Student Assembly

Today’s Mass Education Pushes Children Away from Virtue into Mere Hygiene

by Anthony Esolen

Have you ever waited in line to tour the gigantic, boxlike “machines for living” built by Le Corbusier? Have you purchased tickets to sleep a night in a fifteen-story apartment complex? Have you surveyed a sprawling paper mill or bottling plant and said, “If only my house looked like one of those”? Neither have I. We are human beings, after all.

Yet this insight, that homes actually presuppose human beings to live in them, with human bodies, and a human nature, has had no effect on our public schools. I assert that the way we build schools, where we place them, what we choose . . .

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Anthony Esolen is a professor at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire, and the author of many books, including Life Under Compulsion (ISI Books), Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius Press, 2019). He has also translated Dante's Divine Comedy (Random House). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

more on education from the online archives

24.5—Sept/Oct 2011

Pupils Delighted

on Wondering or Wandering Through College Education by Anthony Esolen

27.2—March/April 2014

Poetry Above Compulsion

Higher Education Should Advance the Glorious Liberty of the Sons of God by Anthony Esolen

28.5—Sept/Oct 2015

Who's Your Teacher?

on Our Sacred Duty to Teach the Devil to Death by Marcus Johnson

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