Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'education'

May 21, 2024

Bare Ruined Choir Schools

My news feed early last month included updates on an ongoing drama involving two animals, both from endangered species. Zookeepers in Fort Worth and in Cleveland breathed a sigh of relief when Jameela, a western lowland gorilla born at the Fort Worth Zoo that had been abandoned by her mother, was accepted by Freddy, a Cleveland gorilla who has successfully fostered orphaned and abandoned gorillas before. Continue Reading...
February 15, 2024

The Michaela Way and Living in Community

Educators love innovation. Education reform is a perennial theme in political campaigns, and almost every government has new rhetoric about how to reverse plummeting test scores, declining student achievement, and increased school violence and truancy. Continue Reading...
October 31, 2023

Setting the World Ablaze, Thales-Style

Business and educational entrepreneur Robert L. Luddy is a conservative Catholic who embraces dynamism and adaptability in bringing visions to life. Thales Academy is one such vision. In his new book, The Thales Way, Luddy provides the blueprint for and origin story of this now immensely successful classical school franchise. Continue Reading...
March 14, 2023

A Catholic College Guts Its Curriculum

Some years ago, only tangentially related to the reading we were doing in our seminar class, the students and I got into a conversation about jobs we found especially unappealing. I began with “guy who sprays de-icing chemicals on planes in the middle of winter from a cherry picker,” and the students quickly followed suit. Continue Reading...
February 01, 2023

What Chinese and American Schools Can Learn from Each Other

In a recent essay for the New York Times, American fashion designer Heather Kaye writes about raising her daughters in Shanghai and sending them to the Chinese public schools. Far from finding the schools backward and totalitarian, she expresses profound gratitude for the experience: “As an American parent in China, I learned to appreciate the strong sense of shared values and of people connected as a nation.” Continue Reading...
September 20, 2022

Progressives Remember COVID but Refuse to Learn from It

There are three ways to look back at the first year of the COVID pandemic. The first is to learn from the whole experience. Recall the fear, pain, and misery brought on by lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing, as well as the deaths that could have been prevented but weren’t because of politics (think the nursing home debacles). Continue Reading...