July 1987

The Oxford Experience

By Andrei Navrozov

The recent election of the new Chancellor of Oxford University—or was it the prospect of another July undisturbed by fireworks?—reminded me of the letter I received from a Cambridge friend last summer, when I was living in Oxford. I quote it with...
Read more
Correspondence

June 1987

Letter From the Southwest

By Odie B. Faulk

In the spring a young man's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of love. What happens in the rest of the year is uncertain, but in the southwestern part of the United States that young man's fancy, in the first chill of autumn, turns to thoughts of...
Read more
Correspondence

May 1987

Just One More Drink of Water

By Jane Greer

A recent Time article reported an astonishing new find. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that men are good for women.
Read more
View

April 1987

About the University and Its Curriculum

By Thomas Molnar

The sociological thesis that education is "for society" is acceptable today because in this statement, "society" is a sufficiently vague term to prescribe fewer and fewer binding guidelines as we ascend from lower to higher education.
Read more
Reviews

April 1987

Harvard Goes South

By Clyde Wilson

This curious big book is an amalgam of left-wing scholarship and commercial panache. On the one hand, the author, a Harvard Ph.D. in American Civilization and a missionary to South Carolina, seems to have enjoyed extended foundation support...
Read more
Reviews

April 1987

Reenchanting the World

By Herbert Schlossberg

Kant has few readers outside of university philosophy departments, but his influence obviously extends to Los Angeles. Part of Kant's legacy to the modern world is the iron curtain that seals off all reality into two compartments: that which can...
Read more
Correspondence

April 1987

Ask Dr. Grants

By Richard Kostelanetz

How do I get a grant? You first must get an application. Forget about those grants for which you cannot apply, such as MacArthur Fellowships, which are essentially designed for people already known, which is to say celebrities, or incipient...
Read more
Correspondence

April 1987

Is Old Bob McNamara Still Teaching at Harvard?

By Andrei Navrozov

I had the distinct feeling I had seen the book somewhere before. It was almost like the old cinematographic cliche: close-up of the Treblinka torturer's face in a dream sequence, a faded photograph shot in sepia tones, men running through the...
Read more
Reviews

March 1987

Doctors of Education?

By Gary Jason

A recent issue of Forbes contained the truly wonderful news that a corporation is now selling a video encyclopedia of the 20th century. This is sure to be a hot item in the "education technology" business.
Read more
Correspondence

March 1987

Rice Paddies and Tea Houses

By Thomas Molnar

The schedule is rather monotonous for a lecturer invited to the big cities where universities are usually located.
Read more
Reviews

February 1987

School Daze

By Phyllis Zagano

American education has never been in very good shape, so criticizing it now would be a redundancy, except for the fact that we are facing an increasing teacher shortage across the curricula and across all grade levels which shows no signs of...
Read more
Correspondence

February 1987

Brown Shirts in the Ivory Tower

By Paul Herron

The orthodoxy of Reason is proclaimed, archconservative turned archliberal Garry Wills once wrote, and it will have its inquisitors.
Read more
Correspondence

February 1987

The Return of Professor X

By Odie B. Faulk

In 1973, at the tag end of the riots and disruptions of the late 1960's and early 1970's, he ventured into print with a small volume entitled This Beats Working for a Living: The Dark Secrets of a College Professor.
Read more
Reviews

December 1986

Clipping the Angel's Wings

By Bryce J. Christensen

The ancients, wiser than modem theorists, recognized language as a gift and (at Babel) a curse from the heavens. Even pagans recognized a Word behind words and a Muse beyond music. The Creator of the world was everywhere acknowledged as the...
Read more
Correspondence

November 1986

Young Yuppies In Love

By Jane Greer

North Dakota—the last place most people ever think of-makes the national news from time to time, usually as part of a survey or study. Sometimes the results surprise those of us who live here, but mostly they don't.
Read more
Reviews

July 1986

The Maze of Metaphor

By Stephen L. Tanner

Jacques Derrida has in recent years made himself one of the most influential figures in literary criticism on American college campuses. The movement he has inspired, alternately known as "deconstruction" or "poststructuralism," asserts that all...
Read more
Correspondence

May 1986

Dr. Bob's Unusual University

By John Shelton Reed

Bob Jones University. Isn't that the segregationist place down in South Carolina someplace?
Read more
Correspondence

October 1985

Letter From College

By T. Harvey Holt

The much-ballyhooed young conservative movement of the early 1980's may soon come to an inglorious and grinding halt. While the early 80's were marked by a certain gusto on the part of conservatives fighting to overthrow entrenched liberals, the...
Read more
View

September 1985

Renaissance in Education

When I accepted President Reagan's appointment to be chairman of the National Council on Educational Research, I did so because I welcomed the opportunity to learn firsthand how professional bureaucrats approached America's many and increasingly...
Read more
Reviews

September 1985

Academic Anomie & Root-Canal Remedies

By Brian Murray

During the 1920's and 30's, it was possible for a talented young American author to earn a living publishing virtually nothing but short fiction. Scribner's, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and numerous other widely circulated magazines all...
Read more
Reviews

September 1985

Passé Passions

By Edward S. Shapiro

Irving Bernstein graduated from the University of Rochester in 1937, the same year as the spectacular series of sit-down strikes in the Midwest industrial heartland, the Memorial Day "massacre" at the Republic Steel plant in South Chicago, and...
Read more
Typefaces

June 1985

Thunder on the Right

By Thomas Fleming

Intellectuals as a class support their own interests, whether they are kissing the ground a prince walks on or fawning on a Marxist dean or editor.
Read more
Editorials

June 1985

Scrambling the Schools

By Bryce J. Christensen

Any university worthy of the name must be both universal in scope, attending to all important fields of knowledge, and unified in thought, bound together into a single coherent philosophical framework. Most contemporary "universities" are...
Read more
Bookshelves

March 1985

Commendables – Schools for Scandal

By Alan J. Levine

Read more
Perspective

March 1985

Private Faith & Public Schools

By Bryce J. Christensen

Read more
Bookshelves

November 1984

Commendables – Of Bullets & Ballots

By John Caiazza

Read more
Reviews

December 1984

Waste of Money

Media MIA's, Power to the Professors
Read more
Reviews

December 1984

Commendables

A Dangerous Classic, Ideological Body Count, Fighting the Media Moguls, Of Puerile Pedagogy
Read more
View

September 1984

The Joy of Cents

By Mark Michaelsen

If government can manage the economy successfully, as Godley and Cripps suggest, think of the joyful politics which could emanate from this intellectual base. But such an outcome is doubtful.
Read more
Comment

August 1984

Comment

By Allan C. Carlson

Read more

Results: 475 Articles found.

View Pages

Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture is a program of

Our Programs

Stay in the know!

Receive intellectually engaging content and updates from our organization.

X