Funding Monticello College: A 21st Century Approach
Historically, most American institutions of higher education struggled to fund themselves. Non-profit institutions did not generally have mechanisms for generating revenue. Thus they relied on tuition, donations, and an endowment. Harvard, America’s first school, suffered this same fate. In 1636, without any endowment (the gift from John Harvard, the school’s name sake was quickly squandered) […]
What The H— Is Wrong With America? – Part One
Click Here For Part Two I’ve been angry for a while now. When I turned 50, I took pause and reflected on my life, presuming that I was at the halfway point (yes, I intend to live to see 100). I thought about my childhood in the 60’s and early 70’s. I reminisced my […]
Why Is Monticello College A Functional Farm?
This post is one that will separate our readers into two groups. You will either read it and say, “wow, that makes so much sense, I see why Monticello College has a farm and teaches the manual arts,” or you will read a part of it, become bored, and drift toward leaving the site. Either […]
What Would Socrates Do?
This post is a tribute to Earl Shorris, one of my favorite writers on education who passed away in 2012. I am reprinting the April 16, 2013 Wall Street Journal Book Review of his latest book, The Art of Freedom. This piece was written by Naomi Schaefer Riley. In The Art of Freedom, Earl Shorris describes his efforts […]
Return of the Manual Arts
We have spent considerable space in these posts discussing education, particularly the liberal arts. This post is dedicated to the lesser known side of our curriculum—the manual arts. Manual arts are not something that the average American thinks about in the 21st century. But a hundred years ago, the vast majority of Americans were engaged […]
The Liberal Arts During Bondage: Part Two; How Do the Liberal Arts Help Us During Bondage?
Click Here to Read Part One Bringing You Up To Speed If you will recall from part one, for the past twenty years, we have taught that America was somewhere on the “pre-bondage” side of the cycle, between Selfishness and Dependence. As we enter 2013, we have clearly entered the Bondage phase. Just consider […]
The Fat Lady Begins To Sing
And so it begins… The most recent national election declared the passion of the American people for the Nanny State. Of the almost 127 million voters, a majority preferred a governing system that favors high taxes, a saturated welfare system, forced health care, and an abundance of government dependent workers. Apparently we have learned nothing […]
The Liberal Arts During Bondage: Part One
[This series of posts are a continuation of the blog posted on January 1, 2013 at Shanonbrooks.com entitled Job Training Versus Character Education] What does bondage look like? One attribute of human nature is that we tend to acclimate over time to whatever condition we are experiencing. We get used to the hot or cold […]
Funding Is Half Way There
Last month we sent out an email (The Right Idea At The Right Time) comparing the beginnings of Monticello College to other now well-known colleges and universities. We showed you the simple solution used by many institutions of higher learning centuries ago and how it stabilized those schools to become the great educational pillars they […]
A Renaissance in Social Leadership
I actually wrote and posted this article in 2009, but I felt that it was a good time to take another look. In Lee Iacocca’s book Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, he strikes a poignant cord—with all of these problems we are facing, where is the outrage? And now that he mentions it, […]
