Articles of Note: Week of August 3, 2026

Classical Catholic Education as Counter-Formation – Gary Houchens, Schools, Souls, and Civitas

“Education as formation” has become a signature theme of my professional life. Whether I’m exploring ways to better form the scholar-practitioners served by the educational leadership doctoral program I direct, highlighting the ways in which modern, secular education tends to malform students, or helping build a new Catholic classical school that forms students according to traditional principles, every day I’m thinking about how schooling forms human beings in particular ways, for better or worse.

From Wonder to Mastery: John Mays and the Story of Novare Science – Christopher Perrin, Renewing Classical Education

John Mays joins me to tell the story of Novare Science, a seventeen-year curriculum odyssey born from his desire to teach science classically and break the “cram, pass, forget” cycle. We discuss mastery, mathematics, history, scientific epistemology, language, textbook beauty, and the teacher's calling to lead students into wonder at God's creation.

Memoria Press Literature Sequence – Cheryl Lowe, Memoria Press

The purpose of classical education is to form better human beings. One essential way we learn how to be better human beings is by reading literature. At Memoria Press, we have chosen the best of literature and poetry for our students, the traditional favorites and the classics that we believe every child needs to read. There is a shared heritage that every person needs to be familiar with, a heritage that connects us to each other and to past generations. The reading levels and content increase in difficulty and complexity each year in our literature program. Determining these parameters is somewhat subjective and depends on a number of factors: vocabulary, sentence structure, maturity of themes and content, and the amount of content. In the primary years, the characters in each book are similar in age to the students.

Two Cheers for the Great Books – Michael S. Kochin, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

The Great Books is a fine program for lifelong learning. 15,000 people a year participate in discussion groups affiliated with the Great Books Foundation. By contrast, a parallel lifelong learning project—the daily two-pages-a-day study program of the Babylonian Talmud known as Daf Yomi—drew over 90,000 people (almost all of them men) to the official completion celebration of its seven-year cycle at MetLife Stadium, with a further 7,000 at the major event in London and many thousands at others throughout the globe. So while Great Books is not the most successful classical-text-based lifelong learning program, it is hanging in there.

Classical Education And The Art Of Dying Well – John Mark N. Reynolds, Patheos

“Nobody is sure of much,” Nana said, “except dying.” I did not find that cheering and yet Nana was right. We are “mortal men doomed to die.” My Nana had six years of formal education and years of church. When her time came, she was ready to go. That was true of Mom and Dad this last year, they were ready as a human can be to die and they had better have been. Even though we were there, dying is lonely: both could hear us but could not speak. We could help some, but Mom and Dad both passed the test by grace through faith instilled in them over decades. Their souls are now set in motion going ever Godward forever. They are as happy as they can be, more joyful every day.

Which families are using ESAs? Here’s what we know about Texas’ first school vouchers – Jaden Edison and Sneha Dey, The Texas Tribune

More than 85,000 families are participating in Texas’ private school voucher program during its first year, a number that could increase as state officials finalize enrollment data, according to a new state report.

White families make up the largest share of participants so far, as do those considered low-income, the comptroller’s office noted in the report released Monday. The report did not say how many students previously attended private school or received home schooling, although earlier data showed that 57% of families invited to the program fell into that category.

The Education Exchange: Homeschoolers No Longer on the Margins of Education Choice – Paul E. Peterson, Education Next

Most families may not be homeschooling, but every kind of family is.

OPINION: America’s teacher shortage is worse than you think. But there’s a way to fix it – Alan Mather, The Hechinger Report

When I was an assistant principal in Chicago, I would post a job opening for a physics teacher and get 20 applications. A call for an English teacher might yield 150.

That was the late 1990s. By the time I left the district, the same postings were lucky to bring in one or two qualified candidates.

Principals were calling the central office and saying, “Send me whoever you have.”

What happened to all the candidates? That question has never been fully answered in the national conversation about teacher shortages, in part because too much of that conversation has been devoted to arguing over whether a shortage exists at all. It does. And the cost of pretending otherwise falls on students who can least afford it.

Pritzker signs bell-to-bell school phone ban – Sean Reed, The Center Square | Illinois

As Illinois students return to school this fall, school boards and families will begin discussing and implementing a bell-to-bell cell phone ban, stemming from a new law that provides few exceptions for phone use during a school day.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the phone ban legislation Tuesday morning at Elgin High School, which has already implemented a phone ban within its district in the previous year.

Many specifics of how bans will be enforced are left up to local school boards, which have a full school year until they must adopt a policy that fits within the law’s minimum requirements.

The Problem with Transferable Skills – Daisy Christondoulou, American Enterprise Institute

Spend any time working in education—either in K–12 schools or universities—and before long you will come across the concept of “transferable skills.” These are skills such as creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking that ostensibly cut across traditional subject areas and are needed for many different kinds of jobs and tasks.

The New Sobriety About Reading – Robert Pondiscio, The Next 30 Years

During my years at TIME magazine, the newsroom had a rule of thumb: If something happens once, it’s news. Twice is a coincidence. Three times? That’s a trend.

We’re not quite at three, but within the span of 10 days, The Atlantic and The New York Times opinion sections published surprising essays in support of Texas’s much-debated statewide curriculum and mandated reading list. Neither piece embraced Texas politics or dismissed concerns about religion in public schools. But both did something remarkable that would have been hard to imagine even a few months ago: They evaluated Texas’s efforts not on predictable culture-war grounds, but on their educational merits.

The Bible Belongs in the Classroom – Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic

Mr. Traub is a journalist and the author of “The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy.”

This summer the Texas State Board of Education approved a mandatory reading list for public school students that includes fairy tales and nursery rhymes for little children, stories of America’s founders and Aesop’s fables for elementary schoolers, poems by Rudyard Kipling and Langston Hughes for middle schoolers and Shakespeare’s plays and Dante’s “Inferno” for high schoolers — and passages or stories from the Bible for every grade, save kindergarten.

In our highly decentralized educational system, states don’t tell teachers which books to assign — the model Texas will begin using in 2030 makes it an outlier. Yet almost all of the reaction to the list, pro and con, has centered on the Bible. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization that promotes strict separation of church and state, described the list as “a brazen promotion of religious doctrine” that threatens to convert public schools into Sunday schools.

The Most Radical Thing About Texas’ Book List Isn’t the Bible – James Traub, The New York Times

This summer, the Texas State Board of Education approved a new required-reading list for public schools, mandating what the state’s 5.4 million students will read in every grade from kindergarten to 12th. If you were a student in the past 20 years, or raised one, you’ll recognize most of the titles: picture books such as The Cat in the Hat and The Snowy Day, parables such as The Giver and Fahrenheit 451. What made the Texas list controversial is the inclusion not of a new book, but of a very old one: the Bible. Students will be assigned short excerpts and adaptations from the Old and New Testaments, starting with vivid tales (Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath) and building to more complex and morally challenging passages, such as Job’s complaint against God.

Bildung and the Machine – Oliver Hartwich, Quadrant

A sense of dread has settled over schools and universities. A machine can now read in an afternoon what a scholar could not finish in a lifetime. It writes papers, works problem sets and can pass many exams in seconds. The skills a degree certifies can be imitated by anyone with an AI subscription, at little cost. Teachers and academics have begun to ask, half under their breath, whether their work is about to become redundant.

The dread is born of confusion about what schools and universities are for. It takes the purpose of education to be the paper and the exam, the thing to be marked. But the paper was never the point. The point is the students, and what writing the paper made of them.

Should you redshirt your kindergartner? – Alicia Anderson, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Sending most five-year-olds off to school is a relatively new phenomenon. State funding for universal kindergarten picked up in the 1970s, an extension of broader anti-poverty and education initiatives under Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society legislation of the 1960s and concurrent with changing family roles that saw more mothers entering the workforce. But the shift to full-day kindergarten was not immediate, and program design often looked more like daycare than formal schooling. Gen X and elder millennial parents have vague memories of playing kickball and scribbling with crayons from that first year of formal schooling; today’s kindergartners take standardized tests.

The Best Part of My Childhood Was Being Bored – Jaclyn Decherd, Real Clear Education

At 11 years old, I refused a smartphone—not because my parents said no, but because I was afraid I would become addicted.

I couldn’t really explain my hesitation at the time. I simply watched people my age—and often twice or three times my age—reach for their phones whenever they encountered boredom, loneliness, or discomfort. Something about that dependence felt wrong.

AI Tutors Are Praising Instead of Teaching. Here’s Why That’s Hurting Students – Davis Austria, The 74

As a professor, I recently gave a chatbot a weak student thesis, propped up by evidence that did not support the claim, and asked what it thought. It called the argument sharp, the structure clear and the reasoning strong.

My job is to tell a student, kindly, when an argument is not working yet. But the machine had just told them it was. Not because the machine was broken, but because it had been optimized to agree.

We’re Finally Starting to Ask the Right Questions About Ed Tech – Rick Hess, Education Week

In “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal,” Harvard University’s Jal Mehta and I examine the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. In a field full of buzzwords, our goal is simple: Tell the truth, in plain English, about what’s being proposed and what it means for students, teachers, and parents. We may be wrong and we will frequently disagree, but we’ll try to be candid and ensure that you don’t need a Ph.D. in eduspeak to understand us. Today’s topic is the tech backlash and what it means for education.

Against the Pinterest classroom – Daniel Buck, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

We’ve all visited those classrooms. They look like 30-gallon bags full of confetti, crepe paper, and Elmer’s glue exploded in the center. The bulletin boards are a mess of student work and neon posters, arts and crafts projects dangle from the ceiling, and groups of desks are buried in tassels and decorations.

Must a classroom be a confusing and unrelenting assault on the senses?

I admit that such an opening salvo leaves me vulnerable to accusations of wanton curmudgeonliness. Classrooms should certainly be welcoming, engaging places, and in light of rancid debates over curriculum, accountability, the role of the federal government, chronic absenteeism, declining test scores, and whatever complaint is currently raising the hackles of culture warriors left and right, why bemoan a construction-paper-happy classroom?

Why Claude for Teachers Might Be a Student Privacy Trap for Educators – Andrew Rice and Mark Schneider, The 74

Anthropic recently rolled out its Claude for Teachers tool, making a free version of Claude with advanced technical capacities available to any K-12 U.S. educator who applies to the company using a school email address and asserts that CfT will be used for educational purposes. The tool has many features that will make it appealing to teachers. Among the most important is its link to Learning Commons, which provides high-quality instructional materials aligned to academic standards across all 50 states. Claude for Teachers also draws on proven curricula like OpenSciEd and Illustrative Mathematics.

Plagiarism Revisited – Jonathan Bate, Jonathan Bate’s Literary Remains

Academic plagiarism has been much in the news, because of a case in Cambridge England that has evoked comparisons with a case in Cambridge Massachusetts (aka Harvard). The Francesca Gino affair, which involved alleged data manipulation as well as alleged plagiarism, had a certain karma because her research specialism is honesty and unethical behaviour - and no doubt it stirred emotions because she was allegedly on a salary of more than a million dollars a year. The Cambridge affair raises a different set of questions which are bound up with the thorny question of diversity and inclusion, which is not my subject here.

I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I. – Bret Stephens, The New York Times

This column isn’t so much an argument as it is a plea: Don’t use artificial intelligence to help you write. Never let A.I. do your writing for you.

Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.

Do none of these things not because they are unethical. Writing with A.I. is unethical when it’s a deception: when you pass off words, ideas and information as your own when they aren’t. An acknowledgment can largely address the problem. Do none of these things, either, because you might be able to learn to write better than an A.I. can. Pretty soon, if not already, you won’t, just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app.

Reading Homer with Hillsdale – Michael McShane, Informed Choice

There has been much ink spilled about Christopher Nolan’s movie adaptation of The Odyssey. The casting, the portrayal of Odysseus, what was included and what wasn’t. If that has become tiring, fear not, for I am here to speak of the man of twists and turns without talking about that movie at all.

Shamefully, I had made it into my early 40s without ever having read Homer’s epic. Even majoring in English at a university with a strong liberal arts core, and then spending many years in graduate school, I was neither required nor ever took it upon myself to crack it open. That changed this summer.

But I didn’t just read The Odyssey, I read it while participating in Hillsdale College’s new free online course on the book that I happened upon when searching online for a copy of it.