I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is. University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages. Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures. There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them. If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything. Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings: Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them. Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.

One of the hidden benefits of reading old books is that they rescue you from the arrogance of the present.

I regret my degree more than I regret my kid, that's for sure 😂

Opinion: SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him theglobeandmail.com/business…

It's Friday! What are you reading this weekend?

I remember when you could just toss a few kids into the back of an open-bed pickup truck, wave at a cop at the stoplight, and he'd wave back.

"Teaching is not about information. It’s about having an honest intellectual relationship with your students. It requires no method, no tools, and no training. Just the ability to be real. And if you can’t be real, then you have no right to inflict yourself upon innocent children." - Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament

Students do not need AI if they know how to write. How do you teach students to write? You use a centuries-old program, called Progymnasmata, the steps of which have been left to us by Aphtonius, a Greek rhetorician of the fourth century AD. This program follows the principle of mimesis (imitation) before poiesis (creativity). Starting with simple exercises of retelling, restructuring, summarizing, imitating, the exercises described in the Progymnasmata advance slowly as the students learn to manipulate the narrative components in order to create complex argumentations, improve their style, and invent their own stories worth telling. The program emphasizes moral education and eloquence; it gives students a pattern of writing as well as an appreciation of perennial ideas. Students who follow Progymnasmata will write literary analysis essays with ease and virtue, if this👇approach is observed.

We hear a lot about the science of reading but is there a science of writing? There are a lot of bad ideas in this space but one idea that wider reading will, by itself, turn into good writing or that it's "caught not taught" is among the most widely held-beliefs in English teaching, but also very damaging because it excuses us from teaching writing explicitly. The "caught not taught" absorption idea is to writing what whole language was to reading. The reading wars were a fight over whether decoding is caught or taught; the writing version of that fight is the same argument with the productive skill substituted for the receptive one. Another important element is that writing ability is just assumed at secondary level and not taught explicitly. This is a mistake. researchgate.net/publication…

New Jersey school has required every freshman to hike 55 miles on the Appalachian Trail for 53 years straight. At St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, this isn’t optional — it’s a mandatory 5-day rite of passage before becoming a sophomore. Many students have never hiked or camped before. They train together in the spring, then get split into small teams where each kid gets a critical role: navigator, medic, cook, captain, etc. No one knows everything — they must rely on each other. With minimal adult supervision, they hike rain or shine, facing blisters, sore muscles, and real challenges head-on. As one administrator put it: “The only way we can get through this is if we work together.” The result? Teens who return more confident, resilient, and bonded — proving that real growth happens when you step away from screens and into the wilderness. What an incredible tradition! Parents, educators, and anyone raising tough kids — this is gold. Who else believes we need more experiences like this?

What’s a book you wish you could read again for the first time?📚💙

Printed books are more important than ever, especially in light of current events. The web is changeable and heavily controlled. Ebooks can disappear. Artificial Intelligence is only a summary of the information on the web, good or bad. But real books, in your own house—- those are yours to keep. That’s why I created Knowledge Keepers Bookstore. We cannot store up knowledge in a cloud. It needs to be in print. It needs to be everywhere. It needs to be passed down to our descendants. And when you buy them, read them. Know what’s really in our history. Don’t get your history from a web page. Get it from the people who lived it, saw it, and made it. “Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.” (Thomas Jefferson) knowledgekeepersbookstore.co…