HeightsCast: Forming Men Fully Alive

Hell, Dante expresses, is being trapped by our false attempts to be free. Thus, the Comedy's Satan is forever stuck in the ice of a lake made frozen by the beating of his wings as he attempts to "free" himself from the reality of God. Education, on the other hand, frees us from such a lake by leading us to embrace, with the fullness of our being, the Truth which sets us free. This week on HeightCa...

What does it mean to be "civilized"? What is justice? What is a citizen? Given the opportunity, would you have killed Julius Caesar? Was Nero inevitable, or is it possible to keep one's wits while running such a powerful empire?  These are a few of the questions that eighth graders at The Heights are challenged to ponder together in their core class. With the help of their teachers and a new histo...

As teachers and parents, it is often difficult to find the balance between leniency and strictness, love and fear. Getting the right tone, being firm in principle and flexible in preference, is indeed an art and an especially difficult one. While nothing can replace personal experience for growing in this art, self-reflection is a great aid to this end.  This week on HeightsCast, Mr. Colin Gleason...

It's not merely where you are going, but how you get there, that matters. And as we often find ourselves going places in cars, it is worth stopping to consider how we spend our car rides.  In this week's episode, we welcome back to the podcast Mr. Kyle Blackmer for a discussion of the daily commute. Whether we carpool or ride solo, Mr. Blackmer helps us to reframe how we approach this daily endeav...

In a recent national survey of adults in America, a striking sixty-one percent of young adults (age 18-25) reported feeling serious loneliness. Such feelings of loneliness were also accompanied by anxiety and depression. Although humans are by nature social animals, it would seem that forming deep friendships may not always come so naturally. How do we form friendships? How do we help our sons for...

With another year having passed—perhaps even sped by—and a new one underfoot, HeightsCast returns with a discussion of time and solitude with Mike Ortiz and Rob Greving. Together, Mike and Rob invite us to slow down as they unpack their two recently published articles on the Forum.  Mr. Ortiz dives into Henry David Thoreau 's cabin life and the importance of intentional times of solitude in our li...

From the very start, the founders of The Heights understood education to consist in the communication of a culture. As culture often enters a boy's mind through his senses, an important means of this transmission is the art and architecture of a school. Indeed, in many ways buildings embody the ideals of an institution.  This week Joe Cardenas, head of mentoring and long-time art history teacher,...

In many schools, education is understood in reductively intellectual terms. The point of teaching, it would seem, is merely to inform, to fill the mind with data, to train the intellect to perform tasks and solve puzzles. To be sure, information and intellectual virtues are essential aspects of education; but they are not the whole, and to make them so would be to reduce the person to his mind.  I...

In this episode, we feature a recorded lecture given by Rich Moss in his introductory presentation at the Art of Teaching conference hosted by The Heights Forum last week. In this talk, Rich explains why teaching is an art, what that art is, and what are the tools utilized by the teaching artist.

Boys love concrete details and, even more, they love when those concrete details form the fabric of a hero's tale. Indeed, as Aristotle himself knew, better than telling adolescents merely about virtue is giving them examples of heroes, for good men are not made in theory, but in practice and boys need to see virtues practiced to be inspired themselves. What better place to turn than an author who...

This week on HeightsCast, we feature headmaster Alvaro de Vicente's open house speech on the mission and vision of The Heights School. In the speech, Alvaro helps parents discern the right school for their son. Understanding education to be essentially about partnering with parents to transmit a culture, he encourages parents to thoughtfully consider the culture of our school and how it relates to...

This week on HeightsCast, we feature a recording of the 2022 Headmaster's Lecture on the man fully alive . In this lecture, Mr. Alvaro de Vicente helps us understand what we mean when we use St. Irenaeus' oft-quoted though seldom understood words that gloria Dei est vivens homo : the glory of God is living man.  Mr. de Vicente shares his thoughts on the destination and the road ahead, suggesting t...

In this week's episode, we discuss science fiction with Mr. Joe Breslin, fifth grade teacher and soon-to-be published author of Other Minds: 13 Tales of Wonder and Sorrow . Surveying the wide umbrella of literature and film termed "sci-fi," Mr. Breslin helps us understand what makes this genre of literature valuable, interesting, and beautiful. As Mr. Breslin explains, science fiction done well of...

From the boys' choir in the lower school to the men's chorus in the upper school, informal performances at faculty dinners to songs at the annual Maryland Day Gala, singing echoes throughout the whole of The Heights experience. This week, we sit down with Mr. Patrick Love, music teacher at The Heights since 2004, to discuss not only when and where we sing at The Heights but  why  we love to sing s...

This week on HeightsCast we talk with upper school head, Michael Moynihan, about a new initiative of his on the Forum: the Initiative for the Renewal of Science Education . In the episode, Michael discusses the need for a new synthesis in the liberal arts, combining the best of modern science with the wisdom of ages. In particular, he explains how the recent tendency in science education to begin...

In this week's episode, we talk with headmaster Alavaro de Vicente about a central theme from our faculty workshop: self-mastery. As Alvaro explains, self-mastery is a certain integration of action, words, thoughts, and desires that gives one the interior freedom to not only do the good but to want to do the good. What does this self-mastery look like for teachers, for students, and for parents? H...

In this week's episode we discuss fights. Most boys, especially at a young age, have a beautiful need for rough and tumble physical play. But what happens when it's not play? What happens when egos are insulted and the fists go up? Or when there's an unjust aggression? At what point is a young lad–or an older one–justified in puttin' up his dukes? Teacher and Coach, Kyle Blackmer, gives us some po...

In many quarters of contemporary society, busy-ness has become a sort of cliche greeting. To the question "How are you?", the response, "So busy," is often automatic. To borrow the words of Dr. R.J. Snell, many of us are conspicuously busy; and we wear our busy-ness as a sort of badge of honor, rooting our worth in our work. In last week's episode , we talked with Dr. Snell about work and acedia....

A certain distinguished school leader, when asked when he would retire from his work, replied, "the day that I wake up and do not want to go to work." A reply such as this perhaps strikes the modern ear as senseless. For many of us, work fills the greater portion of our daily lives, but do we feel ourselves thereby fulfilled? Especially today, we may often feel trapped in what seem like unspectacu...

This episode features Mr. Michael Moynihan's lecture at last year's Teaching Vocation Conference. Our Upper School Head shares why a liberal arts education is needed more today than in times past. And the reasons are not simply that classics majors can code too. To the contrary, an authentic liberal education gives us not only truth, but also a ground upon which to stand. Many of our current socia...

In last week's episode , we considered how beauty is a special combination of order and surprise. To behold beauty, we learned, is to contemplate the dynamism of a being on the way to its perfection. It is to see the rose emerging from its seed.  This week we talk with assistant headmaster, Tom Royals, about learning to see the beauty—albeit often messy beauty—of our own growing children. To be su...

It sounds nice to say, using Dostoevsky's words, that beauty will save the world. But is this claim true? If so, in what sense is it true? What even is beauty? And what would it mean for it to save the world? This week, we welcome Dr. Lionel Yaceczko back to HeightsCast to discuss beauty: what it is and what the Western tradition can tell us about it. Today's episode is rooted in a previous discus...

In this week's episode, we continue our conversation with Dr. Kevin Majeres , turning our attention to the importance of setting challenges and the way actions shape emotions. Drawing on these two topics, Dr. Majeres helps us think through how parents can best help a son that is struggling with an addiction of any sort.   In particular, Dr. Majeres responds to the following questions:  What is add...

We have all experienced moments in which we are so immersed in a task that we lose track of time and performance feels effortless. For some, this may occur on the sports field; for others, in the classroom; and still, for others, in the performance hall. Yet, we have likely also experienced the opposite. For many children, the struggle for concentration is probably more prevalent.  Last week, we b...

Adorning our school's main hallway is a sort of charter for the Heights graduate which designates him as a man who is "optimistic toward life's challenges," as one who "sees freedom as an opportunity to choose the good." Fostering these ideals in each student is a central aspect of the school's mission. But, in a world that is increasingly filled with children suffering from anxiety, how—in very p...