Astronomy in the Quadrivium
Astronomy crowns the sequence of the mathematical arts because it unites arithmetic, geometry, and music in a sublime study of the cosmos itself.
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Brothers, The Trades Aren’t The Only Answer
Something peculiar is brewing in higher education. Enrollment trends are shifting as four-year colleges are declining. In fact, high school grads are skipping tertiary education altogether. What caused these changes? Ultimately, the flaws in traditional higher education are plentiful, even at Christian colleges. Substance abuse. Sexual licentiousness. Ideological indoctrination. Antisemitism and other forms of racism….
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President Smith’s Remarks on the Occasion of New Aberdeen’s First Convocation
When I was in graduate school, I strolled through our church’s cemetery each Sunday before worship. I reveled in the tangible connection to previous generations of believers. But one plot haunted me. Rev. Joseph Wilson was a staunch nineteenth-century Southern Presbyterian minister who preached at First Presbyterian Church in Columbia. His son, Woodrow, spent his…
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Law and the Value of Classical Education
“The out-performance of classics majors isn’t related to the facts and information they memorized or anything written on their diploma. It’s related to the intellectual skills they developed in their studies. In a world where many students are memorizing terms and textbooks, students stand out who receive a real education in grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In other words, students who went to college to get an education outperformed students who went to college to get a degree.”
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Why the Trump-Harvard Battle?
Last weekend I watched The Return to the Hiding Place, a film tracing college students’ role in the Dutch Resistance during World War II. The movie contains a powerful scene in which a German officer confronts and threatens the student body president. The Nazi’s dictum struck a chord: “As goes the will of the students,…
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Science in Classical Christian Education
The natural sciences are critical to a proper Classical Christian Education. The four arts in the quadrivium explained the ancient cosmology, providing the pupil with a deeper appreciation of God’s world. Dr. Williams addresses the Christian worldview behind the sciences, and he demonstrates how New Aberdeen students would explore astronomy in a classical setting.
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What Hath Classical Education To Do With AI, Part II: Curriculum
By Joshua Pauling In Part 1 of this series, I briefly laid out how classical education, in its assessment and pedagogy, is ready to handle the AI Age. Here in Part 2, I explore how the same is true for a classical curriculum. Robin Phillips and I address the challenges of the digital age for…
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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Classical Education?
The DEI movement is neither “classical,” in that it promotes values that are contrary to traditional Western civilization, nor “Christian,” in that it is necessarily discriminatory based on such factors as race, gender, and unbiblical sexual preferences (e.g. Gal. 3:28; Rom. 1:26-27). DEI threatens the integrity of the CCE programs because it undermines the West’s legitimate cultural accomplishments and the Judeo-Christian values that underline them.
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What Hath Classical Education To Do With AI, Part 1: Assessment and Pedagogy
By Josh Pauling, Guest Contributor In the summer of 2024, Open AI, a leading company in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), released its latest version of ChatGPT, called GPT-4o, where the “o” stands for “omni,” meaning all. This “omni-tool” can generate text, audio, and images, speak in a human voice, and perceive and interpret…
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Loving Christ With All Our Minds
When educators intentionally omit God from the classroom for the alleged purpose of moral neutrality, another organizing principle and telos will necessarily fill the resulting vacuum. Many Christians have naively accepted what they thought was agnosticism in their educational models, but it turns out to be much worse.
