Scholarship and Research
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The Role of Poetry in Cultivating Attentiveness
Abstract Poetry is endemic to classical education and often studied for its own sake. However, poetry is also posited to possess a pedagogical power not shared by prose or formal... Read more
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The Artist and the Philosopher
I'm going to begin a paper on beauty by considering commercials. I can hear you say, "but Dr. Anderson, no one thinks commercials are beautiful." I'm not considering them... Read more
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Teaching Critical Thinking in Science Education
As we begin to teach about science we naturally find a distinction arises between doing science and thinking about science. In a science class the emphasis may be on teaching... Read more
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Research on Mastery Learning
Mastery learning has been the subject of hundreds of research studies since Benjamin Bloom’s ground-breaking 1968 paper. The concept actually goes back way before Bloom, but it was Bloom’s prestige... Read more
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Studies of Cancer Mutations Lead to New Discovery
The reader may not be a biologist, or a chemist or a science teacher but I am certain that you are a human being. As such, everyone is touched by... Read more
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Role of Imagination in the Copernican Revolution
Science often advances because scientists gain access to new data, or even entirely new types of data, which their theories must then explain. New technologies can open up... Read more
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Seneca on History
The emergence of history as a discipline, like that of other “social sciences,” is relatively recent. There was, however, some ancient discussion about the topic before it become a field... Read more
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Social Media Is Isolating and Polarizing Us.
From Netflix’s docudrama The Social Dilemma to daily exposés, we are learning more about how social media is driving polarization by only showing users content that fits their “worldview,” spreading... Read more
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Great Texts Prepare Minds for Liberal Education
I understand that despite the title of our panel, “How Reading Great Texts Prepares Minds for Liberal Education—and a Life of Leisure” or maybe because of it, I am supposed... Read more
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Great Literature as a Humanizing Influence
I’d like to begin my remarks with a caveat. In order for the reading of great literature to have a humanizing effect, students have to approach it with the right... Read more
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Poetic Meter as Habituation to Metaphysics
In the Republic, and again in his late dialogue the Laws, Plato has Socrates and the unnamed Athenian both identify the art of poetry with music and make two powerful... Read more
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The Work of Art and the Student
The Precarious Status of the Arts At the time I took a post at the National Endowment for the Arts in Summer 2003, with a teaching leave granted to me... Read more
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When Art Illuminates Nature
All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts… Read more
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What is Beauty?
What is beauty? The very concept is rejected by many contemporary artists and estheticians. This evening I will try to show how beauty is at the very core of science... Read more
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The Cave, the Quadrivium, & Classical Education
What place should the study of mathematics have in classical education? Most classical schools rightly emphasize the linguistic arts of the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—but few have thought through... Read more
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Quality Matters
After all the bad publicity and spirited criticism of the Common Core ELA Standards, it may surprise people that one of the best defenses of classic literature in the primary... Read more
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The Workshop of Humanity: Reading Toward Virtue
Aristotle makes a claim that some of my students find objectionable but which most educators find self-evident. Aristotle asserts in multiple places that the young are not wise and typically fail to possess the... Read more
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How Scholarship Brought Western Musical Canon
As Classical educators, we know that history cannot be understood or mastered in isolation. Within the skein of history, every human endeavor is interwoven. One of the great supports for... Read more
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Summarizing Epic
From two basic themes—freedom and the knowledge of death–flow all the essential elements of epic: the hero, the quest, the natural man, the fall, the kin struggles, the death–world journey... Read more
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The History of Happiness
A talk on the “history of happiness” is a bound to disappoint. Happiness, after all, is something we would prefer to possess than to study. To consider its history seems to... Read more
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A Couple of Do’s: Twenty Major Poetry Projects
Here is something that looks like a kind of poem: No Vote The rocks were true, In the way it is impossible to count The atoms in a sparrow... Read more
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Teaching Beowulf
attended graduate school in the wild and crazy 1980s, when the God of Theory overthrew all of the other gods on literary Olympus, conquering and eating its fathers, mothers,... Read more
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Stasis Theory: Practical Rhetoric
Rhetoric as taught in the classical schools tradition has added, or more accurately recalled, a great and powerful tradition to and for 21st-century writing pedagogy, reviving and re-energizing an ancient... Read more
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Xenophon on the Purpose of History
Introduction Xenophon is often placed alongside Herodotus and Thucydides as one of the greatest historians of Greek antiquity, but Xenophon is by far the least well-known of the three chief... Read more
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Daughters of Memory
The Motive for Story History and poetry grew up in the same family, but what a strange, dysfunctional brood they have become in our era of academic specialization. In our... Read more
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Your Syllabus Needs a Story
When I was in graduate school in English at UCLA in the 1980s, one of the hot, cutting-edge books in the discipline was Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report... Read more
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Teaching History, Education, and Meaning
Thesis: History is the outworking of the conflict between basic beliefs. Analyzing history gets us into basic questions especially focused on the good. Asking a Philosopher As a philosopher... Read more
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