“We can only lean on what offers resistance.” So writes the historian Oswald Spengler in The Hour of Decision (1934). Seven years later, Simone Weil incorporated this principle in her declaration that the key to academic studies is an undivided focus on each particular subject at hand, with no concessions to the student’s aptitude or preferences. Weil’s […]
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E. D. Hirsch, famed literary critic and educator, founder of Core Knowledge Foundation and author of Cultural Literacy, has a new book out. It’s called The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools , and the arguments there are worth repeating again and again. While the preferred academic approach to American history and society is […]
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