Classical Compass Rose

Classical Compass Rose

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The Soft Apocalypse of Your New Best Friend
Your search engine would like to know your favorite color. Your chatbot wonders if you slept well. Next week, perhaps, it will offer to tuck you in.
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Michael S. Rose
5
Should We Look to Shakespeare, or to AI?
Against the seductive promise of effortless education, Shakespeare's example stands as a reminder that there are no shortcuts to wisdom and that the…
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Michael S. Rose
12
The Currency of Contemporary Despair
The greatest novels have always explored suffering, loss, and moral ambiguity. But there's a crucial difference between examining life's difficulties…
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Michael S. Rose
10
Do We Really Want WEF Involved in American K-12 Education?
WEF's "schools of the future” are factories of forgetfulness, erasing the memory of what it means to be human in exchange for digital interfacing with a…
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Michael S. Rose
24

July 2025

Architecture: Where Thought Takes Form
Alberti is steeped in classical philosophy, and for him, architecture—like justice or virtue—has an ideal form, to be sought through the disciplined use…
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Michael S. Rose
Virtue, Not Virtue Signaling
We need to move past the performative displays of moral superiority that proliferate on social media and in corporate boardrooms. Classical schools…
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Michael S. Rose
5
Vitruvius and the Education We Forgot
The ideal of a cultivated generalist resists the modern tendency to collapse instruction into utility, to treat learning as a path to employment rather…
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Michael S. Rose
5
Seven Essential Books for Understanding Poetry Memorization
The child who memorizes poetry inherits not merely specific texts but an entire way of engaging with language, with memory, with cultural inheritance…
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Michael S. Rose
2
Lessons from the Dystopian Imagination
Huxley imagined tyranny through pleasure, Orwell through pain, and Lewis through the corruption of science and language. What emerges from their…
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Michael S. Rose
1

June 2025

Seven Essential Books for Understanding Annotation
Whether marginal notes scrawled in pencil, underlined passages in pen, or digital highlights layered with commentary, annotation elevates reading from…
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Michael S. Rose
3
Beauty Elevates. Beauty Educates. Beauty Endures.
In abandoning beauty, schools do not simply neglect an optional component of education; they amputate an entire mode of knowing.
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Michael S. Rose
8
In Defense of Educational Boredom
The mind that never experiences "boredom" cannot hear its own voice. The consciousness that never encounters emptiness has no space in which to expand.
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Michael S. Rose
8
© 2025 Michael S. Rose
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