Tag: wisdom

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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The Classical Notion of Self-Education for Today

In her lecture at Oxford in 1947, Dorothy Sayers remarked, “Is it not the great defect of our education today, a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned, that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.” Here we observe the seedlings of the classical Christian renewal movement: the distinction between training students how to think versus what to think. Sayers’ diagnosis is that schools in her day had prioritized learning subjects over

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Counsels of the Wise, Part 4: Preliminary Instruction in Prudence

How does a person become wise? What are the proper ingredients in an educational paradigm aimed at prudence? Where would we even begin? So much of K-12 education seems to have nothing to do with practical wisdom, as Aristotle defines it. How do we recover the classical goals of wisdom and virtue in earnest, and not simply as a marketing claim?  So far in this series we have had occasion to develop the Christian underpinnings for prudence. “Be wise [phronemoi, prudent] as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16), Jesus tells his disciples, utilizing the same word for prudence that

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Virtue Formation and Rightly Ordered Loves

The cultivation of virtue is unarguably a core objective in the classical vision for education. In contrast to knowledge acquisition or skills mastery, growing virtue in our students is about strengthening their internal moral structure. It is fundamentally a project of formation, changing a person for the good in pursuit of it. Interestingly, Augustine of Hippo, the great medieval theologian, observed that the lives we live and the things we love are inextricably linked. What we love impacts if, and how, we embody the virtues. In this way, seeking to live a virtuous life is both a moral enterprise and an

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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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Love the Lord Your God With All Your Mind

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”  And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”  Luke 10:25-28 ESV What does it mean to love God? How are we to

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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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Learning Gratitude: A Pathway to a Good Life

Among the greatest characters created by Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings is the noble prince Faramir. He is the younger brother of the fallen Boromir and is characterized by wisdom and judgment. When we first meet Faramir in the forests of Ithilien, he chances upon the hobbits Frodo and Sam who have already journeyed far on their quest to destroy the One Ring. The character of Faramir is demonstrated in his resistance to the temptation of the ring. The downfall of Boromir had been his desire to possess the One Ring. Having brought the hobbits to the secret

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