Join the second ACES-CiRCE online conference! Over two days, learn from skilled and knowledgeable CiRCE staff, and alongside participants from throughout the world, experience what it means to cultivate a humane, Logos-centred education, a pious heart, and a coherent mind. Speakers include US classical experts like Andrew Kern and Christopher Perrin, as well as Australian locals Michael Mendieta and Difff Crowther.
To register for this free event, please email ACES: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (registrations close 7 September).
Winston Churchill spoke these words in 1943 while advocating for the faithful restoration of the House of Lords exactly as it was before its bombing in 1941.
"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."
While appearing to be strange bedfellows, using mathematics to teach English is worthwhile and has a long history stretching back to the classical schools of rhetoric. To couple letters and numbers might appear to many educators as a strained partnership, a view that is probable due to the pervasive tendency of modern schools and universities towards over-specialisation and relativism. While admitting that respective fields of study should have a practical degree of autonomy, this autonomy does not supplant the fundamental principle that undergirds all fields of knowledge – namely the unity that belongs to all truth. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe," wrote the naturalist John Muir, an observation also reflected in Charlotte Mason’s definition of education as “the science of relations.”
About the Author: Conor Ross is a teacher and writer based in Melbourne, Australia.
The words of a madman – or of an oracle? My new book - The Revival of Beauty: Aesthetics, Experience and Philosophy - explores two duelling schools of thought: Anti-Aestheticism and Beauty Revivalism. For the former, these words are lunacy: for the later, prophecy.
In his perennial novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis’s character of the Professor bemoans the state of modern progressive education. “Logic!” he cries, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” Despite there being many teachers who have read the book and re-read it to their children or students, this pointed question hasn’t really sunk in and continues to go unaddressed. The pursuit of logic vanishes like a summer fog in the clamour of educationalists, politicians and social commentators demanding a greater curriculum focus on literacy, numeracy or – God-forbid! – STEM.
As a current graduate student in the great books program at St. John’s College, Annapolis, U.S., I am regularly asked to give an account of what liberal arts education is, and to justify its relevance. I believe that an investigation into the relationship between the terms of liberal education and the liberal arts will help illuminate their relevance and key benefits offered by their advocates.
About the Author: Michael Connors is a Postgraduate Scholar with the Ramsay Centre For Western Civilisation. He is currently completing his Master of Arts in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College in Annapolis, U.S.A. Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
St John's College Information Evening The Ramsay Centre is hosting an evening to find out more about St John’s with Associate Professor Andrew Poe. He will deliver a lecture on “Thinking and Unthinking Political Necessity: ADemocratic Reading of Book 2 of Plato’s Republic" and share his experience of the Great Books education he received at St John’s College. The talk will be followed by light refreshments and conversation.