The following speech was first delivered by Alexandra York during the “Art and the Moral Imagination” conference at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan and re-printed by Vital Speeches of the Day. Ms. York has graciously allowed it to be reprinted here to support the launching of ROAR’s website.
Read more →The Spirit of the Enlightenment in Education The defining spirit of Restore Our American Republic (ROAR) is the spirit of the Enlightenment, a time of youthful exuberance and curiosity that led to an age characterized by a celebration of the individual. As such, ROAR is opposed to the failed
Read more →Lisa VanDamme founded the VanDamme Academy in 2001 after working several years as a private homeschool teacher for two children. According to Miss VanDamme, the goal of education is the following:
“The proper goal of education is to foster the conceptual development of the child—to instill in him the knowledge and cognitive powers needed for mature life. It involves taking the whole of human knowledge, selecting that which is essential to the child’s conceptual development, presenting it in a way that allows the student to clearly grasp both the material itself and its value to his life, and thereby supplying him with both crucial knowledge and the rational thinking skills that will enable him to acquire real knowledge ever after.
Read more →If you are pursuing a higher education, e.g., college and professional schools after college, at some point you may begin to wonder if it is worth all the long hours of study and work. The purpose of this essay is to give you some specifics on what that education will give you, and hopefully convince you that the effort is worth it from the aspect of professional satisfaction, monetary compensation, and personal growth. If you suspect these items are related, you are absolutely correct.
Read more →Few things frighten students more than the prospect of having to write an essay. Although I am a professional writer, in my college days I did whatever I could think of to to avoid writing essays.
In my judgment, the primary reason that so many of us feel this way is that not enough writing is incorporated into the educational curriculum during the primary grades through high school.
Although the college years for some people can be “the best years of your life,” if you enter it in a blindly naive fashion it could be more like the undergrad who screamed at her exasperated parents during one phone call home: “I can’t wait for the best years of my life to be over!” My goal for this essay is to give you information that will help your college years to be among the “best years of your life” rather than the alternate scenario above.
Read more →The thought of beginning a day of studying can often push a normal person into procrastination mode. Why? Because we see it as something we have to do rather than something we want to do.
The purpose of this essay is to convince you that with a better approach, your time spent studying can be both more enjoyable and more effective. In other words, it may become something you may actually want to do.