The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being

The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being

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Genres: Education, Non-Fiction, Philosophical
Tags: #1, #1 Scholé Everyday, #100, #100 Topical Discussion, #103, #103 Topical Discussion, #11, #11 Scholé Everyday, #18, #18 Topical Discussion, #21, #21 Scholé Everyday, #26, #26 Topical Discussion, #27, #27 Topical Discussion, #28, #28 Topical Discussion, #29, #29 Topical Discussion, #35, #35 Topical Discussion, #38, #38 Topical Discussion, #41, #41 Topical Discussion, #42, #42 Topical Discussion, #54, #54 Topical Discussion, #76 Topical Discussion, #8, #80, #80 Topical Discussion, #88, #88 Topical Discussion, #9, #96, #96 Topical Discussion, #98, #98 Topical Discussion, Mystie Winckler, Sistership Book Club Pick

Frustrated with the continuing educational crisis of our time, concerned parents, teachers, and students sense that true reform requires more than innovative classroom technology, standardized tests, or skills training. An older tradition—the Great Tradition—of education in the West is waiting to be heard. Since antiquity, the Great Tradition has defined education first and foremost as the hard work of rightly ordering the human soul, helping it to love what it ought to love, and helping it to know itself and its maker. In the classical and Christian tradition, the formation of the soul in wisdom, virtue, and eloquence took precedence over all else, including instrumental training aimed at the inculcation of "useful" knowledge.

Edited by historian Richard Gamble, this anthology reconstructs a centuries-long conversation about the goals, conditions, and ultimate value of true education. Spanning more than two millennia, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary writers, it includes substantial excerpts from more than sixty seminal writings on education. Represented here are the wisdom and insight of such figures as Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Basil, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Erasmus, Edmund Burke, John Henry Newman, Thomas Arnold, Albert Jay Nock, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and Eric Voegelin.

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Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

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Genres: Christian Living, Education, Philosophical, Schole
Tags: #11, #11 Scholé Everyday, #22, #22 Topical Discussion, #23, #23 Scholé Everyday, #38, #38 Topical Discussion, #49, #49 Topical Discussion, #54, #54 Topical Discussion, #60, #60 Topical Discussion, #97 Topical Discussion, Mystie Winckler

What is a good education? What is it for? To answer these questions, Stratford Caldecott shines a fresh light on the three arts of language, in a marvelous recasting of the Trivium whereby Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric are explored as Remembering, Thinking, and Communicating. These are the foundational steps every student must take towards conversion of heart and mind, so that a Catholic Faith can be lived out in unabashed pursuit of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Beauty in the Word is a unique contribution to bringing these bountiful aspects of the Real back to the center of learning, where they rightfully belong. If your concern is for the true meaning of education for your children, here is the place to begin.

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The Graves of Academe

The Graves of Academe

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Tags: #35, #35 Scholé Everyday, #38, #38 Topical Discussion, Brandy Vencel
Twenty-odd years ago, Richard Mitchell, a professor at New Jersey’s Glassboro State College, set out on a quixotic pursuit: the rescue of the English language and the minds of those attached to the world by it. Donning cape and mask as “The Underground Grammarian,” Mitchell sallied forth upon his newsletter against the nonsense being spoken, written, and, indeed, encouraged by the educational establishment. (“One thing led to another,” as he tells it, “a front page piece in The Wall Street Journal, a proÞle in Time, and other such. Before it was over, The Underground Grammarian came to be, in the world of desktop printing, the Þrst publication to have subscribers on every continent except Antarctica.”) What began as a vivid catalog of ignorance and inanity in the written work of professional educators and their hapless students soon became an enterprise of most noble moment: an investigation, via mordant wit and Þerce intelligence, of “what we might usefully decide to mean by ‘education.’” The results of Mitchell’s inquiries are as stimulating today as they were when Þrst articulated. His project remains a telling explication of how, through writing, we discover thought and make knowledge. It is certainly the most drolly entertaining.
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Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir

Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir

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Tags: #38, #38 Topical Discussion
From his decision to leave school at fifteen to roam the world, to his recollections of life as a hobo on the Southern Pacific Railroad, as a cattle skinner in Texas, as a merchant seaman in Singapore and the West Indies, and as an itinerant bare-knuckled prizefighter across small-town America, here is Louis L'Amour's memoir of his lifelong love affair with learning—from books, from yondering, and from some remarkable men and women—that shaped him as a storyteller and as a man. Like classic L'Amour fiction, Education of a Wandering Man mixes authentic frontier drama--such as the author's desperate efforts to survive a sudden two-day trek across the blazing Mojave desert--with true-life characters like Shanghai waterfront toughs, desert prospectors, and cowboys whom Louis L'Amour met while traveling the globe. At last, in his own words, this is a story of a one-of-a-kind life lived to the fullest . . . a life that inspired the books that will forever enable us to relive our glorious frontier heritage.
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