5 Elements of Faculty Culture for a New School to Implement on Day 1

With the skyrocketing number of new classical schools opening each year in the United States and beyond, the launch teams for these schools are no doubt busy working to prepare for the first day of school. On the one hand, this inaugural day probably feels far away yet. But on the other hand, for these pioneers, it is coming all too fast.  To prepare for a launch year, there are a number of elements for school founders to discuss, care for, and organize into a cohesive plan. These elements, many of which are minute, taken individually may at times feel

Continue reading

Gifted to Serve: Spiritual Gifting and High School Students

The Via Sabaste was a Roman road that cut through the heart of Asia Minor, bringing traffic of all sorts through the small town of Lystra. Well-formed routes such as this enabled the rapid expansion of the church in the first century. Despite the ease of travel, Paul’s first visit to Lystra could not have gone worse. When Paul and Barnabas healed a crippled man, the locals insisted that they were Zeus and Hermes (Acts 14:12), offending the two missionaries and inciting the local Jewish population to stone Paul (Acts 14:19). Undeterred, they continued to preach the gospel, making many

Continue reading

Ancient Wisdom for the New Economy

Our educational renewal movement comes at a peculiar time in history. Classical education around the globe plugs us into something the predates many of the movements that shape the conventional educational assumptions of our day. One could identify the Enlightenment as the starting point of conventional education, largely because of the empirical epistemology that championed scientific fact over religious faith. Surprisingly, the classical educational renewal movement has not attempted to rewind the clock to take us back to a world before modern plumbing let alone the internet. Instead, it has called out today’s conventional education for selling short our view

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

Learning to Appreciate Beauty: A Deep Dive into Picture Study

Amongst the subjects that epitomize Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education, picture study – otherwise known as artist study or art study – offers so much scope for us to consider how classical education can benefit from a deeper understanding of Mason’s methods. When we think about the classical tradition, we often focus on the great books, from the classics of the ancient world to the literary and philosophical masterpieces down through the ages. Yet, the tradition of the visual arts has generated masterpieces of a different sort, and in some cases of greater esteem that the written tradition. The Visual

Continue reading

Discipleship in the School, Part 2: Spiritual Formation

In my first article in this series, I explored the idea of discipleship and what it means for the Christian school to make disciples. I noted from the offset that the Christian school and local church have different purposes, and therefore, we should expect their discipleship approaches to look different. At the same time, both institutions share a goal to promote the gospel of Jesus Christ. In this regard, there is to be found a shared vision of discipleship, namely, to help others follow Jesus and grow in conformity to his image. I then went on to offer two general

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

Discipleship in the School, Part 1: An Introduction

What is discipleship and how does discipleship happen in a Christian school? Like most good questions, we must begin by defining our terms. What is discipleship? According to Mark Dever, a pastor in the Washington D.C. area, we can define discipleship simply as helping someone follow Jesus. As an expanded definition, he writes that discipleship is “…deliberately doing spiritual good to someone so that he or she will be more like Christ” (Discipling, p. 13). Greg Ogden, a pastor who served for many years in the Chicago suburbs, defines discipleship as “walking alongside other disciples in order to encourage, equip,

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

How to Teach Grit and the Growth Mindset

Over the years we have written about grit and growth mindset here at Educational Renaissance. These are important areas of recent research that align well with the aims of our educational renewal movement. But one of the really tricky issues is whether we can teach grit and growth mindset. Is it the case that children are either gritty or not? What do we do when a child comes to us with a fixed mindset? We might be committed to the ideas of grit and growth mindset, but to really have transformative classrooms, we need to consider the question of how

Continue reading