David Bryant CCE, Cultural context, Dorothy Sayers
I want to share a passage with you from Dorothy Sayers’s seminal lecture “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Delivered at Oxford in 1947, her lecture has been reprinted as an essay that has had enormous influence on thinking Christians interested in giving their children an excellent education. But don’t think of her lecture as a […]
David Bryant CCE, Hellos and Goodbyes
Each summer, about a week and a half before school starts, Providence teachers congregate to prepare for the year. It’s a wonderful week of training, preparation, and fellowship. New teachers get to know the vision of the school and become acquainted with their new colleagues, and returning teachers prepare to practice their craft for another […]
Some of the best questions in the world are “why” questions. Here are a few of mine: Why isn’t the word “phonetic” spelled the way it sounds? Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii? Why is it that when you transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when you transport something by ship, […]
David Bryant CCE, Uncategorized
How does classical education differ from progressive education? That is a question worth contemplating for parents of students in classical Christian schools. One way to answer is to contrast state Common Core standards with the texts and goals used by classical Christian schools. They differ dramatically, both philosophically and practically, with a very different vision […]
David Bryant CCE, Providence Parents
The summer issue of The Classical Difference succinctly answers a question that many classical Christian parents contemplate or ask. We are bombarded by messages about the supposed need for our children to receive specific STEM instruction in order to prepare them for specific job tracks. How should we respond? Q: We live in a STEM […]
David Bryant CCE, Cultural context, History
What lesson does a student learn in history class if history is a story without God at the center?
Some of the most well-known documents and speeches in history were extraordinarily brief. The Ten Commandments are composed of only 301 words. The Mayflower Compact was but 298 words. The Declaration of Independence was a little more than 1,330 words. On November 19, 1863, minister and politician Edward Everett spoke for two hours at a […]
Education is teleological. “Teleological” is a big word that comes from the Greek word telos, which means end, goal, or purpose. To say that education is teleological is to say that it shapes children to be a certain kind of adult, and education always works because it always forms students toward its inherent telos, its […]
It’s November, so I am going to talk about the end of school. No, not the end of the school year. I mean the end of school, as in the purpose or goal of education, as in, “Educate to what end?” Why are you educating your children? I’m not asking merely about your immediate goals […]
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterful tale The Hobbit, the wizard Gandalf accompanies the story’s unlikely hero, Bilbo Baggins, and his dwarf friends on their adventure across the Misty Mountains. As they prepare to enter the forbidding forest of Mirkwood, Gandalf announces that he must leave his friends. Danger awaits them ahead, he assures them, but they […]