Tag: wisdom
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Handwork: Fostering Excellence Through the Habit of Creating
Guest post by Joleen Steel, Classical Christian Educator and Director of Camping Stick Kids We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. Aristotle What do you find yourself repeatedly doing? In this digital world, it is easy to immerse ourselves in the repetition of scrolling through social media…
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Work, Toil, and the Quest for Academic Rigor
American educational culture is obsessed with the idea of academic rigor. It shows up on marketing materials, core value statements, and school comparison charts. Rigor has become the gold standard of education, separating the wheat from the chaff and the excellent from the mediocre. Public schools, private schools, classical schools, progressive schools–they all claim academic…
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20 Quotable Quotes from the First Half of 2020 Educational Renaissance
At the end of 2019 we shared a series of memorable maxims from that year’s blog articles. As we transition toward the next half of 2020, we thought we’d do something similar and share 20 Quotable Quotes from Educational Renaissance articles January through June. These are longer block quotes that will whet your appetite for…
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Class of 2020: The Next Greatest Generation
The class of 2020 has felt the full force of the disruption caused by the Coronavirus. Graduation ceremonies have been cancelled, postponed or held virtually online. Nothing about the spring of senior year went according to plan for the class of 2020. It has been described as catastrophic and traumatic by students, parents and teachers.…
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“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 3: Check for Understanding
It’s happened to every teacher I’ve ever met. You put together a great lesson, one that you are sure will engage the attention of your students and draw them in to explore some new concept or idea. After teaching the lesson and providing opportunities for students to engage, you confidently pass out the exit slip,…
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The Problem of Technicism in Conventional Education
Technicism is not simply an over-fascination with technology as a means of stimulating learning out of students, though that problem plagues conventional education as well. Instead, I use the term ‘technicism’ to refer to a broader ideological approach to education that has become captivated by quantitative measurements and the economic evaluation of success. In technicism…
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Cultivating a Community: Wisdom for Parents Educating at Home Amidst the Present Crisis
In the last few weeks, life has changed dramatically for families across the globe. For families living in some parts of the United States, the most predictable elements of their busy schedules—the nine-to-five work day, daily school routine, church commitments, soccer practice, piano lessons—have vanished from the calendar. For perhaps the first time since the…
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The Flow of Thought, Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers
In my last article, The Flow of Thought, Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom, I made a case for the value of re-envisioning natural science as philosophy. While science might never come to mind today when philosophy is discussed, this was not always the case. The association of Solomon with the type…
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The Flow of Thought, Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom
In this series we’ve been finding arguments for a classical education from the unlikely realm of positive psychology, particularly Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s classic Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. After connecting the concept of flow with Aristotle’s link between virtue or excellence and eudaimonia (happiness or flourishing), we’ve been racing through aspects of the liberal arts…
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The Search for Happiness, Part 2: The Way of Wisdom
In my previous blog, I examined how modern research, particularly through the avenue of positive psychology, confirms some of Aristotle’s insights about human beings and the well-lived life. In particular, I observed that author Shawn Achor’s definition of happiness as “the joy of striving after our potential” isn’t that far afield from Aristotelian virtue theory. …