Sublime

Enter the Swiss political philosopher and polymath Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who shocked the world with Émile: or On Education ([1762] 1993). Émile is the eponymous pupil-hero of Rousseau’s treatise on child-rearing and education; his book contains passages such as this: Instead of keeping [Émile] mewed up in a stuffy room, take him out into a meadow

“kind” learning environments.

If character is not taught, how can it possibly be learned? The affluent world in which so many young citizens exist today doesn’t easily create the ability to build character. Often character requires failure; it requires adversity; it requires contemplation; it requires determination and steadfastness; it requires finding one’s own space as an in

Mindfulness of others at the societal level, Sachs says, means paying attention to the suffering of the poor and to the social safety net, which is badly fraying in the United States and many other advanced economies. He argues that while now the poor are helped just enough to barely survive, that simply creates intergenerational poverty. What’s ne

Great teachers set high standards for all their students, not just the ones who are already achieving.

A similar study was conducted at Italy’s Bocconi University, on twelve hundred first-year students who were randomized into introductory course sections in management, economics, or law, and then the courses that followed them in a prescribed sequence over four years. It showed precisely the same pattern. Teachers who guided students to overachieve