ClassicalEd Review

Classical Education News & Articles | 8 June 2026

Paul Weinhold — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:00:36 GMT

By Maya Sulkin | The Free Press

Jeremy Tate thinks the SAT is way too easy—so he invented the Classic Learning Test. He says he’s ‘in a battle to save Western civilization.’

The Seminar and the Recovery of Civil Discourse

By Thomas P. Harmon | Public Discourse

The seminar cannot, by itself, heal our public life. No educational form can bear that burden alone. But if we want a society capable of civil disagreement, we will need to create and sustain places where we can safely learn it.

Save Our Catholic Colleges

By Daniel Lipinski | Substack

Having spent a lifetime in politics and higher education, too many Catholics value the former more than the latter.

The Catholic Argument for Abolishing the United States Department of Education

By Luke Parks | Crisis Magazine

While the Department of Education has been praised by both Republicans and Democrats alike, its creation has caused more problems than most Americans realize.

Progressivism Is Incompatible With Classical Learning

By Auguste Meyrat | The Federalist

Altogether, the rules, expectations, and disciplinary consequences largely determine a school’s culture and values.

Out, Out!—Violence, Obscenity, and the Recovery of Language

By Daniel Fitzpatrick | Crisis Magazine

When we desensitize ourselves to bad language as a culture, we risk becoming a more violent culture.

Sovereigns in the Schoolhouse

By Daniel Buck | American Enterprise Institute

Imagine for a moment a school where no adults showed up for an entire month, but students still did.

Arizona Honors Colleges Trade Plato for Politics

By Timothy K. Minella | Minding the Campus

‘Eating the Globe: The Diverse, Weird, and Queer Food Politics’ among courses flagged in Goldwater Institute report.

Stanford’s War on the Western Canon

By Iván Marinovic | The Free Press

A faculty member explains why he voted against Stanford’s new general education program, and what the curriculum reveals about the university’s retreat from the values it is founded on.

Technological Religions

By Paul O’Connor | VoegelinView

One of the underlying assumptions of the modern world has been the association of science and technology with disenchantment.

Crisis of Narration: Fragmented Lives, Hyper-textuality, and Hyper-culture

By Jason M Baxter | Substack

In 2024, the Korean-born, German philosopher Byung-Chul Han claimed that our culture is suffering from a “crisis of narration.”

Roots and Fables

By Carmel Richardson | The American Mind

A new illustrated collection gives Americans a mythology worth loving.

C. S. Lewis’s Philosophy of Gender

By Rachelle Peterson | First Things

When Lucy steps through the wardrobe into Narnia and runs into the faun Mr. Tumnus, he exclaims, “Excuse me—I don’t want to be inquisitive—but should I be right in thinking that you are a Daughter of Eve?”

C. S. Lewis’s Wordy Wisdom

By Richard Weaver | Modern Age

From 1961: Studying the history of language reveals its deeper meaning.

Evangelical Moralism Is Political Escapism

By Mike Sabo | American Reformer

We Need a Coherent Theory of Voting, Not Drive-By Denunciations

What “Plato” Cannot Teach

By Kathleen O’Toole | Law & Liberty

Machines can’t be social or relational—so they can’t replace human educators.

Dr. Amy Richards Reimagines the Classroom for Every Student

By Dr. Melissa Mitchell | Word on Fire

Research and practice around inclusion in Catholic education have increasingly moved beyond strategies and accommodations toward something deeper in recent years: a reexamination of what it means to teach, to learn, and to be human.

How the Declaration Can Unite a Divided Nation

By Larry Arnn | The American Mind

Lincoln looked back to the Founders—and so should we.

Telling Good Stories: Teaching History with Narrative

By Zachary Stone | Reflections on the Belles Lettres

A Better Way to Engage Students with History

Rufo in the Dock

By Colin Redemer | The American Mind

Examining Elizabeth Corey’s charges against the “scrappy warriors.”

The Need for Failure in Education

By Jonah F. McCoy | New Guard Press

For decades, we’ve put educational attainment on a pedestal, to the detriment of actual education.

In a Minneapolis Public School, a Cure for Toxic Politics

By James Traub | The New Yorker

Inside a Public School Reclaiming an Idea Liberals Left Behind

Oklahoma, Florida, and Iowa Are Restoring Religious Freedom

By Michael A. Helfand; Nicole Stelle Garnett | City Journal

Oklahoma, Florida, and Iowa have embraced the Supreme Court’s recent First Amendment rulings.

Wendell Berry’s Wisdom for Living in Time

By Anne Ryan | Plough

The remarkable record of a long, faithful, creative life, Wendell Berry’s collected Sabbath poems span over forty-four years, from 1979–2023.

How Teaching History Can Help Our Terrible Reading Scores

By Frederick Hess | Education Next

The narrative appeal of the past has common cause with building literacy

Four Ways to Approach Poetry (and Why the Order Matters!)

By Betsy K. Brown | Cana Academy

What do we do with poetry?

How Philosophy Unlocks Great Literature

By Joseph Pearce | The Imaginative Conservative

Insofar as we understand Plato and Aristotle, we understand where the great thinkers of Christendom, the great writers of Christendom, are coming from.

A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.

By Ross Douthat | The New Yorker

What’s really driving the humanities crisis in higher education?

Classical education and AI could reshape how America prepares its children

By Beth Herman | Fox News

There’s a revolution underway in American education, and First Lady Melania Trump and the White House are leading the way.

Florida and CLT Are Building an Alternative to AP Courses

By David Randall | Minding the Campus

Education reformers now need to ensure these new programs can compete with the College Board on equal footing.

Florida Launches Rival Course to ‘Woke’ AP US History

By Tyler O’Neil | The Daily Signal

The Florida Department of Education launched a new framework Monday to explicitly compete with “woke” Advanced Placement U.S. history courses, following criticism that the College Board embeds racist bias and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” into such courses.

To Fight Antisemitism, Rebuild the Core Curriculum

By Samuel J. Abrams | Algemeiner.com

Walk into almost any college classroom today and try a simple exercise: ask students to explain when, why, and by whom the modern state of Israel was founded.

Opinion: Strict uniforms. Ancient philosophy. Can a public school cure our toxic politics?

By James Traub | The New Yorker

The idea that public schools should be used to impart virtue raises many hackles.

What People Get Wrong about Homeschoolers

By Sarah Wilder | RealClearEducation

Is everyone fit to homeschool?

Classical Christian Education’s Rapid Rise

By Alex Littlefield | Juicy Ecumenism

In 1948, Richard M. Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences, a short but forceful book that traced the roots of modern Western decline.

Noteworthy Podcast Episodes

The Difference Between Artificial Intelligence and Actual Intelligence

Paul Weinhold — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:03:57 GMT

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Almost all of the conversation about artificial intelligence seems to revolve around specific use-cases, as if to say, “A.I. is a tool, and all tools can be used for virtuous or for vicious purposes.” Never mind that this position of tool neutrality has been widely criticized for at least sixty years by authors such as Marshall McLuhan, his student Neil Postman, and most recently, Pope Leo XIV in Magnifica Humanitas. At this point, it seems well established that no technology is ever neutral, but this seems far more obvious when it comes to artificial intelligence. After all, A.I. was developed to mimic human intelligence, which alone should cause us to stop and think deeply about its very nature, not merely its applications. While others will continue to debate the use of A.I. for this or that purpose—for writing assistance, medical research, sharpening one’s thinking, companionship . . . the list goes on—I would like to focus on the much more basic question: how does artificial “intelligence” differ from human intelligence? Of course, this is a big question, too big for one short essay, and it is a subset of the larger question about what it means to be human. Answering the larger question will necessarily involve commentary on the nature of the soul, the soul’s relationship to a body, and a whole host of other theological, metaphysical, and anthropological issues. My purpose here is much more modest: I want to investigate how A.I. differs from the human intellect in three important ways. The human intellect pursues truth, is capable of understanding, and apprehends essences. Artificial intelligence does none of these things.

Before addressing these three differences, it is important to briefly describe the way in which artificial intelligence works. I am unconcerned for the moment about the particular interface that is layered on top of the algorithm. Or, rather, I should say that I am very concerned about the interface, especially as it mimics human interaction, but that this particular essay will not focus on the interface. Instead, I am focused only on the algorithm, or the step-by-step process that starts with input data and ends with output data. The algorithm that underpins artificial intelligence is called a neural network. For our purpose here, we do not need to dive deep into all the ins and outs of how a neural network is built and functions. Rather, there are only two things that we need to know. The first thing is that a neural network does all of its calculations by breaking the input into pieces and building up patterns from those pieces. It takes input, transforms it through many layers of increasing granularity, and then uses learned patterns at the smallest level to predict and utilize patterns at the higher levels, eventually leading to an output. In other words, a neural network works on parts instead of wholes.

The second thing we need to know is that a neural network is probabilistic in nature. The results it produces are not logical certainties, nor are they even intended to be. The results of the neural network are only those that are calculated by the model to be the most likely given a particular input. For example, as ChatGPT produces the next word in its response, it is choosing the output that has the highest probability of following what has come before. Similarly, as Grok is used to generate a picture, it is looking at the most likely pixel coloring in a particular spot given the prompt and the surrounding pixels, and as Gemini is used to transcribe human handwriting, it is analyzing the image and producing the most probable match. Probabilistic behavior is at the very heart of how a neural network functions. However, this is not the only way in which the algorithm is probabilistic. If it were, the algorithm would still be deterministic, meaning that every time we asked it the same prompt, we would get exactly the same answer: the one with the highest calculated probability. We know from experience that this is not true. The answer changes every time we ask for something, even if we ask in exactly the same way. This is because modern neural networks, especially those based on large natural language models, have been programmed to occasionally, and randomly, give an answer that is not the most probable. One reason for this is that early on the researchers realized that a certain amount of randomness led to a product that was more believable on the part of the user. It may also be that this produces more accurate results over time, but that is debated. Regardless, what is not debated is that the neural network is, by design, a probabilistic mechanism.

With that background in place, we are ready to address the three ways in which artificial intelligence is, and always will be, categorically different from human intelligence. First, the human intellect is oriented towards truth. In the Summa Theologica (I.16.1), Aquinas writes, “As the good denotes that towards which the appetite tends, so the true denotes that towards which the intellect tends.” In other words, the mind wants to know true things and know them to be true. I wish this were not a controversial statement. And yet, as beauty and goodness long ago fell under the guillotine of relativism, it seems that truth itself has been tied down and awaiting the wrath of Madame. Given this reluctance on the part of modernity to admit even the obvious, it is worth restating the obvious: objective truth exists, and the human intellect is oriented towards knowing that truth. In fact, the very definition of “truth,” at least according to Aquinas, is “the conformity of the intellect and thing.” To say that the human intellect is oriented towards truth is to, in some way, say that it wants an encounter with something outside of itself, to know something that exists independently of thought, and to conform itself to that reality.

On the other hand, the neural network is in no way oriented towards truth. It is unconcerned with conforming its answers to anything beyond itself except perhaps the persuasion of its interlocutor. It is like trying to exercise the art of rhetoric without the prior art of logic. This comes from its probabilistic nature. To put it bluntly: the neural network is oriented towards the probable, not the true. Whether the algorithm gives a simple answer to a query (When did the Civil War begin?), a full explanation on a topic (Why did the Civil War happen?), or even an ongoing “dialogue” with the human user, its responses are produced by mere probabilities, not an orientation towards truth. This is most evident in the fact that ChatGPT, as of publication time, still misses multiplication problems involving large numbers. This is because it doesn’t actually perform calculations; rather, it finds instead the “most likely” digits that follow the inquiry. The answers are bizarrely close to correct, but often with a random digit or two in the middle being off. What’s more, the incorrect digits that are off will differ every time the query is asked. This is particularly interesting because it could be that mathematics is the last bastion against the aforementioned attack of relativism. Few would argue that the product of two numbers is one exact answer, and yet ChatGPT seems unconcerned about getting this answer correct.

It may be helpful to contrast the neural network with most traditional algorithms, which are the result of performing predictable steps that the programmer knows will always produce the correct result. Think of implementing Euclid’s algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers. A truth-oriented human intellect discovered the algorithm, and a programmer makes the computer perform the steps. In cases such as this, the computer is not doing anything fundamentally different than a human being would in running the same algorithm with a paper and a pencil. The case of the neural network is categorically different, for it has no guarantee of outputting the same results every time, let alone true results, and it is not designed to do so. For this reason, it can never be oriented towards the truth—it is always at best oriented towards the probable.

This is not to disregard something like the study of statistics in which the entire discipline is about using probabilities to answer questions. However, in statistics probability is used to answer questions that are probabilistic in nature. Moreover, the very science of statistics is about being exact about the nature of probability. It is that exactness that is truth-oriented, not the probabilities themselves. Something similar can be said about advances in physics suggesting that the nature of reality might be based on probabilities. Even if this is true, the human mind is still oriented towards the exactness of the claim itself. The difference for a neural network is that it is never exact about anything; it operates only through probabilistic answers.

The second way in which artificial intelligence differs from human intelligence is that human intelligence is capable of understanding. The human mind, while capable of running Euclid’s algorithm, can also understand why the results of the algorithm are true. In other words, the human mind is capable of at least two things: algorithm and understanding. What’s more, these two acts of the mind are different from one another. Computer programs, including both traditional ones as well as neural networks, can only do the first thing. This is not mere opinion; it is well-known to computer scientists who refer to algorithms as “Turing computable” and know full well that a computer is only ever capable of Turing computable processes. As for the human intellect, there is an act, which we call “understanding,” that is not Turing computable, and therefore out of reach of computer programs. There are several mathematical arguments for this, including those stemming from the work of Turing himself (the “Halting Problem”) and of Gödel (the “First Incompleteness Theorem”). However, the details of these two arguments are beyond our scope. Instead, to illustrate the point, we rely on an elegant argument from the American philosopher John Searle from nearly one hundred years ago.

Searle imagines being locked in a room with an endless supply of paper and pencils and all of the steps necessary to process information in the same way that a neural network does, but in a language unfamiliar to him. For Searle it was Chinese, which is why this argument has become known as the “Chinese room argument.” The person locked in the room receives a query written in this unfamiliar language through a slot in the door, runs it through the algorithm—the fact that this would take longer than the age of the universe is no matter—and exports the result written in the same unfamiliar language back through the slot. These exchanges continue in the same way that they would on ChatGPT, with the user continuing to ask follow-up questions, and the human calculator responding by performing the tedious calculations outlined by the neural network’s code. In this setup, the person outside the room has the experience that the person inside the room is responding intelligently, with understanding. However, the reality is that the human calculator understands neither the input nor the output, specifically because it is all being done in an unfamiliar language.

Contrast that with someone who does know the language of inquiry and knows the topic being discussed. If the respondent is good enough and the speed is fast enough, the inquirer may not be able to perceive the difference, but there is a difference. More importantly, at least as it concerns our thesis, the same difference is present in our interactions with a neural network such as that underlying ChatGPT.

The genius of Searle’s argument is that it demonstrates clearly that there are at least two things of which the human mind is capable: algorithm and understanding. Yes, we can perform algorithms to produce true answers, as is the case of the person responding in an unknown language. That is decidedly different from understanding the question, the content surrounding the question, and the truth of the correct answer.

Perhaps an example more familiar to most of us is honing a math skill, maybe long division, and being able to correctly apply it but without any idea why it works. In such situations, the human intellect is performing an algorithm without the accompanying act of understanding, again demonstrating that algorithm and understanding are two different things. Algorithms, those based in A.I. or otherwise, are always and forever only algorithms. What Searle demonstrates is that there is something about the human intellect that is decidedly different from the mere application of algorithm: the act of understanding.

I am using the word “understanding” in a more general sense than is typically used by philosophers. Here I mean something like the grasping of the why-is-it of a proposition or even an object. Further distinctions could be made between understanding as the intellectual virtue that allows the human intellect to grasp self-evident principles (Summa I.II.58.4) versus “total comprehension” as the perfect and exhaustive grasp of a proposition or object. I leave these and other distinctions to the philosophers. The salient point for us is that all such acts of the intellect are non-algorithmic, and an algorithm, by definition, can only be algorithmic. As such, a neural network can never grasp first principles, the logic of an argument built upon them, or consequently the totality of the why-is-it of a proposition or object.

The final way in which artificial intelligence differs from human intelligence is that the human intellect is capable of perceiving essences. As we said earlier, the intellect tends towards truth. Aquinas refines this assertion later in the Summa: “The proper object of the human intellect which is united to a body is a quiddity or nature existing in corporeal matter” (I.84.7). When we look at an object, for example, we first apprehend the whole—the what-is-it—and only later concern ourselves with the details. A neural network operates very differently. It first breaks the whole into smaller and smaller pieces and then uses those pieces to make a probabilistic conclusion. We can see this difference clearly in a now well-known example from a 2015 research paper by Goodfellow, Shlens, and Szegedy. In their experiment, they fed the following image into a neural network that was trained to recognize various animals:

The algorithm responded that, with 57.7% confidence, this was a panda. The researches then fed the following image into the same neural network:

This time the algorithm responded with 99.3% confidence that the animal was a gibbon. Of course, when we look at these images, we not only see a panda, but the same panda. How did the algorithm get the second answer not only wrong but wrong with such a high degree of confidence? This happened because the researchers layered in a digital interference pattern in the background that was undetectable to the human eye and designed specifically to fool the neural network. It fooled the neural network precisely because neural networks look at the smallest pieces first and use them to build up patterns that are used in their probabilistic computations.

Picture credit: Ian J. Goodfellow, Jonathon Shlens & Christian Szegedy, “Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples.” Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2015.

The point is not that the computer got the answer wrong on the second pass. Over time, it may be possible for neural networks to detect these interference patterns and filter them out before making the final prediction. The far more interesting point is that human beings do not make the same mistake. This is because we normally see “wholes” first and worry about details later, and some details are too small for us to detect and do not get in the way of the what-is-it of the thing. Even knowing there is an imperceptible inference pattern in the second image, few human beings would say, “That is not a panda. It is a gibbon.” To be clear, I am not saying that humans don’t perceive details. Neither am I saying that there aren’t times when we look at details to discern a whole, as in the case of diagnosing diseases by looking at blood samples under a microscope or through various blood tests.

What is important for us is that the human mind is capable of perceiving the what-is-it of a thing along with its constituent details, whereas an artificial intelligence only sees details and uses them to make predictions about the whole. Human beings can proceed from the “top down” in the grasping of a thing, whereas neural networks always proceed from the “bottom up.” This does not mean that a neural network is ineffective at naming what a thing is. On the contrary, we all have experience with just how good these algorithms have become at such tasks. The point is only that how it is doing this is decidedly different from the way the human intellect proceeds.

This ability to both see both the what-is of an object along with its constituent details finds a parallel in “The Synthetic Impulse in Catholic life,” in which Bishop Daniel Flores describes the Thomistic distinction between the synthetic act of the mind and the analytic act of the mind:

There is a striking resemblance between these two “ways” and the two hemispheres of the human brain as described by the British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist Such in The Master and His Emissary. McGilchrist is highly critical of the popular notions about “left brain” and “right brain,” and convincingly demonstrates that the two sides of the brain can be best understood as an analytic (left) side seeing things as parts and a synthesizing (right) side seeing things as wholes. However, what McGilchrist uniquely adds to the discussion is that cultures both past and present have often emphasized one of these functions to the detriment of the other. When such an imbalance happens, it not only atrophies the side of the brain being ignored, but it also shapes our view of what intelligence is. McGilchrist points to three moments in human history that have cumulatively contributed to a left-brain (analytic) dominance: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and Modernism. Consequently, in the present historical moment, not only has right-brain functioning atrophied, but a culture that has increasingly focussed on left-brain activity has also come to think that intelligence is based in left-brain activity.

I bring this up because there is an obvious objection to all three of my arguments: the human intellect in fact does not pursue truth, is not capable of understanding, and does not apprehend essences. Rather, is does exactly what a neural network does: sees patterns in details and uses these patterns to construct something like a “fiction of meaning,” maybe even as an evolved survival mechanism. In this way, there is really no difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Notwithstanding the fact that such an objection fails to address either Searle’s Chinese Room argument or the adversarial examples from Goodfellow, et al—let alone stronger arguments from Turing’s Halting Problem and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which I have mentioned but not fully discussed—such a view of human intelligence is likely the result of McGilchrist’s observation that culture since the scientific revolution has focussed almost entirely on the left hemisphere of the brain. In other words, since we have a priori ignored the synthesizing (right-side) brain—that part that specifically perceives the what-is of an object—we have weakened its capabilities and have virtually convinced ourselves that it doesn’t exist.

Another way of saying this is that we have redefined human intelligence to match artificial intelligence and subsequently claimed that there is no difference between the two. The identification of one with the other is perhaps all the more convincing because the redefinition occurred long before the advent and widespread rollout of A.I. Moreover, our repeated and long-term interaction with A.I. is likely to reinforce this one-sided view of the human intellect. Per McLuhan and Postman, the use of a technology will form us not merely by its misuse, but also by its mere use. Our interaction with A.I. will continue to shape the way that we think about intelligence itself, and the consequence may be that more and more people will come to define intelligence in terms of how a neural network functions. Nevertheless, the ability of the human intellect to pursue truth, understand that truth, and perceive the what-is of an object has not disappeared altogether. We still instantly recognize a good friend from across the room without examining and analyzing the details of their appearance. Therefore, these three distinctions between human intelligence and artificial intelligence remain, and will perhaps become more important to keep in mind as our interactions with A.I. normalize.

Whatever successes artificial intelligence may have now or in the future—from solving novel mathematics problems, to advancing medical research, or even to creating beautiful music, all of which is not out of the realm of possibility and some of which is already happening—what remains true is that it will do so in a way fundamentally different from human intelligence. Perhaps in the end, a lot of words are expended here on defending the obvious fact that A.I. is not and never will be human. Yet, as A.I. does improve it may start to seem more and more human, especially as we become accustomed to its manner of interaction through our repeated and long-term use. Indeed, especially as robotics catches up with the software, we may find ourselves in a world envisioned by films like Ex Machina. In that case, the distinctions outlined here may end up being increasingly relevant. Although, if and when that happens, perhaps the best advice comes from the Narnian hero, Mr. Beaver: “There’s no two views about things that look like Humans and aren’t.” When encountering such a being, “take my advice … you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”1

Jake Tawney is Director of Curriculum and Academic Resources for the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE) and author of Another Sort of Mathematics with Encounter Books.

I am very grateful to the two Andrews, well familiar to readers of these pages, for their contributions to these thoughts. Mr. Zwerneman suggested the consideration of the nature of probability in statistics and modern physics, and Mr. Ellison gave me the content from McGilchrist and pushed me to refine the concepts of truth and understanding.

The Trivium

Paul Weinhold — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:00:58 GMT

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Until relatively recently, if you asked any teacher or student in the classical education renewal what was at the heart of classical education, you would be most likely to receive a simple answer: the Trivium. When asked for clarification, you would receive one of two answers: 1) The Trivium describes the stages of learning necessary for mastery of any subject, corresponding to the natural process of child development, or 2) The Trivium is the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which train mind and tongue in the critical thinking, clear communication, and eloquence necessary for a well-rounded life. Some answers might land somewhere in between and claim that the Trivium contains a bit of both—stages and subjects alike—which is why it is so central and effective as a metaphor for the project of returning education to its pre-modern roots.

In recent years, many classical educators have made an effort to change the prevailing paradigm of the movement from “rigor,” “fluency,” and “well-roundedness”—terms which emphasize the development of intellectual and linguistic skills in utilitarian contexts—to the language of “wonder,” “leisure,” “contemplation,” and “virtue,” which are more in keeping with an education undertaken “for its own sake.” This signals a gradual shift away from the analogical interpretation of the Trivium as a series of learning stages popularized in the early years of the movement by way of an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers. Still, success is usually found in the mean between extremes. Amidst the backlash against the Sayers model, it can be easy to ignore the fact that the seven liberal arts (of which three encompass the Trivium: the arts of human order as expressed in language) are not incidental but central to any educational program that claims continuity with Greco-Roman paideia, medieval learning, and Renaissance humanism.

With this in mind, Sister Miriam Joseph’s impressively dense, meticulously conceived volume, The Trivium, deserves to play a much more prominent role in the classical education literature, particularly in the crop of books dedicated to the recovery of the humane and mathematical studies comprising the seven liberal arts. As Marguerite McGlinn’s elegant introduction and John Pauley’s brief biography of the author make clear, this work is here released to the public for the first time. Sister Miriam Joseph taught for much of her life at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. A gifted literary scholar of Shakespeare, Thomas More, and the English Renaissance, she created and taught a freshman course on the Trivium for 25 years. This book, first printed in 1937, served as the basis for the course (those interested in the history of American education may be fascinated to learn from Pauley’s biography that Joseph was inspired to investigate the arts of language by attending a lecture on the topic from Mortimer Adler).

Due to its conception as a classroom text, it is not surprising that Joseph’s book is structured and formatted more like a textbook than an informal guide to the Trivium. In eleven chapters, Joseph ascends from a short but profound general consideration of the liberal arts and the nature of language—crucial prolegomena to the actual content of the arts—through the parts of speech, analysis of terms, statements and arguments; and concluding in a guide to compositional style. Important rules, tables, and diagrams are consistently included on almost every page to break up the expository text, along with a multitude of quotations from the Western literary tradition which serve as vivid illustrations of grammatical usage, argumentation, rhetorical devices, and other expressions of the possibilities of language. Indeed, Joseph’s recognition of the natural connection between literature and the Trivium is one of the book’s major assets. Her attention to the great auctores situates The Trivium as a spiritual successor of the medieval Trivialist John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, which revolves around the importance of engaging with the authorities of the past to sharpen the moral imagination. Joseph does not simply want to inform her reader about the Trivium: she wants to situate the reader within the liberal arts tradition of considering the nature and end of man as a speaking, thinking, creating being.

Those who are even somewhat acquainted with the Trivium will recognize an apparent idiosyncrasy in Joseph’s ordering of topics. She places logic first as “the art of thinking,” followed by grammar as “the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought,” then rhetoric as “the art of communicating thought from one mind to another” (3). According to this order, logic is the fundamental humane art because it involves understanding, judging, and arguing about concepts through clear thinking. Logic “directs the very act of reason, which directs all other human acts to their proper end through the means it determines” (10). With the use of reason harnessed correctly, clear thinking can then be symbolized and arranged through grammar, and communicated persuasively through rhetoric. “Grammar first” apologists may retort with the necessity of ensuring that the structure of language is clear before getting to the content of terms, judgments, and syllogisms; but within the framework that Joseph adopts, the progression of topics makes great sense. For example, genus, species, and the categories of being precede the parts of speech before the majority of the book takes up Aristotelian logic.

That said, the presentation of topics does have potential to confuse those without prior exposure to the Trivium. Joseph writes in a very compacted, almost scholastic prose that, like the process of reading Aristotle or Aquinas, requires the reader to pay great attention to every sentence lest a significant piece of the thread be lost. Her sentences are beautifully crafted and deeply considered, evincing a lifetime of immersion in Christian humanism. Within a classroom setting, this renders the book most suitable for advanced courses in logic or composition at the college level (although McGlinn has most helpfully included 20 pages of endnotes that clarify Joseph’s lines of thinking). The average reader who has read some old books will likely be able to track the threads with some difficulty, but there is no denying that this is an extremely content-rich book—a Summa of language arts with logic as the crowning centerpiece.

There are also some shortcomings in Joseph’s treatment of specific topics. In the one chapter entirely devoted to grammar, she does not discuss formal sentence analysis. Whether done through diagramming or another method, this is a critical way for students to understand how each word in a sentence relates to the rest in order to express a complete thought, and its absence is conspicuous. She extensively employs a novel shorthand for categorical propositions both before and after introducing the more familiar Square of Opposition—this may produce headaches for those accustomed to other logic texts. And, also following John of Salisbury, rhetoric is almost an afterthought. She briefly touches on the five components of rhetoric and some stylistic devices, but her focus in this final chapter is not on the structure of the classical oration but on literary analysis, composition, and poetic scansion. Rhetoric handbooks like How to Win an Argument, James M. May’s excellent compendium of texts by Cicero, will have to be consulted for a fuller consideration.

Despite its nature as a encyclopedic resource for the arts of language, The Trivium is ultimately a defense of the classical liberal arts for human flourishing. Rather than reading the Trivium analogically, Joseph vindicates the Trivium by simply presenting its copious content in all its glorious richness, inviting her readers to treat and employ language with gravity and respect. This book has intimidating facets. But if we want ourselves and our students to speak, write, and persuade others of reality at the highest level, The Trivium is perhaps the best available single-volume resource for such a task—even if books devoted entirely to each of the three arts are also needed as supplements for a more comprehensive view. In Sister Miriam’s words, liberal education “imposes forms on the mind” that are “received through active cooperation” by the student (7). Much cooperation will be needed on the part of the reader to get the most out of this work, but the type of person which Joseph aims to form is a most noble goal for attainment.

Davis C. Smith holds an MA in Classical Education from Hillsdale College. His work has been featured by several publications, including the Circe Institute, Voegelin View, American Reformer, and the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education.

Search Your Feelings

Paul Weinhold — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:02:34 GMT

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There’s a little video that’s been making the social media rounds of late that will be of interest to readers of ClassicalEd Review. Filmed and posted on TikTok by a student1 at a “science and technology” charter school out east,2 it depicts a series of hapless high school peers of the filmmaker attempting on camera to read aloud a hand-written sentence3 presented to them on a 3x5 card:

She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.

Now, let’s speak frankly: this sentence is clumsily adolescent, the author obviously trying to construct something “elevated” that he knows his classmates will struggle with. The phrase “silhouette of clothes” sort of delicately wafts across your brain like a translucent silken veil at first, but then you realize that it doesn’t paint a clear picture of anything: I know what a silhouette is, and I know what clothes are, but if I can see a silhouette, it is dark with a light source behind the subject, and if it is dark, I don’t think I can confidently say that the clothes are extraordinary, or gauche, or both, or extraordinarily gauche. And here’s another serious weakness in the sentence: the author sets up “extraordinary” and “gauche” as if they were clear antitheses/opposites, but that is hardly the case: something on the higher end of the gaucheness spectrum will likely also be extraordinary. I suspect that the writer meant something other than what he actually said here.

Were I the student’s teacher, I would work with him to recraft this sentence: tell me in other words what you are trying to say. What do you mean by “silhouette”? That’s a very specific word that means an outline of something. Are you just trying to find a creative way to say “outfit”? If so, “silhouette of clothes” won’t quite work—it’s just, well, it’s not a thing you can say; those words just don’t work together in English. It’s like saying “admirable perspiration” or “investigation on epistemological basketball.”4 What are some elevated synonyms for “clothes” or “outfit”? -- “Extraordinary”: it sounds as if you want to say something positive or complimentary about the outfit in question, while noting that it is also tasteless, vulgar, gauche. Is that the case? If so, come up with a more specific positive adjective suitable to the scene you have in mind. “Extraordinary” is bland, cheap, overused to the point of meaninglessness. Like “nice” or “interesting”. Is the outfit “eye-catching”? “Unforgettable?” “Striking?” Since it’s a she who is wearing the ensemble (ooh! That’s a good word.), are you imagining something that a man would find alluring or enchanting? Find a way to say that, because “extraordinary” just isn’t strong enough.

But setting aside the fact that this sentence is amateurish and unclear, it is short, contains no extended modifiers or subordinate clauses, and has some high school level words in it, and at least one college-bound word.5 It would not be unreasonable to expect that upper-grade high school students at a prestigious school like Science Charter Prep Career Academy Prep School would at least be able to pronounce it out loud.

Of course, the video would not have gone viral if the students featured in it had done so. It’s a catastrophe, with students misreading “were” for “wore”, mangling “silhouette”, naturally having no idea what to do with the college word “gauche”, and even making a mess of “extraordinary”, in the mouth of one young man, “exter…gurrnery, whatever, bro!” Not one student filmed is able to make it through the sentence without a major pause or a nervous interjection; one student reads two words and then gives up.

A follow-up video posted by the same TikTok user features a slightly easier sentence: The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the general’s schedule. Aside from the expected stumbles upon the correct pronunciation of “colonel”, this time most of the students in the video are able to make it through from start to finish. Where it then gets interesting is when the young man with the camera asks his peers to explain what the sentence means.

One is notable because all he can do is reorder the given words and repeat them back to the camera. “It’s like, there’s a choir, and the colonel asks them to accommodate the general’s schedule,” he says. “But in your own words?” asks my nominee for the inaugural ClassicalEd Review Excellence in Student Journalism award. “I don’t know, bro, like, he asks them if they will accommodate the general’s schedule or something.” I cannot count the number of times I encountered the same phenomenon in my own high school teaching years, and assuming that the students know the meanings of the individual words in a sentence, they can be easily trained to restate with fluency: Ok, what does “accommodate” mean? Who is more important—a colonel or a general? What does it mean for the choir to accommodate the general’s schedule—and what would the opposite mean, i.e. for the general to accommodate the choir’s schedule? Ok, now explain what this sentence means in your own words; tell me the story of what’s going on here. (The key word is “trained”—if the teacher is to help the students who struggle with this kind of thinking, he must repeat this little exercise over and over again in the classroom. “Training” means rigor and repetition—do it on the spot and unexpectedly in the middle of class, do it while meeting with a student one-on-one about a writing assignment, do it in the middle of the reading of a paragraph for closer analysis. Just keep doing it over and over, and do not for one second balk because you are afraid of making struggling students feel uncomfortable. Do it with spirit and flair and without apology. All the best teachers I ever had, men and women alike, did this kind of training and intellectual disciplining of their students on a daily basis. Yes, sometimes it made us “feel bad”. Then next time, when we did it better, we felt better. It would be a better world if more teachers of all subjects at all grade levels acted more like ursine Romanian Olympic gymnastics coaches6 and less like volunteer pre-K church childcare staff.)

Two students, when asked to explain the sentence, said more or less the same thing: that it simply meant the colonel was asking the choir to sing for the general. I suppose this makes a sort of sense: there’s a choir, and choirs sing, so if someone is asking a choir to do something, it’s probably singing. Makes sense. This REALLY got my attention, for it reminded me of the way in which multiple generations of Americans have been (mis)taught to read since the 1970s, and of a disastrous method once as unassailably THE way to teach reading in American schools as bloodletting was the standard treatment for a fever in pre-modern medicine: the Three Cues method. In the last decade it has finally begun to be disestablished, but its shadow looms long.

Pioneered by an arch-educationist named Ken Goodman7 in a “groundbreaking” 1967 paper, Three Cues proceeds from the entirely-unconfirmed theory8 that phonetics—the relationship of letters to sounds in English—is not really all that important to making sense of words, and that context and syntax actually do most of the work for us; teaching phonics, which is real hard, can thus be dispensed with in the elementary school classroom, and we can get down to a much more efficient and joy-filled way of unlocking the treasures of written language for children:

THINK OF SOME WORD THAT STARTS WITH THE SAME FIRST LETTER THAT YOU SEE HERE. IT’S PROBABLY CLOSE ENOUGH.
OR GUESS A WORD THAT MIGHT MAKE SENSE, ESPECIALLY IF THERE’S A PICTURE TO HELP YOU GUESS ONE. ISN’T THIS FUN?
OR JUST SKIP IT. ALSO FUN!

I am not making this up, though if I were making it up, you can be certain I’d make the “teacher resources” in Comic Sans font:

Of course, we run into trouble when a couple of things happen. First of all, at some point, the pictures start to disappear, though the educationists will surely find a way to postpone their departure as long as possible, perhaps even indefinitely if publishers can be convinced there’s big money to be made in producing illustrated books for the high school market.

But even long before any potential illustration-dearth, we can have problems. For example, an “emerging reader” might be presented with this:

If he uses the “strategies” he’s been taught in the Three Cues classroom, he would be perfectly justified in reading this as My dog likes to lick his bone. I mean, it makes sense—just look at the picture! That’s what the dog is doing. If the text said anything about eating, the picture would show the dog wolfing down Purina Puppy Chow9 out of his doggie bowl. Everyone knows that dogs gnaw on bones for oral-dental-masticular stimulation, not for nutritional value, except maybe educationists. There’s a thought: gnawing on an educationist would probably have some nutritional value.10

Speaking of educationists whose work we think should be fed to the dogs, it turns out that Darth Dyslexus doesn’t actually see this misreading as a problem. In a 2019 interview featured in an article which I have shamelessly pillaged, when asked to comment on the decades of hard cognitive science that have totally debunked the Three Cues method, here was the 91-year-old Goodman’s response:

“Word recognition is a preoccupation,” he said. “I don’t teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that.”

He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word “horse” and says “pony” instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn’t the same thing as a horse. Second, don’t you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says “pony”? And different letters say “horse”?

He dismissed my question.

“The purpose is not to learn words,” he said. “The purpose is to make sense.”

This is truly extraordinary: “sense” is to be constructed apart from the real, existent text; it should probably be somewhat based upon the letters on the page, but it doesn’t matter all that much, as long as you make it “make sense” to you, the reader/meaning-fabricator. Who says that that Sith lords deal in absolutes? Poppycock. This is about as flexible as you can get: “Maybe, Luke. I could have killed your father. Or maybe I am your father. Or maybe I just asked your father to accommodate the Emperor’s schedule. What makes sense to you?”

One notes how consistent this slipshod, pop-Heraclitus, all-is-flux thinking is with Ken Goodman’s claim that a horse and pony “are the same concept,” hippology being a subject he is every bit as qualified to pronounce upon as the formation of intellects. Close enough. I wonder what other reality-hostile, distinction-denying assertions he might own up to?

Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn’t like the value judgment that implies.

What a surprise. There’s no difference between a horse and pony, between eating food and licking a bone, between any two words that start with the same letter, any two narratives that are internally coherent, i.e. “make sense”, for example the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, or Islam and Judaism—and no difference between “skilled” and “unskilled” readers. There’s probably no such thing as reading, either. There’s just sense-making, and that can happen just as well without a text as with one. There’s probably no such thing as “text,” either, so let’s blow up the word “literacy” and start applying it to all kinds of fun things that the kids are already really, really good at, like “consumer literacy”, “graphic literacy”, “social media literacy”, “brand literacy”, “meme literacy.” Come to think of it, what are we doing still talking about “sense” like it means something? “Sense” is whatever makes sense to the person making it make sense, and that’s everybody and everything. This is awesome. First, we get the summers off, and now, the school year just got a lot less demanding.

The kids in the TikTok video aren’t the victims of COVID and school closures, or brain-dead illiterate social media addicts whose spirits will torment Mark Zuckerberg in hell forever, or the zombie spawn of the iPhone: they are Ken Goodman’s kids. Luke—I am your father.

In his “part 2” video of his classmates struggling to read and explain a sentence, TikToker @whatthevek claimed, although this has not been independently verified by any sources, that he was now under disciplinary investigation at Career Science Prep Success Academy Math School for violating phone and social media use policy. He may well have broken their rules. Unfortunately, any sanction more severe than a slap on the wrist will give the impression that the school is simply retaliating against a student who blew the whistle on the abject failures of year upon year of schooling in South Philly. I mean, what the vek?

Andrew Ellison has been a leader in the classical liberal education movement since 1997, having served as a high school teacher, headmaster, and charter school administrator for 26 years in two states before moving into higher education. He is a Senior Writer for Cana Academy and posts regularly about classical education and other topics on LinkedIn. Ellison is currently Vice President of Enrollment Management at the University of Dallas. He writes from Irving, Texas.

A TikTok user known as @whatthevek, whom some sources identify as one Menvekeh Kosia, a senior student.

Sources indicate that the name of the school is “Preparatory Charter School of Mathematics, Science, Technology, and Careers” in South Philadelphia, apparently known as “Prep Charter” for short. You could reverse the terms (“Charter Prep”) and the flavor would be pretty much the same, which is a fairly reliable indicator of emptiness. Furthermore, the name “Prep Charter” suggests a somewhat superficial grasp of the meaning of educationy words, like calling something a “Learning School”, or, in the case of an actual district-run magnet school I once drove past in a major urban center in the desert southwest, an “Education Academy”. Ah, yes—an “education academy”. Good to specify. Don’t want to confuse it with any of those other “academies”.

Not even in cursive.

I am thinking here of a specific trend I have noted in classical schools of high aspirations which require of their graduates a senior thesis. A survey of the thesis titles for any given year, proudly published by the school in a newsletter or in a senior commencement program, invariably features a few thesis titles that, well, just aren’t quite English: “An Investigation on Justice,” or “A Refutation of Raskolnikov Based Off Father Zossima’s Teaching”. Based off—an ill phrase, a vile phrase. Quite gauche.

“Gauche”. I confess to never having heard this word until I got to college, used once in casual conversation by a freshman dorm floormate named Pete. We had a hilarious running joke on the floor about an imaginary self-storage facility called Pete Sass Storage—“Got a bunch of useless stuff? Put it in Pete Sass! Storage, that is!” and used to call him Pete Sass. Deep down inside, I know he loved the attention, in spite of the sullenness and occasional tears.

I think here of the great Béla Károlyi (1942-2024), who, as my many, many Magyar readers will be quick to point out, and maybe just a little bit too touchily so, was of ethnic Hungarian stock, politically a Romanian citizen because of the dismembering of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the Treaty of Trianon (or as you all probably know it, the Trianoni békeszerződés) in 1920, placing millions of ethnic Hungarians under the intolerable foreign yoke of Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, and, of course, Romanians. It is not an entirely unrespectable opinion amongst contemporary Hungarian nationalists that the boundaries of the old kingdom should be restored, which would place millions of Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, and Romanians under Magyar rule, a manifestly more just state of affairs than the situation post-Trianon.

Known as “Darth Dyslexus” to his foes.

Standard educationist “research” method. 1. Make something up that is kinda cool. 2. Test it in your own mind to see if it “makes sense”. 3. Propagate it.

Which the more sardonic older dogs sometimes jokingly refer to as “Soylent Brown” and tell sinister tales of to frighten the puppies.

This is an admittedly cheap shot.

Classical Education News & Articles | 7 May 2026

Paul Weinhold — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:01:23 GMT

Valor Education and the University of Dallas Announce Partnership

Grounded in a shared vision of the human person and a common commitment to the true, good, and beautiful, the partnership will provide formation for faculty and students from UDallas and Valor through a variety of initiatives.

The History of Education in Six Words

By Erik Ellis | Public Discourse

In recent decades, many have committed themselves to the recovery and practice of classical education. It has until recently been a close-knit affair, but in the last half decade the growth and success of the movement has prompted those outside to ask those inside what, precisely, the thing is.

Recovering the University’s Soul

By Robert Barron | First Things

This essay was delivered as the First Things 2026 Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida.

Ancient Thievery and Small-Minded Men

By Christine Norvell | Ford Forum

Imitation is normal.

The Return of the Religious Male

By Richard Vedder | Minding the Campus

Campus hostility toward men is fueling a revival in their return to church.

On Enthusiasm in Classical Christian Schools

By David Seibel | Beza Institute

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) wrote three works on revivals and the work of the Holy Spirit.

The American Book of Fables

By Sophia Institute Press

In this heirloom collection of original and adapted fables, best-selling author and educator Matthew Mehan reimagines Aesop for the New World.

Buy Now

New Caps on Federal Student Lending Could Impact Schools of Education

By Preston Cooper | Education Next

Expensive institutions may need to reckon with OBBBA’s effort to rein in the nation’s $1.7 trillion in student loan debt.

When helping hurts: Rethinking special education accommodations

By | Fordham Institute

We need to talk about accommodations.

What Are We Doing Teaching History?

By Andrew J. Zwerneman | Cana Academy

Too many Americans think that the study of history is strictly a partisan matter.

Fear and Loathing in the Modern Classroom

By Roman Quattrocchi | VoegelinView

“If it were up to me, I would let them speak.”

Awakening the Moral Imagination

By Vigen Guroian | The Imaginative Conservative

The beauty of fairy tales is their ability to attractively depict character and virtue.

The Long March Continues

By Carl Fahrenwald and Garion Frankel | The American Mind

Are universities training school leaders to break the rules?

Resegregate (the Sexes)

By Rebecca Salazar | American Reformer

The developmental differences between boys and girls have long interested me as a teacher.

Don’t Memorize Math Facts. Not Yet.

By Dan Murphy | Substack

How developing number sense builds children who love math

Classical Word Salad: What’s Real, What Ain’t?

By Andrew J. Ellison | Cana Academy

I love a good Greek salad, with fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, mild onions, ripe olives, and all the salty-sour goodness that you can handle in a lemon-vinegar marinade.

Sketching a New Conservative Education Agenda

By Daniel Buck and Anna Low | American Enterprise Institute

The fifth edition of Sketching a New Conservative Education Agenda features terrific contributions from a range of conservative educators, scholars, and activists.

Toward a Sexual Counter-Revolution

By Scott Yenor | The American Mind

For decades, legacy conservatives have sent mixed signals about family life.

The Machiavellian Moment Returns

By Jay Cost | The American Mind

American renewal requires going back to our foundations.

A Fool’s Hope for Higher Education

By Elizabeth Stice | Front Porch Republic

Universities are peculiar institutions, and they need peculiar leaders.

The Education Democracy Requires

By Neal McCluskey | Law & Liberty

There has long been a divide among conservatives and liberals when it comes to education: Do you want the “sage on the stage” model or the “guide on the side?”

St. Jerome Academy and the Call to Inclusive Catholic Schools

By Dr. Melissa Mitchell | Word on Fire

In recent years, Catholic classical schools have increasingly recognized that the call to educate is inseparable from the Church’s commitment to the inherent dignity of every human person.

How do I Teach Euclid to my Students?

By Lucas Fonseca | Substack

Studying Euclid is, without a doubt, one of the most pleasurable intellectual experiences I’ve ever had.

What’s Wrong with Civic Education?

By | Modern Age

When it’s shorthand for multiculturalism, it undermines itself.

Thirteen False and Debilitating Ideas

By Nathaniel Peters | Plough

One winter night in Brooklyn in 1974, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus played a game.

America at 250: Our Lost Opportunity

By Robert Pondiscio | Commentary

A few days after school let out in early July 1976, I mounted my bike on a warm, cloudless morning and headed for water.

Civics is Not Enough: A Proposal for the Study of American Civilization

By Jacob Wolf | Center for Religion Culture & Democracy

As the United States approaches its semiquincentennial celebration, Americans would do well to examine how we talk and, indeed, how we think about our national heritage.

Expeditionary Education Part 2: Brass Tacks

By Patrick Whalen | Substack

The first essay I wrote on Expeditionary Education described a vision of integrated, motivated, and experiential education galvanized by specific missions.

Repairing the Ruins: Why AI Can’t Replace Education

By Santiago Schnell | National Catholic Register

In an era when AI can write anything, authentic education must go beyond the mere production of words.

Noteworthy Podcast Episodes

Lost (Souls on the) Highway

Paul Weinhold — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:53:06 GMT

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There’s a wild, wooly, and weird America alive and well out there on the roads and highways that connect our major urban centers across rural expanses, an America of roadside diners with names like “Ma’s” and “Big Ed’s,” of abandoned gas stations, of antique stands that should more honestly be called junk depots, and, of course, of Christian-admonitory signs of various degrees of professional quality calling motorists to repent and believe at seventy MPH. Flannery O’Connor famously called the South “Christ-haunted,” but as a native of the Rust Belt and seasoned road-farer of many American states, I can say from experience that the Spirit of the Lord hovers over the face of the asphalt in many, many places outside of the old Confederacy.

Along the route that takes one between Dallas and Austin along Interstate 35, several evangelically-inspired signs are memorable. One billboard proclaims INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF THAT JESUS ROSE FROM THE DEAD and provides a URL so one can, presumably, go and see the evidence for oneself, perhaps attempting to controvert it, but in vain. One might note to note that “incontrovertible proof” would render that little thing known as faith quite unnecessary. Compared to the absolute certainty which it would engender in the mind of the beholder, mere faith would be a child’s toy, a crutch and comfort to the little ones who cling to their juvenile assurance of things hoped for and conviction of things not seen.

I am not without some curiosity about the precise details of this incontrovertible proof. Even though I am a believer, I am more than a little interested in testing my powers of controverting, which are nothing to sneeze at, upon it. But thus far I have resisted the urge to go to the website, preferring to remain a Gentile of sorts, lest I be judged under the Law—the law of evidence, that is.

At another point off the highway between Waco and Dallas there is long stretch of tall, white fencing with Proverbs 16:3 (KJV) painted on it in towering letters over a length of at least fifty meters: COMMIT THY WORKS TO THE LORD AND THY THOUGHTS SHALL BE ESTABLISHED. Behind the fence: one of the largest motor vehicle graveyards I have ever seen, acres upon acres of wrecked cars, rusted fifty-year old school buses whose yellow paint has faded in the brutal north Texas sun to the color of unfinished wood, semi-truck trailers that look as if they have been ripped open by a giant can opener, derelict Greyhound Scenicruisers,1 still gleaming incorrupt silver, with broken-out windows, and even a couple dozen watercraft, very far from water. Every time I pass this landmark, I wonder what the connection is between the text painted on the fence and what is on the other side of that fence. Perhaps the message is: if thou don’t commit thy works to the Lord, thou wilt end up like these Datsuns and Ford LTDs and derelict Greyhound Scenicruisers over here, with oxidized paint, mangled bodies, and crumbling tires, picked over for what useful parts can be scavenged from thee by others who did, in fact, commit their works to the Lord.

What does that even mean—thy thoughts shall be established? There’s a certain kind of unexamined citation not uncommon amongst highly-Biblical Christians that often amounts to rattling off sacred syllables so familiar that they have long since left their significance as grammatical and syntactical expressions of meaning, and not always univocal ones, behind and have instead become sonic signifiers of various notions in the mind of the citer, notions which may correspond closely or loosely to the actual semantics of the language. I recall a church youth group leader from my teen years who possessed an impressive and near-photographic memory for copia of out-of-context “Bible verses” but who seldom demonstrated that he knew what any of them meant, instead decorating his little Sunday night talks to us youths with texts like so many chimes, thumb pianos, and rain-sticks on a cut from a ‘90s John Tesh2 album. His3 [3] voice would take on a strange musical lilt whenever he ~~tipped the rain stick~~ quoted the Bible, the spaces between words would become ambiguous, certain consonants would get fudged, and the recombined syllables would rush by in rapid, strangely accented patterns that required a second or two for the hearer to decipher, something like:

Cometh eye were xtootha-lore Dan thigh thaw swillbeast ab lish

At any rate, my hunch is that Prov. 16:3 features a Hebrew idiom made strange to us by two things: first, a rather-too-literal translation into English, and second, a circa-1600 flavor of the word “established,” evoking not a vague notion of “making” or “starting” something (“We established an armed perimeter around the College of Education”; “Big Ed’s: Established 1974”), but a more specific image of erecting a structure upon a foundation. I suspect that the Hebrew means something like and your mind will be put at ease, but being no Hebraist of any kind whatsoever, I cannot do more than speculate sheerly, except maybe also to look at how the eminent linguist and scholar Robert Alter Englishes this half of Proverbs 16:3, which is that your plans may be firm-founded, so I’m definitely wrong. Commit thyself to Alter’s footnotes, and thy ClassicalEd Review columns shall be established.

The last bit of I-35 billboard theology upon which I shall remark is somewhere between Austin and Waco. It shows Planet Earth suspended against a black background of space and stars, while to the right of it, a text proclaims:

PROPHECY IS FULFILLING!

My first thought was that perhaps “Prophecy” was some kind of low-calorie nutritional supplement beverage, something good for you but nonetheless surprisingly satisfying. A second thought was that perhaps the billboard had been placed by the for-profit (sic) DeVry College of Oracular Utterance, encouraging folks to think about a challenging-yet highly-rewarding career in ardently chastising Israelite faithlessness. “Become a certified prophet in just 36 weeks! 100% online classes! Visit devryCOU.edu/enroll!”

Of course, what has happened here is that the local church congregation sponsoring the billboard, much more ardent in gospel zeal than skilled in the use of English, has made what should be a passive verb into an active one. What the sign intends to say is that prophecy is being fulfilled, that the divinely inspired visions of the ancient Biblical speakers of what is to be are in the process of coming true all around us, and those who are both attentive and faithful can see it happening. What it actually says is that lambasting the Israelites for their sins is deeply satisfying, which I don’t doubt—just read a little Jeremiah and you get the idea that he didn’t entirely mind being the bearer of bad news.

One thing that this mangling of correct usage has to recommend it is its comparative brevity: “prophecy is fulfilling” is less of a mouthful than “prophecy is being fulfilled,” and in the constant tussle between standardized, formal language and the forces of linguistic entropy, “extra” consonants, syllables, particles, and auxiliary words will be dropped from speech up to the point just shy of fatal ambiguity. Someone on the church Evangelization Committee may well have suggested that the sign read “PROPHECY IS BEING FULFILLED”, but someone else, thinking this somehow too “wordy”, might have insisted that “PROPHECY IS FULFILLING” meant more or less the same thing.

An analogous dynamic has turned the verb “to grow” from an intransitive one into a transitive one in the domain of business-speak. For there was a time in American English not so long ago when the only direct objects which the verb grow could take were vegetative in nature: one could grow lima beans in the garden, for example, or grow a beard. In the context of business, “grow” was something intransitive, with no object; you could say that revenues grew in the third quarter, or that sales volume had grown by 6% over the previous year, or that the company was growing.

It was sometime in 1997 or ’98 that I first heard the change. An ad for a consulting firm on local public radio concluded with the line our mission is to help you grow your business. What? “Grow my business”? No, that’s not right. You can grow bananas, but not a business; perhaps their mission is “to help my business grow”?

“Right,” one can hear the late- ‘90s consultant saying, more distinguished by his zeal to see fellow entrepreneurs succeed than his attention to the niceties of formal English. “To help grow your business. You know, like, to make it bigger. To grow it. To make it grow.”

“Those aren’t the same things. You can say one of them in English, but not the other. You have to use other words like expand or increase if you are talking about making a business grow. You can’t say ‘grow a business.’”

“Huh? What do you mean I can’t say it? ‘Grow a business.’ I just said it. You know what I mean.”

You know what I mean is, in fact, a good standard by which to judge the life expectancy of a linguistic aberration: does it more or less get the same thing across as the correct/standard expression? If the answer is yes, and the aberration in question has some aesthetic qualities in its favor—for example, it is more concise, or it suggests something bold and dynamic and active (grow your business!) rather than something slow and outside of one’s direct agency (help your business to grow)—then it will likely catch on, protestations of grammarians notwithstanding. Thirty years on, this is what has become of “to grow”; now we grow revenues, we grow sales, we grow the workforce, and language snoots such as your Humble Narrator don’t bat an eye.

For the record, being a grammarian is, in fact, quite fulfilling. The world of human speech and thought is far more interesting than we usually take it to be, and the grammarian is one whose advanced powers of linguistic perception enable him to enjoy it the way a practiced oenophile does fine wines. As Solomon observes, Commit thy works to Garner’s Modern English Usage, and thy thoughts shall be established. Incontrovertibly.

Let the reader understand—the reader of Confederacy of Dunces, that is.

For those too young: Tesh was the longtime host of a daily Hollywood gossip TV show called Entertainment Tonight who shocked the industry when he gave it all up to devote himself full time to recording cheesy New Age piano music.

The youth group leader’s, not John Tesh’s

Classical Education News & Articles | 23 April 2026

Paul Weinhold — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:14:20 GMT

ClassicalEd Review provides our readers with a compendium of recent articles and news stories related to classical education, the liberal arts, and school choice.

Mary Beard offers a spirited defence of studying classics

By The Economist | The Economist

Her book aims to excavate the discipline from the layers of argument that surround it.

The Mount Rushmore of American Educators

By Daniel B. Coupland and Sarah Gomez | The American Mind

These four teachers faced incredible challenges but never gave in to despair.

Learn More

Saving a Lost Generation of Young Men—with Chop Saws

By Emma Green | The New Yorker

The College of St. Joseph the Worker, which combines the trades with a liberal-arts education, is trying to restore its students’ sense of their own competence, and to revive the city of Steubenville, Ohio, along the way.

What Catholic Education is For: Part I

By Matthew Minerd | Substack

Most debates about Catholic education begin in the wrong place.

Parents Want Colorblindness in Classrooms, Not CRT

By Katherine Matt | The Daily Signal

Parents prioritize civic literacy, colorblindness, and transparency in education rather than focusing on preconceived notions of the oppressive and oppressed.

Gold Dust

By Mandi Gerth | Substack

We want children who have accumulated a wealth of good habits and virtue little by little over years of intentional parenting.

Progress

By Modern Age | Modern Age

An old idea continues to provoke new debates.

The State of Education Politics Today

By Frederick Hess | Education Next

What does partisan polarization mean for schooling and higher education?

The Spotify Student: Reckoning with Audiobooks

By Jeannette DeCelles-Zwerneman | Cana Academy

A literacy crisis and a rising “nonreading culture” are being worsened when teachers and professors steer students toward audiobooks.

Defining Progressivism

By Bradley J. Birzer | The Imaginative Conservative

As a theory of history, progressivism always believes in conflict and violence and antagonism.

A Christian Philosophy of Education

By Howard Merken | The Imaginative Conservative

Just what is Christian education? Is it Protestant education, is it evangelical Christian education, or does it also encompass Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox viewpoints?

Who Owns American History?

By John Fonte | The American Mind

Never Despair

By Timon Cline | American Reformer

Discipline, Comfort, and the Uses of Providence

Agentic AI Comes for Teaching

By Zev van Zanten | James G. Martin Center

Will agentic AI let teachers spend more time teaching, or will it remove even more of the human touch from the academy?

What is artificial intelligence anyway?

By Ben Tarnoff | MSN

Artificial intelligence is a nightmare to write about.

Taming Arithmetic and Geometry

By Dan Murphy | Substack

Maintaining a Boundary Between Number and Space

The Accidental Winners of the War on Higher Ed

By Ian Bogost | The Atlantic

Go to a small liberal-arts college if you can.

Public Speaking in College Is Neglected

By Hannah Hutchins | Minding the Campus

Colleges give too little attention to public speaking, leaving students unprepared for careers that demand strong communication skills.

Families Are Pushed and Pulled into School Choice

By Michael McShane | RealClear Education

Families are both pushed and pulled into school choice.

Noteworthy Podcasts

An Open Letter to a Headmaster from a Teacher’s Husband

Paul Weinhold — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:16:16 GMT

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Dear Mr. Headmaster:

It’s been quite a while since we’ve last corresponded, and even longer since we’ve spoken in person, and I hope you are doing well. You and the school have had always had my goodwill and blessings from afar even if I have neither had nor made opportunities to communicate that to you.

I wanted to share something with you since you and the other members of the administration probably aren’t seeing quite all of it, unless you are carefully scrutinizing the after-hours security camera footage from the second floor of the building.

You have an incredible servant in your midst in the person of my wife, your K-2 art teacher, and I know that you value her, but this week has really seen superhuman exertion from her. With the “art gallery” event for the families coming up on Friday, she has worked in her classroom until midnight three times this week. She spent at least half of spring break at school similarly preparing for the gallery night, not infrequently with one of our two college-age daughters in tow as her apprentices and art class sous-chefs. Last night she actually made it home by 9:30 pm, but then she pulled an all-nighter working on a slide show of the kindergarteners’ collected work to keep rolling in the classroom all throughout the event.

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I want you to know that she is not complaining one single bit about all this extra work—she is doing it all out of love for the craft of teaching and out of her commitment to excellence. And I know that you neither have nor ever would command any of your teachers to do so much. She simply wants to do it; she knows that if excellence is the standard, there is no question of whether she will or won’t put in the hours to achieve it. It is no serious criticism to simply observe that such passion for excellence and serious knowledge about the subject matter when it comes to the “specials” of art and music and PE (and I despise this term “specials”, as it connotes a lack of essentiality and likely abets unseriousness—I prefer to think of these classes as “non-daily core”) can be in somewhat rare supply amongst teachers inclined towards the elementary grades; you have been around in admin at multiple classical schools, and I know you know that oftentimes it is all we can do in art class to find someone cheerful, patient with children, and capable of more or less following a scripted set of paint-by-number lesson plans.

My wife is a rara avis in this regard, and as well as I know her and as closely as I have watched her work in a variety of elementary grade TA and teaching assignments for the last 7 years, she continues to surprise me. This is next-level for her.

Now I will say that it has been quite challenging for us all at home to be mom-less this week. I can manage the single-dad thing most of the time, though recently my own health challenges from fighting the cancer have become unfortunately a bit more acute over the past two months (nothing newly mortal—just an unplanned bit of treatment-triggered moderate-to-severe debilitation). But we are all behind her and 100% supportive of her—how could we not be? Teaching is the family business around here: my mother did it for three decades, I did it, my wife does it, and our eldest son and his wife are both now working in the shop. The one thing that will ALWAYS get you a pass in our household is going above and beyond for the cause of classical, liberal arts education.

Thank you for providing a place where my wife can go all-in on her terms. That’s really been the key to her flourishing—you have allowed this creative and focused teacher to just go for it in her passion for the material and for the benefit of the kids. When she taught history and geography in another grade at a different school, she was also given this kind of freedom to be creative—and by “creative” I don’t mean someone who is scatterbrained, messy, undisciplined, and following her fairy-muse or something flakey; rather, I have in mind here the kind of person who restlessly seeks improvement and excellence in her work, thinking constantly of new activities and lessons to better serve the students, putting in the hours to bring them from inchoate dreams to effective execution. The fruits of such freedom allowed to the creative teacher cannot be overvalued, and they are well worth whatever risks one might worry about when it comes to maintaining control in a building with hundreds of students and scores of teachers coming and going and turning over in the middle of the semester. You have done well to trust her with this freedom.

I mentioned earlier our son, who seems poised to inherit the family business, provided he can earn a living to support his family (#1 on the way next month). He currently teaches some 9^th graders at another school who STILL talk about the history and mythology lessons they had in my wife’s classroom years ago as 3^rd graders, innovative and unforgettable lessons (remind me to tell you sometime about the scream-inducing one involving Odin’s eyeball) which she spent multiple all-night sessions at home researching, planning, and practicing and which were certainly not part of any “safe” or “approved” lesson plans she had inherited from previous years. That’s the kind of magic we want to be happening in a school.

My wife is currently exhausted but deeply fulfilled, and that works just fine for all of us here at home.

With best wishes for a successful art gallery evening—

Yours,

Classical Education News & Articles | 17 April 2026

Paul Weinhold — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:03:22 GMT

ClassicalEd Review provides our readers with a compendium of recent articles and news stories related to classical education, the liberal arts, and school choice.

The Battle Hymn of the Refugee Teacher

By Annika Hernandez and Robert Pondiscio | Education Next

The explosive growth of classical education is luring teachers from traditional district schools—and reminding them why they became teachers in the first place

The Quiet Surge of Alternative Micro-Colleges

By Matthew J. Smith | ARC Magazine

Surveys the micro-college movement and argues startups are reshaping higher education through small cohorts, clear missions, lower costs, and renewed liberal arts models.

Five Ways to Make the Faith Attractive to Boys

By Alvaro de Vicente | Substack

Five practical suggestions for presenting Catholic faith as attractive to boys, emphasizing adventure, tangibility, defense, and disciplined prayer.

Learn More

How the West was Won: 4 Ways to Read the Bible

By Andrew J. Ellison | Cana Academy

Argues Western “interpretive reading” was deeply shaped by learning to read Scripture through literary, historical, ethical, and intertextual lenses.

American Classics Worth Celebrating This July

By Mark Bauerlein | The Epoch Times

Urges celebrating American literary classics alongside civic texts for the Fourth of July and the upcoming 250th anniversary of independence.

States approve upstart college entrance exam supported by conservatives

By Todd Wallack | The Washington Post

Reports on growing state adoption of the Classic Learning Test as an SAT/ACT alternative, backed by conservatives and featuring Western texts.

Why Protestant Students Are Converting to Catholicism

By Jared Gould | Minding the Campus

Reports on a rise in Protestant college students entering the Catholic Church and argues the draw is truth-seeking, tradition, sacramental life, and intellectual seriousness.

Against The Machine: Classical Schools Should Ban All Screens on Campus

By Maureen Baldwin | Beza Institute

A manifesto urging classical schools to ban student screens on campus, arguing AI and devices erode the human powers liberal education aims to form.

Rekindling Acquaintanceship: The Key to Community Bonds

By W. Andrew Penrod | New Guard Press

A reflection on “acquaintanceship” as a lost social art, contending that rebuilding everyday ties is key to community life and civic health.

Shakespeare’s long-lost London home is finally found

By Andrew Paul | Yahoo News

Explains new archival findings that pinpoint the site of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars property, shedding light on his late-career life in London.

Confidence in Higher Ed Is Eroding, but a University President Offers a Path to Restoration

By Katherine Matt | The Daily Signal

Profiles Pepperdine president Jim Gash’s argument that higher education must recover its purpose: cultivating virtue and serious intellectual formation.

A whole civilization

By Joshua T. Katz | New Criterion

A meditation on what it means to threaten “a whole civilization,” using Iran’s long cultural continuity to distinguish regimes from peoples and heritage.

Intellectuals, Catholics, and the Intellectual Life

By John Lukacs | Modern Age

A classic essay by John Lukacs on the modern category of “the intellectual,” arguing the deeper crisis is moral and cultural rather than merely intellectual.

College Grades Are Beyond Fixing

By Yascha Mounk | The Free Press

Yascha Mounk argues grade inflation has made college grading dysfunctional and suggests reform efforts are failing at elite institutions like Harvard.

Oklahoma Is Ground Zero in Trump’s “America First” Education Push

By Jennifer Smith Richards | ProPublica

A reported feature on Oklahoma as a test case for “America First” education policies blending patriotism and Christianity, amid culture-war mandates and low performance.

Tradition and Representation

By Joseph Pearce | The Imaginative Conservative

Defends the Great Books tradition as genuinely representative because it treats perennial human questions that transcend time, race, and class.

Against AI Prose

By Josh Herring | James G. Martin Center

Josh Herring argues that delegating writing to generative AI undermines the personal, formative nature of writing and introduces dishonesty into the craft.

Dems Aren’t Far Behind Canada In Efforts To Ban Christian Speech

By Brooke Brandtjen | The Federalist

Argues Canada’s Bill C-9 could criminalize Christian speech and warns similar censorship impulses are advancing in U.S. politics.

Retrieving America’s Natural Aristocracy

By Sam Spound | The American Mind

Calls for recovering Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” ideal by selecting leaders on virtue and talent rather than wealth, birth, or mob politics.

The Natural End of Man

By Brandon Corley | American Reformer

A theological essay distinguishing humanity’s natural end from the supernatural beatific vision, defending the concept of obediential potency and critiquing “pure nature” debates.

Texas education board weighs required reading list with Bible passages for public schools

By Sarah Asch | Texas Standard

Covers Texas SBOE proposals to add Bible readings to required lists and refocus social studies on U.S. and Texas history, with debate over diversity and church-state lines.

Rock Hill SC charter school has money drained, board quits

By Andrew Dys | Rock Hill Herald

Reports turmoil at Ascent Classical Academy of Fort Mill after funds were removed from school accounts and most board members resigned.

Latin is Not Dead Yet. Here’s How We Keep It Alive

By Charlie Friedman | The 74 Million

Student’s View: Presenting Latin as an equity tool rather than a classical tradition can change curricula and who sees themselves as a Latin student.

True Sportsmanship, Classical Christian Education and Media Intransigence

By Lee Habeeb | Newsweek

Uses a viral sportsmanship story to argue classical Christian education forms virtue, and critiques mainstream media for omitting the school’s religious context.

The Lost Art of the Commonplace Book

By Michael S. Rose | Substack

An essay in which Michael S. Rose explains what a commonplace book is and argues it is a powerful intellectual habit for serious readers.

Thales Academy

Paul Weinhold — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:03:17 GMT

General Information

What is Thales’s current enrollment? Do you have a waitlist? Thales Academy currently has over 6,000 students enrolled across our 13 campuses. There may be a waitlist depending on the campus, the grade, and the year, but we still are still enrolling for 2026–2027 at all of our campuses.

What grade levels do you serve? Thales Academy serves grades Pre-K–12, but grades vary depending on the campus location, and we continue to expand with demand. Our current campus locations offer the following grades:

North Carolina:

Apex: Pre-K–12 (2 separate, but nearby campuses: Pre-K–3; 4–12)
Cary: Pre-K–12
Flowers Plantation (Clayton): Pre-K–11 (expanding to 12 in 2027)
Holly Springs: Pre-K–11 (expanding to 12 in 2027)
Knightdale: Pre-K–8
Pittsboro: Pre-K–8
Raleigh: K–8 (a new high school campus is coming in 2027)
Rolesville: 6–12
Wake Forest: Pre-K–5
Waxhaw: K–8

Tennessee:

Franklin: Pre-K–5

Virginia:

Richmond: Pre-K–6 (plans to expand grades in the future)

How much does it cost to attend? Providing the highest quality education at the lowest possible cost to families is Thales Academy’s founding mission, so we are committed to affordable tuition. Our 2026–2027 tuition rates range from $6,000/year for Pre-K to $7,600/year for our upper grades, and scholarships and payment plans are available.

Are you planning to expand? Yes. Our Flowers Plantation (Clayton), NC, and Holly Springs, NC, campuses are adding 11th grade in 2026 and 12th grade in 2027, and our Richmond, VA, campus is expanding to 6th grade in 2026 with plans to continue to expand to more grades in the future years. We also are building a new Raleigh JH/HS campus that will open in the 2027–2028 school year.

Origins

What inspired you to start Thales? Who were your founding leaders or patrons, and what was their vision?

Mr. Robert (Bob) L. Luddy is the founder of Thales Academy. In his book, The Thales Way, he explains: “I decided that if we want to have qualified individuals in the North Carolina workplace, we need to start at the beginning. K-12 education became my passion….The formation of Thales Academy came from the vision of a group of involved parents and dedicated teachers. CaptiveAire provided the office space for the first Thales classrooms; as an entrepreneur, I set about building what a school could and should look like.” Their vision was “to provide an excellent and affordable education for students in Pre-K to 12th grades using Direct Instruction and a Classical Curriculum that embodies traditional American values, including character formation.”

Another instrumental person to Thales Academy’s continued development was Mr. Kent Misegades. He helped launch our second campus (in Apex, North Carolina) in 2008 and also founded our Luddy Institute of Technology (LIT) program in 2013 (the latter with the goal of offering high school students coursework with a focus on classical skills training integrated with modern engineering and vocational skills).

What were the biggest challenges that you faced at the beginning? Bob Luddy notes, “In the beginning, our biggest challenges were hiring the highly qualified teachers we knew were foundational to our mission and completing new facilities.”

What lessons have you learned that might help others seeking to start a classical school? Bob Luddy answers: “The three major challenges are as follows:

Facilities – building a school or finding rental space;
Adequate finances to sustain operations;
Recruiting quality leadership and teachers; most legacy principals do not adapt well to new concepts of discipline, classical education, and Direct Instruction.

A lean leadership team consisting of vision-aligned, smart, honest, prudent, tenacious go-getters that diligently, strategically, and efficiently research, vet, and secure these fundamental aspects is critical to success.”

Mission and Philosophy

How would you describe Thales’s mission and vision? In his book, The Thales Way, Bob Luddy declares: “The mission of Thales Academy is to provide an excellent and affordable education for students in Pre-K to 12th grades using Direct Instruction and a Classical Curriculum that embodies traditional American values, including character formation.” Bob Luddy elaborates on this: “Thales Academy exceeds this mission by providing practical + manual skills through the Luddy Industrial Arts and Luddy Institute of Technology programs, Latin language K–12, and more. Our vision is embodied by our schools graduating highly educated students who are ready for future education, careers, skill development, and life successes.”

Which authors, texts, or thinkers have most shaped Thales’s educational philosophy? Bob Luddy shares, “Classical thinkers, such as Aristotle, Socrates, as well as Thomas Aquinas and The University of Salamanca thinkers in the 15th Century.” Some other influences are noted here.

Faculty Formation

How do you mentor or form new teachers in the classical tradition? First, we pair new teachers with an experienced mentor who is there as a layer of support. That way, new teachers have a seasoned, trustworthy teacher leader to help acclimate them to the school at the beginning of the year and provide some feedback on instructional practices.

Second, we have a wonderful team of leaders who guide and coach new teachers. In K–5, we have the Head of School and the Direct Instruction Leader to offer coaching on execution, pacing, and the right usage of Direct Instruction. In junior high and high school, we have the Classical Leaders who are likewise observing teachers, offering feedback for areas of improvement, and vision-casting for what the junior high and high school teachers ought to be doing for students. Regular walkthroughs and observations are conducted quarterly, and constructive feedback is provided to support teachers in gaining the knowledge and skills to be their best in the classroom.

Third, as a matter of principle, we know that the best way to improve as a teacher is by teaching. We try to remove as many impediments as possible, so the teachers can focus on the quality of instruction they are delivering in their classrooms and the example they are setting for students.

Finally, ultimately a teacher must love what they do to do it well. As a result, we encourage continuous learning and instill in teachers a desire to improve independently. All teachers can attend classes at our sister organization, Thales College, as part of its program that offers a Certificate of Classical Education Philosophy.

How do you evaluate excellent teaching, and what does it look like in practice? Along with instilling in students a sense of joy and eagerness to continue learning, excellence in teaching at Thales Academy includes strong outcomes in academics, character development, and skill acquisition.

Teachers are reviewed frequently each quarter by leadership, often with feedback provided in-the-moment during class instruction. This enables a teacher to make immediate improvements, ultimately benefiting the student experience and overall learning.

What is your approach to teacher compensation? We aim to pay higher than the market for top talent. Increases are given throughout the year, and based on performance rather than tenure, which helps retain and reward the best teachers.

Students and Curriculum

How does your curriculum express Thales’s mission day-to-day in the classroom? The mission of Thales Academy is to help students know what is good, choose what is best, and create works of great value, purpose, and beauty. Thales Academy wants students to integrate the content of a classical education with character consistent with wisdom, nobility, and virtue. We put the very best books and wonder-inspiring lessons in front of students, complementing the books they read with a series of industrial/vocational arts classes to teach hands-on, practical skills.

To that end, we hope our students may grow up to be like the tent-making Paul or the stonecutter Socrates. Both of these individuals learned a valuable skill they could use to take care of themselves and their families. They also received the very best education in their minds that inspired them to live and act with virtue, courage, and determination. Each day, Thales Academy students are reading books that have already helped to mold the minds and characters of history’s greatest leaders and thinkers. Students also learn how to work with their hands, solve problems, and create works of long-lasting value with the talents God has given them.

We structure our program so that students master the essential skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic in kindergarten through fifth grade. In elementary school, we use a teaching methodology called Direct Instruction to teach phonics and reading fluency for students until they have reached a level of mastery appropriate for their age and grade level. We consider teaching children how to read to be of the utmost importance for students and a sacred charge for the teachers at Thales Academy.

Once students know how to read, we put the very best books in front of them to read. In fourth and fifth grade, these books include classics in children’s literature like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Charlotte’s Web, while in junior high and high school, we begin reading the Great Books of the Western canon. Students read adaptations of these works at first—adapted tales of Greek mythology or the legends of King Arthur. Students read more of the original primary source material in 8th grade. By the time students have graduated from Thales Academy, they have read the epic poems of Homer, the Old and New Testaments, the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, the poetry of Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, and works of history by Herodotus, Tacitus, and Tocqueville, as well as many other authors from across our intellectual inheritance.

In each grade level, students take a rotation of fine arts and industrial/vocational arts courses to equip them with a complete education. Students learn how to sing or draw in their fine arts classes and learn how to sew, build, and perform CPR in their industrial/vocational arts courses. To that end, we want to provide students with a wide and general array of skills that would give them the confidence to solve any problem that comes their way.

What virtues, habits, and principles does Thales seek to cultivate in students? Our mission is rooted in the Thales First Principles, and these guide all of our decision making and are foundational principles we seek to cultivate in our students:

Moral Philosophy – We believe in the objective nature of moral philosophy in the Judeo-Christian and Aristotelian tradition and that we must model and encourage the development of character and virtue in our students. The goal is for students to develop practical wisdom (or prudence) to temper their intellectual growth.
Natural Order – We believe there is inherent order in the universe and the natural laws that govern it. We believe this order creates a sense of transcendent beauty and we encourage all students to recognize and value this order.
Intellectual Inheritance – We have received as our inheritance the literary and historical treasures of the Western canon which includes the best examples of the transcendental qualities that promote human flourishing. Accordingly, in our classes we choose to focus on the very best books and ideas from this tradition. We encourage students to admire this intellectual inheritance and appreciate its literary works, heroic figures, and its ideas of human dignity.
Human Dignity – We believe in the Judeo-Christian philosophical concepts of the Imago Dei and natural law that preserves the dignity and uniqueness of every individual as a reflection of the divine imbued with inalienable rights.

Our Top 15 Outcomes of a Thales Academy Student are fifteen aspirational traits that represent foundational values, skills, and character qualities we expect our students to master and eventually embody. Authored by our founder Robert Luddy based on his extensive experience in the business world along with a strong sense of values, these were designed to help us guide our students to true lifelong success. The Top 15 Outcomes include: 1) Unfailing Integrity, 2) A Virtuous Leader with Well-Developed Judgment, 3) Self-Reliance, 4) A Truth Seeker, 5) A Critical Thinker, 6) A Continuous Learner, 7) Competent Technical Skills, 8) Astute Problem Solving, 9) A Cooperative and Contributive Team Member, 10) A Strong Work Ethic, 11) Dreams and Aspirations to Change the World, 12) Traditional American Values and Entrepreneurialism, 13) Well-Developed People & Communication Skills, 14) Gratitude, and 15) A Healthy Mind, Body and Spirit.

Good character and personal integrity are of the utmost importance for Thales Academy students, something we emphasize in every grade level and classroom from kindergarten through twelfth grade. The teachers and Heads of School at Thales Academy maintain the highest standards of conduct among themselves and for the student body at Thales Academy. Character traits and their definitions are inscribed on our hallway walls, and students use transparent lockers without locks to encourage a spirit of honesty and respect. In elementary school, students have a short lesson each morning on virtue and self-control, whereas teachers in junior high and high school integrate reading texts with the cultivation of noble character.

We hope that students may cultivate the virtue of courage, the bravery one feels when one should otherwise feel afraid, so we read works in literature or study the lives of individuals who overcame incredible odds. We hope that they develop the virtue of making wise decisions (or prudence), so we encourage free play and personal responsibility at appropriate times throughout the school day.

We want students to develop integrity and patience, so we offer classes where students learn these virtues while learning rewarding but difficult new skills. To sew a button on a garment or draw a portrait requires time and precious attention to detail from students. They cannot rush through it and expect the finished product to satisfy potential customers. Instead, students have to slow down, focus on the task at hand, and take their skills as far as they can possibly go to deliver a beautiful finished product. By doing so, they cultivate virtues like integrity, the virtue of wholeness and completeness, demonstrated by students putting their best effort on a task even if the task is not necessarily for a grade.

School Culture and Community

What traditions or rituals define an academic year at Thales? We have a variety of traditions and rituals at Thales Academy.

One simple, but important ritual we perform at every Thales Academy campus every day is a campus-wide recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. We also raise and lower the American flag out front of each campus daily. These are important American traditions we uphold across all of our campus communities.

Carpool is another daily ritual at Thales Academy. We work hard to maximize the safety and efficiency of our carpool lines, and we structure it so that our staff members open the car doors and personally greet the driving adult and arriving students in the morning and perform a similar routine in the afternoons as students depart campus. We also offer a wholesome and safe on-site after-school care program for grades K–8 for parents who need a later pick-up time.

Certain milestones in our schools also have traditions. Our schools hold annual graduation celebrations at the end of Kindergarten, 5th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade, and our seniors enjoy a special bell-ringing tradition where each senior has the opportunity to ring the big bell out front of our high school campuses and announce his or her college acceptances/post-graduation plans. We also recognize and celebrate the top 2% of students in each senior class as members of the Board of Valedictorians for their exemplary academic standing, and we offer the opportunity to each graduating class member to be considered for that class’s Chairman Scholarship—a renewable college scholarship awarded to up to one graduate per year based on merit and character.

Our Top 15 Outcomes of a Thales Academy Student are the source of traditions surrounding student honors. The Thales of Miletus First Principle Award is a tradition here at Thales Academy that honors three graduating students whom we believe best represent the cognitive set of the Top 15 Outcomes. (This number stands at three in honor of our noteworthy first graduating class of 2016 because that small yet stellar group of just three established a real benchmark of excellence). Our schools also honor and award younger students in other ways for embodying these Top 15 Outcomes.

Socratic-style discussions also are a tradition at Thales Academy as all of our junior high and high school courses regularly incorporate this highly engaging, truth-seeking question-and-answer learning method. Whether done habitually in daily lessons or in a formal seminar, our students are encouraged to actively participate, listen, and engage with the teacher’s and classmates’ questions and comments. Our students gain practice and confidence in critical thinking, articulation, public speaking, respectfully listening to varying opinions, and truth seeking in these lessons, and it is an important classical tradition we are proud to continue with this generation.

Some traditions at our schools center around community-building and fun. Our elementary and junior high students also enjoy an annual field day with outdoor games and challenges, and our individual campuses establish campus traditions with events like annual fall festivals, homecoming pep rallies, dances, reading buddy programs, service days, and more.

Dress code is another focus for traditions at Thales Academy. Our schools require students to wear a uniform most days, but we let students enjoy some alternative attire days—We allow for school “spirit shirts” to be worn on specific days throughout the year, and once a year, each campus enjoys a “spirit week” with themed days that allow for optional non-uniform attire in line with the day’s theme.

Sharing the fine arts together is also a tradition that spans our campuses. From classical music played in our hallways to participating in and attending school music and theater performances as well as art shows to students playing the baby grand piano in the lobbies at the entrance of our junior high/high school buildings, the fine arts enjoy the center stage often in our campus communities.

Programs that integrate classical skills with modern engineering and vocational skills are also a tradition at Thales Academy. From our original high school pre-engineering elective program—the Luddy Institute of Technology—to our newer Luddy Industrial Arts program (required in grades 6–9 and integrated into K–5), our students are learning real-world skills and problem-solving through enriching lessons with hands-on projects and applying their classical thinking in material ways.

These are just a sampling of some of our rituals and traditions, and we will likely add more as Thales Academy continues to mature and expand.

How do you handle discipline or character formation? As described above, our Top 15 Outcomes serve as our guiding post for character formation. These were formed based on the virtues of the best thinkers in Western civilization and in the spirit of American exceptionalism. All staff are expected to exhibit and uphold these defining qualities each day so students are regularly experiencing the best of humanity.

As such, we maintain high standards of conduct from all students. Across Thales Academy campuses, there is a uniform set of consequences for addressing poor behavior, and teachers are empowered to communicate concerns immediately and directly with families. Students with three or more violations are generally ineligible to remain enrolled. Adherence to our behavior standards and code of conduct is crucial to maintaining a campus culture of high moral standards, allowing students to experience the beauty and order that come from discipline, respect, and integrity.

What athletic or other extracurricular activities are part of Thales’s school culture? At Thales Academy, we offer a variety of extracurricular opportunities, which vary by campus and grade and may include clubs (e.g., art club, chess club, debate club, garden club, Junior Classical League, math team, Science Olympiad, yearbook club, etc.), honor societies, sports (e.g., basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis, volleyball), and student council.

Operations and Access

What is your approach to serving students with disabilities? Thales Academy makes reasonable accommodations for children with physical disabilities, and while we do not provide Individual Education Plans (IEPs), Thales Academy believes a great number of children labeled as slow learners or learning disabled can achieve toward their potential within our educational programs. However, Thales Academy does not have the personnel or the facilities to effectively address the needs of children who have emotional or behavioral problems or who have learning disabilities that require special programs.

What is your approach to parent communication and involvement? Our model is designed to place minimal demands on families as our approach of whole-class, highly-engaged instruction eliminates the need for parental assistance in the classroom. Parents are encouraged to chaperone field trips, attend performances, and support Thales Academy’s educational mission. The best way parents can support teachers is to send students to school on time, well-rested, dressed nicely, with a good attitude, and ready to learn.

When parent communication is needed, it is generally direct and immediate, particularly if related to academic or behavior concerns. And while we operate under the assumption that no news is good news, teachers often send positive notes to families praising student successes as well. Parents can reach out directly to teachers and Heads of School any time regarding their child’s experience and can expect responses within 24 hours.

In addition, most campuses also send monthly memos to all families highlighting upcoming events, policy updates, and general announcements so parents stay informed of all things Thales.

What additional support staff or other administrative personnel are part of the school? In an effort to maintain affordable tuition rates, we operate administratively lean. Each campus has one Head of School and an Office Manager, and most have at least one leader in Direct Instruction or Classical Education. These roles work together as a team to maintain a productive and positive campus culture and to ensure adherence to Thales Academy policies and protocols.

Alumni and Outcomes

How would you describe an ideal Thales graduate? The ideal Thales Academy graduate has mastered and embodies all fifteen of the Top 15 Outcomes of a Thales Academy Student and is well-prepared to reach his or her greatest potential. Bob Luddy adds that an ideal Thales graduate is: “disciplined, energetic, intelligent, well-formed, an effective communicator, and friendly.”

Where do your graduates go after graduation—college, trades, religious life, military, other vocations? Our graduates pursue a variety of paths after graduation. In the past decade, the majority of our graduates have chosen to attend college upon graduation, and we are proud that our graduates receive strong college acceptances and scholarship offers every year. We also increasingly are encouraging our students to consider alternative post-graduation paths, such as trade school and apprenticeships, as these can offer strong avenues to success in our modern world (our industrial arts program helps students learn and practice valuable life skills that can be applied to many careers). We also have graduates that choose to enter the military (we are particularly proud to have had 3 West Point Academy cadets accepted in recent years), and others who pursue professional sports and religious missions post-graduation. We are very proud of our Thales Academy alumni outcomes and endeavors.

Classical Education News & Articles | 11 April 2026

Paul Weinhold — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:50:46 GMT

ClassicalEd Review provides our readers with a compendium of recent articles and news stories related to classical education, the liberal arts, and school choice.

Teaching Students the Way the Founders Learned: Classical Education Makes a Comeback

By Jennifer Wishon | CBN News

A report on the resurgence of classical education and homeschool curricula emphasizing the trivium.

Why Classical Christian Education Will Save This Country

By Gerald R. McDermott | Public Discourse

Argues classical Christian schools can form the intellectual and moral virtues needed for cultural and civic renewal.

Bring memorization back to schools

By Daniel Buck | The Hill

A defense of memorization—especially poetry—as a foundation for analysis, cultural inheritance, and formation.

Learn More

Is C. S. Lewis’s Theory of Gender and Sexuality Worth Investigating?

By Rachel Collins Suffern | Public Discourse

A review of Joshua Herring’s study of Lewis’s ‘images of gender,’ presented as an alternative to contemporary gender orthodoxy.

The Right Has a Lofty Vision for Schools. What about the Left?

By Nora De La Cour | Jacobin

The Right’s ‘classical’ pitch pairs lofty rhetoric about truth and virtue with policies that undermine public education—raising the question of a left countervision.

Teaching Hebrew as a Living Language, Not a Translation Exercise

By Meirav Kravetz | Times of Israel

A case for teaching Hebrew through immersion and direct comprehension rather than translation exercises.

Colleges Require ‘Progressive Ideology’ in General Education

By David Randall | Minding the Campus

A summary of a National Association of Scholars report arguing that general education requirements now embed progressive ideology.

Foundations for Lifelong Learning

By Adam Shanahan | Beza Institute

A review of John Piper’s Foundations for Lifelong Learning, framing education as lifelong formation in “serious joy.”

When a teacher ditched screens, class got harder. That may be why it worked.

By Matt Barnum | Chalkbeat

A look at a Colorado teacher’s experiment ditching classroom screens—and what got harder and what improved.

Small Colleges Must Prioritize Mission Over Marketing

By Garrett Fish | New Guard Press

Argues small colleges should resist branding arms-races and reclaim their mission of intellectual and moral formation.

One of the Noblest Americans

By Casey Chalk | Crisis Magazine

A profile of Justice Samuel Alito emphasizing his reputation for humility, intellect, and defense of religious liberty.

Teachers Are Leaving Unions That Put Activism Ahead of Students

By Emily White | The Daily Signal

A commentary arguing teachers’ unions have prioritized political activism over instruction, contributing to declining membership.

Evelyn Waugh, Self-Made Aristocrat

By Gabriel Gersh | Modern Age

A review of Christopher Sykes’s biography of Evelyn Waugh, arguing Waugh’s ‘snobbery’ masked a hunger for order and stability.

The Renegade Academy

By Spencer Klavan | The American Mind

An excerpted review of The Golden Thread arguing the stewards of Western learning are building outside elite universities.

Education Department’s History Rocks! Celebrates America, and the Left Hates It

By Daniel Buck | National Review

Argues the Education Department’s ‘History Rocks!’ civics tour is a comparatively benign use of federal power—and reveals ongoing culture-war stakes.

The Number Line is a Tricky Beast, Part 2

By Dan Murphy | What Schools Forget

Argues the number line’s geometric abstraction can confuse young learners if introduced too early; urges clearer, later instruction.

Reform Is Working—but Academia Is Still in Decline

By Allen Mendenhall | Minding the Campus

Argues increased outside oversight has curbed some academic excesses, but higher ed still faces long-term decline.

What Do Conservatives Mean by “Western Civilization”?

By James Diddams | Providence

On why ‘Western civilization’ is hard to define yet politically useful as a rallying cry—and how Christianity relates to it.

Let’s Celebrate Reading

By Beth Herman | Independent Women

A personal reflection on National Reading Month and the mental, spiritual, and cultural benefits of reading.

Why Natural Law?

By Pierre Manent | Claremont Review of Books

An essay defending natural law against modern assumptions about autonomy and freedom.

The Hillsdale K-12 American History & Civics Curriculum

By Hillsdale College | Hillsdale

Hillsdale College’s free, primary-source-driven K–12 American History & Civics curriculum with complete unit lesson plans.

The Servile Necessities of Liberal Education

By Andrew Koperski | Classic Test Prep

On how standardized testing can serve (but not master) liberal education—helping students match programs and access funding.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

By Travis Copeland | CiRCE Institute

Two guiding principles for Christian teachers: ‘You cannot give what you do not have’ and ‘the life you save may be your own.’

Erskine operating Ascent Classical Academy after breakdown

By Ian Grenier | The Post and Courier

The Charter Institute at Erskine is taking over operations of Ascent Classical Academy Fort Mill after the school’s leadership collapsed.

Noteworthy podcasts

Classical Education News & Articles | 1 April 2026

Paul Weinhold — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:01:34 GMT

ClassicalEd Review provides our readers with a compendium of recent articles and news stories related to classical education, the liberal arts, and school choice.

Credentialed, Not Educated

By Jared Gould | Minding the Campus

Many foreign language graduates aren’t proficient, raising doubts about what college degrees actually signal.

Reading as a Reality Check

By Joseph Pearce | Crisis Magazine

Great literature acts as a prism, helping readers see reality more vividly than “realism” or escapism.

South Carolina Lawmakers Must Protect Parent Rights

By Jonathan Butcher | The Daily Signal

South Carolina lawmakers are advancing a parental-rights bill; here’s what families need to know.

Learn More

Out of Control

By Glenn Ellmers | New Criterion

A review of Harvey C. Mansfield’s The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy.

The Drama of Reading Poetry

By Oliver Spivey | Modern Age

Helen Vendler’s criticism revives the lost art of close reading, showing the “drama” of reading poetry.

Poetry and Teaching: The Art of Dazzling Gradually

By Betsy K. Brown | Cana Academy

On teaching poetry and “dazzling gradually”: how metaphor and story lead students out of darkness into light.

History as the Revelation of the Logos

By Bradley J. Birzer | The Imaginative Conservative

History reveals the Logos; Providence is at work in time, and we best understand the past by seeing its order and meaning.

Vision and Abdication

By Nate Fischer | American Reformer

America’s strength is mastering technology; its besetting sin is surrendering to it—requiring renewed Christian vision.

American Renewal and the Continuity of the West

By Daniel J. Mahoney | The American Mind

We need to think big as Americans—and as heirs of the West—renewing liberalism’s conservative and Christian foundations.

Classical Education Needs a Better Defense

By Jennifer Jensen | James G. Martin Center

A new book misdefines liberal education, blurring the classical liberal arts’ purpose: forming independent thought.

How to Bring Back School Prayer

By Gerard V. Bradley | First Things

After Kennedy v. Bremerton, a case for restoring school prayer through public policy.

History as the Revelation of the Logos

By Bradley J. Birzer | The Imaginative Conservative

An address framing history around the Logos and the Incarnation as the center of “HIS story.”

The Classic Learning Test Takes Aim at the SAT–ACT Duopoly

By Jon Marcus | Education Next

The upstart assessment is making inroads in the college admissions game.

The Number Line is a Tricky Beast

By Dan Murphy | What Schools Forget

A brief history of the number line and why introducing it too early can confuse number as discrete quantity.

The Lost Practice of Reading

By Jessica Hooten Wilson | Humanitas Institute

Reading as a formative spiritual practice that trains attention, humility, and love in a distracted age.

I “humanize” A.I.-written application essays for a living.

By Kate Gilbertson | Slate

A confession from an “A.I. humanizer” who rewrites chatbot-generated admissions essays—and a warning about what it reveals.

AI-Driven Education Would Be a Disaster for Students

By Kathleen O’Toole | National Review

Education measured only by efficiency produces students who are excellent at completing tasks mindlessly.

Andreessen vs. Augustine

By Thomas P. Harmon | First Things

A critique of Marc Andreessen’s anti-introspection stance through an Augustinian account of interiority.

Stamp Eternity on my Eyeballs

By Dr. Jason Valley | The Classical Dispatch

How seeing students as “masterpieces” (not grades or behaviors) reshapes classical Christian teaching.

Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve

By Nadya Williams | Mere Orthodoxy

Interview and discussion of Josh Herring’s book on C. S. Lewis’s images of gender.

The Cultivation of a Moral Society

By | Beza Institute

How education can help reshape culture by restoring moral formation grounded in Christian teaching.

Elements of Teaching Novels

By Zachary Stone | Reflections on the Belles Lettres

Three teachable tools—plot devices, recognition/transformations, and voice/tone/mood—using A Tale of Two Cities.

Renewing Industrious Christian Womanhood

By Eréndira Ramírez-Ortega | Burning Bush Press

A call for single Christian women to reject mediocrity and pursue intellectual and spiritual formation.

Noteworthy Podcast Episodes

Classical Education News & Articles | 26 March 2026

Paul Weinhold — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:02:44 GMT

ClassicalEd Review provides our readers with a compendium of recent articles and news stories related to classical education, the liberal arts, and school choice.

Arkansas lawmakers approve $12 million for classics-focused exam as alternative to ACT, SAT

By Anne Li | Arkansas Online

Arkansas legislators fund a classics-focused exam option positioned as an alternative to the ACT/SAT.

The Case for Whole Books—And Teaching Them Well

By Robert Pondiscio; Annika Hernandez | American Enterprise Institute

Pondiscio and Hernandez make the case for teaching complete books—carefully and well—rather than excerpts.

Hey hey, ho ho—why not Eastern Civ also?

By Andrew J. Ellison | Cana Academy

A plea to broaden “civ” beyond the West by incorporating Eastern civilizations alongside traditional sequences.

The Liberal Arts Matter More Than Workforce Training

By Jared Gould | Minding the Campus

A defense of liberal education as formation in right living rather than workforce preparation.

Learn More

DODEA names new academic chief to emphasize patriotism, civics education

By Jennifer H. Svan | Stars and Stripes

DoDEA appoints a new academic officer to emphasize patriotism and civics in military-connected schools.

How Four Bronx Charter Schools Are Achieving Educational Excellence

By Adam Lehodey | City Journal

How a cluster of South Bronx classical charter schools is translating traditional curriculum into strong results.

Catholic academy sees enrollment rebound as demand for classical education grows

By Fox News

A Fox News segment on renewed demand for classical education and a Catholic academy’s enrollment rebound.

Are Classical Christian Schools Boy-Friendly?

By Dr. David Seibel | Beza Institute

An argument that classical Christian schools can better serve boys by aligning pedagogy with their developmental needs.

An Overlooked Factor of the ‘Southern Surge’: Investments in Early Childhood

By Elliot Haspel | The 74

How investments in early childhood education are shaping a “southern surge” in education outcomes.

Time to Pick Up the Cross of Beauty

By Ann Burns | Crisis Magazine

A call to recover beauty as a demanding Christian discipline, not an optional aesthetic add-on.

Postliberalism: In Depth

By Chantal Delsol; Patrick Deneen; Phillip Blond | Modern Age

A multi-author package exploring postliberalism’s arguments, tensions, and political implications.

Rediscovering Knowledge as the Key to Reading

By Daniel T. Willingham; E.D. Hirsch, Jr. | Education Next

Willingham and Hirsch argue that reading proficiency depends on background knowledge as much as on decoding skills.

Paul Kingsnorth’s “Against the Machine”

By Chuck Chalberg | The Imaginative Conservative

A review of Paul Kingsnorth’s critique of the machine age and technological domination.

G.K. Chesterton Blazed A Journalistic Trail Worth Following

By Bradley Haley | The Federalist

A case for Chesterton as a model of humane, incisive journalism worth recovering today.

The Age of America

By Spencer Klavan | The American Mind

A reflection on the present moment as an “age of America” and the cultural tasks it entails.

Every Square Inch of Our Minds

By Ryan Smith | American Reformer

An argument for cultivating intellectual and spiritual disciplines that claim every “square inch” of the mind.

Western Civilization Education in Public Schools

By Stanley Kurtz | National Review

Kurtz highlights a revival of Western civilization requirements and instruction in state policy debates.

The Art of Arguing Well

By Michael DeFelice | First Things

A meditation on the intellectual and moral virtues needed to argue well—and why rhetoric requires more than technique.

College, university graduates should be more than employees

By Jim Gash | USA Today

An argument that higher education should form virtuous citizens, not only credentialed employees.

Teachers urge parents to help with classroom behavior

By Lexi Lonas Cochran | The Hill

Teachers describe rising classroom misbehavior and urge greater parental support and accountability.

The Cult of Efficiency and the Technological Society

By Christian Holmes | Front Porch Republic

A critique of efficiency as an idol and a warning about the spiritual costs of technological society.

How AI will destroy universities

By Paul Sagar | UnHerd

A warning that AI-driven automation and assessment could hollow out universities and undermine liberal learning.

The Importance of Beauty: A Civilizational Necessity

By Cooper Moore | New Guard Press

An argument for treating beauty as a public good essential to civilizational health.

Toward a Eucharistic Conservatism

By Anne Husted Burleigh | Modern Age

Burleigh sketches a vision of “eucharistic conservatism” rooted in sacramental and cultural renewal.

The Education Department Is Shrinking

By Keri D. Ingraham | Wall Street Journal

A report on downsizing at the Department of Education and the administrative shake-up surrounding it.

Optimizing Human Fulfillment

By Regis Martin | The Imaginative Conservative

Regis Martin draws on Daniélou to argue that politics should support the conditions for human fulfillment, especially prayer.

Why classical education is gaining ground in St. Louis

By Megan Rubenstein | STL Magazine

A look at why classical education is expanding in the St. Louis area and what attracts families to it.

The Western Great Books Debate Continues

By Matthew James Smith | Substack

A reflection on contemporary debates over “Western canon” reading lists and liberal education.

Why Teachers Shouldn’t Offload Their Busywork to AI (Opinion)

By Daniel Buck | Education Week

Why teachers shouldn’t outsource their everyday work to AI—and what’s lost when they do.

Christian education will sustain America, preserve founding principles, advocates say

By Michaela Estruth | Heartlander News

Advocates argue that Christian education can preserve America’s founding principles and sustain civic culture.

Noteworthy Podcast Episodes

Classical Education News & Articles | 19 March 2026

Paul Weinhold — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:01:45 GMT

ClassicalEd Review provides our readers with a compendium of recent articles and news stories related to classical education, the liberal arts, and school choice.

Let’s Return to Teaching Students How to Argue

By Gregory Roper | James G. Martin Center

Civil debate is not impossible with proper training.

Machines or Mind? The Essay that Launched the Loebs

By W.H.D. Rouse | Antigone

A 1911 defense of the Classics that helped launch the Loeb Classical Library.

Classical Education Needs the Body

By Patrick Whalen | Thomas D. Klingenstein

A case for physical education as the epistemological foundation of classical learning.

Learn More

9 questions to ask schools before enrolling your child

By Kathleen O’Toole | Washington Examiner

Whether you’re sticking with a traditional public school, leaning toward a charter, or exploring a private option, here are the nine questions every parent should ask to find the best fit for their child.

Newman and the university in the age of AI

By Jonathan J. Sanford | Omnes

In the face of the rise of AI, classical education reclaims its place.

Why do teachers quit?

By Daniel Buck | Fordham Institute

A report on Wisconsin teacher turnover shows educators quit amid behavior issues and administrative breakdown—when they’re prevented from doing the work they chose.

Higher-ed Minister wants Rennaissance-style classical education

By Ben Scallan | Gript

Ireland’s Further Education Minister James Lawless calls for a “Renaissance-style” classical education to build shared civic understanding and broader literacy.

A Republic, If You Can Teach It

By Robert Pondiscio | Commentary

Review of James Traub’s The Cradle of Citizenship on why a civics renaissance remains difficult to imagine in U.S. public schools.

Indispensable Plato

By Rhys Laverty | First Things

A review of Piero Boitani’s Timaeus in Paradise on why careful reading of Plato’s Timaeus shaped the West’s sense of the beautiful—and still matters.

Christian Parents Need the Classics Too

By Nadya Williams | Gospel Coalition

Christian parents can still pursue a classical education alongside their kids—by finding community, building daily reading habits, and investing in a home library.

Christian Education for Christian Children

By Dr. Jacob Allee | Beza Institute

A case for classical Christian schooling rooted in worship, catechesis, and Christ’s lordship over every subject.

In states where voucher programs have exploded, opponents make their case for limits

By Lily Altavena | Chalkbeat

Some Arizona public school advocates want voters to add guardrails to the state’s education savings account program.

Understanding the Gender Imbalance in America’s Classrooms

By Garrett Fish | New Guard Press

Education should be about knowledge and virtue.

Men Need Men to Lead Them

By Ann Burns | Crisis Magazine

Women are incapable of teaching men how to be men.

The War on Reading

By John Stossel | The Daily Signal

“My child can’t read!” Why? Balanced Literacy replaced phonics—and parents are pushing back.

Classical Schools, Western Monasteries

By Daniel Buck | Modern Age

They preserve and transmit tradition to a new generation.

The Dumbing Down of Advanced Placement Tests

By Paul E. Peterson | Education Next

High school grade inflation imposes long-term harms, new research shows.

What Is Civic Hope? And Why Should Schools Care About It?

By Rick Hess | Education Week

Doomerism is a lousy recipe for student engagement.

Liberal Education as Civic Renewal

By Jacob Howland | Civitas Institute

The right to pursue happiness enshrined in the Declaration implies “a chance at a good life.” This year’s Semiquincentennial offers an opportunity to restore the education on which that chance depends.

Six Ways You Are Totally Doing Music Wrong at Your School

By Andrew J. Ellison | Cana Academy

A critique of how schools teach music—and six practical ways to recover a genuinely liberal, elevating music program.

Real Classical Education

By Jaspreet Singh Boparai | The American Mind

On recovering basic literacy, stateside and across the pond.

Civic Centers Are a Gamble

By Richard Vedder | Minding the Campus

Ohio’s early results raise doubts about the durability of the reform movement.

Noteworthy podcasts

“Lionizing” a Novel: Salman Rushdie out in the dar al-harb

Paul Weinhold — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:02:30 GMT

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Quichotte, by Salman Rushdie. New York: Random House, 2019. Paperback, 390 pp.

Last week in this space, we gave some re-consideration to the writer Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the death-decree it earned him from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini1 back in 1989. We noticed that, several days after our modest essay appeared, The Free Press ran a Jonathan Rosen piece on the same topic, demonstrating the ever-widening reach and influence of our work here at ClassicalEd Review. We may be bantamweights, but we pack a punch like John Henry’s hammer.

Something we had no intention of suggesting in last week’s column is that Rushdie is, as a novelist, unimpeachable. We do not uncritically lionize anyone here at ClassicalEd Review. Come to think of it, I don’t reckon we critically lionize anyone, either, though we would not be above using AI to generate a sardonic image of some prominent representative of the Progressive Educationist Establishment’s head on the body of a gazelle being devoured by the king of the beasts on the plains of the Serengeti.

In fact, something we did not mention in last week’s column was that, in his public statements over the years, Rushdie has increasingly adopted the posture of Enlightened Progressive Social Critic of All Forms of Bigotry, a position he may well have been driven into by his own unique situation as having been condemned to death by an Ayatollah. We are not without understanding.

However, we take it as axiomatic that you can choose to be an Enlightened Progressive Social Critic or you can be a novelist, but unless you can erect a Berlin Wall of separation between the two vocations, something exceedingly difficult to do, you cannot be good at both. To the extent that your Enlightened Progressive Social Criticism bleeds into your writing, your novels will stink.

It was with fond memories of Rushdie as the writer of Midnight’s Children and the Verses that we recently took up his 2019 Quichotte. The premise seemed quite promising: an homage to Don Quixote, with a failed Indo-American traveling pharmaceutical salesman named Ismail Smile as the Don, an opioid-addicted Bollywood-star-turned-American-talk-show-queen as our Dulcinea love interest, a surly teenager who may or may not be a figment of the Don’s imagination as Sancho Panza, and a battered old Chevy Cruze2 as Rocinante.

The first 40 pages or so were very promising, as we got colorful Bombay back stories on our main characters, expertly-voiced Indian English dialogue, and some good ol’ magical realism. As much of a pathetic failure as our Don is in life—a lifelong bachelor, a washed-up salesman whose employment is an act of charity by a relative, a motel-room TV addict—Rushdie paints his figure with a novelist’s love, by which I mean a) psychological and personal detail commensurate with the dignity of any human person, whatever his faults and failures might be, and b) absolutely zero expressions of judgment about these faults and failures. The clichéd imperative for the fiction writer is show, don’t tell--depict, don’t characterize; paint us a picture but don’t tell us what we are supposed to think about it--and Rushdie’s Ismail Smile has been drawn accordingly. I was coming to love this failure of a man and wanted to see how the story was going to unfold, certain that it would be funny, humane, and tragic all.

Similarly, the character of Salma, a third-generation Bollywood star who has become the unlikeliest of American Oprahs, combating personal loneliness and clinical bipolarity behind her glamor and celebrity, was immediately engaging. She is a figure of splendor and sadness, a wounded a goddess, a vulnerable Venus, entirely believable as a character; I could not help but think of the author’s brief marriage (he seems to have had many, many brief marriages) in the early years of the century to an analogous figure, a glamorous, young Indian actress with an American TV cooking show, which is not to suggest that the character of Salma is merely a thinly-veiled depiction of Rushdie’s 4^th (or was it 5^th?) wife Padma Lakshmi, but rather to offer some modest account of why Rushdie the writer is expertly capable of drawing a figure like Salma: he seems to know people like her, and as a novelist, you’d better know who the hell you are talking about before you try to depict them.

And here is where Quichotte gets into trouble.

Constant in Cervantes’s novel is the comedy that comes about from the Don’s encounters with various peripheral members of La Mancha society, some of whom are cruel, some playful, some cruelly playful, and some laughably stupid and provincial. He gets mocked by some, beaten by others, flattered and humored by yet others, and stared at in stupor by more than one. Now, Rushdie wants to give his Don the antagonist-foil of common folks to clash with, but unfortunately, all that this novelist of rich imagination and detailed portrayals can give us is, surprise, white racist bigot homophobe Islamophobe immigrant haters.

The trouble is foreshadowed by a hah-hah-so-clever caricature of Donald Trump as a fictionalized character in a TV spy drama in which the Indian Salma stars as the CIA chief:

“Wholly imaginary,” “entirely fabulist,” “fictitious”: who exactly are these descriptors for? Are they supposed to make anyone laugh? Are they supposed to needle MAGA readers? I find it unlikely that the author supposes he has any MAGA readers, so that seems improbable. Is this supposed to be irony? It is not; it is smug and contemptuous, scoldy, ham-fisted, humorless.

Fifty pages later, Ismail Smile runs into trouble while planning the next steps of his cross-country journey to find his Dulcinea over a map at an Idaho campground. Or should I say, Rushdie the novelist runs into trouble, for this thin caricature of an antagonist (whom he goes out of his way to tell us is fat) is all he can come up with:

Like a J J Abrams directed sci-fi movie, this has all unfolded with shockingly improbable speed. Rey the desert scavenger has become a lightsaber-wielding Force Ninja faster than you can say “Lucasfilm”; we have gone from zero to vile racist in 2.2 seconds. In no time at all, “a small crowd” plus two armed camp security guards has gathered around Ismail, and like a Mississippi sheriff from a Hollywood movie set in the Jim Crow South, one of the guards quips to Ismail: “We can’t guarantee your safety much longer and I’m not so sure we’re even inclined to do so.”

Is this how Rushdie imagines things work outside of his Manhattan penthouse, out there in the dar al-harb3 of Middle America, of Foxnewsland, red-state flyover country? This is not the writing of someone who has been out there and camped in Idaho, slept at a cheap motel in Flagstaff, Arizona, or had breakfast at a diner in Gallup, NM. (All of which, coincidentally, I have done. Weird.) Speaking of having breakfast in Gallup, when Quichotte and his Sancho attempt to do so, they are again met with a caricature:

The rest of the diner’s clientele turn out to be an angry, racist mob as well; in what follows, we are given no less than four indistinct (fat) characters who all begin their racist bigoted Islamophobe xenophobic one-liners with the same “F-ck you,” the last of which outbursts culminates in another turbans-and-beards remark.

A real basket of deplorables, these fat bigoted white Americans with their guns.

There are plenty of other indicators that Rushdie the Enlightened Progressive has the upper hand over Rushdie the novelist in just the first 140 pages: we get the supposedly-detached voice of the narrator informing us, matter-of-factly, that the British “Brexit” moment was a destructive, “wild, nostalgic decision” (53), the product of the “poisonous, xenophobic bitches’ brew of the new England” (63). The narrator dispassionately and factually informs us that, while England is “broken in two”, so too is (surprise!) America, a land where “Black citizens (are) regularly killed by white policemen” (54), full stop, no qualifications or quantifications.

Apparently without irony, Salman Rushdie has on the one hand given us a protagonist in Ismail Smile/Quichotte whose brains have dried up and whose reason has been driven to flight not by reading romances of chivalry but by watching too much television, and on the other hand he has given us a portrait of how imagines middle America to be and how people talk and act out there in the dar al-harb of the Red States derived entirely from what he, sitting in his Manhattan penthouse, has seen on CNN and MSNBC, with some Jimmy Kimmel and “Saturday Night Live” as condiments.

I quit the novel after 146 pages, unwilling to stomach more such caricaturing. Now, it would be easy for an Enlightened Progressive to accuse me of the same sins as those of the Mullahs who condemned Rushdie for The Satanic Verses: hits a little too close to home, doesn’t it? You know he’s telling the truth about your America, and it outrages you to think that he has nailed you and your bigoted racist culture which you deny exists. Your rejection of his novel is proof that he’s spot-on.

I know I cannot persuade anyone who thinks that way, but permit me to attempt an apologia.

Not only do I not object to it, I absolutely LOVE Flannery O’Connor’s depiction of various foul-mouthed, narrow-minded, bigoted, proud, racist characters. Why? Because they are real people, figures with more to them than just the aforementioned characteristics and behaviors. In addition to being bigoted and cruel, her characters can also be frightened and sensitive. They have hopes, aspirations, and motives of their own. They are three-dimensionally imagined and depicted. They receive from their writer-creator the individuality commensurate with an individual human being’s uniqueness. They are all, however lost they may seem, potentially redeemable. Even so grim and hopeless a character as Sarah Ruth from “Parker’s Back” is believable because she is unique, the only one like her in the story; she is a highly memorable individual, not a representative of a class or a group or an anonymous member of a fat, angry, armed mob.

When O’Connor creates such characters, she is truthful. She depicts characters, not mere caricatures. She clearly knows people like these by experience and observation; she also knows, on deeper level, that a person is more than just a set of mannerisms and attitudes and clichés, even if some might look that way at a glance, and that a convincing and truthful literary portrayal of a person must cleave to this truth.

I doubt Rushdie knows one single Trump or Brexit voter. Not one. He may think this to be a sign of personal righteousness, and maybe it is; what it certainly is is a lack of vision. He just hasn’t seen enough of the world to be able to write about it as convincingly as he wishes.

It is no coincidence that in her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” O’Connor with her jeweler’s eye for artistic perfection and flaws alike absolutely nails all the activist pathologies that make for bad fiction writing, to some of which Rushdie has yielded in Quichotte: social criticism, the journalistic impulse, the urge to speak “about” character and action instead of “with” them.

O’Connor cites Joseph Conrad as having said that the work of the fiction writes is “to do the highest possible justice to the visible universe.” And so I ask myself: has Rushdie, in what I have read of Quichotte, done artistic justice to middle America? Has he imaginatively rendered to diners in Gallup and their patrons, even their racist patrons, what is their due? Has he done justice to campgrounds in Idaho and the people who stay there? To the hopes, fears, and motives operative in certain political movements of his time and of which he disapproves? No.

It saddens me a twinge not to know what will become of Ismail Smile and his Salma. But I’m too old to spend time reading any novels but excellent ones, and I shall not hesitate to put down anything unworthy of my attention, to chuck it out the window of a rapidly moving vehicle, or, if the opportunity should present itself, to rub it with fresh gazelle meat and toss it into the lion cage at the zoo.

Not to be confused with “Khamanei”. I have heard a fair number of journalists in recent weeks mispronouncing the name of the new Supreme Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei (b. 1969) and his recently-deceased Supreme Paterfamilias Ayatollah Ali Khamanei (1939-2026) as if they were still talking about the Supreme Founding Mack-Daddy Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989). To the best of our rudimentary and barbarous understanding of Farsi orthography and pronunciation, Khomeini sounds like “khoh-MAY-nee” and Khamenei like “khaw-men-ey-EE”. Got it?

We would love to bloodily “lionize”, if you will, whomever it was as came up with the marketing gimmick of deliberately misspelling commonplace words to make them seem slick and sexy.

Arabic, “land of war,” a concept in Islamic legal thought referring to infidel lands where Islamic law is not enforced, sometimes used interchangeably with dar al-kufr, “land of unbelief”. In light of Rushdie’s own troubles with certain Islamic jurists, the concept is invoked with unabashed insolence and cheek, which is entirely consistent with our editorial policies here at ClassicalEd Review.

Mastering the Four Arguments

Paul Weinhold — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:08:10 GMT

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Though classical education emphasizes the reading of rich, foundational texts, there are many teachers who still use the five-paragraph essay when it comes to student composition. Many times, the teacher simply does not know any other form of essay writing. It is what we did in high school. It is what we did in college in an expanded form. It is a convenient rhetorical shape that is easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to grade. But this creates a paradox. No great work, no historical essay, no world-changing speech was written in the form of the five-paragraph essay. And more to the point, if writing is thinking, then our inability to teach different essay structures potentially limits our students’ ability to not only think clearly but to recognize the flow of an argument in more complex works of writing. This is where Mastering the Four Arguments comes in.

Written with the desire to bury the five-paragraph essay, Roper presents his take on the age-old stasis theory, walking through how the natural progression of an argument moves from the need to establish a definition of terms, to considering the cause or effect these terms bring about, moving on to evaluating whether the issue is good or bad, and finally deciding what one should do in light of these conclusions. Not only do all four steps make for a solid argument or essay, but, as Roper so clearly lays out, each step can stand alone as its own as a persuasive essay. In Mastering the Four Arguments, Roper convincingly argues that by using the four steps of stasis theory, students can learn to write a variety of persuasive essays well beyond the popular, but limiting, five-paragraph essay. This review will explore Roper’s claim, considering its ease of use in both teaching and learning as well as considering its ability to help students clearly develop their thoughts and recognize the flow of thought in great works.

The main claim of Mastering the Four Arguments is that writing is thinking, and thinking follows a natural progression: definition, cause, evaluation, and policy. This progression of argument was known in the ancient world as stasis theory, and it was put to extensive use in the Roman court to resolve a point of contention. For Roper, teaching students this natural progression of thought not only helps make them better thinkers, but it helps make them better writers and readers.

He dedicates the first four chapters of his book to each type of argument. The subheading for each chapter presents an essential question that the student can easily memorize and later recall when it comes to writing and developing a specific type of argument. Each of these four chapters follow a similar and accessible format: introductory material, a breakdown of what constitutes the type of argument, a walk through of patterns on how to construct the argument, three exercise to get students writing, some further reflections on the given type of argument, and a closing exemplar.

Chapter 5 walks the reader through how to apply the four arguments across the various disciplines, from business to natural science to literary criticism. He even applies stasis theory to everyday life, prompting the reader to reconsider the question posed and the beginning of the book, “What type of argument am I?” The afterword is an exhortation about the lasting power of stasis theory and how it can be woven into our lives and inoculate our minds from the threat of AI. The rest of the book is composed of introductions and appendices. There are two introductions, one for teachers and one for students, breaking down what stasis theory is and suggestions for using the book. Appendix One is a handy collection of the various argument templates presented throughout the book. Appendix Two provides a way to use stasis theory in order to create and assess thesis statements.

Overall, Mastering the Four Arguments is a very accessible book, at-home in both the hands of teachers and the hands of high school or college students. At the high school or college level, this can be a semester’s worth of work. For early high school, this book could guide a class on composition for the entire year. As a resource, elementary school teachers can pull from the four essential questions to craft writing prompts for students. Middle school teachers will find a practical toolbox to pull templates, instruction material, and even brief examples of each type of writing. The predictable structure of each chapter and the clearly outlined templates allow for the ease of both the student and teacher to navigate the material and home-in on a given argument. The exemplars at the end of each chapter, taken from classic works, allow the student to examine the natural flow of the argument type in a literary setting. This is a book that is meant to be read, to be used, and to be referenced.

One aspect of writing that this book lacks is guiding the student to compose introductory and concluding paragraphs. Though it is possible to craft a complete essay just following the templates that Roper provides, some students may need extra help in structuring the introduction and the conclusion. This lack is something that the book readily acknowledges, recommending Scott Crider’s excellent book The Office of Assertion for guidance on the many ways one can craft an introduction and conclusion. No book is perfect, and no book is capable of covering everything.

Where Mastering the Four Arguments truly succeeds is in making both the theoretical and practical case for killing the five-paragraph essay with ease and clarity. And for those of us in classical education, who see rhetoric not just as a sophisticated organization of loosely related thoughts but as a curated presentation of logical thinking, Roper indeed puts the nail on coffin. In a world threatened by the ease of AI composition and by the two-minute polemics of social media grandstanding, it would do us well to have this book in hand as we prepare our students to not only write independently but to think and argue clearly too.

John Roche holds a BA in English Literature from DePaul University, an MDiv from Catholic Theological Union, and an MA in Humanities with a Classical Education concentration from the University of Dallas. He teaches middle school grammar, logic, Latin, and 8^th grade religion at Saint Agatha Academy, a small classical K-8 school in Winchester KY. As a deacon in the Catholic Diocese of Lexington, he also works in Hispanic ministry. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Bellarmine University.

Of Fatwas and Fiction

Paul Weinhold — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:09:32 GMT

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We freely confess that we have long been admirers of 19^th century-style Realpolitik and tough-minded, coldly-rational acts of geopolitical self-interest. When we were younger, we used to stare at portraits of the walrus-mustachioed Otto von Bismarck in his spiked Prussian Pickelhaube1 and dream about what might have been had the colossal German Empire he built through war and cunning endured; do the math: if the Second Reich never ends, there can be no Third. Churchill ordering without a moment’s hesitation an attack upon the French battleships to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Germans after the 1940 armistice still fills us with shock and awe. Henry Kissinger’s book Diplomacy, a historical study of two centuries of Euro-American geopolitics in which the idealistic Woodrow Wilson emerges as a fool and a blunderer rather than as a hero of democracy and humane values, did much to shock us out of our dogmatic slumber when we first read it; for years now we have been longing for the second volume of Niall Ferguson’s Kissinger biography with the ardent passion we once reserved for the release of new Led Zeppelin concert recordings and/or a fresh Cardinal Ratzinger collection from Ignatius Press.

We have often imagined Teddy Roosevelt rolling up his shirtsleeves and challenging the feckless Jimmy Carter2 to a bare-knuckled boxing match to determine whether the Panama Canal would remain under U.S. control, the Rough Rider in the Arena vs. the Malaised Peanut Farmer. Bully.

And yet, as news emerged last weekend of the Israeli-American attacks on Iran, it was not foreign policy and geopolitics we were thinking of. We found ourselves reflecting not upon the single greatest gamble in American foreign policy in our lifetimes and the potential for eliminating the mullahs’ regime and effecting the most consequential change in the global order since the fall of the Soviet Bloc.

We were thinking about a novel, about a novelist, and about the nature and aim of fiction.

In 1988, the Indian-born British-naturalized writer Salman Rushdie published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. Rushdie had won Britain’s Booker Prize for 1981’s Midnight’s Children, the general critical consensus about which is that it belongs on any list of the greatest English-language novels of all time. Like Midnight and so much of his work since then, Verses showcases the author’s re-definition of so-called “magical realism,” in which the worlds of pure fairy tale and magic intersect with post-industrial life and mass culture, of history with the present, and of Old World with New (in Rushdie’s works, the West with the entire Indian subcontinent, inclusive of Pakistan and Bangladesh) in ways more jarring and more ironic than those cultivated by the Latin American pioneers of the style. (If you have never read Rushdie and would like a low-commitment experience of his craft, I recommend the little fairy tale Haroun and the Sea of Stories, marketed by his publishers as a children’s book, but one which more than adequately passes the C. S. Lewis test3 for merit. For the more ambitiously Rushdie-curious I recommend starting with Midnight’s Children, which I would characterize as the Anglo-Indian Tin Drum: picaresque, magical, and world-historically ambitious while being entirely local and particular.)

Rushdie’s novel begins with a bang. Literally: a passenger jet bound from Delhi to London is blown up by terrorists over the English Channel, and the two main characters, a Muslim Bollywood star named Gibreel Farishta who has made his career out of playing Hindu gods on screen, and Saladin Chamcha, an Indian expat who hates the land of his birth and who has made a new life for himself in London as a voice actor and impressionist, are falling 30,000 feet through the air to what is surely their deaths. They embrace as the waters race up at them. But magically, Gibreel begins flapping his arms, their descent slows, and they survive the splashdown. Then the fun begins: in the days and weeks after this miraculous survival, Gibreel begins to suspect that he has divine powers and is metamorphosing into the actual archangel Gibreel/Gabriel; meanwhile, Saladin begins to develop some notably goat-like characteristics, and we are intended to believe that he is turning into some kind of earthy incarnation of Satan.

The story plays out in contemporary London and plays with the appearance and reality of good and evil before climaxing in a role reversal between the two main characters. But a large portion of the novel is devoted to two separate dream sequences of Gibreel’s, both of which directly involve confusion between the angelic and the demonic: one, the story of a medieval Pakistani girl who is celebrated as a prophet but who leads throngs of deluded admirers to their deaths in a hopeless march into the sea; and two, a fanciful re-imagining of a tale about the founding of Islam, regarded by the devout as apocryphal and heretical, though recorded by certain Arab historians: the episode of the so-called “Satanic verses”, when Muhammad repudiated certain parts of the ur-Koran which he had previously presented as divinely revealed but which he now declared to have been dictated to him by Satan masquerading as the Archangel.

In this dream sequence, there are certain other features which relativize it: the character of the Prophet is not named Muhammad but “Mahound”, and the pagan, polytheistic, pleasure-seeking city where the events unfold is not called Mecca but rather “Jahilia”—the great analogue of which in Rushdie’s novel is London itself: rich, decadent, commercial, and a bubbling cauldron of un-integrated ethnicities and cultures.

(In the novel, there are also cut-away visions of a stern Islamic revolutionary leader in exile in the West, using Western technology and communications to direct his minions in his home country. Neither imam nor home country are ever named, but the resemblance to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, maker of the 1979 revolution, is pronounced. More from him shortly.)

Several months after the novel’s publication, and before it had been translated and published in any other languages than English, Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, publicly proclaimed a fatwa, or religious decree: that Salman Rushdie had committed blasphemy with his novel, that he deserved death, and that it was a religious duty of all good Muslims to kill him or, if physically and logistically incapable of doing so, to assist others who could. A cash bounty was promised, which over the following years rose, though support from the Iranian state and other Islamic charities,4 to more than $3 million.

Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Iran, albeit temporarily. Rushdie went into hiding for nine years, changing residences frequently, living under 24-7 British police protection, and going by the alias Joseph Anton (after Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov), which later became the title of his memoir about these years in Britain’s first and only Literary Witness Protection Program. The book was banned in multiple countries, including in majority-Hindu India, whose secularist Congress Party government had no particular concerns about Islamic charges of blasphemy, but very real fears about riots and violence by its minority-Muslim population, a not-inconsequential minority of 100 million people.5

Defense of Rushdie in the West was not entirely coherent. More than a few British politicians tepidly defended his artistic freedom as a writer while also scolding him for having insulted Islam, which good-mannered, broad-minded, sensitive, multiculturalist Westerners just shouldn’t do: “It’s because of things like this that they hate us…if only we could be more tolerant and accepting then there wouldn’t be these hijackings and kidnappings and bombings.” Journalist Christopher Hitchens became one of Rushdie’s loudest apologists, framing the issue as a simple case of religious ignorance vs. liberal enlightenment, with enlightened liberals (such as himself) possessing not only the right but the DUTY to insult and blaspheme against Islam and all other religious forms of bigotry and superstition. Plenty of well-known writers and publishers issued statements and signed petitions in support of Rushdie’s “freedom of speech”, in effect conceding the Ayatollah’s central claim: that The Satanic Verses, a work of fiction and not a pamphlet or a theological tract, had “insulted Islam.” They differed from the Ayatollah not in their fundamental understanding of the book (it’s blasphemy), but only in their judgment of whether or not it was acceptable (let him blaspheme…who are we to judge?).

While I am confident that Rushdie was appreciative of the Western liberal intelligentsia’s “free speech” defense of him, I would suspect that, as a novelist, he was bothered by the fact that even his most spirited defenders assumed the fundamental truth of the Ayatollah’s accusation and thus accepted the idea that a novel, a work of literary art, detached and descriptive rather than interested and didactic, a world of fantasy and irony and humor, of imaginative truth rather than propositional truth, could commit blasphemy. A man can blaspheme—but can a novel? How would that even work?

Perhaps we should not be surprised. Most people tend to think that everything—music, art, film, theatre, poetry, fiction—has a simple “message”, that works of art are (when not simply autobiographical, that is) just general moral or political assertions dressed up in appealing ways. Thus The Scarlet Letter and Anna Karenina are essentially long cautionary tales against adultery; Crime and Punishment is a warning not to subscribe to murderous ideologies; The Crucible is a condemnation the madness of McCarthyism.

“The fact is, people don’t know what they are supposed to do with a novel, believing, as so many do, that it must do something, rather than be something. Their eyes have not been opened to what fiction is,” writes Flannery O’Connor in “The Teaching of Literature.”

Consider the layers of irony and distancing at work in The Satanic Verses:

1. The author is re-telling, with name-changes and significant creative license, a story about the origins of Islam that he did not invent but which is recorded by several early Arab historians;

2. This re-telling of the story is presented as a DREAM of a character;

3. The character having the dream is a (Muslim) movie star who becomes fixated upon it as an idea for his next project, a project we are given to understand would be a commercial failure;

4. This movie star is a cad and a womanizer who has driven one lover to kill her children and commit suicide;

5. He is also suffering from a growing delusion that he himself actually is the Archangel Gabriel.

This is subtle stuff, not easy to unfold for the simple-minded, un-ironic, literalistic reader (or non-reader, as was the case with the Ayatollah Khomeini, since there was no Farsi translation which would have enabled him to read the book before preparing his fatwa. Personally, I make a habit of at least reading parts of novels before pronouncing death sentences upon their authors.) This is not a simple Twinkie with just an inside and an outside; it’s a 55-ply layered butter croissant or piece of honey-soaked phyllo. “Salman Rushdie” is personally nowhere to be found here; we have nothing by the way of a religious opinion, or any opinion at all, which could plausibly be attributed to him in these various layers. We don’t even have a character expressing an opinion about the origins of Islam and the legend of the “Satanic verses”—I imagine here the novel as if Dostoyevsky had written it, with long and fervent articulations of characters’ religious and political views playing a key role in the drama, the action (how many readers, though, are careful about conflating this or that character’s monologue with Dostoyevsky’s own opinions?)—but even if we did have Gibreel Farishta holding forth in a London café about how Islam has been covering up for centuries the “truth” of the Koranic revelation, that there are secret parts of it that were suppressed (the more I write about this, the more it sounds like a bad Dan Brown conspiracy theory6, it is ipso facto invalid to attribute this view to the author himself. Such a discourse could only tell us what the fictional character Gibreel Farishta thinks, that is, if the action in the story does not call this into question by suggesting that he is not in his right mind, or that he is saying what he says for some other reason than to persuade others of truth.

The most irreligious, profane, and even dirty-minded artists are capable of creating works of sublime spiritual beauty: think here of Caravaggio and Mozart. An ironic, liberal, non-believer like Thomas Mann assembled some of the most cogent and compelling arguments imaginable for Catholic integralism and placed them in the mouth of the character Naphta in The Magic Mountain; avowed apostate James Joyce wrote one of the most rhetorically powerful Catholic sermons on hell and fornication ever composed in the English language for a scene in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; no heroically-despairing atheist ever made the case for heroic atheism more effectively than Ivan Karamazov, the literary invention of a devoutly Orthodox-Christian novelist.

Again, this is subtle stuff. It’s far easier to defend a novel with the cry of “free speech!” than to defend it with “imaginative truth, not propositional truth!”, though we here at ClassicalEd Review would be the first to put the bumper stickers on our Kias if that ever became a thing.

So whatever became of the Ayatollah’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie? Khomeini died a natural death a few months after it was issued, which in Shi’a jurisprudence, as I understand it, normally suspends any such decree, but Iranian religious leadership, under the authority of the recently-deceased Khamanei, has re-affirmed its validity several times, the Supreme Ayatollah having done so personally on one occasion in 2005. There is a small martyrdom memorial in downtown Tehran to some London-based bungler who blew himself up while attempting to build a package bomb to deliver to Rushdie.7 The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was stabbed to death, the Italian one survived a similar attack, and Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times but lived.

Rushdie himself eventually came out of hiding after nine years, relocating to New York and becoming an American citizen. He has continued to write novels and essays. But the arm of the Ayatollah is long: while giving a public lecture in 2022, Rushdie was attacked by a masked, knife-wielding assailant and stabbed in the face, hand, neck, and abdomen. He suffered liver damage, was on a ventilator, and completely lost vision in one eye8 and the use of one hand because of nerve damage from the stabbing. A memoir about this event, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, was published in 2024.

So when news came out over the weekend that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had reaffirmed his predecessor Khomeini’s fatwa, was dead, buried under the rubble of his Tehran headquarters leveled by Israeli bombs, I couldn’t help but wonder if a certain battle-scarred, one-eyed, one-handed writer in New York known to some as “Joseph Anton” had the same thought I did:

Rushdie 2, Ayatollahs 0

The helmet with the little spiked thingie on it.

Who, while canoeing, was once attacked by some sort of crazed beaver. He defended himself by slapping the water with his paddle. Contrast this with Teddy Roosevelt, who shot elephants.

“I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.” (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” 1952)

It being, of course, one of the principal aims of charitable organizations to suborn the murder of writers.

Estimated to be 200 million today.

And lest we smugly suppose that Iranian mullahs have cornered the market on reader stupidity, let’s remember how many Americans thought that Brown’s Da Vinci Code was a stunning revelation of the hidden truth about Christianity and not just a cheap adventure story by a very, very bad writer. How bad? “Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop’s ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué”-level bad.

“He wasn’t sure he could be a saint but he knew he could be a martyr if he blew himself up quick.”

Incidentally, Teddy Roosevelt also lost an eye to a sparring partner in the White House gymnasium/boxing ring.

Zhèngmíng

Paul Weinhold — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:16:39 GMT

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Zhèngmíng, y’all.

In a rightly-celebrated but not-yet-widely-enough-known passage in the classical Chinese Analects of Confucius (13.3), Master Kung is asked by a certain Tzu-lu what he would do if he were given control of the government of the state of Wei. These are the kinds of hypotheticals which philosophers of all times and places lay awake fantasizing about when they would prefer that others believe they are hearkening unto the call of Being and shepherding it across the hilly pastures of the Black Forest or something, so it is little wonder that the Master had a ready answer.

The Master said, it would certainly be to correct language.

The key two-character Chinese term here is 正名, zhèngmíng, which in the influential older translation of James Legge (1861), is rendered as “rectification of names”; it could just as well be translated as “correcting terminology”, or even “clarifying the names of things.”

Straight away, we here at ClassicalEd Review would be proud to claim this Master Kung fellow as one of our own. This ancient Chinese sage sounds like he would be just as repulsed by the foul linguistic flatulence of Educationists as we are, and for all of the right reasons. We have reason to suspect that he would, as we do, see in one misused semicolon or misplaced modifier in some administrative document signs of the Apocalypse. A kindred spirit, a predecessor, a patron. (Of course, the bit about being reserved when we aren’t sure what we are talking about gives us pause. Perhaps it was a later interpolation into the text by a copyist?)

The Master continues:

We at ClassicalEd Review share the Master’s concerns about the incorrect administration of mutilations, though the “lesser punishments” seem to us not as urgent of a matter to attend to. We also note the refreshing clarity of the Master pointing out that, in certain very concrete cases of maladministered mutilations, the people will indeed “have nowhere to put hand or foot,” or, to state with more technical accuracy, will have neither hand nor foot to put anywhere. Preventing this seems to us to accord with good government.

The standard interpretation of this key passage is twofold: yes, the Master is calling for language to be used carefully, sparingly, and precisely in all things but especially in governmental affairs; at the same time, he is also calling for persons to properly fulfill the duties which attend the technical names for their social and political roles. Therefore, since a “king” and a “father” are by definition things that exercise a certain benevolent authority over others, a real king and a real father must actually live up to their titles; one who fails to do so ceases to be a king or a father.

“The gentleman leaves nothing to mere chance”—this is an excellent way of looking at the necessity of carefully aligning words to thought. When we get in the business of poorly saying what we mean, and especially when we crystalize such poorly-expressed thoughts in writing, then we are introducing a dangerous element of chance into the communicative act. If we botch a written administrative order, garble up a legal argument, or misplace modifiers, we then have to gamble upon the likelihood of our readers understanding what we meant in spite of our words. Attentive and thoughtful readers and auditors who will make us make sense where we ourselves have failed to do so are a rare thing; to bank upon them doing our jobs for us is risking disaster.

(I cite as a microcosmic example of the disorder and confusion that ensue when what is said is not what is meant, particularly relevant in Classical schools: the often-yawning gap between what is WRITTEN in a school’s uniform dress code and what is actually enforced. When the uniform code says girls’ skirts should be no more than two inches above the knee, and yet half of the student body goes about anywhere between four and six inches with zero apparent correction; when the rules proscribe socks without athletic logos but most ignore this; when shirt-tucking is written as required but widely ignored—students, parents, and staff alike will have no place to put hand or foot. Enforcing a written uniform code in a school is apparently at once both the easiest and the hardest thing to do.)

Refined speech, good government, correct observance of religious rituals, good manners and social morals, the flourishing of fine music, no unnecessary mutilations—this is a harmonious vision of civic order that truly deserves the world “classical”; the bit about even music makes it downright Platonic.

Now when we Classical educators lie awake at night fantasizing about power, most of us are not thinking about taking the reins of state outright. No, we imagine ourselves being installed as benevolent autocrats over schools, school districts, or perhaps even entire state systems of learning. The administration of the state of Wei is at once too grand and not important enough a task for us.

Wang-ho asked the Master: if you were given authority over a school, what is the first thing you would do?

The first thing I would do, said the Master, is to correct the teaching of literature.

Can I have heard you aright? asked Wang-ho. Surely that is wide of the mark! There are much more important things to do in a school than to correct the teaching of literature, such as drafting philosophical statements of principle about the nature and aims of liberal education, followed by subordinate statements about the several academic disciplines, immediately requiring the teaching of Latin across every grade level, hanging the Ten Commandments in every classroom, developing a core virtue list, or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the school day?

You blockheaded donkey, Wang-ho! You think like the many in supposing that a dying farm’s poor soil can be enriched simply by planting delicate flowers in it, or that by changing the name of the farm to something like “Paideia Acres” and hanging up some motivational banners crops will flourish. No—the gentleman starts with the soil, weeding it, tilling it and fertilizing it before attempting anything else. And if something is poisoning the water, he must remove the source.

The teaching of literature is the single most influential, imagination-enriching, soul-shaping thing that goes on in a school. It is so because it works in the realm of words, which everyone uses at all times, and in the realm of story, and humans are all storytellers. No offense to the philomaths, but the realm of number is not as universal nor natural to the human person. Language and story are where it’s at, Wang-brother.

And in my experience, the subject of “literature” or “English” is the origin of much that is foolish in schools, folly that overflows and taints everything. Here is bred the folly of training students to “see themselves” in stories, in exhorting them to make themselves the measure of all things. Here we find the error of “reader-response”, that is, a mode of “interpretation” according to which literally anything the reader thinks about a text is “valid” and cannot be judged according to anything objective. Here we find the doltish construction of “Plot Mountain” that stupid schema that has done more to train stupid readers to stupidly reduce every work of narrative into the same stupid constituent elements. Here we find the distortions of all forms of “theory”, and projecting topics into texts that are of relative interest to us rather than intrinsic pertinence to the story, from critical theory’s destructive obsessions with genderraceclass to the Classical educator’s own praiseworthy care for moral virtue, both of which breed inattentiveness to anything outside of them.

The subject of literature is where the most absurd trivialities pass for “discussion”, where students are encouraged to share personal anecdotes, pet theories, confused references to the entertainments of mass culture, and the most jumbled and unpolished forms of speech are practiced and reinforced daily. Here we have the Wuhan Lab where the deadly educational supervirus of “MAKE STUFF UP” was bred and released, unleashing the pedagogical pandemic of “Write your own ending to the story!”, “Create your own new character to introduce into the plot!”, “Draw what you think the characters look like!”, “Make a poster of your own cover for the book!”, “Think of your own sequel to the story and imagine what happens next!”, the vapidity of which is expressed in the exclamation points that so often accompany the promulgation of such instructions.

Good heavens, answered Wang-ho. Is there anything bad that doesn’t come out of the incorrect study of literature?

Wrongful mutilations, Wang-ho, answered the Master. At least not as far as I have seen.

That is consoling, said Wang-ho. Do you really think I am a blockheaded donkey?

When the teaching of literature is corrected, answered the Master, dodging Wang-ho’s fair question, then the students’ minds will be ordered. When the students’ minds are ordered, they can see beyond themselves. When they see beyond themselves, their imaginations are enriched. When their imaginations are enriched, their hearts come to love good things. When their hearts love good things, they will want what is right. When they want what is right, ritual and music will flourish, what is needed will be done, the state will prosper, and also everyone will have the correct number of hands and feet.

This seems to me to hit the mark, said Wang-ho.

Damn straight, replied the Master.

Vasari's Lives of Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

Paul Weinhold — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:25:41 GMT

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Everyone has heard of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Perhaps, however, there are some who have not heard of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. As a collection of biographies unified by a particular theme, it is clearly inspired by Plutarch. Vasari’s claim to uniqueness stems from the fact that he was the first to direct the attention normally devoted to statesmen to artists. Just as we say that Herodotus was the father of history, so we say that Vasari was the father of art history. Is it worth our time to read Vasari’s work today? I will try to make a brief case that the work is of historical and theoretical interest, skilled at capturing the character of Renaissance artists and relating this character to the paintings of the artist, and amusing in a way characteristic of the Renaissance in general.

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To read Vasari’s Lives front to back as a proper book would be a mammoth undertaking, as intensive as reading all of Plutarch’s Lives: the abridged volume I recommend is almost 500 pages and covers about 25 artists. The descriptions of these lives vary quite considerably in length. For extreme examples, Leon Batista Alberti’s life is about six pages, while the life of Michelagnolo Buonnarroti is about one hundred. Vasari divides the work into three parts, each with its own preface. Each part covers a different age of artistic development. The prefaces are important to the structure of the work and are where its theoretical meat may be found.

Vasari claims that the first age (roughly 1250-1400) “had something of the good” but was “accompanied by so great imperfection that they certainly do not merit too great praise” (59). Rather than spell out the distinctions between the three ages in the first preface, Vasari addresses the question of why an artistic recovery was needed at all. He begins by blaming the “barbarous and savage race” responsible for sacking Rome twice “without respect for anything whatsoever” (12). However, he also includes “the burning zeal of the new Christian religion,” which “defaced or threw to the ground all the marvelous statues, sculptures, pictures, mosaics, and ornaments of the false gods of the heathens” (13). Even so, Vasari admits that Christians “did not do this by reason of hatred that it bore to the arts, but only in order to humiliate and cast down the gods of the heathens” (13).

Vasari describes the second age (roughly 1400 to 1500) as a time in which “matters were much improved, both in the inventions and in the use of more design, better manner, and greater diligence, in their execution; and likewise that the rust of age and the rudeness and disproportion were swept away” (59). It is the task of the second preface to specify the distinctions between the three ages.

It is in the third age (roughly 1500 to 1560) that “art has done everything that it is possible for her, as an imitator of nature, to do, and that she has climbed so high that she has rather to fear a fall to a lower height than to ever hope for more advancement” (59). The third preface celebrates the accomplishment of Vasari’s contemporaries and makes the claim that the ancients have been surpassed, above all, by Michelagnolo Buonarroti: “This master surpasses and excels not only all those moderns who have almost vanquished nature, but even those most famous ancients who without a doubt did so gloriously surpass her; and in his own self he triumphs over moderns, ancients, and nature, who could scarcely conceive anything so strange and so difficult that he would not be able, by the force of his most divine intellect and by means of his industry, draughtsmanship, art, judgment, and grace, to excel it by a great measure” (225-6). As an aside, we can see the modern nature of this work in Vasari’s claim that Buonarroti triumphs over nature.

While one would surely benefit from reading Vasari’s Lives in its entirety, just as one may read Plutarch’s “Life of Alcibiades” without having read his “Life of Theseus,” so one may jump to the life of a particular artist of interest without having read the lives leading up to him. I believe this is more profitably done when one has familiarized oneself with the work of an artist or, perhaps even better, when one is simply intrigued by a particular artist. For example and in my own case, as a reader of Machiavelli, I cannot help but notice that both Harvey Mansfield and Christopher Lynch chose details from Paolo Uccello’s “Battle of San Romano” to grace the covers of their respective translations of Discourses On Livy and Art of War. There are many depictions of mercenaries and of battles: what is it about Uccello’s style that led two separate translators to think of him in a Machiavellian context?

Vasari’s “Life of Paolo Uccello” begins with the following labyrinthine sentence:

There is an eerie quality to the paintings of Uccello (see “The Hunt in the Forest”) that Vasari helps us to articulate: the man’s obsession with depth led him to lose sight of figure. Does this not help explain how different translators of Machiavelli could gravitate towards a painting of Uccello as the visual representation of the thought of Machiavelli? For just as Uccello’s obsession with depth comes at the expense of figure, so Machiavelli’s extraordinary cunning quite deliberately overlooks our common notions of virtue. To generalize the point that I am trying to make, Vasari has the capacity to crystallize the qualities of an artist as a man and to connect those qualities to his works of art.

Finally, Vasari both celebrates and participates in the morally ambiguous good cheer and delight in life that is characterized by the Renaissance. For example, in the life of Buonamico Buffalmacco—a minor painter removed from abridged editions—he is at pains to go into great detail, in one of the longest paragraphs in the life, about the time that Buffalmacco could not get to sleep because his neighbor’s wife set up a spinning wheel “which by misadventure she had planted opposite to the bed of Buffalmacco” and “would spend the whole night spinning her thread; wherefore Buonamico, being able to get scarce a wink of sleep began to think and think how he could remedy this nuisance.” Buffalmacco’s idea was to bore a hole through the wall separating his house from that of his neighbor’s, through which he could slip extra salt into the cooking pot of the wife, causing his neighbor to yell at and even beat his wife for repeatedly oversalting their food! Eventually his neighbor concludes that his sleepless wife was simply incapable of cooking properly without a good night’s sleep and would therefore have to cease her nighttime spinning. Vasari takes great delight in relating this story, and even if we cannot approve of the actions of Buffalmacco or his neighbor, Vasari takes such obvious joy in relating this story to us that the reader cannot help but laugh. The impish pleasure that Vasari takes in the lives of his artists gives his work its particular charm.

Ian Dagg teaches courses on American political theory and the history of political philosophy for the Classical Education graduate program at the University of Dallas. He is the editor of Regime and Education: A Study in the History of Political Philosophy, and has published chapters or articles on Rousseau, Bacon, and Montesquieu. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Dallas in Politics.

Finding Joy in the Moment: Homeland Security Edition

Paul Weinhold — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:26:54 GMT

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(Editor’s note: we celebrate the return of “Torch & Tub” after several weeks of a medically-necessitated hiatus. Contributor A. Ellison, often one for insufferable dramatics, went and got himself hospitalized at the beginning of the month with a complete digestive system shutdown triggered by cancer treatments, and, to be honest, he is still milking it far more than we think befits an individual of his natural talents, however uncultivated, and (purported) all-around personal excellence. Regarding his stint in the hospital, Ellison shared with us that, should you ever have the opportunity to make confession, communion, and receive last rites from a Cistercian monk in a dark hospital room, you should not let the occasion pass you by, as it might not come around again.)

“With everything that’s going on these days, people need to be at peace, and being at peace means finding joy in the moment.”

Also sprach a certain young, well-intentioned soul or other whose professional vocation is somewhere in the whole Church ministry area, a field where the hours are long, the pay is scandalously low, and employers are often fortunate to find anyone over age 25 to do the work. Deep, spiritual masters and wise, old souls are not the usual staff one finds in such jobs, and this sentence would seem to confirm that.

The first thing that I noted in this not particularly profound utterance was how it equates one ill-defined cliché with another: “finding peace” and “finding joy in the moment”. A good indication of whether a sentence is meaningful or not is if, when you make it say the reverse or inverse of what it actually does, there is any discernible loss in the significance of the whole, so let’s give that a whirl: “With everything that’s going on these days, people need to find joy in the moment, and finding joy in the moment means being at peace.”

Nope. Not seeing any major distinction there.

This sense-test trick also works with almost any passage from Hegel, often even having the effect of improving the original sentence significantly, as it does with this little example here from Phenomenology of Spirit:

Then there is also “With everything that’s going on these days,” which is almost invariably an adverbial weasel-phrase. The speaker sort of wants to say something specific about, not “everything that’s going on these days,” but probably just about ONE thing in particular that’s “going on,” and namely something bad, but he is afraid of being too specific because then people might take issue with the assertion that this unnamed one thing is either a) going on, or b) actually bad.

Years ago I awkwardly sat on the board of a strange non-profit foundation which, in name, was dedicated to advocacy for ethics in corporate leadership, but which in practice was a barely-veiled assemblage of political partisans sponsoring high school drawing and writing contests1celebrating same-sex attraction and opposing Bush administration policies on this or that. “With EVERYTHING that’s going on these days…” was several of the board members’ preferred mode of wink-wink, nudge-nudge insinuated condemnation of the Iraq war or the FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina or Dick Cheney being Pure Evil, employed just before self-congratulatorily declaring that the foundation’s work was so desperately needed in the world today. Ah, yes: there may be waterboarding at Gitmo, but at least there are people like us to give cash prizes to high school children drawing pictures in celebration of girl-girl love.

Without troubling you2too much about the contextual evidence surrounding the statement from the well-intentioned church ministry figure, I am confident that the “everything that’s going on these days” was a weaselly, timid reference to last month’s chaos in the streets of Minneapolis. See, if you just call it “everything going on”, then you don’t have to actually stake out a position on it—you don’t have to say what you think is bad—the tactics of ICE, the civilian resistance, the shooting deaths of civilians, the idea of immigration enforcement tout court, Walz and Frey and Trump staging for us a dramatic presentation of the Constitutional issues involved in state vs. federal nullification for America’s 250^th-- and can politely steer around controversies: “Can you believe what’s going on in Minneapolis?” “I know, right? Crazy.” “Yeah, totally crazy. Needs to stop.” “Totally needs to stop.”

So, with everything going on these days, not too long ago I was recumbent in a hospital bed3 and was trying very hard to be at joy in the moment or something having to do with peace, especially with everything going on, especially everything going on, or rather NOT going on, in my hard-crashed digestive system, my memory took me back to a personal encounter I once had in the great city of Minneapolis with the noble men and women of our Department of Homeland Security, an encounter which, I earnestly believe, can show us all a more excellent way of civic friendship, civil society, professionalism, and fellow Americans cooperating for the common good. If you want to be at peace, then read on.

It was June, 2019, and I was flying from Texas with two of my daughters, then 12 and 14, to take them to a Paul McCartney concert in Lexington, Kentucky with a stop-over in the Twin Cities. We are HUGE Beatles fans in our home, and this little trip had been the girls’ big Christmas present in December, which I cannot say had been intended to be an exercise in delayed gratification, but which ended up working out nicely to that end nonetheless.

Spirits were running high on this trip, among father and daughters alike: When do you think he will sing “Hey, Jude”? What will he open with? Will there be explosions during “Live and Let Die”? I really hope he plays a lot of Wings songs, too! I’m TOTALLY GONNA CRY when he starts the piano opening of “Baby, I’m Amazed”! Let’s see if we can literally sing along to every word of every song of the concert!

The Minneapolis layover was quite an extended one, and we had so much time to kill that we even left airport security to meet a brother of mine in town whose office was nearby for a quick coffee on his lunch break. (This brother, by the way, is the one mentioned in my most viral LinkedIn post to date.) After some too-abbreviated catching up with him, he had to run, and we prepared to re-enter security.

Right away one could tell that something out of the ordinary was going on. The line was backed up way down the corridor, and a much larger contingent than the usual number of TSA agents were busily coming and going. As we peered down the corridor, we could see the line turning into a more open space, and after some slow but steady progress, the rhythms of some kind of regular spoken announcement to the queued-up travelers could begin to be heard, words repeating themselves every five minutes or so.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE I ASK THAT YOU LINE UP IN PAIRS AND WAIT FOR MY SIGNAL WHEN EACH PAIR HEARS MY SIGNAL PLEASE WALK AT A REGULAR PACE DIRECTLY FOLLOWING THESE STRAIGHT LINES ON THE FLOOR ACROSS THE ROOM DO NOT SLOW DOWN DO NOT STOP THIS IS A K-9 UNIT TRAINING EXERCISE THE DOG WILL APPROACH YOU AND WILL SMELL YOU DO NOT BE ALARMED IF THE DOG BARKS THIS IS I REPEAT A TRAINING EXERCISE AND NOTHING THAT HAPPENS HERE WILL PREVENT YOU FROM CLEARING SECURITY AND BOARDING YOUR FLIGHT TODAY THANK YOU VERY MUCH ARE THERE ANY QUESTIONS?

As we approached the corner, we could see that travelers were being grouped together in cohorts of about 20 at a time and having this announcement repeated to them by a TSA agent who, if not yet entirely bored with the repetitive function he had been assigned, was giving it his best while looking forward to being relieved. He had clearly been tapped for the announcement gig because he possessed something more than the average personal charisma level of the average TSA security agent, and so perhaps that relief would not be coming anytime soon. Right away, I felt some mysterious bond with his soul awakening in mine. I did not know where it was going to take us both.

We watched the exercise proceed exactly as the announcer-agent had described it: the travelers proceeding two-by-two, the K-9 agents with their German shepherds bearing down and intercepting them for sniffs, the natural human temptation to slow down or even stop in your tracks when a German shepherd makes a bee-line at you from out of your peripheral vision, the frequent promptings of other TSA agents to “keep walking” or “please walk on the solid line.”

One of my daughters has a much more nervous disposition than the other, and she began to fret under furrowed brow: “Dad, what if I can’t help it and stop? What if the dog barks at me? Am I going to get in trouble? I want to walk with you.” Big sister and I went into full comfort mode, assuring her it would be OK, that we would be there, that no one else was having any problems, that a little German shepherd was not going to stop us from seeing PAUL FREAKING MCCARTNEY. Our efforts began to work with her, and we watched and listened as several more cohorts of passengers received the repeated instructions, paired off, and sallied forth to be sniffed. Her brow began to unfurrow.

Finally, our little group reached the front of the line where we were treated to the same announcement we had already heard five times already while getting closer:

Now, I have always had something of a playful disposition in public circumstances in which convention seems to call for a more serious demeanor from participants. I am not one who struggles with the spirit of gravity when being told by the urologist that I have advanced kidney cancer, while on the phone with the insurance adjuster about the third major water damage claim, or while being subjected to a total BS traffic stop for just barely rolling through a stop sign. For years, I cultivated a drive-thru window persona I called “Dumb, Belligerent Dad” who made lots of mistakes in his order4 and then pretended to get upset when the fast food employee corrected his errors.

And these two girls had long been familiar with my disposition, which often found a ready outlet in the drop-off car line at school every morning, where the school’s headmaster or various other teachers would often be personally present to greet the arrivals, meaning I basically had a daily opportunity to roll a window down and say something totally off the wall. Sometimes the mere threat of doing so would send the younger daughter into furrowed fits of worry: “No, dad, no! Don’t say anything weird! Please, it’s so embarrassing!” “Oh, nothing to worry about! I’m just going to say hello!” I would asseverate. “NO YOU’RE NOT I KNOW YOU’RE GONNA SAY SOMETHING WEIRD!” And at this point, the elder daughter in the back seat, an impish grin on her face, would usually begin chanting “DO IT! DO IT, DAD!”

…THE DOG WILL APPROACH YOU AND WILL SMELL YOU DO NOT BE ALARMED IF THE DOG BARKS THIS IS I REPEAT A TRAINING EXERCISE AND NOTHING THAT HAPPENS HERE WILL PREVENT YOU FROM CLEARING SECURITY AND BOARDING YOUR FLIGHT TODAY THANK YOU VERY MUCH ARE THERE ANY QUESTIONS?

I don’t know whether it was because of my own personal excitement about our concert destination, my paternal concern to lighten my youngest daughter’s spirits, or that personal vibe I was getting from the weary TSA agent—it was probably all three in equal measure. But the Spirit brought forth some depths from within, from the most sublime organ of my highest purpose, and I raised my hand.

“Yes, sir?”

I conjured the best blockheaded Indiana boy drawl I could muster and copped a dull, not-reading-at-grade-level expression.

“CAN I SMELL THE DOG?”

He lost it. Busted out laughing. Probably the kind of breaking of character that gets you suspended from the TSA. He attempted to recover, saying, “Whewww…uh…well…as long as you don’t slow down or stop, I guess that’s OK….uhhh…geez! No one EVER gets me. No one EVER makes me break down. You’re the first. Congratulations.”

As I proceeded across the floor on the straight line a few minutes later and the dog began approaching, youngest daughter was no longer worried about her getting in trouble. She had something else on her mind: “Dad, please don’t smell the dog, please don’t, that would be so embarrassing!” As the German shepherd approached, I gave one last backwards glance, without slowing down, to the still-chuckling TSA agent, twitching my nose as if getting ready to do the strange deed. He smiled.

America.

There were MASSIVE pyrotechnic explosions during “Live and Let Die”. At every chorus. We could feel the heat on our brows in the upper decks of the indoor arena. And we might not have known every word to every song, but you should have heard us on the nah-nah-nah-nahs of “Hey Jude”.

Naturally, it was insisted that drawing or writing were “equally valid” modes of expression, except drawing was probably better, because most kids today can’t write and it would be unfair to stage a writing contest.

Really: myself

“Mr. Ellison, do you ever watch television or anything?” There is a TV on the wall.” “Not really, and since I feel too sick to read, I will just stare and think.”

Such as ordering soft drinks that weren’t on the menu, referring to a Value Meal as a “Power Meal”, and asking for no cheese on a cheeseburger. Think of sort of a cross between Jack Nicholson in that “chicken salad sandwich, hold the chicken salad” diner scene from Five Easy Pieces and Ernest P. Worrell in a small-market dairy product TV commercial.

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