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The Educational Common Sense of E.D. Hirsch

The most recent edition of City Journal as an extensive article on educational reformer, E. D. Hirsch. This gentleman's prescriptions have been adopted over a number of years by the education system in the state of Massachusetts, resulting in a salutary rise in educational standards throughout that state.

We have posted several times on how educational theorists and government education systems have become deeply influenced by post-modern philosophical theory, coupled with a relentless drive to subvert and pervert God's established order in creation. Demand rights theories have been applied to children, resulting in a consensus amongst avant-guard educational theorists and bureaucrats to the effect that children are mini-adults, and must be treated as adults from the time they take their first breath (they are entitledto it, don't you know).

The Scriptures, however, reveal that God has created the world with hierarchical structures of superiors and inferiors.

The Fifth Commandment makes clear that children are inferiors, in the sense of being commanded to obey and honour their parents. Modern post-Enlightenment man believes he knows better, insisting that children are the sociological and legal equal of adults and are to be treated as such. This has meant an excessive emphasis has been placed on the child learning and discovering for himself, rather than being taught by a superior. As a consequence, government education systems have increasingly tended towards contentless education. The upshot: more and more illiterate graduates coming out of government schools.

E. D. Hirsch is not, to our knowledge, a Christian. He is just a common-sense academic who has managed to avoid or evade being swept up with the avant-guard establishment. Hirsch's specialist academic field was literature. Eventually he ended up as Chairman of the English Department at the University of Virginia.

Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, “changed my life.” He was “feeling guilty” about the department’s inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA’s [University of Virginia] admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students.

Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”

In other words, Hirsch realised that the dominant cause of poor English skills was a lack of background knowledge in related humanities. This led him to create a knowledge based curriculum for primary and intermediate schools, called the Core Knowledge Curriculum.

For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects.

Hirsch was quickly reviled by the educational establishment. His book Cultural Literacy

came under fierce attack by education progressives, partly for its theory of reading comprehension but even more for its supposedly elitist presumption that a white male college professor should decide what American children learn. Critics derided Hirsch’s lists of names, events, and dates as arbitrary, even racist.

The idea that there might be an authoritative corpus of knowledge which had to be transmitted to children was an anathema to the avant-guard. By the mid 1980's, the avant-guard had become the educational establishment. Their triumph was virtually complete.

Most public schools, for instance, taught reading through the “whole language” method, which encourages children to guess the meaning of words through context clues rather than to master the English phonetic code. In many schools, a teacher could no longer line up children’s desks in rows facing him; indeed, he found himself banished entirely from the front of the classroom, becoming a “guide on the side” instead of a “sage on the stage.” In my children’s elementary school, students in the early grades had no desks at all but instead sat in circles on a rug, hoping to re-create the “natural” environment that education progressives believed would facilitate learning. In the 1970s and 1980s, progressive education also absorbed the trendy new doctrines of multiculturalism, postmodernism (with its dogma that objective facts don’t exist), and social-justice teaching.

Hirsch began systematically to skewer these stupid ideas (which still dominate the New Zealand government education system to this day).

More powerfully than any previous critic, Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be “critical thinkers” and teach them to “learn how to learn,” defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students—the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.

In 1993 the State of Massachusetts quixotically decided that it would follow Hirsch's advice and set knowledge based standards in its curricula for each school year. The result? Rapidly rising educational achievements by students in the Massachusetts school system.

In the new millennium, Massachusetts students have surged upward on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—“the nation’s report card,” as education scholars call it. On the 2005 NAEP tests, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and fourth- and eighth-grade math. It then repeated the feat in 2007. No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year—let alone for two consecutive test cycles. On another reliable test, the Trends in International Math and Science Studies, the state’s fourth-graders last year ranked second globally in science and third in math, while the eighth-graders tied for first in science and placed sixth in math. (States can volunteer, as Massachusetts did, to have their students compared with national averages.) The United States as a whole finished tenth.

It is a salutary achievement. But not unexpected. Strange things happen when you cast of the shackles of a spurious ideology and deal with the world as God has created and established it. Part of that establishment is accepting the superiority of adults (and their delegates, the teachers) over children and their consequent responsibility to teach and impart truth and knowledge to the next generation.

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"Government Education" has Become an Oxymoron

We believe that government education in New Zealand will continue to run down and standards will continue to slip, unless radical changes can be made. It is difficult to see those changes taking place. For the government system has been captured by teachers, teaching unions, and educational bureaucrats who do not believe in the objectivity of truth--which is to say they do not believe in a body of authoritative truth which is to be preserved and passed down from one generation to the next.

There is no authorised body of knowledge to be transmitted to the next generation. Education, amongst the experts, has morphed into a trivial exercise of facilitation. Any information the child or student might "discover" as a result of being "facilitated" is implicitly valid. As Christian educators we know this to be false. We know that certain truth exists because God has created the world, and governs all of it according to His will and power. Therefore, we, who have been created in God's image, can learn and discover truth about this wonderful world, its past, its present and its future. We can unlock many of the created world's secrets using the tools of learning God has given us. We can pass on this information and truth to our children, so they too can function well in the wonderful world God has created.

Now we do not wish to demean all teachers in the government education system. We believe, however, that a great deal of those at the chalkface, dedicated though they may be, lack the philosophical sophistication to understand why the government education system continues to undercut, undermine, and ultimately work against their endeavours. They don't understand why the government education system is constantly and ceaseless and restlessly changing. They just know that the system is not working and that there is no one silver bullet to put it right.

Sociologist Frank Furedi wrote recently criticising contentless education as it is now pervasively practised in government education systems. He also explains why it is so destructive to the government education system itself.

Let’s give children the ‘store of human knowledge’

In flattering kids as ‘digital natives’ for whom the past is irrelevant, we degrade a vital adult mission: transmitting knowledge.

Frank Furedi

In virtually every Western society, education is in trouble. Unfortunately, however, policymakers tend to obsess only about the symptoms of the problem – unsatisfactory standards in core subjects, growth of a cohort of poorly schooled underachievers or erosion of classroom discipline – and not the cause.

Yet the main reason education often is not educating is because it finds it difficult to give meaning to human experience. Time and again, curriculum specialists inform us that because we live in a world of rapid change, the conventions and practices of the past have become outmoded, outdated or irrelevant. Present educational fads are based on the premise that because we live in a new, digitally driven society, the intellectual legacy of the past and the experience of grown-ups have little significance for the schooling of children.

The implicit assumption that adults have little to teach children is rarely made explicit. But there is a growing tendency to flatter children through suggesting that their values are more enlightened than those of their elders because they are more tuned in to the present. So children are often represented as digital natives who are way ahead of their text-bound and backward-looking parents.

Although education is celebrated as one of the most important institutions of society, there is a casual disrespect for the content of what children are taught. Curriculum engineers often display indifference, if not contempt, for abstract thought and the knowledge developed in the past. Both are criticised for being irrelevant or outdated; only new information that can be applied and acted on is seen as suitable for the training – and it is training and not teaching – of digital natives.

In policy deliberations about education, the acquisition of subject-based knowledge is often dismissed as old-fashioned. Typically, an emphasis on the intellectual content of classroom subjects is labelled an outdated form of scholasticism that has little significance in our era. Policymakers often represent change as an omnipotent force that renders prevailing forms of knowledge and schooling redundant. In such circumstances, education must transform itself to keep up with the times. From this perspective, educational policies can be justified only if they can adapt to change.

Since they are likely to be overtaken by events, classroom innovations by definition have a short-term and provisional status. The instability that afflicts the education system is turned into the normal state of an institution that needs to be responsive to the uncertain flow of events. Although fads come and go, the constant feature of today’s throwaway pedagogy is a deep-seated hostility to teaching academic subjects to young people, especially to those who come from disadvantaged socioeconomic groups. So-called modernisers regard the subject-based curriculum as far too rigid for a school system that must adapt to a constantly changing world. The dramatisation of change in Anglo-American education-speak renders the past irrelevant. If indeed we continually move from one new age to another, then the practices of the past have little relevance for today.

Sadly, the ceaseless repetition of the idea that the past is irrelevant desensitises people from understanding the influence of the legacy of human development on their lives. The constant talk of ceaseless change tends to naturalise it and turn it into an omnipotent autonomous force that subjects human beings to its will. This is a force that annihilates the past and demands that people learn to adapt and readapt to new experiences. From this standpoint, humans do not so much determine their future as adapt to forces beyond their control.

In the worldview of the educational establishment change has acquired a sacred character that determines what is taught. It creates new requirements and introduces new ideas about learning. And it encourages the mass production of a disposable pedagogy. Educationalists adopt the rhetoric of ‘breaks’ and ‘ruptures’ and maintain that nothing is as it was and that the present has been decoupled from the past. Their outlook is shaped by an imagination that is so overwhelmed by the displacement of the old by the new that it often overlooks historical experience that may continue to be relevant.

The discussion of the relationship between education and change is frequently overwhelmed by the fad of the moment and with the relatively superficial symptoms of new developments. It is often distracted from acknowledging the fact the fundamental educational needs of students do not alter every time a new technology influences people’s lives. And certainly the questions raised by Greek philosophy, Renaissance poetry, Enlightenment science or the novels of George Eliot continue to be relevant for students in our time and not just to the period that preceded the digital age.

Often change and social transformation are represented as if they are unique to our time. Innovation guru Bill Law makes this pronouncement: ‘We may not know precisely what shape the future will take but we do know that the futures of our current students will not much resemble those of our past ones.’ But when did we last think the future of our children would resemble our own? Not in 1969, or in 1939 or even 1909.

The idea that we live in a qualitatively different world serves as a premise for the claim that the knowledge and insights of the past have only minor historical significance. In education it is claimed that old ways of teaching are outdated precisely because they are old. Knowledge itself is called into question because in a world of constant flux it must be continually overtaken by events. Policy has become so focused on keeping up with change that it has become distracted from the task of giving meaning to education.

The fetishisation of change is symptomatic of a mood of intellectual malaise, where notions of truth, knowledge and meaning have acquired a provisional character. Perversely, the transformation of change into a metaphysical force haunting humanity actually desensitises society from distinguishing between a passing novelty and qualitative change. That is why lessons learned through the experience of the past are so important for helping society face the future. When change is objectified, it turns into spectacle that distracts society from valuing the truths and insights it has acquired throughout the best moments of human history. Yet these are truths that have emerged through attempts to find answers to the deepest and most durable questions facing us, and the more the world changes the more we need to draw on our cultural and intellectual inheritance.

If the legacy of past achievements has ceased to have relevance for the schooling of young people, what can education mean? Thinkers from across the left-right divide have always realised that education represents a transaction between the generations. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist thinker, wrote ‘in reality each generation educates the new generation’. Writing from a conservative perspective, English philosopher Michael Oakeshott concluded ‘education in its most general significance may be recognised as a specific transaction which may go on between the generations of human beings in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world they inhabit’. Liberal political philosopher Hannah Arendt said education provided an opportunity for society to preserve and to renew its intellectual inheritance through an intergenerational conversation.

One of the key tasks of education is to teach children about the world as it is. Although society is subject to the forces of change, education needs to acquaint young people with the legacy of its past. The term ‘learning from the past’ is often used as a platitude. Yet it is impossible to engage with the future unless people do draw on the centuries of human experience. Individuals gain an understanding of themselves through familiarity with the unfolding of the human world.

The transition from one generation to another requires education to transmit an understanding of the lessons learned by humanity through the ages. Consequently, the main mission of education is to preserve the past so young people have the cultural and intellectual resources to deal with the challenges they face. This understanding of education as renewal stands in direct contrast to the present predilection to focus the curriculum on the future.

In Anglo-American societies, curriculum-planning is devoted to cultivating an ethos of flexibility towards the future. Of course, the capacity to adapt is a valuable asset. But the exercise of this capacity requires a grounding in an understanding of the world in which we live. The question of the balance that education should strike between orienting towards the past and towards a changing world should be a source of debate. However, today, when policymakers tend to be so fixated on the present that they attempt to distance education from the past, it is essential to reaffirm the importance of a traditional humanist education.

The impulse to free education from the past is influenced by a prejudice that regards ideas that are not of the moment as old-fashioned and irrelevant. Yet the project of preserving the past through education does not mean an uncritical acceptance of the world as it; it means the assumption of adult responsibility for the world into which the young are integrated. The aim of this act is to acquaint the young with the world as it is so that they have the intellectual resources necessary for renewing it. Through education, all the important old questions are re-raised with the young, leading to a dialogue that moves humanity’s conversation forward.

Education needs to conserve the past. As Arendt argued, conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence of education. Her objective was not to conserve for the sake of nostalgia, but because she recognised that the conservation of the old provided the foundation for renewal and innovation. The characterisation of conservation as the essence of education can be easily misunderstood as a call inspired by a backward or reactionary political agenda. However, the argument for conservation is based on the understanding that, in a generational transaction, adults must assume responsibility for the world as it is and pass on its cultural and intellectual legacy to young people.

An attitude of conservation is called for specifically in the context of intergenerational transmission of this legacy. Until recently, leading thinkers from across the ideological divide understood the significance of transmitting the knowledge of the past to young people. Conservative thinker Matthew Arnold’s formulation of passing on ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ is virtually identical to Lenin’s insistence that education needs to transmit the ‘store of human knowledge’.

A liberal humanist education is underpinned by the assumption that children are rightful heirs to the legacy of the past. It takes responsibility for ensuring this inheritance is handed over to the young. It is because education gives meaning to human experience that it needs to be valued in its own right. One of the key characteristics of education is its lack of interest in an ulterior purpose. That does not mean it is uninterested in developments affecting children and society; it means that it regards the transmission of cultural and intellectual achievements of humanity to children as its defining mission.

Once society is able to affirm an education system that values itself and the acquisition of knowledge, policymakers and the public can begin to envisage the steps required to deal with the practical challenges facing the classroom.

Frank Furedi’s latest book, Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating, is published by Continuum Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) This article was first published in the Australian and is an abridged version of his opening lecture at the Battle of Ideas conference, which took place at the Royal College of Art in London on 31 October/1 November.

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Handwriting Encourages Patient Thinking

Umberto Eco is a prominent philosopher and historian of ideas in Italy. He is well known in English speaking countries for his books such as The Name of the Rose (a historical detective story, set in a remote monastery in Italy. It was later made into a movie, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater).

Recently, two Italian journalists wrote a three-page newspaper article (in print, alas) about the decline of handwriting. By now it's well-known: most kids – what with computers (when they use them) and text messages – can no longer write by hand, except in laboured capital letters. . . .

The tragedy began long before the computer and the cellphone.

My parents' handwriting was slightly slanted because they held the sheet at an angle, and their letters were, at least by today's standards, minor works of art. At the time, some – probably those with poor hand- writing – said that fine writing was the art of fools. It's obvious that fine handwriting does not necessarily mean fine intelligence. But it was pleasing to read notes or documents written as they should be.


My generation was schooled in good handwriting, and we spent the first months of elementary school learning to make the strokes of letters. The exercise was later held to be obtuse and repressive but it taught us to keep our wrists steady as we used our pens to form letters rounded and plump on one side and finely drawn on the other. Well, not always – because the inkwells, with which we soiled our desks, notebooks, fingers and clothing, would often produce a foul sludge that stuck to the pen and took 10 minutes of mucky contortions to clean.

The crisis began with the advent of the ballpoint pen. Early ballpoints were also very messy and if, immediately after writing, you ran your finger over the last few words, a smudge inevitably appeared. And people no longer felt much interest in writing well, since handwriting, when produced with a ballpoint, even a clean one, no longer had soul, style or personality.

Why should we regret the passing of good handwriting? The capacity to write well and quickly on a keyboard encourages rapid thought, and often (not always) the spell-checker will underline a misspelling.

Although the cellphone has taught the younger generation to write "Where R U?" instead of "Where are you?", let us not forget that our forefathers would have been shocked to see that we write "show" instead of "shew" or "enough" instead of "enow". Medieval theologians wrote "respondeo dicendum quod", which would have made Cicero recoil in horror.

The art of handwriting teaches us to control our hands and encourages hand-eye coordination.

The three-page article pointed out that writing by hand obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it does make one slow down and think. Many writers, though accustomed to writing on the computer, would sometimes prefer even to impress letters on a clay tablet, just so they could think with greater calm.

It's true that kids will write more and more on computers and cellphones. Nonetheless, humanity has learned to rediscover as sports and aesthetic pleasures many things that civilisation had eliminated as unnecessary.

People no longer travel on horseback but some go to a riding school; motor yachts exist but many people are as devoted to true sailing as the Phoenicians of 3,000 years ago; there are tunnels and railroads but many still enjoy walking or climbing Alpine passes; people collect stamps even in the age of email; and armies go to war with Kalashnikovs but we also hold peaceful fencing tournaments.

It would be a good thing if parents sent kids off to handwriting schools so they could take part in competitions and tournaments – not only to acquire grounding in what is beautiful, but also for psychomotor wellbeing. Such schools already exist; just search for "calligraphy school" on the internet. And perhaps for those with a steady hand but without a steady job, teaching this art could become a good business.

• Umberto Eco's latest book is On Ugliness. He is also author of the international bestsellers Baudolino, The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, among others.

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The Mermaids Have Stopped Singing

The latest edition of The American Scholar contains an article by William M Chace on how English Departments have declined significantly in US universities and colleges.

While there are many causes, he identifies the main reason straight off:

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

He goes on to describe how studying English used to be in its halcyon days, when he was in college:

What was the appeal of English during those now long-ago days? For me, English as a way of understanding the world began at Haverford College, where I was an undergraduate in the late 1950s. The place was small, the classrooms plain, the students all intimidated boys, and the curriculum both straightforward and challenging. What we read forced us to think about the words on the page, their meaning, their ethical and psychological implications, and what we could contrive (in 500-word essays each week) to write about them. With the books in front of us, we were taught the skills of interpretation. Our tasks were difficult, the books (Emerson’s essays, David Copperfield, Shaw’s Major Barbara, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and a dozen other works) were masterly, and our teacher possessed an authority it would have been “bootless” (his word) to question.

Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.

Chace goes on to point the finger of fundamental blame at the "academy" of professional English teachers itself. It has propagated a post-modern fragmentation of its discipline which has left is rootless and without mooring. He cites Harvard as a leading example:

Consider the English department at Harvard University. It has now agreed to remove its survey of English literature for undergraduates, replacing it and much else with four new “affinity groups”—“Arrivals,” “Poets,” “Diffusions,” and “Shakespeares.” The first would examine outside influences on English literature; the second would look at whatever poets the given instructor would select; the third would study various writings (again, picked by the given instructor) resulting from the spread of English around the globe; and the final grouping would direct attention to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Daniel Donoghue, the department’s director of undergraduate studies, told The Harvard Crimson last December that “our approach was to start with a completely clean slate.” And Harvard’s well-known Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt also told the Crimson that the substance of the old survey will “trickle down to students through the professors themselves who, after all, specialize in each of these areas of English literature.” But under the proposal, there would be no one book, or family of books, that every English major at Harvard would have read by the time he or she graduates. The direction to which Harvard would lead its students in this “clean slate” or “trickle down” experiment is to suspend literary history, thrusting into the hands of undergraduates the job of cobbling together intellectual coherence for themselves. Greenblatt puts it this way: students should craft their own literary “journeys.” The professors might have little idea of where those journeys might lead, or how their paths might become errant. There will be no common destination.

As Harvard goes, so often go the nation’s other colleges and universities. Those who once strove to give order to the curriculum will have learned, from Harvard, that terms like core knowledge and foundational experience only trigger acrimony, turf protection, and faculty mutinies. No one has the stomach anymore to refight the Western culture wars. Let the students find their own way to knowledge.

As the US has moved progressively to be dominated by an anti-Christian culture, the unity and coherence of knowledge, particularly historical knowledge has inevitably started decomposing. As it dismembers, ignorance rises. People, even professional educators, become imprisoned to the whim and fancy of the moment. Rootless and ignorant of their heritage, they become swept about by every changing wind of fashion and opinion. Because they no longer know where they stand, they fall for anything.

Chace, however, places more emphasis upon the deleterious effect of commercial agendas, rather than the culture wars themselves. In the end, students want to get jobs and earn and income. English (and the liberal arts generally) do not appear to offer a ready career path. A vicious circle develops: colleges get less students in such faculties and courses, so they fund them less. Teachers find it harder to get tenure because they do not attract funding and research grants (as do the hard and soft sciences). Teaching quality declines, which in turn leads to another downward cycle. He puts forward several suggestions to help arrest the declension. One of these involves focusing upon mastery of the English language (and therefore cognition) itself:

They can also convert what many of them now consider a liability and a second-rate activity into a sizable asset. They can teach their students to write well, to use rhetoric. They should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression. Those students will thus carry with them, into employment interviews or into further educational training, a proficiency everywhere respected but too often lacking among college graduates.

But in the end, the author remains dispirited. We believe that everything which he described is paralleled in the NZ state education system. There is nothing strange or foreign here. But the study of the humanities, the classical liberal arts, is essentially a phenomenon of the Christian faith: when that faith goes, so goes the central importance of english, history, philosophy, art history and so forth to the culture and to society. It is only the Christian faith which has a fountain of belief in the brightness of the future and of inevitable progress because the future of this world has become inextricably bound to the coming of the Kingdom of Christ into human history. World history has now become redemptive history, and the Redeemer is the King of all kings, and everything is being and will be placed under His feet.

As a culture becomes progressively Christianised, once again the study of the past become important and deeply pregnant with meaning and significance. For in studying the past, we are studying Christ's redemptive work. We discover our place in that divine work in the brief time we have upon the earth--and therefore what we must do now. It was the men of Issachar of old who understood the times, and therefore knew what Israel had to do in their day. The Christian faith makes the humanities central to all learning and human action, for the humanities enable us to discover where we have come from, helping us to discover what we, then, must do in our day and generation.

Cross posted in Contra Celsum

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