What is a Learner?: Reading Charlotte Mason through Aristotle’s Four Causes

The goals and aims of our educational renewal movement center not on the quality of our curriculum or the quality of our teacher. Instead, the quality of learning is the true test of whether we are providing something of lasting value and worth. To that end, I have taken a look at the learner and applied Aristotle’s four causes to understand this pivotal aspect of quality education. In so doing, I have turned to Charlotte Mason’s Toward a Philosophy of Education to elucidate the fine points of the learner. The Four-fold Manner of Knowing an Object Among the most important

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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry

In the previous article we explored the need to counter the passion mindset of our current career counseling by replacing it with a craftsman mindset drawn from a proper understanding of apprenticeship in the arts. Apprenticing students in various forms of artistry (including the liberal arts) constitutes the role of the Academy that is most intimately connected to the professional working world. By making real these connections through actual relationships with the practitioners of arts (whether in athletics and sports, common and domestic arts, fine and performing arts, the professions and trades, or the liberal arts themselves) classical Christian schools

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Growth in the Craft: Fresh Techniques for Your Teaching Tool Belt

The sole true end of education is to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain. Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning” As educators, we get excited when classrooms come alive: Hands shoot up. Eyes brighten. And body language across the room broadcasts that discovery is underway.  The other day I stepped in to sub for our science teacher and experienced a fresh taste of these kinds of moments. The class had been studying insects all semester and the topic of the day was beetles. Now, my background is

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Embrace the Cross: An Easter Vigil Homily

The beautiful and the grotesque, when considered together are the essence not only of our human existence, but of all created reality. In some ways, aesthetics is in the eye of the beholder. What one considers beautiful differs from what another would hold up as an example of beauty. We share with each other both the beautiful and the grotesque. “Come here and see the beautiful sunset,” one might say to a spouse. “Smell this, has it gone bad?” is yet another phrase shared between husband and wife. The Beautiful and the Grotesque How do we value beauty? What does

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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, Cal Newport argues against the well-known Passion Hypothesis of career happiness. He describes the Passion Hypothesis as the idea that “the key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion” (4). It is well summed up by the ever-present, popular advice to “follow your dreams.” As Steve Jobs said in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, “You’ve got to find what you love….[T]he only way to

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On Deep Reading

In an age of misleading news articles, vicious discourse, and exponential ignorance, it is a curious fact that the skill of reading continues to take the backseat to other “practical” areas of study. Society, it seems, would rather have students master Microsoft Excel or how to program computers than they would become lectiophiles. Reading is discarded as an antiquated art, a skill for a bygone area, whose value is akin to a penny: sentimentalized yet basically obsolete. At the same time, no one explicitly endorses the excision of reading from the curriculum as they would the penny from U.S. currency.

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Renaissance Children: How Our View of Children Shapes Our Educational Aims

Perhaps no figure in Twentieth century America captured the idealization of childhood innocence better than Norman Rockwell. His paintings, appearing regularly on The Saturday Evening Post, often included children who evoked an innocence untouched by hard realities that grown ups experienced through the Great Depression and two World Wars. Consider the painting Marble Champion. This 1939 piece features three children, one girl and two boys. It is painted in such a way that one only sees the children and the marbles. There is no physical context given. The viewer is drawn into a world solely inhabited by children at play.

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Good to Great: Helping Schools Find Their Hedgehog Concept

In a world of seemingly endless opportunities for educational innovation, it can be difficult for school leaders to know where to focus. Should they prioritize the building of a successful sports program? How about offering generous packages of financial assistance? Will the school be known for its impressive musical productions, rigorous curriculum, or exceptional classroom teachers? And how about the school’s marketplace focus– financial accessibility, academic superiority, or programmatic breadth?1 In Good to Great, author Jim Collins argues from longitudinal research that one reason organizations fail to make the jump from good to great is that they never land on

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Finding Flow through Effort: Intensity as the Key to Academic Success

At the intersection of challenge and skill, the state of flow emerges: a state of total immersion and enjoyment. Jason Barney’s book on flow, entitled The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education connects Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s study of flow with the classical Christian classroom. In this article I plan to build on Jason’s work by investigating some recent research that connects the concept of flow to grit and the growth mindset. My claim is that in order to achieve lasting flow, one must achieve an appropriate level of intensity. The first aspect of this claim to elaborate is the

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Irrigating Deserts in Schools: The Redemption of Emotion in an Age of Feeling

In a world of sensationalistic news, propaganda, and emotions running in overdrive, our students need specialized training in how to navigate life’s challenges with wisdom. Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis, two favorites in the classical education renewal movement, offered different, but related, educational solutions to respond to emotive and misleading propaganda. Dorothy Sayers, known for her essay The Lost Tools of Learning (1947), advocated for a return to liberal arts education. With a special emphasis on the language arts of the Trivium, Sayers believed that the best remedy against sensationalistic news headlines was to equip the intellect with the right

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