Tag: liberal arts

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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Why Classical Education Needs a Theology of Wisdom: A Foundation for Wise Integration in the Modern World

The modern world of education is characterized by the opposites of integration: isolation and reductionism. Colin Gunton, in the 1992 Bampton Lectures at Cambridge, entitled The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, uses the terms, “disengagement” and “fragmentation” to describe the predicament of modernity. The term “disengagement” he attributes to Charles Taylor, and he describes “fragmentation” by stating “that the cultural disarray that is so marked a feature of our times derives from our failure to integrate or combine the different objects of human thought and activity: in brief, science, morals and art”

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The Drive to Learn: Three Views on the Desire for Knowledge

What is the purpose of knowledge? What is its draw? What drives us to learn and pursue knowledge about God, the world, and ourselves? Most educators agree that pursuing knowledge is a primary goal of education. But views diverge soon after, specifically when questions about the purpose of knowledge emerge as well as what fields of knowledge to pursue.  As I have begun working on my first book about the craft of teaching, this question has become of unique interest to me. In particular, as I have been reading Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 3.0, I have been struck

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Counsels of the Wise, Part 3: The Practical Nature of Prudence

In this series we are recovering several lost goals of education by exploring Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as replacement learning objectives for Bloom’s taxonomy. Prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) is one such lost goal, which is endorsed by the biblical book of Proverbs and the New Testament, even if Aristotle’s exact terminology is not adhered to. The classical tradition too aimed at moral formation, including moral reasoning or normative inquiry as a primary goal. (See Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence.) At the same time, we noted in the last article that our recovery movement has at

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Exploring Our Educational Ideals: Following along Gulliver’s Travels

Since its publication in 1726, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift has been a popular read both for its initial audience as well as for generations of readers since. In my most recent reading of this travelog with our Enlightenment Humanities class at Clapham School, I was struck by Swift’s thoughts on education. Excavating the claim he is making about education can be difficult as the book is an overt satire of English literature and society. Yet, the point he is making can stimulate our thinking about education today, particularly as we think about the values inherent in our educational renewal

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“Education is a Life”: Igniting a Love for Learning in the Classroom

“’Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life’––is perhaps the most complete and adequate definition of education we possess. It is a great thing to have said it; and our wiser posterity may see in that ‘profound and exquisite remark’ the fruition of a lifetime of critical effort (Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children, p. 33). In this series, I have been exploring Charlotte Mason’s notion that education should be approached through a trifold lens of atmosphere, discipline, and life. Stemming from her view of children as persons, Mason argues that we are limited to three and only three tools to

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The Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence

We began this series with a proposal to replace Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives with Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues. While Bloom and his fellow university examiners aimed to create clarity in teaching goals through a common language, their taxonomy of cognitive domain objectives may have done more harm than good. In rejecting the traditional paradigm of the liberal arts and sciences, they privileged the bare intellect and isolated acts of the mind as if they were the whole of education.  When we compare these bite-sized pieces of “analysis” and “comprehension” to the artistry of grammar and rhetoric, for instance, we

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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry

In this series on apprenticeship in the arts we have laid out a vision for the role of the arts in a fully orbed classical Christian education. We began by situating artistry or craftsmanship within a neo-Aristotelian and distinctly Christian purpose of education: namely, the cultivation of moral, intellectual, and spiritual virtues. Then we explored the analogy between artistry and morality through the basis in habit development, including in our purview the revolution in neurobiology regarding the importance of myelin. We saw that some types of elite performance have more established pathways to excellence, allowing for deliberate practice, while moral

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To Save a Civilization, Part 1: Conditions for a Decline

Why did Rome fall? In our present age, this question may yield insights that extend beyond historical inquiry. Rome, in the ancient world, was not simply another European city. It represented the pinnacle of western civilization and the magnetic core of order. Rome embodied itself as both the trustee of culture and the key to its future. When plagues spread and the economy struggled, no serious matter. One could count on the longevity of Rome to endure. You can imagine the horror, then, on that cold winter day when, Alaric, King of the Visigoths, crossed the Rhine and sacked “the

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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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