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school

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, September 2023

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Back-to-school reflections, plus a roundup of this month’s essays
The Iliad

A New Iliad

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The first word of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad signals that this is not quite the Homer we’re used to. You may well ask whether anyone today can be used to an epic, conventionally attributed to a blind bard named Homer, that was composed some 2,750 years ago in a stylized form of Greek that no one spoke natively. But surprisingly, there have been more than a dozen translations into English in the past thirty-five years alone.
American schools

If We Want Better Schools, We Need to Be a Serious People

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Our schools are failing not because of what happens in the classroom, but because of what happens—or more to the point, what doesn’t happen—at the dinner table. If we wish to be a serious people, then we must bolster our institutions with the power to humanize and domesticate the bedlam within us all.
Civic education for two cities

Civic Education for Two Cities

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A parallel challenge exists in preparing active participants for life as citizens and as members of church communities. Similar strategies can help both.
Book reviews

The Bookshelf: Let’s Review

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A book review is not an opening-night party for a book’s author, and it is not a quarrel carried on with brass knuckles. It is an exercise in considered, contextualized judgment for the benefit of readers.
AI and education

Artificial Mediocrity: The Hazard of AI in Education

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Many students may not appreciate the importance of applying themselves rather than using AI, but we must encourage those who do. We should fortify promising students with the assurance that excellence in education is worth pursuing but requires taking a hard road.
AI/ GPT3

What Makes Us Human?

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At the moment, large language models are nothing like us, however easy it is for us to anthropomorphize their outputs. But as AIs develop, it will become increasingly necessary to ask: How much do we want them to become like us? Answering that question will certainly require human wisdom.
Expressive individualism

In Defense of Individuality: A Friendly Critique of Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

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In his impressive 2020 book, Carl Trueman rightly exhorts readers to solidify their commitments to God and moral truth in a world of “expressive individualism.” But by reading human nature through the Marxist-Hegelian lens of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, he undermines the true individualism at the heart of the ethics that he wants to defend.
Science vs. religion

The Entanglements of Science and Religion

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Nicholas Spencer’s new book is an important resource for anyone who wishes to understand the scientific and religious entanglements that have shaped, and continue to frame, our views of God, humanity, and the cosmos.
Classical education

Classical Education’s Remedy for America’s Loneliness Epidemic

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Classical schools embrace an older understanding of education, one that prepares students for festivity and friendship, rather than socially handicapping them. Like their ancient and medieval predecessors, classical educators maintain that a crucial purpose of education is to liberate students from a calculative, utilitarian mindset by teaching them how to enjoy intrinsically worthwhile activities for their own sake.
Franciscan Education

The Merits of a Franciscan Liberal Arts Education

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The point of a Christian liberal education is to take on the mind of God and to be conformed to Christ, or at least to begin to do so, for such a project is endless. This means that a Christian liberal arts school will seek to impart to its students some measure of wisdom and holiness.
The study of theology

In Defense of the Liberal Arts and the “Queen of the Sciences”

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The problem with the way that discussions surrounding university education are often framed is that they seem to accept as inevitable a pernicious anthropology that presumes students are autonomous subjects, consuming in order to be consumed. But we are more than what we achieve, more than we produce, more than our billable hours.
Family

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, August 2023

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Reflections on college drop-off and the centrality of kids to the human experience - plus, a roundup of this month's essays
Devorah Goldman and Dr. Miriam Grossman

How Gender Activists Defaced Pediatric Medicine: An Interview with Miriam Grossman, MD

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“My book is based on a series of dangerous ideas that have led us to where we are now. Beginning with the insidious theories of John Money, these ideas progressed through the fields of psychology and psychiatry and eventually infiltrated our educational and legal systems—corrupting many of the country’s most powerful institutions.”
Summer camp

Summer Camp: An Ailing American Institution

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The original rationale for summer camp is more valid than ever. Young people are struggling with mental health, addiction to technology, disconnection from the body, isolation, and many other painful realities. Summer camps cannot fix these problems. But for many adolescents, the experience of traditional summer camps might help them see that life is about more than accomplishment, and that is a start.
Technology

The Psychology of Digital Dehumanization

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A Web of Our Own Making overflows with disquieting observations about the ways digital technology is reshaping human nature. Antón Barba-Kay puts into haunting words the anxiety, exhaustion, and emptiness that most of us feel but cannot put into words because we are too busy scrolling and ogling.
Christianity in America

If You Like America, Thank Christianity

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Mark David Hall’s Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land represents a landmark contribution to the debate over the impact of Christian faith on American law and culture. It is high time for Christians to reframe this debate, asking not “How much do we have to apologize for?” but “How much can we take credit for?”
Karyatides statues, Erehtheio, on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece

The Past As Enemy Country: Why Teachers of Great Books Should Be Teaching History, Too

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We need to study history as a subject in its own right, acquiring a deep appreciation for the story of Western civilization, with all its abysses of failure and all its deservedly celebrated achievements. We need to help our students understand old texts at a deeper level, in less anachronistic ways. Above all, we need to arm them against the hostility to their own tradition that has become such a destructive force in our culture.
Surgeons

The Transgender Movement’s House of Cards Is Falling

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A growing number of doctors, patients, and whistleblowers are beginning to question the medical establishment’s recommendations for children with gender dysphoria.
Hand of a person casting a vote into the ballot box during elections

There’s No Easy Fix to Our Broken Presidential Nominating System

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For the foreseeable future, there will be no institutional barrier to demagoguery, viciousness, or incompetence to be found within the nominating processes. The only barrier will be the voters themselves.
Garden

Third Places Aren’t Enough

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Activities like gardening—what Josef Pieper has called “active leisure”—offer even more than third places can. They too are a meeting ground for people of any background, but active leisure is more deeply rooted in a true vision of our condition: creatures responsible for stewarding what’s been given to us alongside others.
Three golden domes of a Russian orthodox Christian church

“Traditional Values” Are Russia’s Geopolitical Weapons

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The militant Russian religious conservatism of the twenty-first century, paradoxically, mirrors the Soviet anti-religious socialism of the twentieth century. Their common feature is a shameless instrumentalization of religion, with the consent of the latter.
Segregated drinking fountain in use in the American South. Undated photograph. BPA2# 1135.

The United States Should Give Reparations for Segregation, Not Slavery: A Response to Daniel Philpott

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The United States must apologize for treating blacks with contempt and compensate with reparations those American blacks who lived through racial segregation. But reparations for all black Americans will not erase the wealth gap between blacks and whites, nor improve the significant educational achievement gap rampant throughout the black communities in this country.
woman hands bound prisoner in room, hands bound

A Christian Case for Racial Reparations

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Slavery, Jim Crow, and distributive discrimination assaulted natural rights and the dignity of persons made in the image of God on which these rights are based. They leave behind wounds, the most central of which is the standing victory of injustice, the moral fact of injustice itself that persists in time unless it is repudiated. While constitutional amendments, legislation, and policies have countered and delegitimated these injustices, the lack of a formal apology and reparations has left them still standing.
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