Tag: Charlotte Mason

Rules for Schools?: An Interaction with Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life (Part 3)

I have been interacting with Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life over the past few weeks. This is now the third and final installment. Part 1 looked at habit formation and deliberate practice, while part 2 considered several of Peterson’s rules in conjunction with the idea of discipline. At the heart of Peterson’s book is a concern for truth and meaning. Taken together these have a bearing on our philosophy of education, particularly in what we are trying to produce in the lives of our students. Truth Peterson grounds truth in the biblical conception of the Divine Logos as the creative force behind

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children playing on swing

Rules for Schools?: An Interaction with Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life (Part 2)

Last week I wrote part 1 of my interaction with Jordan Peterson. Here is part 2, grouping several of his 12 rules for life. Discipline is one of the hardest aspects of life as a teacher. Discipline for parents can be quite difficult. But discipline is even harder when you are dealing with other people’s kids. Peterson addresses discipline in his 5th rule, “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.” In this, my second reflection on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, I will dive into discipline. We are adults – for many of us,

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A few classic books illustrating less is more

Less is More: Are Fewers Subjects Better for Schools?

Chris Perrin, over at Inside Classical Ed, suggests that classical schools are offering too many classes. He champions the idea of multum non multa – much not many. Perrin writes, “To study and learn well, humans have learned that it is important to study a few things deeply, even to mastery, rather than to dabble and sample dozens of things.” Here we have a Pareto distribution, there are a few subjects that when learned maximize the entirety of a student’s learning. He points to C. S. Lewis, who as a student predominantly learned the classical authors through his study of

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lightbulb idea with a sky background

The Role of Ideas in Education

Ever the provocateur, Charlotte Mason, the late 19th century British educator, raised the question of the role of ideas in education. After mentioning the importance of ideas in both common life (“I have an idea!”) and the history of philosophy, she castigates the educational establishment of her day for neglecting ideas: “There is but one sphere in which the word idea never occurs, in which the conception of an idea is curiously absent, and that sphere is education! Look at any publisher’s list of school books and you shall find that the books recommended are carefully dessicated, drained of the

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