S.M. Hutchens on education: Maieusis, the work of midwives, involves knowledge and opinion about the process and what its ends are. Those who practice it must understand what is normal and desirable, know error or anomaly, and take steps to correct it with as much force as is required to accomplish the right end. The teacher’s task, to be sure, is essentially that of a guide and encourager, but to do this he must know the path to be taken, and equally, what is not the path, and is to be discouraged. His knowledge of his subject is not to be imparted or simply transferred as much as put forward for the advantage of the learner–who is to make of it what he can, and may be examined by the master on that making, the examination, ideally, being for the master’s learning as well as the student’s.

Anthony Esolen on conservatism and so-called homosexual marriage: When a high court overthrows over two millennia of western tradition, all English common law, and the express will of the people, to engage in an unheard of experiment touching upon the most intimate matters of human society — marriage and the family — and when the people supinely put up with it, at best hoping to tweak the decision or overturn it in some vainly hoped-for election, then it is not the case that civic liberty will soon be lost. It already has been lost. Quit looking at the ephemeral! Your forefathers rebelled over a few high-handed taxes without parliamentary representation. They and their descendants for a hundred and fifty years would have tarred and feathered the silly members of that court, denouncing them as fools and tyrants, and putting them back in their place.