Interview with Isaac Morehouse, co-founder of Praxis Institute, about their programs for (in my words) people who want to live in America 3.0. The interview is by Bill Freeza, Competitive Enterprise Institute, on Real Clear Radio. If you like America 3.0 you will think this is a great interview!

blog.discoverpraxis.com/2014/03/04/praxis-interview-on-real-clear-radio

Also posted on one of my own sites: http://www.scoop.it/t/freeorder

Originally posted at The Scholar’s Stage on the 27th of May, 2013.

A selection of the 60 volume Great Books of the Western World. Image source.

A “proper education” changes with its times.

In the days of America’s founding a true education was a classical education. An educated man was not simply expected to be familiar with the great works of Greek and Roman civilization; the study of these works was the foundation of education itself. Thomas Jefferson’s advice to an aspiring nephew captures the attitudes of his era:

It is time for you now to begin to be choice in your reading; to begin to pursue a regular course in it; and not to suffer yourself to be turned to the right or left by reading any thing out of that course. I have long ago digested a plan for you, suited to the circumstances in which you will be placed. This I will detail to you, from time to time, as you advance. For the present, I advise you to begin a course of antient history, reading every thing in the original and not in translations. First read Goldsmith’s history of Greece. This will give you a digested view of that field. Then take up antient history in the detail, reading the following books, in the following order: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophontis Hellenica, Xenophontis Anabasis, Arrian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, Justin. This shall form the first stage of your historical reading, and is all I need mention to you now. The next, will be of Roman history (*). From that, we will come down to modern history. In Greek and Latin poetry, you have read or will read at school, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles. Read also Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakspeare, Ossian, Pope’s and Swift’s works, in order to form your style in your own language. In morality, read Epictetus, Xenophontis Memorabilia, Plato’s Socratic dialogues, Cicero’s philosophies, Antoninus, and Seneca…. 

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Is America’s entire education infrastructure as obsolete as the “buggy whip?” Is it possible that a short education story in Fortune Magazine and on CNN’s Money site will shake the foundations of America’s overpriced and underperforming education system? One can only hope.

A recent CNN/Fortune Magazine story entitled “Bill Gates’ favorite teacher” told an amazing story of how one young man is revolutionizing the delivery of knowledge over the internet. The site and method is so successful that Bill Gates and venture capitalist John Doerr have snapped to attention at the growing phenomenon of the Khan Academy, an on-line school providing sequenced curricula on a wide range of content – all for free.

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