The Patriot

Paul Graham recently posted an essay How to Disagree. The essay proposes standards for logic and behavior when expressing disagreement in online communities.

Gene Veith has another article on appreciating beauty. He quotes at length someone who describes his path of discovery as going from being an outsider to being an insider.

The Dallas Morning News ran an article by Peter Leithart entitled New Christian education that’s decidedly old about Christian classical education. The newspaper article is condensed from the article The New Classical Schooling by the same author which appeared in First Principles.

Someone told me today that there is no word in the the Hebrew Old Testament for “teacher.” There is only a root word for “learn” that has one form for “one who learns” and another form for “one who causes to learn.” Compare this to the idea of a “lecturer” or “professor.” You can lecture or profess all you want, but unless someone is learning, you’re not teaching.

Gene Veith announced his new book today on his blog. The title is “The Soul of Prince Caspian: Exploring Spiritual Truth in the Land of Narnia.”

Listen to R. C. Sproul speak on the theology of truth, goodness, and beauty, especially beauty, in his talk “The Spirit in Creative Expression” available from the Renewing Your Mind web site. The talk was posted March 7, 2008.

Gene Veith posted an article on his blog saying that a California appeals court has ruled that parents must be state-credentialed in order to teach their children. This would effectively make homeschooling illegal in California.

Andrew Kern posted two though-provoking articles today, one on teaching science and one on teaching reading.

E. T. Jaynes gave a speech entitled A Backward Look to the Future in which he looked back on his long career as a physicist and statistician. Here are his thoughts on the goal of teaching science.

But it required a few years before I perceived what a science teacher’s job really is. The goal should be, not to implant in the student’s mind every fact that the teacher knows now; but rather to implant a way of thinking that will enable the student, in the future, to learn in one year what the teacher learned in two years. Only in that way can we continue to advance from one generation to the next.