"Forget yourself"

Carlos Carvalho is President of the University of Austin, a very young institution admitting its first class in 2024. It is tuition-free, and admission is intended to be by merit. The following are excerpts from the address its president delivered to this year's entering class. If this reflects the school's intent, I hope it is met, and that the school prospers.

.... The pilgrims and pioneers were the most self-reliant people on Earth. They persisted against nature and starvation to set up the colonies; they headed west on wagon trains even as they buried their children on the Oregon Trail. They formed volunteer fire brigades before any government services existed. They ran their own towns without deferring to a distant capital. They carved farms and opened shops and built railroads. They turned wilderness into civilization. Their grandchildren stormed the beaches at Normandy, and their great-grandsons walked on the moon.

That kind of relentless pursuit of greatness was self-uninvolved. It was strong and persistent, and the opposite of introspective. ....

These great achievements begin, however, with the recognition that there’s something greater beyond us; that much of life’s meaning comes from duties imposed on us and loyalties we did not choose. To strive beyond ourselves, we first need to understand ourselves, and that means fully understanding our inheritances before we presume to improve or criticize them.

Greatness starts with recognizing that we incurred a debt to the past, to the family that raised us, to the founders of our country, to the dead who built everything around us and fought our enemies so that we can live in freedom and prosperity. Greatness starts with the recognition of virtue. ....

So, to the class of 2030, the whole world will keep telling you to find yourself. We’re hoping for something better: that you forget yourself and discover the durable joy of being absorbed in something greater than you. .... 

Years from now, you’ll be in a room where something serious is on the line. Maybe a dinner table where a troubling question gets asked, or a courthouse where a big decision is made, or a board meeting where a serious mistake is about to be made. Those rooms will need at least one person who knows how to think through hard things. We want you to be the person the rest of the room quietly turns to.

...[W]e turn to you and ask you to forget yourself. We want you to read books that have no interest in your identity, and to wrestle with facts that don’t care how they make you feel. We want you to help your classmate at an inconvenient hour, to listen and learn from the professors, and to find ways to contribute to this young university without demanding that it conform to you. Forget yourself and find something greater than you. .... (more)

Carlos Carvalho, "What College Is Really For," The Free Press, August 25, 2026.

"But like a child at home"

Challies, quoting from Brett McCracken's The Wisdom of Sleep:

As we lie down to sleep, we give our mental anxieties and physical exhaustions to God, trusting him to tend to our burdens and restore us in the death of night, reviving us every morning. Every lying down to sleep is an enactment of the death and resurrection cycle of our salvation. We give up any notion of saving ourselves as we drift off to sleep. We can only trust that God will preserve us through the night, as he did the Israelites behind the bloodstained doors in Egypt through that terrifying night of wailing (Ex. 12:1–30). And we must trust not only that God will get us through night’s death but also that he will deliver us to new life in the morning, as he did for the Israelites in their exodus out of Egypt and eventually to the promised land. “The Lord kept vigil that night to bring them out of Egypt” (Ex. 12:42), and he keeps vigil every night, the sovereign author and perfecter of our faith.

Do we sleep well and rest easy as an outgrowth of our trust in God, calmed by the internalized, embodied knowledge that God reigns and keeps watch over our every breath?

Maybe we should strive to be more like a sleeping baby at peace in a parent’s arms. ....

Chesterton:

The greatest act of faith a man can perform is the act that we perform every night. We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and body into chaos and old night. We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world: for all practical purposes we become dead men, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection. (G.K. Chesterton, "The Meaning of Dreams" in Lunacy and Letters [pdf]).

A children's prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep;

And if I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Coming of age

From another essay in The Free Press series, "Things Worth Remembering." I do remember a time when my parents didn't really care what I was doing so long as I turned up for meals. I also remember the time in my adolescence when our parents were perfectly willing to let a bunch of us high-school-age guys take the train down to Chicago without any adults going along. We wandered around the Loop, took the "El" to the Science and Industry Museum, visited some bookstores, and returned by train that evening. About Stand by Me and times already gone before the movie was made:

Three adolescent boys are gathered in a ramshackle tree house—the kind you might have built yourself as a kid, if you were born before 1990, using scrap wood and a bucket of nails; the kind that would get you an unpleasant visit from your homeowners association were your own kids to attempt the same thing today.

This, the opening scene of Rob Reiner’s film Stand by Me, is the first indication that this story takes place in a very different time; the second, in case you missed the first, is that the boys are smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and listening to Bobby Day on a transistor radio. But this is only the setup for a punch line that arrives moments later, as another boy bursts into the tree house with a breathless question that will alter the trajectory of the rest of their lives:

“You guys want to go see a dead body?”

The answer, obviously, is yes. ....

This was a world in which it was still possible for a group of kids on the cusp of 13 to simply disappear for a period of 36 hours, during which their parents were not just unaware of but also not even curious as to their whereabouts, and if they got into trouble somewhere along the way, they would simply have to get themselves out of it. More than that: The act of extricating yourself from a mess of your own making was understood to be valuable, even essential, fueled by an unspoken consensus that growing up is a thing kids could only truly do in moments when they were on their own, out of adult view. Your upbringing was your parents’ responsibility, sure, but your coming-of-age? This was none of their business. You knew it, and so did they. ....

In hindsight, 1959 was the beginning of the end for this boundless, archetypal American adolescence. If it had been set just a decade later, this same story might have come to an abrupt conclusion after the boys’ parents were reminded of their existence by one of those by then standard public service announcements on the evening news: “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?!” Ten years after that, the kidnappings of Etan Patz and Adam Walsh ushered in an era of skyrocketing anxiety over the safety of children and with it, far less freedom for wanderlust-afflicted preteens. ....

Meanwhile, this year, a poll from the Institute for Family Studies revealed that a majority of 14-year-olds aren’t allowed to leave the street where they live without adult supervision. .... (more)

Kat Rosenfield, "A Time Capsule of Free-Range Childhood," The Free Press, August 14, 2026.

Grievance culture

From the author of Therapy Nation, who is himself a psychotherapist:

Too much of modern therapy culture keeps people stuck, reinforcing grievance, externalizing blame, and turning everyone else into the reason their lives are so miserable.

The problem begins with my own field. For years, my profession has trained clinicians to elevate validation over challenge, affirmation over interpretation, and emotional fluency over the harder work of behavioral change. ....

The patient becomes good at explanation, more sophisticated in the language of harm, and more certain about who is to blame, but no closer to actual change. Grievance becomes part of identity.

That same emotional habit doesn’t stay confined to the therapy office. People carry it into marriages, friendships, workplaces, and, eventually, politics. Ordinary frustration becomes proof of mistreatment. Ambivalence becomes danger. Disagreement becomes evidence of harm. Once enough people are trained to interpret discomfort this way, coexisting with others starts to feel impossible. ....

The same therapeutic scripts that encourage patients to pathologize difficult bosses and disappointing partners now teach citizens to reinterpret ordinary democratic differences as evidence of danger. The result is a society less capable of living with differences, less able to tolerate friction, and more likely to retreat into emotionally curated silos and echo chambers. .... (more)

Jonathan Alpert, "Is Therapy Tearing Us Apart?" The Free Press, May 15, 2026.

A pretty good guide for decent behavior

Gene Autry's "Cowboy Code" for his young fans:

1. 
   The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.
2. He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.
3. He must always tell the truth.
4. He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.
5. He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.
6. He must help people in distress.
7. He must be a good worker.
8. He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits.
9. He must respect women, parents, and his nation's laws.
10. The Cowboy is a patriot.

Positive thinking

This reminded me of the argument that optimists are often disappointed while pessimists may be happily surprised. From "Don't Worry, Be Unhappy":

In the years since Sigmund Freud discovered the couch, Americans got the strange idea that happiness is the natural human condition. Unhappiness, they decided, is a psychological problem. “Unhappiness is both a political state and a mental health crisis,” wrote Tara D. Sonenshine in The Hill in 2024. In a Guardian piece last month, therapists described patients who became “depressed” by political stress.

Despite the narrative that it’s a disease to be treated, unhappiness is totally normal.

Humans aren’t designed to be happy all the time. ....

In recent decades, there’s been an obsession with improving “mental health.” But the concept of “mental health” has so many vague definitions that anyone the least bit unhappy is presumably “mentally unwell.” Therapy culture has taught us to attend closely to our emotions because anything negative supposedly might be the early sign of something serious and merit professional intervention. ....

A purely positive attitude, meanwhile, isn’t always a cognitive asset. Research on goal achievement finds that total optimists who fantasize about success often underperform those who realistically imagine obstacles. College graduates who fantasized about getting a job, for example, got fewer offers and earned less two years later than graduates who were filled with more doubt and worry. .... (more)

Carolyn D. Gorman, "Don't Worry, Be Unhappy," The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2026.

Disruption

I taught in public high schools for almost forty years. I didn't have serious discipline problems in the classroom. When I introduced myself to a new class of 9^th grade US History students, I would tell them something like, "You've been in school for eight or nine years. You know the behavior teachers expect. If you misbehave, I'll assume you're doing it on purpose." I had very few behavior issues. I retired twenty years ago. I wonder whether that would work today. From "How Public Disorder Starts":

[Schools] are the institutions where we teach the next generation how shared spaces work.

Schools confront the dilemma of inclusion every day to a degree outsiders may not fully appreciate. They are less visible than churches and other spaces; you cannot wander into a school uninvited. Yet inside those walls, maintaining order has become increasingly difficult. Inappropriate student behavior has long been a chronic challenge in American schools, but many teachers report the problem has grown more acute in the years since the pandemic disrupted schooling and children’s social development. The RAND American Teacher Survey, for example, finds that teachers report increased classroom disruption and student misbehavior, with managing student behavior ranking among their top sources of job-related stress.

Disorder doesn’t arrive in schools as a single incident. It spreads gradually, and behaviors once considered unacceptable become tolerated, then normalized. Eventually, the culture of the school bends around accommodating disruption. When that happens, learning becomes secondary to managing chaos. Reflecting on my own experience teaching in a low-performing South Bronx elementary school in my book, How the Other Half Learns, I wrote:

A single disruptive child can bring a classroom to a halt. Put three or four such children in a single room and even minor misbehaviors can have a cascading effect, bleeding away a teacher’s time and attention and student learning. When multiple children with serious behavior problems share a classroom, a level of disorder can ensue that tests the patience and skill of all but the most gifted teachers. When those behaviors become common across classes and grades, an entire school soon groans under its weight.

This is not a mere philosophical concern. Surveys consistently rank student behavior issues among the leading reasons teachers leave the profession. Predictable consequences ensue: Teacher turnover destabilizes schools, instructional continuity disappears, and new teachers arrive unprepared for the conditions they encounter, with many leaving as quickly as they came. Over time, the institution itself begins to falter and fail to serve its primary purpose: educating children. Faced with these pressures, many schools have responded not by reasserting norms of order and academic purpose but by subtly redefining their mission. ....

Again from How the Other Half Learns:

When a school or teacher fails to engage or manage disruptive behavior, children are cheated. But who, exactly? The disruptive child who is suspended and excluded from class? Or the diligent student whose education bleeds away hour after hour, while her teacher responds to antisocial outbursts, or focuses on her classmate to prevent them? The weight of education policy and practice, as enshrined in impulse, empathy, and the law, comes down on the side of the disruptive child.

Schools occupy a unique place in this debate because they do more than simply reflect social norms—they help create them. Public transit works only when riders respect basic rules of conduct. Courts function only when citizens accept procedures and verdicts. Workplaces operate only when adults can tolerate standards and correction. Where do those habits come from? School. .... (more)

Robert Pondiscio, "How Public Disorder Starts," The Dispatch, March 26, 2026.

Read books!

National Review's March edition recognizes the 250^th anniversary of America's Independence with some pretty good essays. From Mary Katharine Ham in "Reading Makes Us Better Citizens":

In a video I stumbled on recently, a man in a hoodie reads to the camera, somewhat haltingly telling the story of Aslan and the Pevensie children. He’s been working his way, one chapter a day, through The Chronicles of Narnia. The text over the video reads, “37 years old, fifth-grade reading level, no one taught me, but I’m not giving up.” ....

The truth is that a lot of Americans, for more than a generation, haven’t been learning very much. They don’t learn because they don’t read. They don’t read because they’re not asked to, and if they are, it’s in small excerpts. If they were asked to read, many couldn’t because trendy pedagogy took precedence over phonics and didn’t begin to lose its hold until 2022, when journalist Emily Hanford revealed that there is a science to reading that research shows works but that schools ignored. ....

Even an elite college like Columbia University, with its great-books curriculum, is cutting the number of required books because students are “overwhelmed by the reading,” a situation recounted by professors to The Atlantic. The share of nine-year-olds who read for fun every day is at the lowest level since the Nation’s Report Card began studying the trend in 1984. And the percentage of adults who read for pleasure daily dropped from 28 percent to 16 percent over 20 years. ....

Despite the research showing that newer methods of teaching reading didn’t work, the education establishment wouldn’t let go of debunked practices. Yet some states, like Mississippi, had figured things out. When the Magnolia State launched a new approach to literacy in 2013, it started on a trajectory that took it from 49th to ninth in the Nation’s Report Card rankings. The poorest state in the country, with large numbers of low-income and minority students, began outperforming everyone, showing gains across all income and achievement levels for half what California spends per student.

The state’s approach was to screen young kids several times per year for literacy, attempting to close the kind of cracks that Oliver James had fallen through 30 years ago. Mississippi added a policy to hold back third-graders who were not proficient. This caused controversy, as many assumed that large numbers of students would be held back. What actually happened is that accountability and a new approach got adults in gear to help students succeed by third grade. Setting higher expectations, not hiding failure with lower ones, worked. The state invested in training to get teachers bought in on new curricula and used tried-and-true phonics instruction in line with the science of reading.

This success has already been replicated in Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana, which all rose substantially in NAEP rankings in 2024 as other states continued to fight pandemic losses. ....

At the risk of simplifying complex problems, the answer is books. They’re not just practical, but as the “Mississippi miracle” moniker suggests, downright astounding in their delivery of public good. In the 2019 book The Enchanted Hour, which inspired me to start regular read-alouds with my children, author Meghan Cox Gurdon calls it a “dazzlingly transformative and even countercultural act” in an age of increased technology and decreased connection. “Reading out loud is probably the least expensive and most effective intervention we can make for the good of our families, and for the wider culture.” .... (more)

I was taught before phonics went out of style. I also had a father who read to me, and there were many, many books available. I didn't always read what was assigned, but I always read. I was very fortunate.

Mary Katharine Ham, "Reading Makes Us Better Citizens," National Review, March, 2026.

Self-esteem

A passing reference in a blog I read almost every day sent me looking for "Psychobabble that shields the seriously selfish," a 1999 essay by Theodore Dalrymple:

When someone says that he lacks self-esteem he says it as if he were denied something that is his of right. Merely by virtue of drawing breath, each person has the right to think well of himself. Are not all men created equal, in some not-quite-specifiable metaphysical sense? And is not man the paragon of animals, the beauty of the world, like unto a god? Should we not all, then, think well of ourselves? ....

Does anyone not know someone who is too full of self-esteem, who is pompous, puffed up, self-important, vainglorious, self-regarding and altogether too pleased with himself? Whose achievements or qualities are minimal, yet who seems walled around by an awareness of his own assumed superiority? And is it not the case that such inflated self-esteem is one of the most unpleasant qualities anyone can have, drawing immediate censure from almost everyone? ....

Many people come to me saying that they need to find themselves, on the assumption that somewhere buried deep within them, like a vein of precious ore in the Witwatersrand, there is a wonderful, exceptional, talented person trying to get out, about whom they will be able to feel good. The doctor is thus a miner in the hard rock of the personality. I sometimes astonish my patients by telling them that it is far more important that they should be able to lose themselves than that they should be able to find themselves. For it is only in losing oneself that one does find oneself. (emphasis added) ....

Anyone who even asks the question of whether he has sufficient self-esteem is, ipso facto, a lost soul. Whatever answer is given, the person is in trouble, in a state of profound error and confusion. It is a sign of our increasing self-obsession, of the narrowing of our emotional, spiritual and intellectual horizons, that a concept such as self-esteem should have assumed such importance and become central to so many kinds of therapy. I recall the words of Lord Bacon (admittedly not a man entirely without ego himself), which are as true now as they were when he wrote them: “It is a poore centre of a Man’s life, Himselfe.”

Theodore Dalrymple, "Psychobabble that shields the seriously selfish," The New Statesman, August 16, 1999.

A ripping good yarn

From a review of Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson:

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) belongs at the head of a select company of writers renowned in their day—Alexandre ­Dumas, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—who are no longer taken seriously, or for that matter read much, by most adults. However, the pleasures of reading adventure stories are not all guilty ones. The very best of such tales not only entertain but also teach—­reminding grown men and women of fundamental truths they took in when young. ....

Treasure Island portrays an adolescent’s initiation into the depths of manly wickedness—and his boldness in fighting against it. The sinister forces that generally flee the daylight penetrate the peaceable life of young Jim Hawkins. A succession of seafaring ruffians, each more rotten than the previous—Billy Bones, Black Dog, Blind Pew—arrive at his father’s inn, and bring with them terror and bloodshed, as they pursue the notorious pirate Captain Flint’s buried treasure. Pelf, loot, plunder: That is what pirates live and die for. But this fascination with riches infects the good men whom Jim knows, and with Flint’s treasure map in their possession a select group of them heads out to sea in quest of a fortune.

They are all innocents, with a lot to learn about the nature of evil. Squire Trelawney, the ringleader, unwittingly hires a crew of pirates who had sailed with Flint, among them Long John Silver, the peg-legged archvillain who has become the favorite buccaneer of popular legend. At first, they strike the Squire as virtuous men; but appearances can be fatefully deceiving, as Jim learns more quickly than his adult companions. Having climbed into a barrel on deck to get one of the few apples remaining there, Jim overhears Silver feverishly tell his fellow cutthroats of his plan to murder the good men—he imagines the most exquisite mutilations for the Squire—and take all the treasure for themselves. As Jim tells the story, “I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the ­extreme of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.”

One lesson after another in maintaining his composure will follow. The pirates and the honest men will go to war, and several will be killed. Perhaps the biggest excitement comes when Jim fights to the death with the malignant Israel Hands. In a tour de force of practical criticism, Damrosch captures perfectly, sentence by sentence, the intricate and unrelenting narrative movement that renders the violent action, right down to the killing blow. ....

And for all that, it is a ripping good yarn, like Stevenson’s other most remarkable works of fiction. Each of these is singular in plot, but all are similar in their fundamental teaching: that righteous men must resist wrongdoers with all the courage they have, especially when the vicious have superior strength.

In Kidnapped (1886), seventeen-­year-old David Balfour, another slow learner, narrowly escapes a murderous pitfall contrived by his malicious, miserly uncle Ebenezer—yet still trusts the old reprobate enough to be suckered aboard a ship manned by evildoers, whom Ebenezer has paid to transport him into indentured servitude in the Carolinas. David, too, will have to fight for his life, and is fortunate to have at his side an expert ­swordsman who will become his fast friend. .... (more)

Algis Valiunas, "Stevenson’s Treasure," First Things, Jan 21, 2026.

Civilized

The mother of a very young son wants to raise him as a "civilized" human being:

Unfortunately, “civilized” has become a dirty word. It’s politically incorrect. To identify something or someone as civilized implies that some people and things are uncivilized, and therefore bad. But if the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that there are bad people and bad cultures. They’ve all either refused to abide by the norms of merit and moral responsibility that uphold our civilization or proven incompatible with them. If I want to raise my son well, I must provide him with moral tools so that he doesn’t become uncivilized, too.

Civilization on the societal level begins in the home. It’s where my son will learn to say “please” and “thank you” and where he’ll first learn the word “no.” At home, we’ll show him unconditional love and teach him the difference between right and wrong. It’s the first place where he’ll learn to respect authority and the rule of law. If my son isn’t raised to recognize authority at home, he won’t recognize it in the public square and will likely subvert it. Civilization decays when the rule of law is disregarded. ....

Raising and sustaining a civilized child means teaching gratitude. Gratitude for the Herculean achievements of those who bequeathed the Western tradition they’ve been blessed to inherit. Gratitude for the profound books they read, debate and live by. Through the words of great men and women, our children inherit ideas. Through ideas, they’ll build upon our civilization.

I also hope to raise my son with a good sense of humor. .... (more)

Sarah Baird, "I’ll Teach My Son to Be Civilized," The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 6, 2026.

"Children tend not to enjoy hectoring"

From "Kids Deserve Beautiful Books":

By now perhaps you’ve heard that America’s children aren’t interested in reading and aren’t capable of digesting books befitting their grade levels. A litany of articles and national report cards testify to the crisis. But the fight for young minds is being lost even earlier than most appreciate and long before a child sets foot in a school.

The first frontier is children’s literature: chapter, picture and even board books. There are thousands of children’s books that train the ear in language and form the moral imagination, narratives that help children place themselves in the larger human story. But many are now hard to find, and most of the latest titles can be fairly described as awful. ....

American families do still read some good books to young children. But it’s typical now in bookstores to find children’s books browbeating kids about why Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a girlboss or how all the animals will soon be extinct because of human rapaciousness. One title I encountered recently at a store was about an ocelot separated from another cat by an evil wall on the southern border.

The nation’s most prestigious honor for children’s literature, the Randolph Caldecott Medal, once went to powerhouse titles like The Little House and Chanticleer and the Fox, the latter a spin on the Canterbury Tales. In 2024, the winner was an “emotional exploration of being big in a world that prizes small.” In 2021, the Caldecott went to a tale about how “water is the first medicine.” ....

The books aren’t compelling. They teach through lectures about self-confidence or managing emotions, instead of rich stories that stir a heart to ponder characters and lessons. Children tend not to enjoy hectoring, and who can blame them? ....

Alas, most public libraries have abandoned their role in providing equitable access to excellent books. My local library features staff book lists for children, and what’s on offer? Books on “divorce and separation”; books on “mindfulness for kids”; “Feelings: Shelf-Help for Littles”; “funny picture books to make you LOL.” There’s also a list dedicated to gender issues and identities for “younger readers,” including a book about a kid who “has always been a boy, even if the world sees him as a girl.” ....

This Christmas, I’m reading aloud to my family perhaps the best story for children ever written, published 75 years ago this fall: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. I figured the falling snow outside was an evocative moment to invite the children to imagine a world where it’s “always winter but never Christmas.”

Wardrobe is a masterpiece precisely because it doesn’t hammer readers with a simple lesson or obsess over the inner emotional monologues of the four protagonist children, even as they encounter a sometimes frightening world. There’s more to absorb in that short story about emotional courage, justice and a healthy sense of identity than you’ll ever find in today’s hackneyed books for children. (more, but likely behind a paywall)

Kate B. Odell, "Kids Deserve Beautiful Books," The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 22, 2025.

Character counts

I liked this review of History Matters, a collection of David McCullough's essays and speeches on the subject.

Many, if not all, of the chapters in this book reinforce the message of the title: History Matters. Along with the ways in which history is important to the body politic, McCullough always emphasizes the personal ways in which we are all enriched by history. For example, in 1995 remarks, he told an audience: “I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.” This book is a cri de coeur for a discipline too often neglected by undergraduates. The rise in historical illiteracy was very concerning to McCullough....

Again and again, we see the importance of character for McCullough. It was not only seemingly one of his criteria for writing a biography, but it is perhaps the chief lesson he hopes we will draw from history. He writes that “character counts in the presidency more than any other single quality. It is more important than how much the president knows of foreign policy or economics, or even about politics.” McCullough once began working on a biography of Picasso, but ceased his labors because Picasso was not an admirable person. In contrast, McCullough was well-known for his admiration of Harry Truman, Abigail Adams, and George Washington, among others. ....

In all his work, David McCullough’s approach to the past demonstrated the possibility of clear-sighted patriotism. Not every American was a hero, Trumbull’s paintings were inaccurate, George Washington’s false teeth included the teeth of other people, Teddy Roosevelt’s childhood asthma attacks were likely caused by anxiety—but you can still respect character when you see it and appreciate courage and believe in values that can transcend times. You do not have to deny that Harry Truman had ties to the Pendergast machine in order to appreciate Truman’s strengths. This clear-sighted patriotism is why McCullough could maintain some optimism about America’s future. The good parts of our past were not built on perfect people. .... (more)

Elizabeth Stice, "Why History Matters," Mere Orthodoxy, Dec. 19, 2025.

Chivalry

Kevin DeYoung on a worthy aspiration:

We need heroes from the past, as well as inspiration for the present. And the knight has proved to be an enduring symbol of valor for almost a thousand years. But if Christian men are going to aspire to be these heroic defenders of Christendom, we ought to know what these knights were supposed to be like. ....

As medieval historian Maurice Keen explains in his book, Chivalry, the knight had three basic duties. The first duty was to defend the faith of Christ against unbelievers (note: not to wield the sword against other Christians). His next duty was to defend his earthly lord. His third responsibility was to protect the weak. In pursuit of these duties, the knight might be sent on a crusade far away, or he might be asked to exercise his responsibilities closer to home.

As important as these obligations were, the manner in which the knight carried them out was as important as the duties themselves. .... The chivalric ideal identified and codified which acts and which attitudes were considered honorable. Chivalry prized bravery, fortitude, and physical prowess—but also humility, gentlemanly behavior, and courtliness toward women. The two sets of virtues were never to be separated. At all times, the knight was to be noble and courteous. ....

What is missing from the present version of manly bravery is the insistence that charging into battle requires the “heavy burden” of virtue—and not just one virtue (fortitude), but all of them (prudence, justice, and temperance). If today’s would-be knights are serious about exercising Christ’s dominion on the earth, they must first be serious about exercising dominion over themselves—over their speech, over their anger, over their petty vindictiveness. It is not enough that we are ready to fight. We must also be courteous and not base, fair and not ruled by our passions, gracious and not a scoundrel. ....

There is nothing noble in fighting for its own sake. The devil knows how to prowl and devour and fight as well as anyone. Every culture celebrates warriors of one kind or another. Often, they are bloodthirsty and cruel. What the best of Christendom called knights to be was a different kind of warrior—humble, honest, fair, dignified in speech and gracious in character. That’s the chivalrous hero we ought to emulate, not the brawler who thinks self-restraint is for sissies and courtesy is for cowards. .... (more)

Kevin DeYoung, "In Search of Chivalry," Clearly Reformed, Oct. 30, 2025.

It isn't just phonics

In "There Are No Silver Bullets for Illiteracy" the author explains what some states are doing right about teaching literacy. A curriculum reform that has to be a part of the solution was recommended by E.D. Hirsch some time ago. Phonics is necessary but not sufficient.

...[C]reating literate children is a years-long process. As phonics advocates rightly point out, children must first understand how to decode words through phonics instruction. But phonics is only the beginning. To progress further, children—especially children from low-income households who aren’t exposed to significant background knowledge at home—need lots and lots of factual knowledge about the world. To get there, it helps to have motivated teachers who appropriately teach phonics in the early grades, and then switch over to building knowledge in the later ones. It helps to motivate students—including through retention policies and curricula that are designed to be interesting. It also helps to have frequent assessments so struggling students can be identified and helped. ....

...[T]eaching general reading comprehension skills is not useful if kids don’t have enough background knowledge to actually understand what they are reading. Even if I know to look for the main idea in a passage, that study tip does me no good if the passage is still inscrutable when I read it. Yet many schools focus on this kind of attempted “skill development,” without a recognition that comprehension, reading, and writing skills follow mastering content, and not the other way around. .... (more)

Ivana Greco, "There Are No Silver Bullets for Illiteracy," The Dispatch, Oct. 16, 2025.

Reading when young (or old)

Once again this summer, The Telegraph offered "The best children’s books for every age group." It's a pretty good list. A few examples:

Four- to five-year-olds

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) by AA Milne

In his 1939 memoir, It’s Too Late Now, AA Milne raged at how the “bear of very little brain” had undermined his reputation as a serious writer. For though Milne wrote seven adult novels and 34 plays, the extraordinary success of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), with line drawings by EH Shepard, eclipsed any of the Englishman’s other literary efforts. They show Milne to be a brilliant observer of human behaviour, to the extent that the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood, be it pompous Owl or melancholic Eeyore, have become part of the cultural lexicon. And just as you’re never too old to read Pooh, you’re never too young: the books will give any inquisitive child an Arcadian first step into plot-driven stories.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) by Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter’s stories contain all manners of horrors, from Squirrel Nutkin’s tail being broken off by Old Brown the owl to Benjamin Bunny’s young family being kidnapped by a hungry badger. The Tale of Peter Rabbit begins with a particularly gruesome image, as Peter’s mother warns him not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden: “Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.” Not always a comforting read, then. But Potter’s exquisite illustrations, with their teasing interplay between fantasy and realism, make for some of the most enchanting children’s stories of all time.

Nine- to eleven-year-olds

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by CS Lewis

CS Lewis’s postwar fantasy has inspired more literary analysis than almost any other work of children’s fiction; but it’s part of the novel’s magic that its subtext can be enjoyed in blissful ignorance. Countless fans have reported that they read it for the first time unaware even of its Christian allegory – let alone the academic theories that link the trees in the Narnian woods, like Kerr’s hungry tiger, to the Gestapo. Lewis understood the unbridled power of a child’s imagination: no child who has followed the adventures of the Pevensie children will look on a wardrobe the same way again.

The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame

The poetic language in Grahame’s story, which is set in a bucolic Edwardian England, might strike the modern child as old-fashioned. But they should persevere: the tale of Mole, Ratty, Badger and their trouble-prone friend Toad is a dazzling combination of enchantment and psychological acuity. As with Winnie-the-Pooh, the characters have acquired a universal quality. We may not be lucky enough to know a Ratty – but we all know a Toad: “I have the gift of conversation. I’ve been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be.”

(more, perhaps only available to subscribers)

Emily Bearn, "The best children’s books for every age group," The Telegraph, July 15, 2025.

Conviction or compliance?

I was a public school teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. Many (most?) of the students in my high school classes had political and social opinions that differed from mine. If I created the kind of classroom atmosphere described below, it was certainly not my intention, and it would have definitely contradicted my teaching philosophy. This article from The Hill discusses what many college students believe they need to do to succeed.

On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe. ....

Late adolescence and early adulthood represent a narrow and non-replicable developmental window. It is during this stage that individuals begin the lifelong work of integrating personal experience with inherited values, forming the foundations of moral reasoning, internal coherence, and emotional resilience.

But when belief is prescriptive, and ideological divergence is treated as social risk, the integrative process stalls. Rather than forging a durable sense of self through trial, error, and reflection, students learn to compartmentalize. Publicly, they conform; privately, they question — often in isolation. This split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments identity but arrests its development.

This dissonance shows up everywhere. Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation. .... (more)

Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman, "Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed," The Hill, Aug. 13, 2025.

"The sage on the stage"

My teaching style was primarily the lecture. There was pressure, especially in the '70s, to avoid lectures in favor of students sitting in a circle and sharing what little they knew. However, it always seemed to me that, having formally studied a subject in college and graduate school, I was qualified to share it, translating it into understandable terms for my students. It was incumbent on me to make the lectures interesting and to respond to questions. But what was the point of requiring teachers to have advanced education if it wasn't intended to be used? Consequently, I liked "Don’t Yank the Sage From His Stage":

.... Relegating the teacher to a secondary (or even tertiary) supporting role as a “guide on the side” implicitly devalues what it is that sets him apart from his students: his education, knowledge, and professional experience. We reduce him to a mere repository of information. This may have initially been a bug in the system, but, in any case, it is now a feature. The transformation of the teacher’s role from “sage” to “guide” and the corollary “flip” of the classroom have been aided by obsessions with “power,” biases against “privilege,” and efforts to dismantle “systemic” and “institutional” structures of “oppression”—all of which are represented by the “sage on the stage.” ....

Contrary to widespread characterizations, the sage on the stage does far more than merely transmit information to a necessarily passive audience. The lecture, writes Amanda Fulford and Áine Mahon, “should … be seen as a special form of human encounter.” And it is a human encounter that allows for the kind of “guidance” that the flipped classroom may or may not actually provide in practice.

This is particularly true when the lecture is delivered live. Students not only are able to think critically about the material that is being presented, but they may also be able to ask questions about it and receive answers in real time. They may even be able to engage in dialogue with the lecturer. ....

A good lecture isn’t the regurgitation of information gleaned from sources that could be provided directly to students to be read on their own. It is the product of the kind of active learning that teachers seek to promote—a synthesis of information, critical analysis, and informed interpretation on a specific subject, carefully prepared within a particular context for a target audience for specific purposes. In this, it serves as a real-world example of “active learning.” In a piece titled “In Defense of Lecturing,” professor Mary Burgan notes that lecturers serve as “models of knowledgeable adults grappling with first principles in order to open their students’ understanding. […] The phenomenon of a grown-up person capable of talking enthusiastically and sequentially can show students how they themselves might someday be able to think things through.” Lectures thus provide students with the opportunity to see that “the passionate display of erudition [is] valuable in itself—regardless of the rewards of approval or popularity.” Those students “rarely … have the chance to observe intellectual mastery and excitement in their daily world. When they find it on a campus, it validates the life—the liveliness—of the mind.” ....

None of this means that direct instruction is always the best approach—that there is no room at all for facilitated “active learning” in an occasionally “flipped” classroom. In practice, almost every sage occasionally leaves the stage to guide from the side. As Peter Stanton argues, “the ideal teacher should be able to act as both a sage on the stage and a guide on the side, and they should carefully evaluate when it’s most valuable to use each approach.”

What I do mean, however, is that the guide on the side is no substitute for a sage on the stage. Students do, in fact, need a sage—for his education, knowledge, experience, and expertise. And if students are to receive the full benefit of these things, the sage needs his stage—even if he may occasionally leave it to guide from the side. (more)

David C. Phillips, "Don’t Yank the Sage From His Stage," Martin Center for Academic Renewal, August 8, 2025.

"Footprints on the sands of time"

In its weekly "Things Worth Remembering" essay, The Free Press publishes "Life Is Real! Life Is Earnest!" quoting from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1838 poem “A Psalm of Life.” From the end of that essay:

“A Psalm of Life” is a call to meaning. A call to action. A call to be good. A call to try to make a difference—for yourself and for others. A reassurance that we matter. A reassurance that although we return to dust, our soul lives on.

That’s why I read it to my sons. That’s the lesson I want to pass along, a footprint I am trying to leave behind for them now, so that they might draw on it in some moment of struggle far in the future. So that they can always remember why we are here:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

One foot in front of the other. One small act after one small action. One little thing that makes a difference, for us and for others. (more)

Ryan Holiday, "Things Worth Remembering: ‘Life Is Real! Life Is Earnest!’," The Free Press, July 13, 2025.

Therapy speak

Via Prufrock, from "Nobody Has A Personality Anymore":

Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.

In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us, until nobody is normal. Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same. ....

Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. .... (more)

Freya India, "Nobody Has A Personality Anymore," June 26, 2025.