The Necessity of Leisure

"Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only a person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear.  Such stillness as this is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul's power, as real, of responding to the real - a co-respondence, eternally established in nature - has not yet descended into words.  Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion - in the real."  (Leisure The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper, page 31)

You may be covering material, memorizing, testing, computing, but unless you have leisure - "a disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion" - you don't have true learning.

The Dark Ages and the Rise of Islam

What caused the end of the classical world?  Was it a decline from within, barbarian tribes from without, or as many Enlightenment thinkers proposed, the influence of Christians?  Emmet Scott argues that the classical world in the West continued right up to the beginning of the seventh century; with architectural achievements, high literacy rates, and Roman and classical modes of living.  Then abruptly at the beginning of the seventh century and continuing for the next three hundred years; building stopped, fertile ground around the Mediterranean was abandoned, people moved to hill top villages and castles, and the availability of papyrus was no more.  What accounts for this abrupt "dark age" in the history of the West?

In his fascinating book Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited, Scott argues that the cause of this abrupt decline was Mohammed and the rise of Islam.  The perpetual and total war instituted by Islamic theology, including the Muslim pirates and slavers in the Mediterranean, brought classical civilization to a halt and inaugurated the Medieval world.   Scott marshals evidence from archaeology and other historic disciplines to update and give strength to the thesis of Henri Pirenne in his book also titled Mohammed & Charlemagne.  Filled with historical insight, almost every page has something to teach and his conclusion, which I won't reveal, will keep you thinking for a while.  Highly recommended.

A Cherubic Sword of Flame

"But You are stronger than the world, O Lord my God, and You will lend Your servant a cherubic sword of flame, with which I shall repel the onslaught of the world on my life."  St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake, prayer LXXVIII

The Importance of Stories for Children

“Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.  Hence there is no way to give us understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its dramatic resources.  Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things.  Vico was right and so was Joyce.  And so too is that moral tradition from heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.”  Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Genuine Education

    The product of a genuine education is an ordinate soul.  The ordinate soul is properly ordered to the hierarchy of being and value: it loves the lovable, desires the good, and admires the beautiful.
    Order is produced in the soul through the inculcation of habits that bind our pleasures to that which is good and our pains to that which is bad.
    A soul thus habituated is virtuous. (Mark Anderson, Pure)

Who is so stupidly curious....

For do teachers profess that it is their thoughts which are perceived and grasped by the students, and not the sciences themselves which they convey through thinking? For who is so stupidly curious as to send his son to school that he may learn what the teacher thinks?...Those who are pupils consider within themselves whether what has been explained has been said truly; looking of course to that interior truth, according to the measure of which each of us is able. Thus they learn, and when the interior truth makes known to them that true things have been said, they applaud... (St. Augustine, On the Teacher)

The Aim of Classical Education

The formation of a mature person who loves inquiry that reaches into earthly as well as transcendent realms of knowledge, who makes the connection between this knowledge and his responsibility in the life of virtue, and who struggles against long odds to fulfill in himself the high exigencies of the Ideal Type.  (David V. Hicks, Norms & Nobility)