Funding the Dream: An Honest Look at College Financial Aid

One of the biggest investments you can make in life is in the education of children. With the rising cost of higher education, many are questioning this proposition. Has the traditional four-year college remained a good investment? Or has it saddled the next generation with a debt burden too great to bear? In this article, we will do a little bit of cost analysis to determine whether students, parents and schools should continue to aim for college placements. We will also look at how financial aid works with some guidance on how to navigate a fairly complex set of factors

Continue reading

The Education of the Count of Monte Cristo

What are the proper sources for an educational philosophy? Should educators read only sociological journals and experiment in their classroom for the best results? Or is there something more humane and artistic in the nature of teaching? We have decried the technicism and scientism characteristic of modern education before.  One consequence of these trends is the exclusion of literature and humanities from the broader conversation about education, its goals, methods, and ideals. Charlotte Mason, for one, found novels, fictional literature, and poetry to be a potent source for her educational philosophy. While certainly we can understand the reticence to feature

Continue reading

Why Gender Matters in Education

We often take for granted the givenness of the world we live in, that is, the things in life that are not questionable. For example, I have never questioned that the sky is blue or that I am the son of my parents. These aspects of reality strike me as matter of fact and have served as two axioms among many upon which my mind has built its picture of reality. While these beliefs may not be foundational in the strictest philosophical sense, they are close enough to the foundation that I form subsequent beliefs about reality around them. For

Continue reading

Playing the Game: The Typical Rules for College Entry

Let’s be honest, there’s a game being played here. College entry has traditionally been about a very few factors that tell so much about a high school student’s ability to play this game, and not so much about the individual qualities that make that student an interesting person with the potential to be a great addition to the academic atmosphere as well as student life. Now COVID went a long way towards changing the game in radical ways. And we will get to some of the new currents in admissions such as student interviews. For some students, they adeptly navigate

Continue reading

Proclaiming the “True Myth”: Tim Keller’s Ministry and Classical Education 

I was first exposed to the ministry of Dr. Timothy Keller in college while pursuing a degree in philosophy and reading through the western canon of Great Books. Immersed in the intersection of Christian discipleship and the life of the mind, I found in Keller a comforting voice that resonated with many of the questions I was asking.  Keller had a gift for making complex things simple for ordinary people to understand. This made him a great teacher. It did not matter whether he was distilling the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards or the secularization analysis of Charles Taylor. He

Continue reading

The State of Affairs: Higher Education as an Educational-industrial Complex

As I begin this series on college guidance, my aim is to take seriously our mission to cultivate lifelong learning and flourishing. We must begin with the current state of affairs. We really cannot guide students into the higher education of today without taking stock of the long backstory of colleges and universities. Industrialization has had a massive impact on higher education, transforming these institutions into destinations for most high school graduates as a pipeline to the job market the industrialized economy created. As we go into this historical review, we will keep in mind that much of what our

Continue reading

The Counsels of the Wise, Part 6: A Pedagogy of Prudence

At this point in our series, we have established prudence or practical wisdom as a Christian and classical goal of education. We have also laid out several paths toward prudence, seeds really, which must be sown in early youth in order to reap the full flowering of practical wisdom in students’ more mature years. Among these seeds are proverbial instruction, good habits, exemplars, discipline and practice. Even with all this we have yet to lay out a specific method for instilling prudence itself. In what sort of thought process does the capacity for prudence consist? To answer this question we

Continue reading

Practicing Happiness: Ancient Wisdom for Our Modern World

The pursuit of happiness is one of three rights originally drafted by Thomas Jefferson in the “Declaration of Independence.” These “unalienable rights” are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It is an odd turn of phrase, but one that has a profound backdrop to it, one which we have perhaps lost today. It is likely that Jefferson borrowed the three rights from John Locke. Almost a century prior to the American declaration, the English philosopher had written in Two Treatises on Government that government existed to protect a person’s “life, liberty and estate.” By estate, Locke surely meant property

Continue reading

An Educational Renaissance for the Development Shop

The purpose of Educational Renaissance is to promote a rebirth of ancient wisdom for the modern era. Through synthesizing the insights of the great philosophers of education across time and place with contemporary findings in modern research, we aspire to serve fellow educators in the worthy calling to educate future generations for the good of society and in service to the church.  If you are new to this blog, you will notice that we typically focus on wisdom and modern research for the classroom or homeschool. As classical Christian educators who have been profoundly influenced by the educational philosophy of

Continue reading

Charlotte Mason, the Educational Philosopher

In researching Charlotte Mason’s life for my forthcoming book on her with Classical Academic Press (preorder Charlotte Mason: A Liberal Education for all!), the latest in the Giants in the History of Education series (register for my live webinar with Classical Academic Press!) I was struck by Mason’s insistence on the importance of educational philosophy. This stands in contrast to many of the other “giants” in this series (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Milton, C.S. Lewis), who were not educational philosophers first and foremost, but philosophers and theologians simply, who also happened to address education specifically. None of these thinkers felt the

Continue reading