Author: Jason Barney

The Role of Imagination in Education

Imagination. The word brings so much to mind for us today. If there’s one thing that everybody can agree on for children, it’s the need to help them develop a vivid imagination through school, play, and well… everything they do. Or perhaps, ‘develop a vivid imagination’ is the wrong way of putting it. “Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination,” said Walt Disney. “But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.” So maybe it’s not children who need to develop

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The Soul of Education, Part 2: Plato’s Immortal and Tripartite Soul

In the introduction to this series, we explained how our view of the soul, or nature of a human being, will necessarily impact our practice of education. In our modern world we are bombarded by so many competing views of the soul, both implicit and explicit, that we operate in a confused mess. From behaviorism to Buddhism, ancient Greek ideas to Freud and Descartes, neuroplasticity and the prefrontal cortex, our complex picture of ourselves is all jumbled up, like various types of toys all thrown together in the same bin. This series may not be able to answer all the

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The Soul of Education, Part 1: What Is a Human Being?

Every educational philosophy necessarily relies on a pre-existing view of the human person. Anthropology informs pedagogy. Many of the problems that classical Christian educators have identified in conventional education have their roots in a false or insufficient view of human beings. The factory model of education, for instance, underrates certain aspects of human development and purpose (see articles on the problems of Technicism or Scientism for example).  This is why it has been so crucial for classical Christian educators to return to foundational questions. The average parent or teacher in our movement may tire of such stargazing, but it is

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Counsels of the Wise, Part 9: The Limits and Transcendence of Prudence

We have come full circle in this series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom. Prudence is one of those forgotten gems of the classical educational tradition. Its proper flowering is the result of early instruction, long reflection and the blooming of rationality in man. Discipline, early training in habits, examples and good instruction about the real differences between things—all play a role in the acquisition of prudence. But prudence itself comes through a pedagogy of dialectic, rhetoric, and ethics, since it is concerned primarily with a person’s ability to deliberate correctly and act with regard to human

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New Year’s Resolutions, Goal Setting and Education

The idea of New Year’s resolutions elicits strong reactions from some people. “If you want to change, why wait until the New Year to start?” the cynical say. Others perhaps remember the failure of last year with some measure of shame and regret. Still others are fired up about the success and dream-fulfillment that lie ahead, given their newfound will-power and determination. According to some statistics almost half of American adults participate in New Year’s resolutions, and most relate to improving one’s health (see 19 Surprising New Year’s Resolution Statistics (2024 Updated) (insideoutmastery.com)). Unfortunately, only 9% stick with their resolutions,

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Counsels of the Wise, Part 8: Aiming at the Intermediate or Aristotle’s Moral Virtues

We’ve traveled far in this series on restoring the forgotten goal of prudence or practical wisdom to our educational goals. We established the necessity of prudence alongside moral virtue as constituting the intellectual virtue that accompanies and regulates all the moral virtues by deliberating about what is good or bad for human beings. A Christian and classical education must provide for this instruction in moral wisdom, without which life has no real direction. Prudence thus restores a practical dimension to education that is not utilitarian.  We’ve also explored how the underpinnings of prudence are instilled in the young through practice

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Counsels of the Wise, Part 7: Leadership, Liberal Arts, and Prudence

In the previous article we finally laid out a pedagogy for training students in prudence. While there are many preliminary actions that we can take to sow the seeds of prudence and provide for students’ good instruction from sources of moral wisdom, it is nevertheless true that the full acquisition of practical wisdom awaits a student’s later years. In secondary and collegiate education, then, students should study the ethical dimensions of all subjects and be taught through dialectical and rhetorical means to reason about human goods using biblical moral categories.  If our educational renewal movement consistently graduated students well on

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The Education of the Count of Monte Cristo

What are the proper sources for an educational philosophy? Should educators read only sociological journals and experiment in their classroom for the best results? Or is there something more humane and artistic in the nature of teaching? We have decried the technicism and scientism characteristic of modern education before.  One consequence of these trends is the exclusion of literature and humanities from the broader conversation about education, its goals, methods, and ideals. Charlotte Mason, for one, found novels, fictional literature, and poetry to be a potent source for her educational philosophy. While certainly we can understand the reticence to feature

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The Counsels of the Wise, Part 6: A Pedagogy of Prudence

At this point in our series, we have established prudence or practical wisdom as a Christian and classical goal of education. We have also laid out several paths toward prudence, seeds really, which must be sown in early youth in order to reap the full flowering of practical wisdom in students’ more mature years. Among these seeds are proverbial instruction, good habits, exemplars, discipline and practice. Even with all this we have yet to lay out a specific method for instilling prudence itself. In what sort of thought process does the capacity for prudence consist? To answer this question we

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Charlotte Mason, the Educational Philosopher

In researching Charlotte Mason’s life for my forthcoming book on her with Classical Academic Press (preorder Charlotte Mason: A Liberal Education for all!), the latest in the Giants in the History of Education series (register for my live webinar with Classical Academic Press!) I was struck by Mason’s insistence on the importance of educational philosophy. This stands in contrast to many of the other “giants” in this series (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Milton, C.S. Lewis), who were not educational philosophers first and foremost, but philosophers and theologians simply, who also happened to address education specifically. None of these thinkers felt the

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