May 162013
 

Jacob Glover

Just a nice piece of news to share with everyone. NC Contributor Jacob Glover graduated with a BA in Combined Honours in Contemporary Studies and Classics from the University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, this afternoon. The ceremony took place in the Great Hall of All Saints Cathedral (Anglican) and concluded with the singing of “God Save the Queen” as is surely fitting on all such occasions. It is safe to say that the young man’s father was proud; he had a lump the size of a wheelbarrow in his throat.  Jacob is working on a new piece for NC (though probably not tonight.)

dg

Apr 292013
 

Education and politics both seem to have lost a rudder. I watched my son Jacob go through the University of King’s College Foundation Year Programme in Halifax, a reading year devoted to old fashioned Great Books and a history of Western Culture. It did not make him narrow-minded and racist; it taught him to think and gave him a basis of self-understanding upon which to reach out and understand the larger world while critiquing his own immediate surroundings. If I were a kid getting ready for university, I would be breaking down the doors of that little school.

Here is an interview with Yale Classics Professor Donald Kagan on the university and the culture wars (which we have lost).

dg

Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are “individualized, unfocused and scattered.” On campus, he said, “I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness.” Rare are “faculty with atypical views,” he charged. “Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values.” He counseled schools to adopt “a common core of studies” in the history, literature and philosophy “of our culture.” By “our” he means Western.

via The Weekend Interview with Donald Kagan: ‘Democracy May Have Had Its Day’ – WSJ.com.

Apr 232010
 

Raphael’s School of Athens

The University of King’s College Middle Bay version of the School of Athens. Jacob Glover is Parmenides, holding the book, talking to a young woman named Hypatia, centre left.