Ryan N.S. Topping

“Moderns maintain a peculiar relationship with rhetoric. We no longer teach it to our young, nor demand it of our wise. What since ancient Athens was considered an essential skill for a free citizen has now largely been consigned to hucksters and to the tarmacs of used car dealerships. The tragedy is that we abandoned the art on purpose. About the same time the Russians flung Sputnik into space, in the name of progress American, Canadian, and British educators tossed the old grammar and style books onto the intergalactic rubbish heap of history. The past was trashed. In a scientific age, so the reasoning went, questions of philosophy, of beauty, of sex, of God, could be set aside in favor of technological solutions. The science was settled. Just the same, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Who would’ve foreseen that at the same hour the West turned its back on its humanistic traditions, it would be called to police the global order, shore up markets, and shoot down terrorists?”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“of expression is a society that soon finds itself crowded with the army of counselors, social service agents, and police officers needed to manage and contain the young people it has set adrift without rudder.”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Case for Catholic Education: Why Parents, Teachers, and Politicians Should Reclaim the Principles of Catholic Pedagogy