Category: Article

Poetry is both useful and useless. To put it in Horace’s Latin, poetry is both dulce et utile. To put in Boccaccio’s Italian, by reading good literature we may derive both diletto and utile consiglio. To put it in my English, poetry is both good in itself and useful for a life of virtue. As such, poetry is quintessentially human, for as Chesterton once remarked, one of the first practical needs of man is for something beyond what is merely practical. Perhaps the best way to capture the double nature of poetry in a single word is to say that reading—and…

Ironically, I don’t believe my love for the art of writing started with books. The very first poem I remember reading was Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in sixth grade.  What clicked for me, at least at first, was how that poem in my elementary school anthology was printed over a watercolor of a snow-filled forest. Growing up in New England, I was quite familiar with such scenes. The luminous blue glow of snow by starlight caught my imagination, opened wide the door of Frost’s poem, and…

Trees. We generally drive past them and are sometimes glad when they shade the setting sun from coming straight into our eyes. We may love the leaves when they’re on their trees and shun them as they litter our lawns. The fall, however, provides an opportunity each year for us to examine them more closely. To see the tulip poplar leaf up close rather than 60 feet above us on its branch, to watch them reveal their true colors as the days shorten, the nights cool, and the chlorophyll cover…

The Promise It is not uncommon today to read about the positive aspects of incorporating the use of computers and the Internet in education.  Several examples come to mind: the push to bring classrooms online, software designed to teach, and the general trend towards providing each student with a computer with Internet access.  Although it is probably apocryphal, the most moving anecdote I heard involves an Internet-ready computer someone set up in a slum in India that illiterate children used to not only learn how to read but to actually…

Whether in the lower, middle, or upper school, we all associate the cooler, shorter days with the return of many good things. Fall feels scholastic as the leaves begin to litter the campus and the boys toss footballs on the field. In the classroom, we return to memorizing poetry for the Bard Competition at the Festival Days. We memorize poetry for all kinds of great reasons, which we’ve defended in the past. This article seeks rather to celebrate and share the great poems of Fall that we’ve committed to memory…

What should society do about economic inequality? Does a larger empire make a greater leader? What is the meaning of suffering? What societal trends weaken a civilization? How can we tell right from wrong? The above questions are not the typical questions heard in a history class! What ever happened to “How many Confederate troops fought at Shiloh?” or “Which battle turned the tide and led to Napoleon’s eventual defeat?” Tom Cox, Chris Breslin, and I—the faculty who teach the 8th-grade Core Humanities Sequence—spent the 2016-17 school year compiling an…

  A boy sits, head canting to the right, his mud-touched shoulder pressed against the wooden moulding that caps the pew end. The light from the altar partly reveals a face at rest from the day’s furious activity. He has striven, and acted, and now can only be in the presence of another. The student’s hands curl absently on an unopened chapbook, but his eyes never lose their golden mark. It calls to mind the story of the peasant at adoration. “What do you say to Him?” asked the French…

The classical education movement has grown tremendously in recent years. Throughout the United States and abroad, hundreds of small classical academies have emerged, some of which are growing into well-established schools. There are professional associations that support these classical schools and even publishing companies that provide curriculum materials. The movement encompasses homeschools, private schools, religious schools, and even some public charter schools. Many people have wondered how The Heights fits into the classical education movement. Is The Heights a classical school? If not, in what ways does a Heights education…

Quiz Time? The Juniors in Moral Theology class glance furtively at each other as Mr. Gleason passes out what appears to be a quiz. The unspoken question is answered, “Gentlemen, this is not for a grade. I simply want you to write next to each statement whether it is a fact or an opinion. We will be discussing this in class.” A few of the boys visibly relax. Fifteen minutes later the class begins what will become a lengthy and heated discussion, spanning multiple class periods, on matters foundational not only…

Each fall, our students in The History of Western Thought find themselves reading Plato’s Phaedo, an account of the last day of Socrates, and the work in which he treats of the immortality of the human soul.  This is, many times, the boys’ first foray into a full Platonic dialogue.  Why do we begin the year there, and what do we hope a student will gain from reading this seminal text? To begin, Plato provides for . . . a good beginning.  Serious thought, on the level of our capstone…