MartinCothran

It is more beneficial for children to read the classics aimed at their season of life than to rush them into reading Homer or Plato. Do not rush children into the "great books."

Right they are arts in respect to their role as being teachable and formative to a man. Rational disciplines is a good way to consider them. But people need to also understand the four quantitative arts are indeed sciences. Importantly so because it is through what makes them sciences that the intellect is led to higher philosophy and theology.

The revival of classical education cannot be reduced to “read the Great Books.” That is a necessary part; but it is neither sufficient nor the place for education to start. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky are not magical talismans. Their greatness does not automatically transfer itself to the reader. One might read any great author—and miss almost everything they are truly saying, because one has not been educated to read them well. Do we still today possess the arts by which these texts can be truly read? Reading well is not passive reception but an act and even a habit of inquiring. It requires a myriad of cognitive activities, schooled in a tradition of grammar, logic, rhetoric, commentary, disputation, and teaching. Without these, even the greatest books can become little more than raw material for private opinion, cultural signaling, or—much oftener—ideological appropriation. Contemporary habits of reading are increasingly formed by skimming, excerpting, reacting, searching, and prompting or outsourcing to AI and to podcasts. Even if we do read these books, today, it is often under habits that make us incapable of truly understanding them. Does the renewal of education require more than recovering a canon? Indeed—it requires recovering the art of reading itself. Join us in this conversation.

Universities had 17 years of warning. They responded by doing the opposite of what the math demanded. In 2008, American birth rates fell off a cliff. The Great Recession made people stop having kids. Those never-born children would be turning 18 right now. The number of U.S. high school graduates peaked at roughly 3.9 million in 2025. By 2029, that number drops 15%. By 2041, it drops by nearly half a million students per year. Every school in this tweet had access to the same Census data. They all saw the same curve. Administrative positions at U.S. colleges grew 60% between 1993 and 2009, ten times the rate of tenured faculty growth. Non-instructional spending (student services, administration) grew 29% from 2010 to 2018. Instructional spending grew 17%. Average tuition at public four-year schools went from $3,500 in 2000 to $10,560 in 2023. Yale now has more administrators than undergraduate students. 5,460 administrators for fewer than 5,000 undergrads. They built the cost structure of a growth company on top of a customer base that was mathematically guaranteed to shrink. The split in this data tells you everything. Clemson, Syracuse, Duke, UNC, and Indiana are all cutting because the model broke. Alabama, Ole Miss, and the University of Florida are turning away more applicants than ever. Harvard gets five applications for every spot. The middle is where the cliff hits. Elite schools absorb demand. Everyone between elite and community college fights over a shrinking pool. The Fed published a study in December 2024 predicting 80 colleges will close in the next five years. Since 2016, over 100 already have. In 2024 alone, 28 shut down. One per week. These program cuts and layoffs are a decade late. The birth rate data was sitting in Census spreadsheets the entire time. Everyone in higher education administration saw the enrollment cliff coming. They hired more administrators anyway.

All of the arts can also be considered AS sciences (particularly the quantitative ones, like geometry), but as liberal ARTS, they are considered primarily as arts. Plato notably considers geometry primarily as a science.

It seems there is an army of para-academic or just bookish people who don’t really produce work but are very emotionally invested in various academic signifiers. In a way that working scholars rarely are. All the best professors I’ve ever known are genuinely geniuses who don’t get riled up over hot-button talking points but will randomly say mind-blowing stuff about what they know. It is very easy to tell the difference between a real academic and someone obsessed with academia issues on social media.

Right they are arts in respect to their role as being teachable and formative to a man. Rational disciplines is a good way to consider them. But people need to also understand the four quantitative arts are indeed sciences. Importantly so because it is through what makes them sciences that the intellect is led to higher philosophy and theology.