Reading · ON Classical Education

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey Belongs to the Western Tradition (Whether He Likes It Or Not): Part One – James Hankins, The Golden Thread

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is still in movie theaters, and has just passed $700 million in box office receipts. It’s estimated that it will top a billion dollars worldwide in the coming months. Though it has now fallen to third place among the summer’s movies, just behind such cultural treasures as the new Spiderman flick and Toy Story 5, it has embarked on a second wave of influence as the school year commences. Teachers of literature everywhere have seized on the movie, thrilled by the prospect of discussing an icon of Western high culture with their students. By the grace of Hollywood, millions of their students now share a common fascination with Homer’s world and enough of a knowledge-base to talk about the Odyssey intelligently.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, Part II: Homer’s World, Great Books, and History – James Hankins, The Golden Thread

To begin with the auteur himself: as far as one can tell, Nolan’s portrayal of Homer’s Greeks isn’t in any obvious way meant as a condemnation of classical Greece or the later Western tradition built upon it. We can’t accuse him of echoing the shallow anti-Western wokerati of recent times who try to discredit our tradition by focusing myopically on its militarism, imperialism and slaveholding practices. In fact, at the end of the film, Nolan points to a brighter future for the West by having the sun set behind ravaged Ithaca and the Greek-dominated Aegean Sea, while the most injured and victimized character in the film, Penelope, and Odysseus, the character who has undergone the most significant moral transformation, sail off together towards the West, where the sun may someday rise on a better civilization.

Passing the Torch: Louis Markos on the Classical Christian Inheritance – Chistopher Perrin, Renewing Classical Education

Louis Markos joins me to explore Athens and Jerusalem, general revelation, ClassicalU, and why Christians can receive the pagan classics with discernment.

What Does It Mean To Be Human, Now? Reflections from the Aspen Socrates Seminar – Ashley Kim, Cosmos Institute

Almost everything we believe about rights, dignity, the correct way to treat others, and the idea of a good life presupposes a stable notion of what constitutes a human being. Until recently, there were certain markers of humanity that seemed relatively secure, whether it was the capacity for reason and reflection, language, or planning. But in the last few years, we’ve seen models that are arguably capable of all of these.

Truth Resurrected: The Many Afterlives and Lessons of the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program – Patrick Callahan, Classical Ed Review

Today few men, excepting Cardinal Newman, can claim as important a place in the conversation around Classical Education and the American Church as Franklyn Nelick, Dennis Quinn, and John Senior. And in many ways, Cardinal Newman’s vision for what he called “integral knowledge,” developed during his time as rector of Catholic University of Ireland (1854-1858), took root in America for the first time in the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program (1970-1979).

The best defense against AI is ancient intelligence – Ian V. Rowe, Washington Examiner

Teaching Children the Fruit of Longsuffering – Toyin Atolagbe, Humanitas Institute

A new generation of parents has arrived, people who love their children more visibly, more anxiously, and more attentively than perhaps any generation before them. They read the books, they watch for the warning signs, and they would lay down almost anything for the good of the child in front of them. Yet many of these same parents struggle to tell the difference between play and scholé, or between protecting a child from cruelty and protecting a child from difficulty. These are not the same acts of love. One forms a soul while the other, however tenderly intended, can quietly deform it.

Why Parents Choose a School – Alli Aldis, Informed Choice

Why do parents choose a particular school for their children? It sounds like a simple question, but the reality is more complicated.

First of all, we’re actually looking at two questions in a trench coat. There are positive reasons parents might like a school, which is a different type of consideration than negative factors that make them think, “No thanks, this school isn’t for me.” Notably, my colleague Mike McShane has done some really great work on these push and pull factors.

The supply side of school choice: Who participates? Who doesn’t? – Mike McShane, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

“If you build it, they will come” makes a great tagline for a mythical baseball movie but a poor strategy for educational improvement. Markets are not magic and are shaped by external factors that encourage or discourage participation.

School choice programs are no exception. How they are structured, how much money they offer, what regulations they place on families and providers, and more will determine if schools choose to participate and the level to which they will choose to participate.

The Literacy Gap Is Following Gen Z to College – Jatika Hudson, The Edu Ledger

Reports from Notre Dame, Pepperdine, Columbia University, and the University of Virginia have shown that Gen Z students are walking evidence of the failure in the education system that leaves them struggling to read and ill prepared to succeed on the college level.

In 2024, Aleysha Ortiz, a top-ranking Hartford Public School student in Connecticut, sued the Hartford Board of Education alleging that staff bullying and harassment led to her inability to learn how to read or write.

Could the Lessons of a 19th-Century Education Advocate Help Solve the Nation’s Educational Woes? Beth Herman, RealClear Education

Linda McMahon is a woman on a mission: to make American education great again.

The Secretary of Education’s commitment to “reverse our national decline with a hard reset,” involves a multi-pronged plan: placing the task of running the nation’s schools back in the hands of the individual states, loosening regulation and oversight, expanding charter schools, reducing the stranglehold of the leftist teachers unions, and restoring faith in test scores and grades (at a time when grades are under assault even at prestigious institutions like the University of Michigan). And perhaps most importantly, she’s determined to empower parents to make educational choices for their own children.

Back to School Is Different This Year – Jeanne Allen, RealClear Education

Every August, America goes back to school. The backpacks are packed, buses roll and parents hope their children get the right teacher.

But back to school is different than it used to be. The question is no longer simply whether the schools are ready. It is: Ready for what?

How Much Do Instructional Reforms Actually Improve Schools? – Rick Hess, Education Week

We’ve been reforming schools about as long as we’ve had them. A lot of the attention focuses on controversial reforms like test-based accountability or merit pay. But much reform consists of more modest efforts to improve instructional practice through coaching, observation, training, and the like. These reforms tend to fly under the radar. In a new book, A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems, my friend and frequent collaborator Jal Mehta partners with a team of researchers, including Radford University’s Max Yurkofsky, to ask whether these reforms help and why they may not. Jal is the Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at Harvard, where he directs the Deeper Learning Institute.

How Schools Should Approach Mental Health – Nat Malkus with Carolyn D. Gorman, AEI: The Report Card Podcast

Many schools today offer mental health programming, but according to Carolyn Gorman, a lot of school mental health programming is not only wasteful and ineffective but also directionally misguided: School mental health programming often targets students who don’t need help, pathologizes ordinary emotions, and fails to adequately help students with the most severe mental health problems.

Students should only use AI for things they already know how to do well – Daniel Willingham, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Most educators agree that there should be some guardrails regarding how students use AI in their independent work. Here, I argue for this guiding principle: Students should only use AI for things that they already know how to do well.

A story is told about Harold Alexander, British field marshal in command of the evacuation at Dunkirk. At the end of the workday he had the habit of taking any correspondence still in his “in” tray and simply putting it in the “out” tray. When his assistant once asked about it, he said, “You’d be surprised how little of it comes back.”

The Right Reading Level—or the Right Reading Challenge? – Louise Baigelman and Timothy Shanahan, Education Next

Last year, Timothy Shanahan published Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives to broad acclaim in education circles (including in this publication). His book’s central argument is that confining students to prescribed reading levels in school has contributed to slow progress—and lately, deterioration—in students’ reading comprehension, as demonstrated in national reading assessments. What students need, Shanahan asserts, is challenging texts paired with dedicated teacher support, which together provide exposure to rigorous language and promote skill development.

Paul Banksley: AI Means It’s Time to Think Bigly – Rick Hess, Rick Hess on Education

I hadn’t spoken to 22nd-Century Skills guru Paul Banksley for a few months. But with AI looming so large in the future of education, I wanted to get the celebrated innovator’s take on where things are headed as the new school year dawns. The former vacuum salesman and founder of Tomorrows Are for Tomorrow had been in Paris to collect another prestigious award and was on his way to Qatar, but he made a few minutes to chat with me from his hotel.

10 Tips for Managing (and Reducing) Your Kid’s Screen Time – Lee Neikirk, New York Times: Wirecutter

Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So naturally, kids find it tantalizing.

Yet parents are bombarded with warnings about the risks that technology poses to their children’s developmental milestones, and parents often have no idea just how much “magic” is safe.

Lessons From the Ledge: Gen Z is risk-averse. Climbing could fix that. Moira Gleason, The Wall Street Journal

An elite sport climber died Aug. 3 while attempting a new route in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Jake Whisenant, 30, joins a long list of climbers who have died or disappeared . Anyone looking at that headline asks why someone in his right mind would dedicate years to advancing in a sport that could kill him tomorrow. As an amateur rock climber, I understand why.

Stephen Greenblatt’s best book: Hamlet in Purgatory – Jonathan Bate, Jonathan Bate’s Literary Remains

I admire the work of Stephen Greenblatt more than that of any of the other “new historicist” critics, principally because he writes so gracefully and accessibly. I was blown away by Renaissance Self-Fashioning when I read it as a graduate student, and I’ve lapped up all his subsequent books. I had some reservations about Will in the World (I might revert to that in a future post), but really liked the recent biography of Christopher Marlowe. But for sustained scholarship and really opening up a key dimension of Shakespeare that had not been fully thought through in previous criticism, the palm goes to Hamlet in Purgatory. His best book? Or does Renaissance Self-Fashioning still take the lead? So maybe second-best … Enough of rankings - my original review follows here. With one key adaptation: at the time, I retained a degree of faith in the authenticity of “John Shakespeare’s spiritual testament,” but more recent scholarship has convinced me that it was not his. Matthew Steggle’s utterly brilliant research has decisively shown that it cannot have been - for reasons of date. Intriguingly, though, it may have belonged to Joan Shakespeare Hart, Shakespeare’s sister. So the sense of family recusancy remains …

Literary Fiction Has Lost the Plot – Devon Halliday, Devon Halliday Substack

A month ago, I wrote a post called “Why You’re Not Writing.” I wrote it in part to figure out why I’m not writing.

Sure, I’ve been writing essays, substack posts, the usual scribbled diary entries—I’ve even tried my hand at a screenplay. But for the last five months, I haven’t been writing fiction.

When I fretted about this to my partner for the nth time, he very gently said: “I haven’t seen you excited about a book in a long time. When you’re not reading anything you like, it’s hard to get excited about writing.”

Articles of Note: Week of August 24, 2026

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