Welcome to "Educator in Residence"
An introduction to my newsletter on all things educational . . .
Welcome to Educator in Residence. I am glad you decided to join us, and—if I might—I wanted to welcome you, and also take a moment to explain where all the light switches are.
Allow me to change the metaphor. This is a Substack newsletter and, as is the custom on these DC-10 airplanes, some of you are in coach and some of you are in first class. The first class customers are the paid subscribers and have access to all the new content that I hope to be publishing here on the subject of education. These folks will have a newsletter appear in their in-box at least monthly, and sometimes, when the fit is upon me, it may be more often than that.
I have also written a fair number of pieces on education over the years, articles that have not found their way into any of my books on the subject. As time goes by, I am going to be posting these articles as free content here (with edits if they need to be made more timely). Everyone who is signed up should receive these in their in-box. Everyone on the plane gets all the pretzels or goldfish they want.
Now if you are interested enough in the subject of education to subscribe to a newsletter like this, you may want to obtain and read my books on education as well. If you do that, you will be in a better position to understand the background to what I am writing about here.
Here are some images for these books, and links to them, in the order of their publication.
The first was Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, the book that started it all. Published in 1991 by the good folks at Crossway, this is now a Canon Press title.
Repairing the Ruins was published by Canon in 1996, and contains numerous essays on education by a number of people, and I contributed 8 of those essays.
The Paideia of God (1999) is an additional collection of my essays on education, published by Canon.
Excused Absence was originally published by Crux Press in 2001, and is also new to Canon’s catalog. This is a book that argues for removing Christian kids from public schools.
Ten years after Recovering (2003), Crossway published The Case for Classical Christian Education, which also has been recently picked up by Canon.
Why Christian Kids Need a Christian Education (2013) is published by Athanasius Press, and can be obtained from Canon.
In these last two paragraphs, I need to toot my own horn for a little bit, but I made up for that potential problem by putting it all down at the bottom, thus keeping my humility points intact.
My qualifications for writing about education need to extend beyond the mere fact of having written on education for a long time. Writing is not the same thing as doing, and so I need to explain the row of logos across the bottom here. I am a founder of Logos School here in Moscow, a K-12 program that looks to have over 600 students next fall, which, given the size of our town has been a remarkable blessing. I still serve on the board of Logos. I am a founder of New St. Andrews College, a classical and Christian college here in Moscow, with several hundred undergraduate and graduate students. I teach at NSA, and I serve on the board as well. And last, I am a founder of The Association of Classical and Christian Schools, which includes over three hundred member schools now. For years I served on the ACCS board as an ex officio member, and am now serving there as an Educator-in-Residence, a title that I requisitioned for this newsletter.
All of this is to say that I have been involved in education reform, up to my neck shall we say, for the past forty years. This could have made me quite crotchety in my opinions, but if you read this newsletter in the right spirit, you will find that the years have made me sweet and mellow.
Cordially in Christ,
Douglas Wilson