Once More with Peter Schramm

It was great of Jason Stevens, professor at Ashland University, to write a tribute yesterday to Peter Schramm in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (and kudos of the Journal for running it). The Ashbrook Center has posted the article on their website so you don’t have to workaround the Journal‘s subscriber paywall. Jason reminds us at the end of one of Peter’s favorite classroom devices—an acorn:

He began his freshman course by asking about the nature of the acorn. After several false starts, someone would say, “To become the oak tree.” Once the truth had revealed itself, Schramm would react with palpable joy—a loud outburst, a fist pounded on the lectern, a little hop. He reveled in our successes mostly, I think, because he loved what was good and saw the potential for good in us.

The great oak has now vanished from the face of the earth. But, thank God, he has left behind thousands of tiny acorns that continue to grow.

I decided to go back and whip up a podcast version of the radio conversation I had with Peter back in 2012 on the Bill Bennett show, where he talks further about classroom teaching, and you can tell from how he describes it here how very different is this style of higher education from the typical lecture-mode at Behemoth University:

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