Tag: tools of learning

Building Ratio: Training Students to Think and Learn for Themselves

In 1947, medievalist Dorothy Sayers took the podium at Oxford University and delivered a lecture that would launch a referendum on modern methods of education. It took time, to be sure, but from our current vantage point in 2020, there is no doubt that her words left a sizeable imprint on the current educational landscape. The Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) reports the existence of hundreds of Christian, classical schools across the nation, many of which point to Sayers’ lecture as a source for both inspiration and guidance. What did Sayers share that day that elicited such a response

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Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 1: Mapping a Harmony

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” the church father Tertullian skeptically asked. Tertullian was writing at a time in which church leaders were weighing the pros and cons of mining the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition for insights they could utilize in the development of a distinctively Christian philosophy.  Similarly, within the Christian classical school movement, some have asked, “What has Charlotte Mason to do with Dorothy Sayers?” In other words, can the pedagogical insights of the British educator Charlotte Mason be conducive for classical education today? Where is there harmony? Where is there discord? While a full treatment of this

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STEM careers scientist in a lab lost in flow of thought

The Flow of Thought, Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games

There’s a lot of talk these days about the war between STEM and the liberal arts (which we are meant to understand as the humanities generally). Often this gets posed as a trade-off between a utilitarian education—training our future engineers, scientists and programmers—vs. a soft education in human skills and cultural awareness. Given the hype for STEM, defending the value of the humanities (as Martin Luther did, for one) is an important move in the broader education dialogue. And it’s one that’s not very hard to make, when there are articles like this one on how Google was planning to

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