The problem is broader than a single generation. Most podcasts I find unlistenable simply because whatever language the hosts are speaking is not English. It’s something else entirely and barely coherent. My complaints are not traceable to some kind of grammatical snobbery. There is much more at stake here: the very capacity of humanity to communicate.
September 23, 2026
I’ve Gone Back to Fourth Grade
The Epoch Times • Jeffrey A. Tucker
What happens when a fourth-grade reader expects children not only to read well, but to speak clearly, persevere through difficulty, recognize right from wrong, and reflect on what makes a life worth living? A return to the once-ubiquitous McGuffey Readers offers a striking glimpse of an education that treated children seriously—and formed character and judgment alongside literacy.
The Epoch Times
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Classical Christian education in Africa is not a cultural import or a luxury reserved for the materially secure. It is a humane education that equips students to think, speak, serve, and flourish within their own communities.
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Coby Dollof was a ninth-grade student trying to avoid the reading when a classical school teacher assigned him Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. There was no shortcut, no SparkNotes page, no easy way around the book. So he opened it and something opened in him. What began with Chesterton became a doorway into wonder, beauty, humility, and the great questions of life. Years later, standing before Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica, Coby found himself moved by something larger than he could explain. He was being drawn into a story bigger than his own. Now a writer and teacher at Pepperdine University, Coby helps students ask the questions that once found him: What is wisdom? What is virtue? Why do truth, goodness, and beauty matter? What is vocation? And what kind of life is worth living? This is a story about classical education as awakening. The kind of awakening that forms a person and helps them become fully alive.
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In an age when artificial intelligence can write for us, why should children still learn to write? Drawing on Pixar’s Wall-E , this article warns that technological convenience can make the mind flabby just as surely as comfort can weaken the body. Writing, rightly taught, is more than a school assignment: it is thinking, therapy, and protection against manipulation. Classical education insists on this difficult but liberating work because children who learn to write well learn to think clearly, live freely, and bring order and beauty into the world.