Tag: Aristotle

The Great Cause of Teaching

In Aristotle’s writings, the philosopher famously articulates four causes, or explanations, for why a thing exists: Together these causes serve as the foundation for whatever knowledge we can know about anything that exists. In this article, I will explore the final cause, or purpose, of teaching. It practically goes without saying that there is great confusion in the world today about what the purpose of education is, broadly speaking, and teaching in particular. What precisely is the teaching act and what is its end goal? Let us take a modern primer on teaching as an example. Doug Lemov’s Teach Like

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The Role of Imagination in Education

Imagination. The word brings so much to mind for us today. If there’s one thing that everybody can agree on for children, it’s the need to help them develop a vivid imagination through school, play, and well… everything they do. Or perhaps, ‘develop a vivid imagination’ is the wrong way of putting it. “Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination,” said Walt Disney. “But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.” So maybe it’s not children who need to develop

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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

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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

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Goal Setting and Habits: Starting the New Year SMARTer

It is the start of 2024 and I return once more to the topic of habits. There is an ancient tradition associating habits with virtues. It was Aristotle, for instance, who wrote that “moral virtue comes about as a result of habit” (Nichomachean Ethics 2:1 or 1103a15-b25, trans. W. D. Ross). At the beginning of each new year it is worthwhile to take stock of the virtues we would most like to cultivate and then set out a course of action for how we plan to grow in that virtue. It takes a certain amount of creativity and advance planning

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New Year’s Resolutions, Goal Setting and Education

The idea of New Year’s resolutions elicits strong reactions from some people. “If you want to change, why wait until the New Year to start?” the cynical say. Others perhaps remember the failure of last year with some measure of shame and regret. Still others are fired up about the success and dream-fulfillment that lie ahead, given their newfound will-power and determination. According to some statistics almost half of American adults participate in New Year’s resolutions, and most relate to improving one’s health (see 19 Surprising New Year’s Resolution Statistics (2024 Updated) (insideoutmastery.com)). Unfortunately, only 9% stick with their resolutions,

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Counsels of the Wise, Part 8: Aiming at the Intermediate or Aristotle’s Moral Virtues

We’ve traveled far in this series on restoring the forgotten goal of prudence or practical wisdom to our educational goals. We established the necessity of prudence alongside moral virtue as constituting the intellectual virtue that accompanies and regulates all the moral virtues by deliberating about what is good or bad for human beings. A Christian and classical education must provide for this instruction in moral wisdom, without which life has no real direction. Prudence thus restores a practical dimension to education that is not utilitarian.  We’ve also explored how the underpinnings of prudence are instilled in the young through practice

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Counsels of the Wise, Part 7: Leadership, Liberal Arts, and Prudence

In the previous article we finally laid out a pedagogy for training students in prudence. While there are many preliminary actions that we can take to sow the seeds of prudence and provide for students’ good instruction from sources of moral wisdom, it is nevertheless true that the full acquisition of practical wisdom awaits a student’s later years. In secondary and collegiate education, then, students should study the ethical dimensions of all subjects and be taught through dialectical and rhetorical means to reason about human goods using biblical moral categories.  If our educational renewal movement consistently graduated students well on

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The Education of the Count of Monte Cristo

What are the proper sources for an educational philosophy? Should educators read only sociological journals and experiment in their classroom for the best results? Or is there something more humane and artistic in the nature of teaching? We have decried the technicism and scientism characteristic of modern education before.  One consequence of these trends is the exclusion of literature and humanities from the broader conversation about education, its goals, methods, and ideals. Charlotte Mason, for one, found novels, fictional literature, and poetry to be a potent source for her educational philosophy. While certainly we can understand the reticence to feature

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The Counsels of the Wise, Part 6: A Pedagogy of Prudence

At this point in our series, we have established prudence or practical wisdom as a Christian and classical goal of education. We have also laid out several paths toward prudence, seeds really, which must be sown in early youth in order to reap the full flowering of practical wisdom in students’ more mature years. Among these seeds are proverbial instruction, good habits, exemplars, discipline and practice. Even with all this we have yet to lay out a specific method for instilling prudence itself. In what sort of thought process does the capacity for prudence consist? To answer this question we

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