Category: Classical Tradition

Practicing Happiness: Ancient Wisdom for Our Modern World

The pursuit of happiness is one of three rights originally drafted by Thomas Jefferson in the “Declaration of Independence.” These “unalienable rights” are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It is an odd turn of phrase, but one that has a profound backdrop to it, one which we have perhaps lost today. It is likely that Jefferson borrowed the three rights from John Locke. Almost a century prior to the American declaration, the English philosopher had written in Two Treatises on Government that government existed to protect a person’s “life, liberty and estate.” By estate, Locke surely meant property

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Counsels of the Wise, Part 5: Principles and Practice, Examples and Discipline

In the last article we discussed “good instruction” as a preliminary or a forerunner to prudence. While the development of prudence itself must be confirmed through experience, since it requires familiarity with all the particulars of life, it can and must be fostered in the young through implanting the right principles. A great part of the proper education therefore consists in parents and teachers, tutors and mentors, sharing their wise instruction for life with children. This includes not only simple statements of right and wrong, but also proverbial observations about human nature and what is truly valuable in life.  The

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The Classical Notion of Self-Education for Today

In her lecture at Oxford in 1947, Dorothy Sayers remarked, “Is it not the great defect of our education today, a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned, that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.” Here we observe the seedlings of the classical Christian renewal movement: the distinction between training students how to think versus what to think. Sayers’ diagnosis is that schools in her day had prioritized learning subjects over

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Learning to Wonder: A Deep Dive into the World of Geometric Thinking

The painting of Saint John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci seems to be one of his final paintings. Leonardo depicts John the Baptist with a similar enigmatic smile as the famous Mona Lisa. Yet, there is no background and the hues are dark enough that the viewer struggles to identify the Baptist’s garments. Leonardo poses his subject in such a way that he points upward while looking downward. In many respects, the Baptist pulls us into a contemplation of a spiritual enigma. How does the spiritual relate to the physical? One of the elements that pulls us into this

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Virtue Formation and Rightly Ordered Loves

The cultivation of virtue is unarguably a core objective in the classical vision for education. In contrast to knowledge acquisition or skills mastery, growing virtue in our students is about strengthening their internal moral structure. It is fundamentally a project of formation, changing a person for the good in pursuit of it. Interestingly, Augustine of Hippo, the great medieval theologian, observed that the lives we live and the things we love are inextricably linked. What we love impacts if, and how, we embody the virtues. In this way, seeking to live a virtuous life is both a moral enterprise and an

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Counsels of the Wise, Part 3: The Practical Nature of Prudence

In this series we are recovering several lost goals of education by exploring Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as replacement learning objectives for Bloom’s taxonomy. Prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) is one such lost goal, which is endorsed by the biblical book of Proverbs and the New Testament, even if Aristotle’s exact terminology is not adhered to. The classical tradition too aimed at moral formation, including moral reasoning or normative inquiry as a primary goal. (See Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence.) At the same time, we noted in the last article that our recovery movement has at

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Learning Gratitude: A Pathway to a Good Life

Among the greatest characters created by Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings is the noble prince Faramir. He is the younger brother of the fallen Boromir and is characterized by wisdom and judgment. When we first meet Faramir in the forests of Ithilien, he chances upon the hobbits Frodo and Sam who have already journeyed far on their quest to destroy the One Ring. The character of Faramir is demonstrated in his resistance to the temptation of the ring. The downfall of Boromir had been his desire to possess the One Ring. Having brought the hobbits to the secret

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The Counsels of the Wise, Part 2: Why Reviving Moral Philosophy Is Not Enough

In The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (Version 2.0, Revised Edition), Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain argue for a recovery of the tradition of moral philosophy against the reductionism of the modern social sciences. Their account of the intellectual history that led to the replacement of this classical and Christian paradigm for wisdom in ethics and the humanities, broadly considered, faithfully unpacks the faulty assumptions of this shaky modern and postmodern problem. In this series on replacing Bloom’s taxonomy with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues, we have already had occasion to bring the razor edge of their intellectual

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C.S. Lewis and Two Types of Education

Our educational renewal movement champions a return to the life-giving role great books play in forming lives of flourishing for our students and for society. We want our students to gain an appreciation for great literature and to be devoted to life-long learning. So if our goal is appreciation, should we do away with exams in order to really focus on appreciation? Don’t exams quench the thirst for literary art? In his 1944 essay, C.S. Lewis takes up questions like this with answers that might surprise us today. There are two types of education Lewis describes in his essay “The

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To Save a Civilization, Part 2: The Road to Rebuilding

In my previous article, I reflected on the nature of civilizations: how they emerge, what they are built upon, and why they fall. I specifically examined the story of the fall of the Roman Empire. While it is difficult for historians to identify a single point in time when the decline began, various cultural, moral, and economic factors interweaved to ripen the moment for Rome to fall. And fall it did, ushering in a two hundred year period known as the Dark Ages. While the Middle Ages themselves span a period of one thousand years, many of which were full

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