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Some prejudices are good to have, some are bad, some are indifferent. Acquiring an education is learning to discriminate the good prejudices one carries about from the bad ones—to keep the former, as confirmed by knowledge, and discard the latter, as condemned by knowledge.

Don’t delay your life. Don’t wait until you get a job, then tenure, to do the normal things that make life sweet, like marrying and having children. Remember the time-worn observation: “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” Professors who build their career around their own ego and cutthroat ambition tend to shrivel into something you don’t want to be.

Law students shouldn’t be content with shallow conceptions of law. Instead, they should look deeper, asking questions about the nature and destiny of the human person, and the connection between our human nature and the legal enterprise.

As you enter into the medical profession, I encourage you to “start with the end in mind” by studying the Hippocratic Oath. The oath articulates the true aim of medicine, guiding physicians to provide treatments that align with the purpose of medicine and so are right for a doctor to do, and to refuse to provide treatments that go against this purpose and are wrong for a doctor to do.

New teachers need concrete examples from their teaching communities to help them manage their classrooms well and begin building experience and expertise. Returning teachers need opportunities for discussion within their communities to help them reflect on the experience and expertise they have already gained.

A powerful antidote to such atomistic existence, loneliness, and alienation, is found in the family: productive, resilient, and together. A family-centered life with the home as the engine of education and economics orders one’s vocations and roles in ways that build lasting familial bonds and provide stability amid a changing world. COVID-19 quarantining provides an opportunity for this reality to sink in.

Technology may permit us to supplement, but it should not lead us to discard, the personal Socratic education that does full justice to human nature and has contributed so much to the development of our civilization.

Our current national experiment reveals how unpopular online education is. Its proponents on the political right should admit its limitations and end their infatuation with its novelty and presumed efficiency.

So much of feminist thought is concerned with the idea that women need affordable, high-quality childcare options so that they can pursue professional success. But there is so little written on the ways we could use technology so that women could be with their children the vast majority of the time while still advancing in their careers.

Through the stories we tell and the wisdom of traditions we know, professors should invite students to rethink their lives as a creative call to move outside themselves into relationships with goods, work, and people that are fulfilling and fruitful.

Augustine, Aquinas, and Alexandria offer forgotten ideals regarding what learning is and the scale at which it flourishes.

What are the ends of education? How do various conceptions of the human person influence our understanding of education? What does a liberal arts education look like in an educational system dominated by specialized fields of study and focused on credentials and skills? How do friendship and community relate to education?

Many adults discover that their undergraduate education has provided little material for real intellectual, creative, or spiritual life. St. John’s Graduate Institute, emphasizing Great Books and discussion, furnishes an invaluable model for educating adults with non-professional, life-informing goals.

In her memoirs of teaching at Hunter College for nearly forty years, Alice von Hildebrand shows aspiring academics the importance of perseverance, courage, and love in the face of hostility toward one’s moral and religious views.

All education is moral education, because it carries an understanding of the things worth knowing—and a hierarchy of the things more or less worthy of being known. Moral education must also point to a certain end: an understanding of the ways of life that are better or worse for human beings. It must point to a certain kind of political regime in providing the cast of our lives: the laws that protect the integrity of families and the professions, and the terms of principle on which a decent people deserve to live. The following article is adapted from the Commencement Address Arkes delivered at Hillsdale College on May 10, 2009.

Higher education exposes ingratiating talk as the counterfeit of teaching; rote learning as the counterfeit of thought; mere opinion as the counterfeit of judgment; enthusiasm as the counterfeit of principle.

True liberal education should teach us that we do not only give ourselves away: we become ourselves by the gift. We become who we are by forgetting to think about who we are.

We need docile teachers and students, those unafraid of the fundamental questions and the highest things: those who want truth.

In order to lead students to wisdom, schools must be prepared to integrate technology in the classroom with moderation when it helps to facilitate real, authentic engagement, and they must be willing to set it aside when it pulls students away from such engagement.