Combat and Classics is a series of podcasts and online seminars that explores the nature of man in conflict and cooperation through socratic dialogue and the great books. For more info visit 
Brian interviews Daniel Elkins, founder and director of the Veterans Education Project, which works to address issues faced by veterans in higher education. You can find more information on the Project’s website. And tune in to the Project’s podcast “Coffee with Congress” here, where it shares conversations with members of Congress about everything but politics. Get more Continue Reading …
Paulo Freire’s Philosophy of Education and Our Ontological Incompleteness
Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, perhaps best known for his work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and for popularizing the practice of “critical pedagogy,” also wrote passionately and profoundly about what it means to be human. In fact, both Freire’s critique of oppression and his ideas about education were informed by how he posed the problem of being human. Problematizing Continue Reading …
Degree of Freedom
I discovered PEL in 2013 while engaged in a quixotic experiment in online education involving a form of learning making headlines at the time: Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs). MOOCs came on the scene a couple of years earlier, after professors at Stanford were stunned when free online courses they offered to the world drew in hundreds of thousands of participants. The Continue Reading …
Education and Schopenhauer’s “Thinking for Oneself”
In Arthur Schopenhauer's essay “On Thinking for Oneself” (1851), he writes that there are few people who possess a natural love of learning and that they will only learn from others if they find something that triggers an innate interest inside themselves. Thinking must be kindled, like a fire by a draught; it must be sustained by some interest in the matter in hand. This Continue Reading …
The Wisdom of the ‘Ignorant Schoolmaster’
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” ― Benjamin Franklin “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” ― Socrates [From Sotiris Triantis] An intellectual adventure Joseph Jacotot (born in 1770) was a French teacher who discovered something remarkable in the education process. His intellectual adventure begun Continue Reading …