Wendell Berry and Zoom
While the futurists and transhumanists and purveyors of educational technologies would have us voluntarily cut off our arms so we can enjoy their fancy new prostheses, our priority should be to avoid dismembering ourselves.
With Students At Home, Let’s Make America Local Again
Perhaps we ought to hope that things won’t quite go back to what’s normal: rootless young folk siphoned away by elite universities and groomed to lead the managerial bureaucracies and mass popular culture that dominate our national life. The students who remain in their hometowns have the potential to restore declining local institutions and community associations.
The Metamorphoses and #MeToo
As difficult as some content is to teach, we have a responsibility to educate our students about the past, good and bad. A curriculum which leaves out the bad would gaslight our students.
The Classroom as a Welcoming Space
If we have all the knowledge in the world but have not love, the apostle Paul says, then we’re as annoying as a banging cymbal. It’s no wonder students wouldn’t want to listen to us.
Learning about Food and Proper Nouns
Berry moves the conversation from common nouns to proper ones and implicates us all in something deeply practical and doable, yet inexplicably difficult: to love our neighbor, the person right next to us, and the land beneath our very feet.
Early-Alerting Early-Alert Systems on College Campuses
The university’s best, most utopian aims must not beget dystopian early-alert policies that infringe on students’ personal liberties while turning campus into a place where everyone is an informant, and deviations from the norm beget Orwellian intervention.
Recapturing the Real: Physicality, Imitation, and Tradition in a Digital World
Our educational approach should include the validation of physicality, the imitation of the master, and the celebration of tradition.
Online Learning Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
There is certainly a place for online learning in undergraduate education, but we should not undercut traditional higher education for the sake of innovation or profit margin.
Optionality and the Intellectual Life: In Gratitude for the Real World...
Something about Taleb’s emphasis on practical wisdom unleashes in his readers a sense of humility, a renewed trust in reason, and a spiritual hunger courageous enough to move beyond the cynicism and skepticism typically bred in schools.
Two Forms of Despair
What I’m writing is not an exposé of the Christian college, nor a bitter and defiant account of my triumph over an evil system, but a confession of my own failures, faulty motivations, and despair.