Classical Compass Rose

Classical Compass Rose

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Classical Education

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
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
The Unstreamable Truth of the Lecture
What if showing up still matters? The live lecture remains a rare, vital ritual of shared thought. Learning, at its best, is a communal, embodied…
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Michael S. Rose
7
A Modest Proposal for the Advancement of 21st Century Learning
For reducing the antiquated burdens of reading, writing, and critical thinking among youth, and for advancing the noble cause of outsourcing human…
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Michael S. Rose
10
The Subversive Art of Observation
Classical education’s commitment to seeing—seeing reality—is a kind of resistance, not merely to error, but to the machinery that institutionalizes it.
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Michael S. Rose
15
How Classical Education is Transforming American Schools
In its recent report, Classical Schools in America: A Movement of Hope, the Heritage Foundation offers a quiet cartography of the growing alternative…
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Michael S. Rose
1
The Formative Books of Abraham Lincoln
An education that bears striking resemblance to the curricula of American classical schools: narrow in volume, deep in substance, grounded in language…
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Michael S. Rose
7
Seven Essential Books for Understanding Classical Education
Admit it: you're curious about this thing called classical education, but you can't quite put your finger on what it is. Fret no more! I've put together…
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Michael S. Rose
10
The Subversive Art of Active Reading
To read actively is an act of defiance, of self-discipline, of engagement with something larger than oneself. It is to think, to wrestle, to question…
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Michael S. Rose
5
The Great Forgetting
A society that no longer transmits its foundational narratives is a society suffering from a kind of cultural Alzheimer's—still physically present but…
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Michael S. Rose
8
© 2025 Michael S. Rose
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