Author: Jason Barney

Aristotle close-up as famously portrayed by Raphael with arm stretched forward indicating his engagement in the human world of moral excellence, virtue and habits

Excellence Comes by Habit: Aristotle on Moral Virtue

All too often we are inclined to think of excellence as the product of good genes and good fortune rather than our personal habits. The fates bestow their blessings indiscriminately and haphazardly, and the talented and successful are the lucky recipients of excellence, while the rest of us are mired in mediocrity. Those who rise to the top, the outliers, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them, were born that way, or else became that way because of a combination of heredity, privileged upbringing and opportune circumstances. As we’ve mentioned before (Aristotle and the Growth Mindset), while the great philosopher Aristotle doesn’t

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temple wall in Jerusalem

Jesus the Ideal Learner: Priestly Lessons for Education

 In a previous article on Jesus’ student-teacher relationship with John the Baptist, we mentioned that there is so much that can be learned about education from Jesus’ example. The mystery of the incarnation is packed with significance for the process of learning, human maturation and discipleship. As it says in Hebrews, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.” (Heb 5:8-9 ESV) The idea that Jesus “learned obedience

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model of areas of the brain, frontal lobes for attention and willpower

Educating for Self-control, Part 2: The Link Between Attention and Willpower

In my last post on educating for self-control, I laid out a Christian case for the importance of self-control from the New Testament, citing Paul’s famous fruit of the Spirit and Peter’s not-as-famous virtue list in the first chapter of 2 Peter. Then we delved into the roots of self-control as a concept deriving from early Greek philosophers, before turning to what it might look like to develop a school for self-control, rethinking how our schools should be set up if supporting self-control is a chief goal. In particular, we referenced the British educator Charlotte Mason, as she discussed “the

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Educating for Self-control, Part 1: A Lost Christian Virtue

If there’s any virtue that Christians need, especially in contemporary society, it’s self-control. We have available to us more seductive entertainment, more well-advertised temptations and even more innocent pleasures (like unhealthy foods, which end up being not so innocent in the long run…), than any other people at any time in the history of the world. The average 1st world Christian experiences a higher “standard of living” than the richest kings of the ancient world and middle ages. Our prosperity itself may be the greatest weapon the enemy ever devised. And unfortunately, at such a moment, self-control is one of

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a classroom, a common setting for practicing education

Practicing Education: Growing in the Art of Teaching

When I was a child I did gymnastics, and one of the most fundamental aspects of gymnastics is practice. We practiced skills and routines, we stretched and we worked out for hours, far longer than the average sports team practices. Where your average soccer team practiced an hour or an hour and a half a couple times a week, gymnasts practice three hours at a stretch at least three times a week. And that’s at my American gym which was no doubt less intense than some. One of the biggest lessons I learned from my coach was his frequent saying,

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an elegant oval library, the perfect place for deep reading

The Importance of Deep Reading in Education

Deep reading is the type of reading that involves one’s undivided attention in a sustained manner to tackle a long-form book, like a novel. The feeling cultivated by deep reading is that of being lost in a book, taken to new worlds, enraptured by an alien train of thought. While many educators still feel that the importance of deep reading for education can hardly be overstated, that it is sacrosanct, the end-all-be-all of education, the winds are blowing a different direction. Beyond the basic literacy taught in early grade-school and the short-form, though still highly complex, reading skills needed to master

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lightbulb idea with a sky background

The Role of Ideas in Education

Ever the provocateur, Charlotte Mason, the late 19th century British educator, raised the question of the role of ideas in education. After mentioning the importance of ideas in both common life (“I have an idea!”) and the history of philosophy, she castigates the educational establishment of her day for neglecting ideas: “There is but one sphere in which the word idea never occurs, in which the conception of an idea is curiously absent, and that sphere is education! Look at any publisher’s list of school books and you shall find that the books recommended are carefully dessicated, drained of the

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bronze statue of Aristotle with pen

Aristotle and the Growth Mindset

Whether you’ve been involved in the world of education, sports, self-help or business, it’s likely that you’ve heard of Carol Dweck’s growth mindset. A Stanford University psychologist, Carol Dweck popularized her findings about how much success in any endeavor depends on a person’s mindset. In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she explains that people who believe their talents and abilities are fixed tend to lose motivation when they experience challenges or setbacks, because they fear that failure will brand them as untalented or unintelligent. On the other hand, people who believe in the development of their intellect

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The Cathedral of the Liberal Arts Tradition

Review of The Liberal Arts Tradition by Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain

Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain. The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. Classical Academic Press, 2013. In The Liberal Arts Tradition Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain endeavor to set the record straight about what made up the course of study in the classical tradition of education. As two longtime friends and colleagues at the Geneva School–one of the early and well-developed classical Christian schools located outside of Orlando, FL–they combined their talents in rhetoric/philosophy (Kevin) and math/science (Ravi) and their mutual love of theology and the tradition to broaden the focus of the conversation about classical

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The Liberal Arts of the Classical Tradition

The Classical Distinction Between the Liberal Arts and Sciences

One of the encouraging recent developments in education is the recovery of the classical educational tradition of the liberal arts and sciences amongst Christian classical schools. Of course, we’re already laboring upstream, since to most people the term ‘liberal arts’ simply refers to general studies or the humanities. However, even the Christian classical school movement hasn’t always held on to an important classical distinction, the distinction between an ‘art’ and a ‘science’. As a movement of classical Christian schools, we’ve talked a lot about the liberal arts, especially the trivium, and more recently the quadrivium or mathematical arts. Recent books,

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