Sublime

Yet Athens’s decisive role in Western history was far from over, for it was the next century that gave us Plato, Aristotle, and the very foundations of Western philosophy. Socrates’ death sentence was carried out in 399 BCE, and his greatest student and follower, Plato, opened his famed Academy in 387 BCE. There Plato put forward many of the core

Following the 20th-century philosopher Michael Oakeshott, though, we might conclude that arguments for the instrumentally based curricula of today’s commentators are misplaced. For Oakeshott, the subjects of the curriculum—history, mathematics, science, and so on—offer ways of capturing and understanding the world; they are a precious legacy passed

Contemplating one’s place in the universe was seen as one of the most worthwhile things to do and at minimum, more important than the “money-making life,” which Aristotle described as “something quite contrary to nature…for it is merely useful as a means to something else.”⁠

The astute American commentator on education Neil Postman argued compellingly for a curriculum built around what he called ‘the three As’ (as distinct from the three Rs): astronomy, archaeology, and anthropology. Astronomy, favourite of the Greeks, would cultivate in the young a sense of awe, interdependence, and global responsibility. Archaeology

Don’t give too much weight to erudition alone. Look to the example of people whose actions are consistent with their professed principles.

What is ‘the function of human beings’? Aristotle approaches an answer to this question by analogies. What makes a good flute-player? Skill at playing the flute. A good carpenter? One good at making things from wood. Each is ‘good’ because he performs his particular function, his work (ergon), well. To do his work well is the virtue or excellence

For Lee Kuan Yew,26 the aspirational ideal was to become, as Confucius urged more than two thousand years ago, a junzi, which has been variously translated as an “exemplary person,” or “gentleman.” This was someone who is27 “loyal to his father and mother,” “faithful to his wife,” “brings up his children well,” and is a “loyal citizen of his

There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living. DAVID STARR JORDAN