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
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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
Continue readingEducating for Resilience in a Coddling Culture
In The Coddling of the American Mind (Random House, 2018), authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt make a forceful critique of the way Americans today go about raising and educating their children. Their point isn’t complicated: parents and teachers, in general, overprotect children from the challenges and rigor of everyday life. As a result of such coddling, the majority of youth today are soft and fragile students, easily perturbed, anxious, and intimidated. The key to raising strong, independent young people, the authors argue, is not to shield boys and girls from these challenges, but instead to allow for situations in
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