Cultivating a Community: Wisdom for Parents Educating at Home Amidst the Present Crisis

In the last few weeks, life has changed dramatically for families across the globe. For families living in some parts of the United States, the most predictable elements of their busy schedules—the nine-to-five work day, daily school routine, church commitments, soccer practice, piano lessons—have vanished from the calendar. For perhaps the first time since the holidays, last summer, or never, families finally have the chance to breathe.  But will they? How will families adapt in such a crisis? And how will they ensure their children’s learning continues while at home, far removed from the influence of their teachers? The Stoics,

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the love of learning from old books

The Flow of Thought, Part 9: The Lifelong Love of Learning

The ‘love of learning’ is one of those phrases that is so overused in education that it feels like it has been beaten to death with a stick. Every educator and every educational model claims to promote the ‘lifelong love of learning’ for their students. I challenge you to find an engaged teacher who doesn’t endorse this goal. Side note: There are still unengaged teachers, who are only in it for the job or who will openly claim that they don’t care about their students. I had a few of those in public high school. But that’s another story…. I

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Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 2: Educating the Whole Person

What has Charlotte Mason to do with classical education? In my first blog in this series, I began exploring this question through a close reading of Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. In this book, Clark and Jain offer a paradigm for understanding classical education as it exists within the broader liberal arts tradition. According to these thinkers, the purpose of classical education is to cultivate virtue in body, heart, and mind, while nurturing a love for wisdom under the lordship of Jesus Christ. This is a comprehensive purpose statement to

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Socrates in front of the Academy in Athens

The Flow of Thought, Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers

In my last article, The Flow of Thought, Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom, I made a case for the value of re-envisioning natural science as philosophy. While science might never come to mind today when philosophy is discussed, this was not always the case. The association of Solomon with the type of wisdom that includes nature lore provides a biblical example. Likewise, the great philosopher Socrates was mocked in his own day by the playwright Aristophanes for having his head in the clouds of speculation about the natural world. Although this claim was untrue—Socrates was almost

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art of learning chess

The Art of Learning: Four Principles from Josh Waitzkin’s Book

My mother-in-law feeds my addiction to books. For over a decade she has worked at a used bookstore, and often shows up at family events with a stack of books for me to add to my personal library. She now also supplies my friends and my school. Jason was recently the beneficiary of her generosity, inheriting a slew of Hebrew resources–much to his enjoyment as he begins teaching an Intro to Hebrew class. At Christmas, my mother-in-law got me a brand-new copy of Josh Waitzkin’s book The Art of Learning. Since then I have been devouring the book, and there

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Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 1: Mapping a Harmony

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” the church father Tertullian skeptically asked. Tertullian was writing at a time in which church leaders were weighing the pros and cons of mining the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition for insights they could utilize in the development of a distinctively Christian philosophy.  Similarly, within the Christian classical school movement, some have asked, “What has Charlotte Mason to do with Dorothy Sayers?” In other words, can the pedagogical insights of the British educator Charlotte Mason be conducive for classical education today? Where is there harmony? Where is there discord? While a full treatment of this

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scientist with chemicals in flasks

The Flow of Thought, Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom

In this series we’ve been finding arguments for a classical education from the unlikely realm of positive psychology, particularly Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s classic Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. After connecting the concept of flow with Aristotle’s link between virtue or excellence and eudaimonia (happiness or flourishing), we’ve been racing through aspects of the liberal arts tradition, in a sort of running commentary on Csikszentmihalyi’s chapter, entitled The Flow of Thought. I’ve already treated science briefly under the heading “The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games.” That’s because the quadrivium, or four mathematical arts, included not only arithmetic and geometry, but

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writing with black ballpoint pen

The Writing Process: Sentences, Paragraphs, Edit, Repeat

Why do we need instructions on a shampoo bottle? After only a few training exercises, any three-year-old can operate a shampoo bottle. Yet every bottle of shampoo I can find has instructions. The sequence, “lather, rinse, repeat,” became such a well-known instruction that it took on meme status in culture. Brian Regan has taken on a similar set of instructions on a Pop Tarts box. If you haven’t enjoyed his take on the ridiculous nature of obvious instructions, you should take a moment to watch it here on YouTube before proceeding. I will wait. (And while you’re there, you might

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Charlotte Mason and the Power of Ideas

As Charlotte Mason observed, there is nothing quite like the experience of being struck by an idea. The experience is equivalent to being the recipient of some unexpected treasure. Ideas loosen our grip on holding a thin view of the world. They open our minds, especially through narration, to connections previously gone undetected and stir our imaginations to explore further up and further in. Ideas light the fire beneath us to learn, search, and discover. I’ll never forget when as a child I encountered the idea of the Roman Empire. In the family room we had an entire bookshelf dedicated

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open journal

The Flow of Thought, Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians

I’ve never been one for journaling. It’s not for lack of trying or admiration for the idea behind the practice. But keeping a journal and writing down my thoughts about myself or what I experienced that day just never caught on for me. I was almost tempted to say that it would have felt too egotistical to me to record my everyday feelings and happenings, but that’s not entirely the truth. I’ve had plenty of egoism to support that; it’s more that the trivialities of most days didn’t strike me as worthy of that sort of memorialization. And so, not

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