Tag: Plato

The Soul of Education, Part 2: Plato’s Immortal and Tripartite Soul

In the introduction to this series, we explained how our view of the soul, or nature of a human being, will necessarily impact our practice of education. In our modern world we are bombarded by so many competing views of the soul, both implicit and explicit, that we operate in a confused mess. From behaviorism to Buddhism, ancient Greek ideas to Freud and Descartes, neuroplasticity and the prefrontal cortex, our complex picture of ourselves is all jumbled up, like various types of toys all thrown together in the same bin. This series may not be able to answer all the

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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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Practicing Happiness: Ancient Wisdom for Our Modern World

The pursuit of happiness is one of three rights originally drafted by Thomas Jefferson in the “Declaration of Independence.” These “unalienable rights” are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It is an odd turn of phrase, but one that has a profound backdrop to it, one which we have perhaps lost today. It is likely that Jefferson borrowed the three rights from John Locke. Almost a century prior to the American declaration, the English philosopher had written in Two Treatises on Government that government existed to protect a person’s “life, liberty and estate.” By estate, Locke surely meant property

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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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Expanding Narration’s History in the late Middle Ages: Bernard of Chartres from John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon

This is the third blog article expanding the short history of narration I laid out a year ago. In the last two I expanded my treatment of John Amos Comenius to engage in detail with the passages from The Great Didactic and the Analytical Didactic that recommend activities that Charlotte Mason would have called narration. As I have searched for teaching practices in the classical tradition, I have tried to be fairly precise in what would qualify as “narration”. In my book A Classical Guide to Narration I defined “narration” as a long-form imitative response to content that a teacher

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Educating in Desire for the Kingdom

In the Christian, classical renewal movement we often draw the distinction between an education focused on information and an education focused on formation. Education in information focuses on the dissemination of facts, critical thinking skills, and beefing up the intellect, while education for formation prioritizes the process of developing a certain type of person. Both information and formation are important, of course, so which is right?  Well, that depends on what humans essentially are. If humans are, at core, cognitive creatures, then it makes sense to focus exclusively on the intellect. This was the predominant view of modernism. Influenced by

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The Value of Objective Value: C. S. Lewis on Renewing Education

No matter what age you or your children are, I highly recommend The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis for summer reading. They are lighthearted yet full of depth. I am reading aloud The Silver Chair, the fourth book in the seven-book series. For those who know the general contours of the series, this book sees Eustace Scrubb return to Narnia accompanied by his classmate Jill Pole. It is a rescue mission, attempting to free Prince Rilian from the clutches of the Emerald Witch. I am reading it aloud with my son this summer. I was struck on this

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Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

In my last article we explored the analogy between Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of artistry or craftsmanship (Greek: techne) and moral virtue, taking our cue from the Nicomachean Ethics book II. Along the way we discovered the foundation for these two types of excellence in habit development or the neural networks of the brain. Excellence, according to Aristotle, comes by the type of practice or exercise that works along the lines of nature. The modern Copernican revolution of neurobiology confirms this thesis by revealing the role of myelin, a white fatty substance that is wrapped around neural circuits that fire together.

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Life in Plato’s Republic, Part 2: Building the Just City

“Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important place of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give it.” Plato, Republic, Book II Welcome back to my series on Plato’s Republic! As I shared in my first article, I’m producing this series for two reasons. First, I want to make Plato more accessible to everyone. Part of preserving the western intellectual tradition, or at least, not losing it, entails cracking open the

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Life in Plato’s Republic, Part 1: Is Justice Worth it?

“Whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, we are all more or less Platonists. Even if we reject Plato’s conclusions, our views are shaped by the way in which he stated his problems.”1  In today’s article, I begin a new series on Plato’s Republic. I’ve been wanting to start this project for some time now for two reasons.  First, I want to make Plato more accessible for everyone. The philosopher is a seminal figure in the history of ideas. Without his writings, it is difficult to know where western civilization would be today. In particular,

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