As 2020 wraps up there is much to be grateful for in the midst of one of the most difficult years we’ve experienced as a society. Today is Boxing Day, which is a great day for gift giving, reflection on the year past and perspective on the year ahead. (When I lived in the UK, my family and I fell in love with Boxing Day. It was such a relaxing addition to the Christmas season.) So I would like to give a gift by recommending a few different podcasters who will fill your new year with excellent content and interesting ideas.
Bill & Maryellen St. Cyr
The first people you should listen to in 2021 are a husband and wife team, Bill and Maryellen St. Cyr. Together they founded Ambleside Schools International in 1999 to promote the educational approach of Charlotte Mason. There are quite a number of Ambleside schools throughout the US as well as in Africa, India and Austria.
Written about in the recent book Rare Leadership by Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder, the St. Cyrs exemplified an approach to educational leadership that is worthy of consideration. Bill explains that maturity is essential to the success of a school. Therefore he calls for emotional-relational maturity as the mission of schools, which often gets swept aside by performance goals. Warner and Wilder quote Bill:
“While efficient management of resources is essential, it is secondary to maintaining an optimal school atmosphere and ensuring teachers and students are thriving. Management must serve mission and the mission is maturity. Persons cannot be managed into maturity.”
Warner and Wilder, Rare Leadership (Chicago: Moody, 2016), p. 97.
Bill and Maryellen excel at teacher training, providing inspiration and motivation. Jason and I first met Bill and Maryellen in August 2009 when they provided teacher training on site at Clapham School in Wheaton. Their mentorship of teachers has had a lasting effect on us personally. Over the years, their teachings on the Charlotte Mason method has transformed my parenting, teaching and school leadership. Here at Educational Renaissance we’ve written extensively on Charlotte Mason’s educational principles.
The St. Cyrs started their podcast in 2018, and I have found it to be a great source of knowledge and inspiration. Episodes are compact and easy to listen to during a morning commute. If you are new to Charlotte Mason, I recommend listening to the episode on “The Method of a Lesson.” I also found Bill’s seminar “Educating with the Brain in Mind” a great expression of the ancient and modern synthesis that we are going for here at Educational Renaissance.
Jocko Willink
The next person you should be listening to in 2021 is retired Navy Seal Jocko Willink. The Jocko Podcast began at the end of 2015 and has been released weekly ever since. Jocko is a highly decorated veteran who fought in Iraq during the battle of Ramadi. After retiring from the Teams in 2010, Jocko started teaching the leadership principles he learned on the battlefield to business leaders.
I first accessed Jocko’s ideas in his book Extreme Ownership. There he lays out several essential principles of leadership, exemplifying them with stories from battle and then translating those principles to the civilian sector. As a school administrator, I find myself repeating and rehearsing these principles. At some point I plan to do a full exploration of these principles for the educational environment in a blog series. For now you can read Kolby’s article on educational leadership in which he explores principles by Brene Brown.
The Jocko Podcast explores principles of leadership through reading books. Many of the books Jocko reads through are military works, either memoirs of past wars or military field manuals. I thoroughly enjoy learning some of the military history as someone who has taught history previously. From time to time, Jocko will cover a book from our classical curriculum. For instance, you might find his take on Shakespeare’s Henry V (Episode 15) insightful. Jocko also reads Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (Episode 161) with some interesting approaches to leadership you could use in the classroom.
At various points Jocko discusses education and learning. Perhaps one of the most important episode that fully explores education is Episode 227 “Learning for Ultimate Winning.” Here he reads Marine Core doctrinal publication MCDP 7 on learning. It’s fascinating to consider how the military views and values learning. As Jocko interacts with this manual, he develops ideas about problem solving, critical thinking, analysis, mental imaging, synthesis, reasoning and creativity.
Seth Godin
The third person on my list is an entrepreneur and author who has massively influenced the way we think about marketing over the past decades. Godin originally made his mark during the dot com boom in the 1990s, but has since focused on writing and speaking. Godin has been particularly helpful in disseminating ideas like telling the difference between early adopters and the mass market, finding the smallest viable audience, and differentiating oneself by being remarkable. We’ll return to some of these ideas on marketing in a moment.
I first accessed Godin’s ideas through his book Linchpin. I delved into this book to learn more about business leadership and was inspired with his idea that the more value you create for your company makes you more indispensable. What really struck me though was his take on education. Godin is no fan of mass marketing, instead preferring what he terms permission marketing. What I found fascinating was how he connected the idea of the mass market to what we might call mass education. He does not have a high view of what he calls the factory model of education:
“The launch of universal (public and free) education was a profound change in the way our society works, and it was a deliberate attempt to transform our culture. And it worked. We trained millions of factory workers.”
Seth Godin, Linchpin (Penguin, 2010)
The factory model of education created a consumer culture and a workforce that is good at following instructions. Education pursued a race to the bottom, providing minimum standards to produce a proficient population at minimal cost. Godin’s critique of modern education resonates with our educational renewal movement, making him an interesting person to listen to.
Back to marketing for a moment. Small schools need marketing. I was originally resistant to marketing, feeling that the effort to market was futile and would erode the organic qualities of the grassroots educational renewal movement. Godin helped me reconsider my views on marketing, especially when I saw a marketing expert critiquing the ills of mass marketing. As an educator, he helped me frame marketing as teaching the wider community about what schooling can be when you care about quality learning environments. Godin trusts that if you provide your community with valuable content, you will be granted permission by that community to share more about your company or school.
So, in 2021 I encourage you to listen to what Seth Godin has to say. I was an early adopter of his podcast Akimbo, which started in 2018. Episodes are compact, usually centering on a key idea, and then concluding with Godin’s answers to listener questions. You might like one of his early episodes on Game Theory and the Infinite Game (Episode 7). I found his episodes on Solving Interesting Problems (S5E9) and Organized Learning (S7E5) stimulating. You might not find yourself agreeing with all his conclusions, but here is someone who is problematizing several of the issues our educational renewal movement has with mass education.
Bonus Recommendation: The Educational Renaissance Podcast
This year Jason, Kolby and I started podcasting. We wanted to find a convenient way to provide our audience with high quality, long form content that augmented our weekly articles. So far the feedback has been positive, and we’ve enjoyed collaborating in this new format.
This past fall we released the first several episodes of our podcast, tracing important themes we’ve written about in our blog articles, but in a conversational format, delving into more detail. You can find each of our episodes on our website or you can subscribe in any podcast app, such as iTunes or Spotify.
Like some of the other recommended voices mentioned above, we aim to provide excellent content to support our educational renewal movement. We reach into the past to glean classical models of education while also making connections with recent discoveries in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and theology. Our greatest desire is to provide you with meaningful content to help you in the craft of teaching.
So with these recommendations in mind, hopefully 2021 will be a year of learning, inspiration and educational renewal for you, your students and your schools.