Passing the Torch of American History to Our Children

Passing the Torch of American History to Our Children by Jeff Minick at Intellectual Takeout. Never have parents and teachers possessed such a wealth of treasure for teaching history as we do today. The countless stories and biographies written for the young, the songs and movies, the museums: all are widely available in libraries, bookstores and online. The gold is there; all we have to do is mine it. Read

Forming Young Creatives with Wonder and Hope by Haley Stewart at Word on Fire. Haley interviews Millie Florence, author of the brand new middle grade fantasy novel Beyond Mulberry Glen. Millie lives in Illinois and published her first book at age thirteen! In this episode we’re discussing her new title, the education and environment that prepared her for becoming such a young author, and the call to write books that lead young readers to hope. Listen

Shaping Your Son’s Moral Imagination by Alvaro de Vicente at The Heights Forum. A boy’s moral imagination touches every aspect of his life because it is the frame through which he views the world. Whatever parents or teachers explicitly communicate to a boy is received in the broader context of how he implicitly understands the world and his place in it. How he responds to events in his life, the way he approaches decisions to be made, and the manner in which he relates to others are all informed by a boy’s moral imagination. In short, the moral imagination is the all-encompassing story through which one sees the particular episodes of his life. Read

Opinion | We Need to Pick Up Books Again by William Hawrylak at The Daily Illini. Despite books being more available than ever in virtually all forms — audio, e-book, handheld — it feels that reading comprehension, speed and overall enjoyment have gone way down within the past decade…I’m mainly referring to children and young adults, as we seem to be increasingly dependent on technology, drifting away from traditional forms of entertainment like reading. In 2012, 27% of 13-year-olds reported that they read for fun, and in 2023, that number decreased to 14%. Average reading comprehension scores have also slipped among 13-year-olds, indicating that English classes aren’t making up for the lower reading enjoyment. Read

How to Ruin a Passage of Dickens for Your Students by Andrew J. Ellison at Cana Academy. By dwelling on historical context, authorial biography and psychology, intellectual history, contemporary socio-political issues, or abstract moral desiderata, outside in trains students in the unfortunate habits of either coming to view literature as fundamentally inaccessible without extraneous commentary, or thinking of fiction as just a set of coded messages, which, when the code is cracked and the meaning extracted, can be safely discarded. Students who are so trained will become passive and impatient readers, giving up on anything that isn’t immediately transparent and sitting inertly until a teacher explains it. Read

Reading Scores Plummet In Rich Blue States And Rise In Poor Red Ones by Helen Raleigh at The Federalist. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has released the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for the 2024 school year. Known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” NAEP assesses the reading and math skills of America’s fourth and eighth graders. The latest report reveals something surprising: after adjusting for demographics, the reading and math scores of students in Mississippi and Louisiana, two heavily Republican states and among the poorest in the nation, have surpassed those in deeply Democratic states such as California and New York. Read

Supreme Court Considers Whether the First Amendment Allows ‘Religious Charter Schools’ by Thomas Jipping at Daily Signal. One of the Supreme Court’s last argued cases of the 2024-25 term may turn out to be one of its most significant. On Wednesday, the court heard arguments over whether states may insist that charter schools, which they all define as public schools, be nonsectarian. Nearly every state offers charter schools to provide an alternative model for free public education. Like traditional public schools, charter schools may not charge tuition but are funded directly by the state and are regulated in many of the same ways. Under the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, a private organization may contract with the Statewide Charter School Board to establish and operate a charter school under a charter approved by the state. Read

Classical vs Modern "Progressive" Education: What's the Difference? by the University of Dallas. In the 21st-century, what goes by the name of “classical education” has taken on the character of a movement for reform in K-12 schools.  While what classical education offers feels like something new in the contemporary landscape, it is in essence a return to and a recovery of an educational tradition that goes back centuries. While this older tradition of education in the West never completely disappeared, the mainstream of American thought about public K-12 schooling in the 20th century pushed it to the margins in the name of certain ideals and assumptions which were revolutionary at first and which eventually obtained a position of unquestioned dominance. Read

Tragic Anniversary: 60 Years of Decline in Catholic Schools by Patrick Reilly at The Cardinal Newman Society. Six decades after the peak of Catholic schooling in the United States, a new report from the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) shows that Catholic school enrollment declined again this year. It’s a sad way of marking one of the Church’s great accomplishments: a nationwide network of parochial schools that served about 5.6 million students in the 1964-65 school year. But over the next 60 years, enrollment plummeted 70 percent to fewer than 1.7 million students today. Read

Newman Guide Colleges Lead the Way at Commencement 2025 at The Cardinal Newman Society. You can tell a lot about a person by the friends they keep. You can also tell a lot about a college by whom it chooses as its commencement speaker or honorary degree recipient. To become Newman Guide Recommended, we review an institution’s policy on speakers and honors. A Newman Guide Recommended school or college invites speakers, hosts events, and honors individuals to advance its mission of forming young people in truth. Read

Throwback Thursday

Moral Literacy And Character Formation by William Bennett at Memoria Press. It is now the case, as it has always been the case, that by exposing our children to good character and inviting its imitation, we will help them develop good character for themselves. This means our schools must have what the ancient Greeks would have called an “ethos”—that is, our schools themselves must have good character. Such an ethos depends on two crucial conditions. Read