As I wrap up this series of reviews, we turn to Students as Persons: Charlotte Mason on Personalism and Relational Liberal Education by Deani Van Pelt and Jen Spencer. One of the key tenets of Mason’s pedagogy is the statement that “children are persons.” This book delves deeply into this foundational philosophical concept by looking at personalist theory and differentiating personhood from individualism. This is an important book that covers a lot of ground in just over 60 pages.

Deani Van Pelt has been a leading voice in Charlotte Mason education, championing school choice in Canada and adding to our knowledge of Charlotte Mason through her research. The is the current board chair for the Charlotte Mason Institute and is Scholar-in-Residence in Charlotte Mason Studies, University of Cumbria, England. Van Pelt is not only the series editor of the 18 monographs in the Centenary Series, this book is one of two volumes she has had a hand in writing in the series. Co-author Jen Spencer has likewise been a leader within the Charlotte Mason movement, having led study groups and founding a school. Her work includes the digitization of Mason archives at the Armitt Museum in Ambleside, England as well as serving as the program director for the Alveary, a curriculum created by the Charlotte Mason Institute. Spencer was recently appointed as a Visiting Research Fellow in Charlotte Mason Studies at the University of Cumbria, Ambleside.

Situating Personhood

It can be difficult to differentiate Mason’s concept of personhood when there are many theories about childhood and learning that surround the work of Mason. A number of key figures and concepts are therefore helpfully presented at the outset of Students as Persons to establish what exactly personhood is and is not. Blank-slate theory as set forth by John Locke views the child as an empty vessel to be filled. Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed in the inherent goodness of the child, meaning that the child should be left untampered. Frederick Froebel viewed the child like a plant to be tended in a Kindergarten. John Dewey viewed education as a socializing process making them fit for democratic society. Maria Montessori considered that children are individuals “who should be left alone to explore specially created apparatus so that their creativity could flourish” (14). Beyond these individual theorists, the industrialists of North America viewed children as a work force and learning as training for a role in the industrial system. In Mason’s own Victorian context, children were viewed as “personal property, better seen than heard” (14).

Through this broad set of ideas, Mason’s statement “children are persons” takes a very different direction. Originally delivered through a series of evening “Lectures to Ladies” in Bradford, England, the ideas Mason set forth were a philosophical alternative to a host of insufficient views of the child. Even more today, this idea has found resonance:

“When education increasingly places emphasis on credentials to be attained and employment to be secured, thoughtful, searching parents, teachers and educational leaders are finding resonance with educational ideas that focus on the child’s whole wellbeing” (Students as Persons 14-15).

The wellbeing of the child is a grand vision that sets forth an educational enterprise that raises up the child “not only for a useful life but also for learning how to live this life in all its fullness” (15).

The Contours of Personhood

Van Pelt and Spencer ground Mason’s concept of personhood in her career working with children. She set forth her thoughts in the Bradford lectures “having had nearly a quarter-century to observe children and work out her thoughts about teaching and learning” (16). It is interesting to note that Mason’s career as a teacher and then as an educational philosopher occurred between that of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) and Maria Montessori (1870-1952). In the philosophies of both these figures, children were viewed as requiring special treatment through the use of carefully developed learning tools and environments. However, for Mason, she took the view that “children are not that different from adults and do not need for everything to be specially organized for them” (17). This conception of the child garners an amount of respect toward the child that finds what the authors describe as a “middle way between ‘despising’ children and worshipping them” (18). In other words, our view of children can tend towards an inaccurate view of the child when we do not grant them the respect of personhood due to them.

The British industrial revolution brought children into the workplace, which meant that society was well prepared to afford them the responsibilities of adulthood but had not really granted them their rights as children. Mason’s concept of personhood was connected to the rights of children in her third book School Education. These rights called for children to enjoy the freedoms of childhood, including the rights “to play freely, to work by their own initiative, to choose their own friends, to decide how they would spend their own money, and to form their own opinions” (18). Issuing these rights within the Victorian milieu was something of a crusade for Mason and the PNEU. However, unlike the child-centric models of education proposed by figures such as Rousseau and Montessori, Mason proposed that there is a burden of responsibility upon parents and teachers to “instruct the child’s conscience and help him to train his will and consider ideas carefully, so that he may grow to live with intention and continually work towards becoming the best version of himself as he conceived is” (19-20).

Considered in this way, the personhood of the child assumes that the child has their own will that must be given strength to choose what is good and right. There is a sense that the child will be self-directed and ought to have a diet of living ideas with which to populate a vision of what it means to live a good life.

Personhood Today

The study of personhood today interacts with insights gained from sociology, philosophy and theology. Van Pelt and Spencer bring to bear a number of recent authors to spell out how personhood has developed in our contemporary setting in ways that are consistent with Mason’s original expression of personhood.

They begin by drawing up on the work of Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, in his 2010 publication What is a Person? Amongst several points worth consideration, Smith concurs that personhood is on full display from the start of life:

“Persons do not emerge out of capacities and bodies at some chronologically delayed time, only after some crucial development has taken place. Persons exist at the start of life and are their own agents of development and emergent being across their entire life course” (Smith 457, quoted in Van Pelt and Spencer 29).

This agency on the part of the child is something worthy of respect, even though we as grown ups have a burden of responsibility to nourish and train the young person. Personhood also entails a sense of purpose “to develop and sustain our own incommunicable selves in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the nonpersonal world” (Smith 85, emphasis added by Van Pelt and Spencer 30). This is consistent with Mason’s concept of the science of relationship whereby the child develops three kinds of knowledge—knowledge of God, knowledge of man, and knowledge of the universe.

Based on this understanding of personhood, in distinction from individualism, our authors explain the implications of what this means pedagogically.

“Indeed, it is not to liberal individualism that Mason turns for her anthropology but to relational personhood. Had she rooted her anthropology in the child as individual rather than the child as person, child-centeredness could become a concept leading to license rather than to liberty of the child. It would also have brushed over the relational nature embedded in personhood and it sets one up at best as autonomous and at worst as isolated, free-floating, untethered, and alone” (32).

Thus, the child is a responsible agent learning how to relate as a person with other persons, instead of somehow trying to get off the grid, so to speak, of dependence on other individuals.

Personhood, then, is distinct from individualism, but it is also distinct from collectivism. For this distinction, our authors turn to the philosopher Juan Manuel Burgos, professor at the University of San Pablo in Madrid, in his 2018 publication An Introduction to Personalism. The person, according to Burgos, is a “subsistent and autonomous but essentially social being” (Burgos 32, quoted in Van Pelt and Spencer 34). Burgos goes on to differentiate personalism from that of collectivism and individualism:

“It was distinguished and separated from the egocentric individual by stressing the moral obligation to serve others and the community, but it did not fall into the collectivist orbit because, due to his intrinsic dignity, the person possesses an absolute and noninterchangeable value and a series of inalienable rights” (Burgos 32).

In this understanding of personalism, each person is able to experience true freedom while also maintaining a sense of connection to others that is morally responsible.

Grounding these sociological and philosophical insights is the theological concept of the divine image. Van Pelt and Spencer bring alongside the aforementioned Smith the bioethicist John Kilner, founding director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, in his 2015 publication Dignity and Destiny. Human dignity stems from God’s creation of humanity in his own image (Genesis 1:26-27). For Kilner, the imago dei, or being created in the image of God “has played a significant role historically in freeing people from the ravages of need and oppression” (Kilner 7, quoted in Van Pelt and Spencer 36). This is the central claim of the theist ground for human dignity. Kilner also notes how oppression and exploitation stem from what he “would call a non-biblical understanding of God’s image” (Van Pelt and Spencer 37).

There is a sacredness to human personhood based on the special relationship all humans have with their Creator. Instead of the autonomous individual or collective humanity, personhood implies the value and dignity of every human being while also promoting the ability people have to relate to their Creator.

Personhood and Self-education

Mason’s view of the personhood of the child is foundational to a constructivist approach to learning, according to Van Pelt and Spencer. To put it simply, constructivist theory posits that the learner actively builds knowledge through their own experience of and interaction with information. John Mays in his 2022 article “Thoughts on Teaching” pits constructivism against essentialism, which helpfully provides categories for us to consider. In essentialism, there is a body of core knowledge and skills delivered to the learner by the teacher. Mays, while spelling out the differences, finds that these philosophies of learning are a false dichotomy. One of the benefits of Van Pelt and Spencer’s book is a fuller understanding of this central debate in education. As classical education untethers itself from conventional education to promote a love of learning, there is a need to engage the learner in ways that Mason directly connects to the dignity and agency of the learner.

The constructivist ideal is best expressed by Mason in her final volume, Towards a Philosophy of Education, where she wrote, “The children, not the teachers, are the responsible persons; they do the work by self-effort” (241). So even someone committed to a teacher-centric approach should recognize that the dissemination of information only goes out into the blank void unless a responsible and motivated learner is there to capture what is sent. Van Pelt and Spencer compare Mason’s constructivism to that of other models. In particular, they review the cognitive constructivism of Jean Piaget, the social constructivism of Lev Vygotsky, and the radical constructivism of Ernst von Glasersfield. We can see, therefore, that the categories are fairly nuanced. Our authors critically examine these three models and conclude that Mason’s “aligns most comfortably among the social constructivists” (46). In this social constructivist model, children learn “by interacting with others, with our culture, and with our society” (45). Again, the personhood of the child in this sense is responsibly related to others, not as an autonomous individual nor as an indiscriminate part of a collective.

An important point made by Van Pelt and Spencer is that knowledge is made personal by each learner. When the personhood of the child is honored as something sacred, then the very form of our assessment must account for the personal. For instance, when listening to or reading through students narrations, we are looking not simply for an accurate record of what the author has said. We are also accounting for the ways in which the child has personally assimilated this knowledge.

“Factual accuracy was not the sole important thing about assessment to Mason. It was equally important to her that each child had engaged with people, places, and ideas as best they could and according to their personhood. In this way, each student’s response contained originality” (49).

Not the both-and within this statement. It is important for students to have an accurate understanding of the information that they have assimilated. But for those of us who deem it important for this education to be formative, we must also take into account how knowledge has shaped character, moral reasoning, spiritual insight, and human understanding.

In all, I found this book to be a fine representation of research into Charlotte Mason. It furthers our understanding of her philosophy by bringing to bear good exemplars of modern thinkers so that we can gain insight into how her methods have relevance and utility today. I could see many benefitting from the thoughtful and engaging prose in this volume, even though some of the ideas are challenging to grapple with. Thankfully, Van Pelt and Spencer have done most of the heavy lifting, so that we as readers can wrap our mind around so many of the key elements of Mason’s philosophy surrounding the personhood of children.

The post The Personhood of the Child: Book Review of Deani Van Pelt and Jen Spencer’s Students as Persons appeared first on .

The next volume is one that is perhaps my favorite in the series. In Field Notebooks and Natural History Journals: Cornerstone of Outdoor Learning, Lois Mansfield makes the case for the pedagogical importance of field notebooks and nature study within Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education. Lois Mansfield is Professor of Upland Landscapes at the University of Cumbria in Ambleside, England as well as Director of the Center for National Parks and Protected Areas. She argues that field work not only helps children learn about how to care for creation, but that they also cultivate observational skills that transfer easily to other domains of knowledge.

Nature study is a hallmark subject in a Charlotte Mason education, and at times nature study has been misunderstood. Mansfield clarifies many of the cognitive skills that are developed through the use of field notebooks in nature study, helping us better situate this subject within the wider curriculum. In addition to clarifying the role of nature study with Charlotte Mason’s educational vision, I think this book also helps classical educators understand the role of natural history within the liberal arts tradition.

Field Notebooks in the History of Science

Mansfield situates field notebooks within the development of scientific inquiry. She notes how “there has been a shift from biological field observations to laboratory work, modelling, and theoretical investigation” which has coincided with the decline of the study of natural history (18). We can picture scholars with notebooks in hand traversing diverse landscapes taking notes and sketching specimens. This is a tradition that goes all the way back to the ancient world, with figures such as Herodotus, Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder contributing to our knowledge of the natural world (20-21). Collectors of plant and animal specimens in the Victorian era were celebrated for adding knowledge of new worlds (21).

Much of the development of medical knowledge comes from the field observations of generations of scholars, particularly in the Middle Ages in both Europe and the Middle East (21-22). We can see the connection between field observations and the development of the scientific method during the Enlightenment with figures such as Francis Bacon and Carl Linneaus codifying and systematizing the domain of scientific knowledge. Mansfield summarizes the work of natural historians:

“Trained naturalists were able to employ empirical observation through the scientific method along with accurate record-keeping through written accounts and illustration in notebooks and journals.” (24-25)

It seems like something was lost in the transition to laboratory and theoretical work that has diminished not only an exciting arena of learning, but also a vital connection with the outdoor world that ought to be reconsidered by educators today.

Charlotte Mason’s Use of Field Notebooks

The students who attended the Charlotte Mason’s House of Education in Ambleside were required to keep a field notebook, where they recorded observations about the surrounding landscape. Mansfield gives us a sense of the development of skills at the training school:

“They recorded anything and everything related to the natural world, be it geology, landform, landscape, plants, animals, insects, or other things. Many notebooks were richly illustrated with brush drawings using watercolours to support their written observations, but like all student work, content started slowly and developed over the two years of their training.” (25)

These notebooks were assessed by a panel of external examiners, and certificates were awarded for satisfactory completion of the notebooks. These inspectors would take the students on a yearly nature walk, providing in-depth instruction, with the result that entries were lengthier and more detailed as a consequence (27). This gives the impression that the field notebooks were not simply a hoop to jump through on the journey to certification, but a genuine learning exercise cultivating a rich connection to nature that left an indelible mark in the lives of these future teachers, who themselves would teach children to use field notebooks.

Deep Learning and Field Notebooks

One might think that nature study is a lighter subject, something along the lines of a free play or recess. Mansfield demonstrates that in fact nature study is a mean to deep learning and the development of key skills. She writes:

“These notebooks operated at a number of levels through the application of different learning styles in a complex interrelationship of consecutive, synchronous, and asynchronous approach, which are of value today.” (30)

One of the learning styles Mansfield highlights is the domain of kinesthetic learning. Alongside visual, auditory and reading/writing, kinesthetic learning provides a more physical engagement in learning. In the creation of field notebooks whilst out in nature, students are learning and processing in ways that are unavailable in the classroom or lab.

“They [field notebooks] were, in point of fact, a form of embodied cognition, where all senses and motor skills were employed to experience and learn about natural history to make sense of our perceptions, which can contribute to memorisation abilities.” (30)

The kinesthetic “embodied cognition” connects to experiential learning where students encounter items in their natural setting and transform this experience through observation, conceptualization and experimentation. (33-34) Mansfield demonstrates that the student who asks “Here is a new insect I do not recognize; how do I identify it?” (32) is processing information is a way that utilizes these experiential learning skills in new and ever-changing natural settings.

Through observation and recording, Mansfield identifies how students are engaged in reflexive learning. This differs from reflective learning, where a student “analyzes what has happened.” With reflexive learning, the students “automatically self-assesses and reacts to synchronous circumstances.” (35) In other words, the child is placed in a natural setting where they encounter something in real time and use a variety of thinking skills to interact with something right in front of them.

This deep learning occurs via processes that carry a low cognitive load. Field experiences and the keeping of a field notebook draws upon previous learning by providing students with models and diagrams that enable the identification of specimens in such a way as to reduce cognitive load. (36-38) (Cognitive load theory is something I plan to delve into in a future article to further situate the concepts here within the whole curriculum.)

Developing Observational Skills

One of the distinct advantages of field work and the keeping of a field notebook is the efficient development of observational skills. Mansfield sees this as a hallmark of field notebooks within Mason’s methods. Nature notebooks “formed a cornerstone for out of door life for children and arguably are the fundamental building block to gaining scientific knowledge to understand the world.” (38)

Mansfield clarifies that observation is not merely looking at something. Instead, one applies knowledge and reflexive thinking to understand what one is looking at. She differentiates how a child observes when compared to a trained botanist:

“[Expert botanists] collect observations about various morphological structures and compare it to other plants where they have seen similar diagnostic features, and are able to identify it drawing on their a priori (previously known) knowledge of taxonomy, plant morphology, and ecological context. Children, on the other hand, do not have this prior knowledge to draw upon, so their observations focus on surface features in front of their eyes to start, until they begin to build associated knowledge.” (39)

This comparison between novice and expert helps us to see where we as teachers provide coaching and training to help develop observational skills. Consider how a child that is given lessons in the basic leaf shapes, bark textures, branch patterns of trees will be able to use this knowledge in their observations of trees. In their field notebooks, we would be able to track growing observational skills as they use these identifying characteristics to specify what it is they are seeing when out in nature.

Mansfield includes a set of sample student work from one of Mason’s students in their nature notebook entries:

“April 23^rd On climbing up near Dungeon Ghyll we saw several snails amongst the bracken and rocks.”

“Dec 27^th There were more than a dozen Peewits [Vanellus vanellus] collected together in the free wide open space of a field. In flight the wings are short and rounded at the ends, they flap slowly and heavily. A Peewit flied forward for a few yards, then turns suddenly and seems to tumble right down almost to the ground, then another turn and he is flying close to the ground, or upwards to descend again suddenly.”

Not only did the entry in the notebook become lengthier, we see more specificity in the second entry, with the student using the flight pattern of the bird to confirm her identification of this species.

Contemporary Field Notebook Methods

When it comes to using field notebooks today, there are a few different methods that Mansfield shares. She highlights the work of John Muir Laws (55-56), who has written a number of guides teaching nature journaling. His work promotes a joyful and artistic approach to field work, encouraging children to illustrate, write and measure the natural world around them. For those wanting an entry-level guide, his 2016 publication, The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling is a great place to begin. Teachers might like his How to Teach Nature Journaling (2020), co-written with Emilie Lygren.

Next Mansfield discusses the Grinnell method (56-57), named after the biologist Joseph Grinnell. This is the method used by universities and museums, which is a more technical and standardized procedure for keeping a field notebook. It may be that this method due to its rigorous standard is best learned by advanced students. High schoolers going into fields such as geography, geology, environmental sciences and ecology may find it useful to learn the Grinnell method. Yet, even with a foundation in basic approaches to field notebooks will establish a good foundation for the skills of observation and data collection.

Field Notebooks in the Classical Tradition

Hopefully by reviewing this book, we who are part of the classical renewal movement will gain an appreciation for the role field notebooks played within the liberal arts tradition. From the ancient world through the middle ages and even into the post-Enlightenment era, field notebooks were the means by which great minds interacted with the natural world. Teaching students to use this tool connects them to a rich tradition of inquiry and creative engagement with creation. Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain call for poetic knowledge in the natural sciences.

“Thus, natural philosophy values poetic insight, intuition, and imagination in addition to rational demonstration. This approach interweaves the objective and subjective into a transcendent unity. It also acknowledges that our understanding of an object, while true, never exhausts the intelligibility of the object. A foundation in the seven liberal arts provides the common reason that is required to adjudicate the truth of arguments and justify or demonstrate the claims of reason. Natural philosophy offers students today a critical opportunity to hone their arts of reason in discussions of the natural world. When all the arts are employed, natural philosophy teaches students to think properly and promotes true wisdom.” (Clark and Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition, 114)

What this amounts to is an engagement with the natural world that integrates the imagination and emotions. This harkens back to the work of James Taylor’s Poetic Knowledge who calls for a non-analytic approach to education. We do not need to necessarily adopt an anti-analytic approach to gain value from what might best be described as a hand-on pathway to the mind. In fact, the poetic knowledge available through a rich and varied field notebook containing ample personal encounters with the natural world (full of illustrations, quotations of literature, emotional responses, spontaneous expressions of praise to God for his creation, etc.) comes alongside a highly analytical approach to categorizing, measuring and identifying objects. This is truly the classical foundation for the natural sciences.

And so I highly recommend this book as a means to explore the implementation or refinement of a program at your school or homeschool that utilizes field notebooks in nature study or science. Mansfield provides a deep understanding of the key role field notebooks played in the history of natural philosophy while also providing concrete examples of what these might look like for younger and older children.

Watch an in-depth training session by Jason Barney on how to use the teaching tool of the apprenticeship lesson plan. Learn how to use a time-tested approach to coaching students in the acquisition of a new skill.

Gain practical skills to help your students develop mastery of a process that can be replicated, whether solving a problem, performing a task, or applying one of the liberal arts. You will have the opportunity to ask questions as you aim to implement the apprenticeship lesson plan.

The post The Study of Nature: Book Review of Lois Mansfield’s Field Notebooks and Natural History Journals appeared first on .

Next up is a volume written by Deani Van Pelt and Camille Malucci entitled Charlotte Mason’s Great Recognition: A Scheme of Magnificent Unity. Mason describes in her book Parents and Children her trip to Florence where she encountered the frescoes of the Spanish Chapel in the basilica Santa Maria Novella. This event and its significance are the subject of this monograph. In roughly 70 pages, this addition to the Centenary Series provides ample information and insight into a key moment in the development of Mason’s philosophy of education.

Deani Van Pelt has been a leading voice in Charlotte Mason education, championing school choice in Canada and adding to our knowledge of Charlotte Mason through her research. The is the current board chair for the Charlotte Mason Institute and is Scholar-in-Residence in Charlotte Mason Studies, University of Cumbria, England. Van Pelt is not only the series editor of the 18 monographs in the Centenary Series, this book is one of two volumes she has had a hand in writing in the series. Co-author Camille Malucci resides in Williamsburg, Virginia and is a homeschooling mother of six. She is not only a Charlotte Mason practitioner, but also a student of her philosophy with a particular interest in the great recognition.

Visit to Florence in 1893

We have all felt the need for a holiday when after a time of great enterprise the body simply needs to be reenergized. The authors chronicle how Mason had been building a number of institutions such as the Parents’ National Education Union (PNEU) and the House of Education in Ambleside. In 1890 the PNEU began publishing The Parents’ Review, and the Springfield property opened in 1892. Such monumental efforts took their toll on Mason:

“The House of Education opened at Springfield, Ambleside, UK, in January of 1892 with four students, and this was also the year that she completed the last of her six geography volumes. Then, in early 1893 a period of illness began.” (18)

A three-month trip to Italy was therefore undertaken with her friend Julia Firth, who had recently begun to give Saturday morning talks at the House of Education. John Ruskin, whom Firth knew personally, had recently published a series of travel guides, directing readers to take in the great cultural artifacts on their visits to places such as Venice, Amiens and Florence. It was his Mornings in Florence (1875) that Mason and Firth used as they explored Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

The authors capture how this visit to Florence coincided with events in Mason’s life that made the visit to the Spanish Chapel such a poignant moment for her, especially as regards the ongoing development of her educational philosophy.

“Thus, the circumstances surrounding Mason’s standing in the Spanish Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Italy were probably characterized by a growing passion for picture study, a deep emotional ache, the satisfying exhaustion of establishing multiple institutions, and the imminent responsibility of maintaining and growing them.” (18-19)

It stands out that the methods deployed in Mason’s pedagogy, and in particular here we can focus on picture study, were not deemed only fit for children. She herself practiced these methods alongside children and teachers. Living ideas, at whatever age or stage of life we might access them, are a means to deep and meaningful insights into life. And this is exactly what Mason found as she focused her attention to the artwork contained within the Spanish Chapel.

The Frescos of Santa Maria Novella

As the authors trace the steps of Mason accompanied by Firth, there are several points they draw out that help us to see why exactly the frescos of the Spanish Chapel were so important to Mason’s educational philosophy. First, the Dominican order that commissioned the paintings were founded with a mission that emphasized education and study. These paintings were first and foremost inspired by this mission and therefore served as a means of inspiration and contemplation for the order. “As it was a room mostly reserved for the order, the paintings commissioned within it were aimed to remind the brothers not only about the story of Christ, but also the special mission of the Dominicans to bring Christ’s teachings to the people through education and preaching in the common tongue.” (19) There is an educational rationale behind the paintings’ provenance, a rationale that would immediately resonate with Mason.

A second important philosophical point centers on St. Thomas Aquinas. As a leading scholar and theological amongst the Dominican order early in its history, the frescos play out a philosophical point made by Aquinas in his work On the Unity of the Intellect, Against the Averroists. The ideas of Averroes (1126-1198) had spread in Western Europe and had promoted an anti-Christian dualism. The authors explain the significance of the Thomistic argument for both faith and reason working together.

“His argument for faith and reason being gifts from a good God, meant to work together for the good of man, would be conclusive and indisputable. He wrote that God wrote two books: the Book of Creation, available to all, and the Book of Scripture, available to those willing to accept divine revelation. This was a unified vision of knowledge and its appropriate uses.” (23)

The unified vision of knowledge would have a profound impact upon Mason’s thinking that she call “the great recognition.” We shall see that this is one of the driving forces in her epistemological statement regarding the “science of relation” or the educational philosophy that all areas of knowledge are related to one another.

A third point draws upon the schema portrayed by the artist Andrea di Buonaiuto. Virtually every surface is covered with paintings organized around the principle of the unity of knowledge that emanates from the mind of God and points back to God. The authors walk us through the four walls and vaulted ceilings following the steps of Mason and Firth with quotes from Ruskin’s guide—north, east, south and then west. The western wall is the culmination of the theological and philosophical expression represented on the walls. The eyes begin at the point of the vault where the Holy Spirit descends upon Mary and the apostles, beneath whom the devout of every nation are gathered (29).

The combined frescoes—The Descent of the Holy Sprit in the vault above the west wall and The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas on the west wall—make a theological statement in a highly organizes manner, as ranks upon ranks of individuals cascade down the wall. The authors devote attention to each grouping, particularly those on the west wall. The theological and cardinal virtues (31-33) fly above the seated Aquinas (33-34), who is flanked on either side by biblical figures (34-36). Bowing at Aquinas’s feet are three heretics whose errors are refuted by the teachings of the church (36). Below the biblical figures are two sets of seven thrones upon which are seated figures representing the seven sacred sciences and the seven natural sciences (36-38). Below these allegorical figures are historical individuals associated with each science. There is a handy appendix with a table of all the figures in the fresco (68-70).

We have rushed through some very interesting detail to arrive at one of the main points the authors dwell on having to do with the seven liberal arts. Among the important points made by the authors are that, working from the outside in, the trivium is listed as grammar, rhetoric and then logic. They write:

“Note that the fresco does not list Rhetoric, the ability to speak and persuade, as the third aspect of the trivium, as do other classical versions of the trivium. It is speaking that leads to clarity of thought. One wonder: Is this another reason for Mason prioritizing oracy and narration in her educational philosophy?” (40-41)

It is a point well made, although one also wonders whether the liberal arts have always had an amount of flexibility in them such that we should be cautious about making too great a point about the ordering here. One can equally question whether the rigidity with which some classical educators hold to grammar, logic and rhetoric as stages was somewhat fabricated in the famous Dorothy Sayers essay. Bonaiuto’s fresco should go some way towards revising our thinking to see that these arts fit into a larger schema such that each component is in a sense interwoven with the others (whether that be horizontally with the other arts and sciences or vertically with biblical revelation). Our authors conclude this section with an explanation of the quadrivium—music, astronomy, geometry and arithmetic—alongside the trivium (41-44). Together the natural and sacred sciences make for a wide and varied curriculum that “represent the Book of Scripture and the Book of Creation.” (36)

The Great Recognition for Mason

Mason’s visit to Santa Maria Novella had an indelible impact on her emerging philosophy of education. By the time of her visit, Mason had only written the first volume in her education series, Home Education (1886). We learn of her visit to Florence in the second of her six volumes on education, Parents and Children (1896). The visit to Florence is clearly still present in her thinking in the third volume, School Education (1904) as well as her final work, Towards a Philosophy of Education (1925). Certainly this moment in time arrested her attention such that something crystallized in her thinking about education.

Van Pelt and Malucci develop a number of key insights in the Great Recognition. The initial insight has to do with the emergence of scientific atheism that powerfully altered the aims of education after the Enlightenment and had especially taken root in the Victorian era in which Mason worked. The Great Recognition cuts across the dualism of the era, creating a sacred-secular divide. They quote Mason, “Many of us are content to do without religious education altogether; and are satisfied with what we not only call secular but make secular, in the sense in which we understand the word, i.e. entirely limited to the uses of this visible world” (Mason, Parents and Children, 270). Mason certainly had her finger on the pulse of a dangerous problem in education for society and had gained insight when she encountered the frescos in the Spanish Chapel. The authors rightly highlight the importance of this moment in Mason’s philosophy:

“She knew this was a false dichotomy. She had noted the dove in the tip of the vaulted ceiling, over all—implying an often neglected source of unity.” (Van Pelt and Malucci 45).

God, then, is the source of all knowledge, and all truth emanates from him as it exists in all creation (general revelation) as well as in scripture (special revelation). Mason realized that a secular educational enterprise was not being honest with itself at a deep epistemological level.

The authors provide another interesting insight based on the role of the liberal arts. The Latin root word, liber, means free in the sense that a liberal arts education is one that makes one free from bondage. Anyone who has read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass understands this principle inasmuch as he considered he had gained freedom through self-education well before he was emancipated from slavery.

There was once a sense that the liberal arts were intended for those who are free, meaning the leadership class or those who were free from the constraints of financial dependence. But Mason envisioned an education available to all, or an education that is liberally spread throughout all society.

“It [liber] is where we derive our word liberty from as well. A liberal education makes a person free from the shackles of ignorance. She also uses the word catholic not as a religious term, but because it means universal. This is an education for all: men and women, rich and poor, people of all backgrounds and races—just as we see at the top of the fresco, it is for people of every nation (Acts 2:5).” (46)

Alongside this vision of a liberal education from all, we have a spiritual affirmation that the Holy Spirit is the one who accomplishes the work of teaching. There is an intimacy one notices about this claim, as each individual can have live-giving knowledge presented through the inner work of the Holy Spirit. Mason’s educational philosophy views God as an active agent through the ministry the Holy Spirit who is active in all areas of knowledge. “The Holy Spirit, in His infinite wisdom, is ready to tend to each soul for the entirety of its lifetime and offer knowledge, consolation, wisdom, and peace with abundant measure.” (47) The authors consider this the “golden thread” of Mason’s teaching and writing. “The Holy Spirit is our teacher and we find not only ultimate unity in this Trinitarian God, but also unity on earth when we recognize the reality of His Lordship here.” (48) As the authors demonstrate in a brief coda to this section, there is multiple attestation to these theological principles through the Bible and the many Christian traditions that would find value in Mason’s voice today.

Conclusion

Van Pelt and Malucci have written an accessible and exciting treatment of one of the most important moments in Mason’s development as an educational philosopher. In a little over fifty pages we are taken along a journey with Mason to examine the frescos of Santa Maria Novella afresh. I appreciate their closing sentences:

“This fresco has spoken to generations of viewers spanning 570 years. It continues to invite us—each in our own generation—to engage its wisdom as it points us toward the recognition and promise of a magnificent unity.” (56)

Perhaps this volume will entice you to study Mason in greater depth, to explore the Great Recognition for yourself and your school, and to examine not only the Florentine frescos but numerous other works of art for their inherent inspiration for our contemplation of the truths that God has disseminated throughout his creation.

Are you ready to bring narration to your school or to implement habit training? Bring one of our trainers to your school. Visit our consultation page to learn more about our one- or two-day faculty training packages. Email us for a free initial consultation.

The post The Great Recognition: Book Review of Deani Van Pelt and Camille Malucci’s Charlotte Mason’s Great Recognition appeared first on .

Up first is a volume written by Elaine Cooper entitled The Power and Neglected Voice of Charlotte Mason: A Coherent, Holistic Approach to Education for Our Times. Her thesis is many ways is captured by the two adjectives in the subtitle: coherent and holistic. I could see this book being a centerpiece for introducing parents and teachers to Charlotte Mason who may have only a passing acquaintance with her life and work due to the far-reaching scope of such a succinct volume.

Cooper has been at the heart of the Charlotte Mason revival since the 1970s, working alongside Susan Schaeffer Macaulay to establish the Child Light Trust to promote Charlotte Mason education in England. In 2004, Cooper edited the book When Children Love to Learn (Crossway), bringing together leading voices in the US and England to provide practical applications for Mason’s philosophy. Cooper was also involved in the start of Heritage School in Cambridge, England, which opened its doors in 2007.

Biography

Cooper begins her work with a succinct biography of Charlotte Mason. The contours of this biographical sketch of Mason follows the work of Margaret Coombs, who published Charlotte Mason: Hidden Heritage and Educational Influence in 2015. I appreciate how Cooper retraces the hidden childhood of Mason without dwelling on her birth out of wedlock or the potential influence either parent or their families might have had on her subsequent achievements. Mason rarely mentioned her upbringing, which could be due to her embarrassment of that upbringing. But equally, she could have just as easily viewed those years as irrelevant to the person she became as an educational thinker. To that end, Cooper’s sketch devotes the bulk of the section to her experiences in teacher training schools and posts at Birkenhead, London, Worthing and Chichester.

One of the important points Cooper brings out pertains to the collapse of the positivism of late Victorians progressivism. World War 1 had swept away much of this positivism, and with it many turned to modernist views of education. Cooper writes:

“But the horrors of the First World War and the disillusionment with western civilisation sent shock waves through society. Many educators and leaders at the time felt that old ways of thinking and doing needed to be swept away, and the new be emphatically implemented for the 20^th century. Mason’s educational vision and model for a full and abundant life binding knowledge and virtue and shaping Britain as a righteous nation no longer fitted in.” (19)

From this we may derive two insights. First, this factor demonstrates how in the height of Mason’s reach within British culture—she had established the House of Education in Ambleside, she was a respected author, moved in important circles in society, and a growing number of state schools were adopting her methods—she became almost anonymous and forgotten in history. It wasn’t due to a deficiency in her educational philosophy or pedagogical methods, but rather to a radical turning away from traditional values. A turn, one might add, that demonstrably was for the worse not only in Britain but throughout the world, as a Second World War so soon after the First would confirm.

Second, Cooper hints at the fact that Mason is well grounded in the liberal arts tradition. This is something that Cooper identifies at various points in the book. Many advocates for educational renewal, particularly in the classical educational landscape, doubt Mason’s compatibility with classical education. Cooper spells out that at a fundamental level, Mason shares convictions with proponents of a renewal of the liberal arts tradition.

Philosophy of Education

Cooper next develops Mason’s philosophy of education by highlighting the core tenets of her work as well as spelling out interactions she has with numerous other philosophers of education. She grounds Mason’s philosophy within a Christian perspective, meaning that Mason’s “understanding of the world and the person” fit squarely “within a Christian metaphysical framework” (22). I think this points to an aspect of the coherent and holistic approach Mason provides in her approach to education. In a modern world driven by technology and economic outcomes, grounding education in scripture and a vital connection to God is essential.

The singular foundation to Mason’s philosophy of education, according to Cooper, is the personhood of the child. After quoting Mason, who views the child’s mind as complete—“his mind is the instrument of his education and his education does not produce his mind” (Mason, Philosophy of Education, 36)—Cooper expands upon this view of the personhood of the child:

“In her view—Mason’s understanding of identity and personhood—someone, rather than something is located in the imago dei, bearing the image of a personal, creator God. Children are separate and complete beings even in their dependency, capable of reflecting some of God’s attributes. They have language and reason and imagination. Each one exists as a real physical and metaphysical entity—an embodied self, a spiritual being with a soul and the powers necessary to appropriate knowledge, beauty and goodness.” (Cooper 24)

Grounded in the biblical concept of the image of God, the personhood of the child means that we are not educating blank slates and manipulating them to become something of significance at a later stage in their lives. They are born with capacities to learn and grow, and thus our job is to provide suitable means for them to acquire knowledge and wisdom. The respect due to the child as a learner with a powerful mind well equipped to assimilate what is to be learned is not only a foundational aspect to Mason’s work, but sets her apart from other modern educational theorists. After quoting Martin Marty, University of Chicago professor, regarding the shortcomings of modern approaches to childhood education, Cooper concludes regarding the personhood of the child that there is a “need for thoughtful and critical evaluations of popular developmental and educational theories, suggesting there is much more to understanding the child and person than hitherto assumed.” (27)

To this end, Cooper segues into a series of educational theorists with whom Mason grappled in the development of her own educational philosophy. The list of interlocutors is substantial—John Locke, Johann Friedrick Herbart, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Fröbel, Maria Montessori, Herbert Spencer, and William James—and indicates a wide range of thought and power of mind on the part of Mason. Cooper’s development of each interaction is succinct yet helps develop in compelling ways Mason’s concern with “the increasing influence of intellectual rationalism and scientific reductionism flowing out from the Enlightenment.” (27) Seeing Mason in light of this series of educational theorists makes it difficult to simply categorize her as an educational reformer in the progressive mold of Rousseau or Dewey, and yet she is not merely a traditionalist unwilling to take on board, for instance, Pestalozzi and Fröbel’s insistence on the natural capacities of the child. In fact, Mason proved herself quite capable of incorporating modern research into psychology and neurology while also breaking the mold of traditionalist conceptions of class, making a liberal arts educational available to all.

A thorough educational philosophy relies not only on a the quality of the anthropology—a high view of the child in Mason’s case—but also on a sound epistemology. For Mason, the mind does not emerge as a property due to education, the mind is what acts upon knowledge to produce the education person. There is a “spiritual nature of mind” that “requires the food of ideas for its daily bread” (45). The mind is active and seeks out knowledge, according to Mason. This differs from the empirical views of philosophers such as Locke and Herbart who view children as empty slates or sacs to be filled with knowledge. Mason abhorred predigested information and desired children to read books full of living ideas that would feed not only the minds of children, but also form their character. The goal of education, therefore, is to give every opportunity for the child to experience the wide array of insights available in a rich and generous curriculum.

To that end, the qualities of the materials Mason sought to present to children are in keeping with the best cultural artifacts produced across generations. Cooper connects this with the classical liberal arts:

“Mason ([Philosophy of Education] 1925) was passionately concerned to education all pupils broadly in the classic, liberal arts tradition—‘the joy of the Renaissance without its lawlessness’ (p. 9)—a holistic tradition which could cultivate imagination and good habits, train judgement and engender wide interests, after which anyone would be able to master the intricacies of any profession. (Cooper 50)

Methodology

Having established the main contours of Mason’s educational philosophy, Cooper then develops the key elements of Mason’s educational methods. The two keystones here are narration and habit training. What I like about Cooper’s work here is that she connects the dots, so to speak, between philosophy and method.

For instance, with regard to narration—the ability “to individually narrate back, in their own words, what they had heard” after a single reading—Cooper connects narration to the power of the mind, or the high view of the child explored in Mason’s philosophy:

“Narration was founded on her belief in the intrinsic and natural power of mind, through attentive listening, to recall knowledge gained from a single reading or seeing or doing, and the fact that such direct recollection makes so deep an impression on the mind that it remains for a long time and is never entirely lost.” (60)

Thus, narration is an active outworking of the high view of the child. Not only do we view the child as capable of assimilating knowledge, we place those capabilities in the driver’s seat of the child’s learning. Cooper shares a delightful quote from Comenius, the Czech reformer and educational philosopher, “teachers shall teach less and scholars should learn more.” (61 quoting The Great Didactic (1907), 4). In other words, the energy of learning is rightly placed within the sphere of the child, rather than energies being wasted by a teacher who overprepares and overdelivers materials that the learner can access directly through living books.

Regarding habits, Cooper again connects method to the high view of the child. Each child is naturally equipped to follow certain pathways when the parent or teacher rightly guides them along those pathways. There are physical habits (cleanliness, tidiness), moral habits (obedience, kindness), and intellectual habits (attention, accuracy), which must actually make life easier for the child. The temptation exists for parents and teachers to consider these habits as burdensome and therefore neglect to properly instill them, yet worse habits will be fixed within the child, making life ultimately harder for the child.

The rich curriculum of living books gives feet to Mason’s epistemology since the mind craves living ideas. Cooper notes how these living books are “written in literary language” or in a “narrative style.” (63) Some of the hallmarks of a Charlotte Mason education are the inclusion of nature study, picture study, composer study, and architecture, all of which Cooper situates within the methods of Mason.

Conclusion

Cooper wraps up her volume by evaluating the legacy of Mason. As someone who has been part of the Mason revival, she suggests an exciting potential outcome in the flourishing of homeschools and schools that adopt her philosophy and methods:

“It is possible that widespread interest could spearhead both a faithful and contemporary understanding of her applied Christian philosophy of education, backed up by the practical evidence of thousands of children educated in over 300 of her schools and many home schools in early 20^th-century Britain and beyond.” (69)

I for one agree that this revival of interest in Mason is having profound effects in North America. I am grateful that Elaine Cooper has put this very readable book together. For anyone wanting a clear and concise overview of Mason, this book is essential reading. If you provide leadership at a school using Charlotte Mason’s philosophy and methods, this is a great book to give to new faculty as part of their onboarding.

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C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

I begin with a book that rivals in many ways the essay by Dorothy Sayers that got our educational renewal movement started. In fact, C. S. Lewis delivered these lectures (the Riddell Memorial Lectures were a series given over three nights at King’s College, Newcastle University on 24–26 February 1943) a good four years before Sayers (her paper was read at the Vacation Course in Education at Oxford University in the Summer of 1947). If you have read “The Lost Tools of Learning,” then you are well prepared to tackle these essays.

In three essays, Lewis mounts a defense of objective value in the face of moral subjectivism. He predicted the dystopian future we now live in where tolerance is the reigning virtue, despite the fact that we are not a very tolerant people, at least one wouldn’t think so when one reads comments on social media. This book provides a foundational rationale for the “classical” part of our movement. (This book pairs nicely with Mere Christianity, connecting the “Christian” part of our movement.) And yet it nicely goes beyond what we might consider a fixation on Western civilization as the sole or sufficient basis for a liberal arts education. We see this most prominently in his use of the Tao as representative of objective values based on natural law. What he is getting at transcends an East/West divide and demonstrates that values are meta-cultural.

Sample Quote: “This things which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. . . . The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.”

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Harper, 2000): 43-44.

I could see this book being valuable if you are a teacher or administrator. It is also well worth adopting in an upper-level humanities course.

If you would like an opportunity to delve deeply into this book, there is an upcoming event you might consider joining if you are located in the American mid-west. The Alcuin Fellowship will be meeting on March 30-April 1 at Clapham School in Wheaton. We’ll be reading The Abolition of Man and having rich discussion around the book in small groups. There are limited spaces available. You can register for this fellowship at https://www.alcuinfellowship.com/midwestern-alcuin-retreat-2023/.

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher

Okay, so I reviewed this book in two posts back in the autumn of 2021. Jonathan is a good friend, and this is a good book. I keep returning to it because it offers such a compelling synthesis of Christianity with the liberal arts tradition. The wisdom of this book abounds, and we benefit repeatedly from the insights of a leading New Testament scholar. Yet, Pennington also puts the cookies on the bottom shelf, so to speak.

This book goes well with the previous selection, although it offers a more modern mix of metaphors and imagery. There’s a brilliance in being able to bring such individuals as Aristotle and Steve Martin together as Pennington does. I think you’ll find this is a volume that can speak to teacher and student alike.

Sample Quote: “Hence, as we have seen throughout this book, there is insight to be gained from what the philosophers said about all sorts of topics. We needn’t cut ourselves completely off from their wisdom. Rather, we can gather lumber from whatever trees are available as we build the Christ-shaped temple of our lives, with Holy Scripture as the building inspector. As Justin himself said, “Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians. . . . For all the writers [ancient philosophers and poets] were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them. For the seed and imitation that is imparted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the things itself, of which there is the participation and imitation according to the grace which is from Him.”

That last part gets a bit complex, but the point is straightforward – any wisdom in the world is from God, who created all, but we Christians have the grace that enables complete understanding. This includes the grandest human philosophical question: What does it mean to live a whole, meaningful, and flourishing life? What is the wisdom we need for the Good Life?”

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher (Brazos, 2020): 203.

Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers

My next selection moves away from the humanities and provides something for those STEM teachers among us. Having taught Geometry for several years, I have appreciated how Barbara Oakley spells out effective learning strategies for students. I myself was never a great math student, and diving into teaching math well over a decade ago required going back to the basics. Along the way I found that math itself is not particularly difficult, but it can be quite different than the kinds of learning that goes on in the humanities side of the curriculum.

Oakley bases her work in solid neurological studies. One of the key insights in her book is to “chunk” mathematical and scientific concepts. A chunk is a conceptual piece of information that is “bound together through meaning.” (54) That “meaning” bit is significant because there’s a sense of the personal importance. The chunk attracts information or ideas to it, providing for mental leaps as separate units of information bind together through neural networks.

She provides three steps to forming a chunk. First, you focus your attention on the information to be chunked. (57) She advises learning in a low-distraction environment, free from screens. One of the core concepts here is that old neural networks enable you to form new neural pathways. In other words, we build from the known to the unknown. In essence, we want to create these chunks off of ideas, concepts or information that we already know well.

Second, you need to understand the basic idea (58). She differentiates the initial moment of understanding – the “aha!” moment – from the kind of understanding where you can close the book and test yourself on the problem. This is very much the way narration works. Being able to bring forward the formula, the steps, or the process in mathematics demonstrates that the idea is understood.

Third, you need to connect the basic idea to a context (58-59). In other words, a student needs to know when, say, apply the Pythagorean theorem, and when not to. She likens the chunk to a tool, “If you don’t know when to use that tool, it’s not going to do you a lot of good.” (59)

Chunking is not only valuable in mathematics, but across the curriculum. You can chunk historical concepts or literary terms. Chunking can be a pathway toward integration as we allow that chunk to attract more and more concepts to it. I think this is similar to Charlotte Mason’s expression about ideas, “Ideas behave like living creatures––they feed, grow, and multiply.” (Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children, 77)

Sample Quote: “A synthesis – an abstraction, chunk, or gist idea – is a neural pattern. Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another. That’s why great art, poetry, music, and literature can be so compelling. When we grasp the chunk, it takes on a new life in our own minds – we form ideas that enhance and enlighten the neural patters we already possess, allowing us to more readily see and develop other related patterns.”

Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers (Tarcher Perigee, 2014): 197.

What I like about this book is that her strategies are not simply about how to test better to get good scores on tests or entrance into college, etc. Instead, she sees how this can be a pathway to deep meaning in life through acquired skill, and how an individual can achieve creativity in multiple domains of knowledge through accumulated competence. The quote comes from a section entitled “Deep Chunking,” which segues nicely to our next book.

Cal Newport, Deep Work

Associate professor of computer science at Georgetown, Cal Newport not only delivered a best-selling book, but coined a phrase that has become part of the cultural parlance: “deep work.” In many respects, this is a counterpoint to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows inasmuch as Newport accepts the premise that the internet has made us shallow and then goes on to propose a solution by going deep through focused attention. The book is designed in an interesting way. Newport begins by spelling out three ideas that get at the “why” of deep work. Then the second part of the book spells out the “how.” Here I want to focus on the first part.

Newport’s first two ideas interact with the new economy centered around knowledge work: deep work is valuable largely because it is rare. This points to a “market mismatch” where talented individuals who are able to produce knowledge that is deep. His third idea is that deep work is meaningful. This is an idea that riffs on the metaphorical meaning of the word “deep.” When our work connects to something of the human experience, there’s a depth of character that has intrinsic value. I like how Newport develops the concept of craftsmanship as a sacred practice.

Sample Quote: “Once understood, we can connect this sacredness inherent in traditional craftsmanship to the world of knowledge work. To do so, there are two key observations we must first make. The first might be obvious but requires emphasis: There’s nothing intrinsic about the manual trades when it comes to generating this particular source of meaning. Any pursuit – be it physical or cognitive – that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.”

Cal Newport, Deep Work (Grand Central, 2016): 88-89.

As our skill increases, our sense of the meaning we are generating also increases. One gets plugged into the creative impulse that is part of our own imago Dei createdness. Now this is a point that is likely remote from Newport’s thinking, but his use of the word “sacred” points in this direction. Newport goes on to explain his second key observation that to access this deep meaning, we must embrace deep work as the portal to cultivating our skill.

One of the reasons why I recommend this book is that it has provided a framework for understanding how our educational renewal movement – perhaps counterintuitively – gives our students a strategic advantage as they enter the new economy. By encountering the deep ideas of the great works our students get connected to a level of depth not present in the school system. Many of our schools feature intense instruction on writing and rhetoric, which is essential to the knowledge work Newport describes as so rare and valuable. Graduates from classical schools are well trained to do deep work. So, by reading this you can cultivate the habit of deep work in yourself and your students.

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, They Say / I Say

My final selection is a textbook ostensibly for college writing. This year I adopted this title for our junior rhetoric class. It is full of practical advice for writers learning how to build effective arguments in academic writing. We are using the fifth edition, which came out in 2021, but any of the editions that have come out since the original 2006 edition features most of the same contours.

The central idea of the book is that effective argumentation begins with a good understanding of what others have said before venturing into an expression of one’s own beliefs. They posit that “working with the ‘they say / I say” model can also help with invention, finding something to say. In our experience, students best discover what they want to say not by thinking about a subject in an isolation booth but by reading texts, listening closely to what other writers say, and looking for an opening through which they can enter the conversation.” (xviii). As classical educators, we are very aware that the great books tradition is all about the great conversation. How better to take advantage of the plethora of books we read than by utilizing that conversation to initiate new pathways for our students to explore based on the “they say / I say” model.

Another feature of this book is how it utilizes templates. The authors recognize the liability of training students to use templates. “At first, many of our students complain that using templates will take away their originality and creativity and make them all sound the same.” (13) But through practice and instruction, students begin to see how there is a basic structure to how good argumentation works. Even after initial exposure to these templates, we can analyze academic writing to identify not only the basic “they say / I say” structure, but also finer points of perspective, argumentation, and analysis. For students raised on the 10-sentence paragraph and the five-paragraph essay, this approach to templates builds on earlier types of templates.

Students are able to practice utilizing two major questions as they work through this book. There is the establishment of relief (using an idea from sculpture), between what you are proposing and what others might say. Students begin to become sensitive to the question, “Oh yeah, who says otherwise?” The other question that students learn to become aware of is the “so what?” or “what difference does this make?” set of questions. For students in junior rhetoric, this is excellent training for the work they will accomplish the following year during senior thesis. The essential skills students learn in this book are critical analysis of sources, summary of conventional viewpoints, handling controversial topics, and expressing the application and consequences of one’s point.

One chapter I really appreciate is the chapter on revision. For many students, revision amounts to identifying typographical errors and eliminating the teacher’s red marks. Well, the approach taken by the authors provides a handy guide to how to make substantial revisions to an essay.

Sample Quote: “One of the most common frustrations teachers have – we’ve had it, too – is that students do not revise in any substantial way. As one of our colleagues put it, “I ask my classes to do a substantial revision of an essay they’ve turned in, emphasis on the word ‘substantial,’ but invariably little is changed in what I get back. Students hand in the original essay with a word changed here and there, a few spelling errors corrected, and a comma or two added. . . . I feel like all my advice is for nothing.” We suspect, however, that in most cases when students do merely superficial revisions, it’s not because they are indifferent or lazy, as some teachers may assume, but because they aren’t sure what a good revision looks like. Like even many seasoned writers, these students would like to revise more thoroughly, but when they reread what they’ve written, they have trouble seeing where it can be improved – and how. What they lack is not just a reliable picture in their head of what their draft could be but also reliable strategies for getting there.”

Gerald Graff & Cathy Birkenstein, They Say / I Say (Norton, 2021): 149.

After this introduction, which describes what many a teacher has felt, the authors provide guidance on how to make substantial revisions to an essay. The chapter on revision concludes with an excellent revision checklist. Students regularly run into the same frustrations we have with revision. They have a sense that they could express their thoughts in a better, more sophisticated way, but they are unpracticed in how to excavate their own writing with a view to finding the veins of gold, let alone finding the weaknesses to correct.

Conclusion

Hopefully this list of books to read in 2023 will inspire you to dig into some different areas where you can become a more inspired and skilled educator this year. There are tons of other books I could have recommended, and you likely have some of your own that are top of your list.

Even more essential than reading the selection of book listed here is building the habit of daily reading. Even a little bit on a daily basis begins to accumulate to a significant amount of input into your life. With lesson planning, grading, meetings and family life, it can be difficult to carve out time to read. Steven Covey talks about how important it is to “sharpen the saw.” For us educators, reading is one of the best ways for us to cultivate the joy of learning we want to inspire in our students. So whether it’s these books or others that spark interest in you, take a moment even now to read.

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In the previous article in this two-part review of Jonathan Pennington’s book Jesus the Great Philosopher, I spelled out the first two sections of his book dealing with the ancient philosophers (chapters 1 and 2) and then the Old and New Testaments (chapters 3 and 4). Here I will dive into the final three sections on emotions, relationships and the flourishing life. In each of these sections, Pennington provides insights that help us understand better the nature of our roles as teachers to educate formationally the students given into our care.

The thesis that emerges through my review is a sense that we are apprenticing students in the craft of living flourishing lives. There are so many points of connection between what Pennington has written and our educational renewal movement. Even though he didn’t write this book solely with our context in mind, it resonates so much that I highly recommend this as one of your must reads in the coming year.

Training the Emotions

It is difficult to get a handle on our emotional lives. Think about how true this is in your own life as a teacher. The vicissitudes of the school day and the school year impact us at an emotional level constantly. If this is true in our own lives, how much more do our students feel a range of different emotions? And yet we rarely consider how much emotional training is part of our job as educators. Pennington does a great job laying out a sophisticated view of emotions from a Christian philosophical perspective.

To begin with, the philosophical discussion surrounding emotions goes all the way back to the ancient philosophers. Plato and Aristotle had significantly different views on our emotions. Plato “saw emotions (or passions) as impulses that come upon us as an uncontrollable force.” (86) His noncognitive understanding of emotions weaves its way through history down to our modern era of chemical and neurological research. Pennington writes, “Even if one doesn’t take an entirely chemical approach to emotions, today emotions are largely viewed as negative and the enemy of sound thinking.” (88) Aristotle saw things very differently, taking an “integrated, cognitive approach.” (89) Our whole being works together. “We feel emotion in our bodies and souls through cognition, through using our minds in dialogue with our bodies.” (89) Now obviously the chemical and neurological insights gained by modern research has contributed to our understanding of numerous factors contributing to both emotions and cognition. But Pennington correctly draws forward and understanding of emotions as something that can be educated. There is a certain amount of control we have over our emotions. Our emotions can be trained.

To what end, though, are we training our emotions? Is it to gain complete detachment from emotional response as modern Stoic philosophy would have it? Emotions or feelings are actually necessary for navigating life successfully, so the kind of training envisioned is not to root out emotions but to feel with understanding. Pennington writes:

“Philosophical reflection and psychological research have also shown that emotions are central to aspects of our lives that we may not immediately recognize – specifically, our ethics and morality. . . . To state it most clearly: Emotions are central to our morality (1) in enabling us to determine what is right and wrong, and (2) as indicators of our moral character. Therefore, paying attention to and educating our emotions is crucial to the Good Life.”

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher, 95

Our development as integrated beings means bringing together our feeling self, our thinking self and our acting self (emotions, reason and behavior). Pennington posits that Christianity takes a cognitive approach to emotions similar to the Aristotelian tradition. Emotions are fundamentally good in part because they reflect the nature of God who has emotions and is entirely good. (105) As Christians we are called to control our emotions, not simply detach from them. “While promoting the good of emotions, Christianity also recommends a measured and intentional detachment from the world and its circumstances for the sake of living a tranquil life.” (114)

So how does one go about educating the emotions? One of the keys highlighted by Pennington is “the habit of intentional reflection.” (123) He demonstrates through readings in Deuteronomy, the Psalms and Matthew that “This habit of intentional reflection has a shaping effect on the belief, faithfulness, obedience, and thereby emotional health of the Israelites.” (124) Christian virtue, then, relies on training in specific habits to shape our emotional response to God leading toward true happiness.

Training New Citizens

The philosophy of the Good Life involves not only a coherence of one’s own integrated self, but a coherence of relationships with others. The next section in Pennington’s book delves into relationships and once again synthesizes ancient wisdom with the teachings of the Bible. Relationships are a central teaching in the philosophical tradition. (135) Philosphers like Plutarch, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero all see how marriage and families are the bedrock of a good society. Thus for the society as a whole to be well ordered, “the household was to be ordered well.” (139) So as we consider the philosophical tradition as it teaches about relationships, we can see that relationships span the most intimate and the most global arrangements.

Aristotle once again takes center stage. Pennington writes, “Aristotle argues that the end goal of enabling virtuous citizens to flourish must be the evaluative tool for determining which form of government is best.” (143) From this we can gather that the individual and the many live in a dynamic relationship that ought to aim at a singular goal: “the flourishing of virtuous individuals.” This is a challenging proposition in a society that desires individual autonomy while it remains confused about moral virtue. I think this is where classical Christian education can best serve society by training new citizens to understand what it means to live virtuously as individuals and to engage in public discourse about how to promote the wellbeing of all in light of what it means to be a good person.

The Bible provides a nuanced perspective, however, on what it means to be a citizen. “Jesus’s life and teaching can fairly be described as a re-forming and renewing of all kinds of relationships – between God and humanity and between humans of every language, ethnicity, gender, and class.” (156) The revelation of God’s divine Word breaks down our understanding of such things as family, friendship and society, and build them up into a new kind of structure centered on Christ Jesus. I think Pennington is most helpful in laying out the fact that the Bible is thoroughly political. What he means by this is that it expresses several nuanced points about a philosophy of politics. For instance, “Christians must understand that they are now citizens of two reams, or two cities, as Augustine would famously describe it – the city of humanity and the city of God.” (166) Our first loyalty is to our citizenship above. We pray fervently that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Yet, these two realms exist in conflict. As citizens of an earthly realm, we prioritize our heavenly citizenship while also participating in the betterment of our earthly society. “Therefore, the Christian’s relationship to the state is one of respectful participation and honor where honor is due (1 Pet. 2:17), praying for even ungodly leaders (1 Tim. 2:1-4).” (166) Our civic duty is real and earnest because we are emissaries of our Lord Jesus Christ and carry the diplomatic message of the good news of the gospel.

Training up new citizens is a difficult task. Even though our present state of cultural discourse feels overwhelming and dysfunctional, I am certain that this feeling is not unique to our day. As educators, our task is not to teach a number of talking points from whatever political party our constituents agree with. Instead, we are to help our students understand their dual citizenship, learning to walk as Christ walked and working toward the transformation of society in light of the gospel. Pennington puts it well:

“Jesus and the New Testament regularly paint a picture of what the true politeia modeled on God’s kingdom should be. Christian teaching is a vision that resocializes people’s values and habits, that creates a new community of people, a new covenant people who will live together in love and serve as a model for the world of God himself. This is a sophisticated philosophy of relationships.”

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher, 171

Training in Happiness

One of the claims I persistently make that differentiates our educational renewal movement from conventional education is that we train up students to live lives of meaning and purpose. The factory model of education focuses on technology and techniques that provide for better jobs with the assumption that a highly trained workforce is the chief end of society. But as classical Christian educators, we have a higher vision that transcends career. We believe that educating the whole person entails addressing life’s biggest questions and launching our students into a pursuit of true happiness.

Pennington closes his book with two chapters that align with what makes our movement unique. He demonstrates that “happiness and meaningfulness entail each other” (189) by reviewing ancient and modern philosophers. Our modern world with its largely scientific worldview struggles to provide the kind of comprehensive view of life that produces meaning and purpose. This is why we benefit so much from going back to the great philosophers of the ancient world. They “all pondered the great questions of happiness and offered practical, real-life wisdom on how to live well.” (191) The antidote to our modern malaise comes through intentional reflection on the big questions of life. He writes in summary of the ancient wisdom:

“So they disagreed on lots of habits and beliefs, but they all shared this central idea: We long for flourishing, and the only way to find it is through living intentionally and thoughtfully in particular ways. Neither virtue nor its eventual fruit, happiness, come to us accidentally.”

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher, 193

The ancient wisdom stands in stark relief with what we might call the self-help industry. We have modern YouTube gurus offering tips and tricks to live better lives. In certain cases, really thoughtful programs synthesize philosophical sophistication with modern science, attempting a nonreligious, “whole-life philosophy of happiness.” (200) But “the gurus that people look to today offer only a limited kind of happiness.” (200) It seems to me that our society reflects the educational norms of conventional education: technology and techniques have soft pedaled a less-than-satisfying philosophy of life.

Pennington’s final chapter masterfully explores Christianity as a superior life philosophy full of meaning that promotes flourishing. He writes, “Jesus in the actual Logos – the organizing principle of the world, the agent of creation, the being that holds the whole universe together – this means that his philosophy alone is whole, complete, and truly true.” (201) Two key words stand out in Pennington’s exposition of Christian philosophy: grace and hope. Despite the fall and despite the limitations we face as human beings, God’s grace is poured out on humanity in the form of wisdom. We are recipients of divine wisdom: not only what we might call special revelation, but the wisdom that permeates all creation. “Any wisdom in the world is from God who created all.” (203) Together God’s creation and God’s Word provide answers to life’s greatest questions. This is grace.

Hope is perhaps the single greatest factor when comparing the self-help philosophy of today with the whole-life philosophy of the Bible. Pennington writes:

“The Christian hope is that God is going to return to restore the world to right, to bring light into darkness, to create a new creation of shalom and peace, to be present fact-to-face with his creatures. It is this hope alone that can bridge the eudaimonia gap between our experience now and our deepest longings.” (216)

To understand what he means here, it is helpful to consider the eudaimonia gap. All humans desire to experience happiness or eudaimonia. However, we face a world of suffering, whether it be physical, mental, relational or otherwise. The gap we experience between the happiness we want to achieve and the reality of the obstacles that interfere with us experiencing that happiness is what we might call the eudaimonia gap. Christianity offers a satisfying solution by presenting us with a future hope. “Christian philosophy emphasizes precisely this – an honest assessment of the brokenness of life that is always oriented toward a sure hope for God’s restoration of true flourishing to the world.” (218) Christian hope is not a detachment from the problems in our world nor does it trivialize suffering. Instead, Christian hope finds profound meaning in this life through the recognition that suffering and pain are where God meets us as he leads us toward eudaimonia.

This review of Pennington’s book Jesus the Great Philosopher has hopefully stimulated your thoughts on what it means to be a classical Christian educator. A book like this helps contextualize daily classroom life with the long view of living the Good Life. In the liberal arts tradition, discrete subjects (if that is even the correct word) cohere around philosophy. So when we are teaching mathematics, literature or science, we should have in view that the subject matter is not limited to one domain of knowledge. Education is a science of relations, as Charlotte Mason has so famously put it. Pennington’s book serves as a convenient and accessible manual for bringing into conversation the liberal arts and a biblical worldview. I highly recommend you reading this for yourself to be inspired as a classical Christian educator.

Beyond this, I could see this book being adopted in a theology or humanities class at your school. The way he brings the many streams of wisdom together will benefit students who have had many years of tutelage under the writings of Aristotle, Augustine, Lewis and many others. Even if you don’t bring this into your curriculum, I could see this being a great read in a book club, contributing to lively discussion and thoughtful interaction.

The post Christianity, a Superior Philosophy: Book Review of Jonathan T. Pennington’s Jesus the Great Philosopher, Part 2 appeared first on .

If you attended the Society for Classical Learning conference this past summer in Charleston, South Carolina, you may have attended the plenary session with Jonathan T. Pennington. He presented on “Jesus the Classical Educator.” The presentation was drawn from his new book Jesus the Great Philosopher. I think this is a really important book that classical educators need to read and grapple with. In this and the following post I will review the book and lay out several of the ideas that we well worth your attention.

But first, a disclaimer. I am not an unbiased reader. Jonathan is a good friend. We both attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and later University of St Andrews. At both places he preceded me by a few years. At each stage he played a key mentoring role, helping me to consider studying overseas in Scotland and then introducing me to his and my doctoral supervisor, Richard Bauckham. There’s a real kinship Bauckham’s advisees share, striving for excellence in biblical scholarship while desiring to produce work that will prove valuable for the church. Prof. Pennington has been one of the leading lights among Bauckham’s students, so it’s exciting to see him produce a work that now speaks into the kind of project we are doing in our educational renewal movement.

Pennington is associate professor of New Testament Interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. has previously written extensively on the New Testament, publishing Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew, the research he had done during his PhD studies. He has written and contributed to several other books, including Reading the Gospels Wisely (Baker, 2012), The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing (Baker, 2017) and Reading the New Testament as Christian Scripture with Con Campbell (Baker, 2020). With the publication of Jesus the Great Philosopher (Brazos, 2020), Pennington has shifted slightly away from writing exclusively academic biblical studies volumes and presenting ideas that have a more popular-level appeal. In this latest book you’ll find that Pennington is able to adeptly bring his scholarly prowess into connection with contemporary issues and cultural motifs.

Here in part 1 of this review, I’ll explore the foundational work he present on ancient and biblical wisdom. Later in part 2, we’ll see how he builds on this foundation to address matters such as the self-help industry, our current political discourse, perspectives on justice and the role of emotions in our lives.

The Renewal of the Ancient Philosophical Tradition

Pennington diagnoses a major problem in modern Christianity as a result of not viewing Jesus Christ as a philosopher. His major claim is that “there are four significant things that have happened to the church as a result of this loss of ‘philosophy’ language.” (Jesus the Great Philosopher 10) What are those four things. First, Christians experience disconnected lives. “Our Christian faith is often disconnected from other aspects of our human lives.” The Christian life today is compartmentalized such that we haven’t connected all aspects of our lives to an overarching philosophy of human flourishing centered on Christ Jesus. Second, Christians are prone to search for answers to life’s biggest questions from popular culture. “We naturally look to other sources – alternative gurus – to give us the wisdom needed to live flourishing lives, to find the Good Life.” It is all too easy to swipe open an iPhone to watch a YouTube video of a TED Talk than it is to pore over the text of the Bible. Third, Christians are untrained to answer the difficult questions of life. “We have stopped asking a set of big questions that Holy Scripture is seeking to answer.” I will delve into this third point in greater length in a moment. And fourth, Christians are not able to share the gospel in its fullness. “We have limited our witness to the world.” When we short circuit the philosophical power of the gospel, we actually miss out on the way redemption in Christ helps people makes sense of all of life.

Now, this matter of asking profound questions of the Bible is worthy of further deliberation. Pennington writes, “So, with our high view of Scripture in hand, we go to the Bible and ask important questions – religious, vertical questions – and that is good. But because of habits and training, we have stopped asking another set of questions – the human, horizontal, philosophical ones.” (15) To be clear, as Christians we have tended to approach our Bibles with a view to learn about God and then apply it to daily life. But our metaphysical musings have largely tended to not include a major set of philosophical questions. These questions include, “What is the nature of reality? How do we know this? What does it mean to be human? How do we order our relationships and emotions? How do we find true happiness?” (15) Notice how these questions are different than questions pertaining to doctrines of the Trinity, the sacraments or church order. Furthermore, we often skip from those heady theological insights to highly practical practices like daily Bible reading and listening to Christian music. The important questions that Pennington highlights enable the Christian to masterfully build lives of meaning and purpose in all domains of life.

The second chapter of Jesus the Great Philosopher traces the ancient philosophical tradition, identifying how philosophy wasn’t some esoteric, exclusive club. Instead, philosophy sought to guide people toward “true happiness; it was the vision for life itself.” (18) Pennington looks at the role of virtues in developing human flourishing. He explains what he calls the “four main compass points” of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. (28) The renewal of the ancient philosophical tradition has been a key component of our own educational renewal movement. This chapter sets the stage for what comes next, an examination of the Bible in light of the major philosophical questions Pennington points to.

The Bible as an Ancient Philosophical Text

The Bible itself is shown to be a thoroughly philosophical text. Pennington spans both the Old and New Testaments demonstrating how the four compass-point questions are extensively present throughout the Bible. From creation to new creation, the Bible provides a grand view of the universe. Pennington writes, “This world that we experience is actually created and upheld by the incarnated and now-risen Jesus, in unity with God the Father. This is a radical metaphysical claim not only for Jews but also for Greeks and Romans, who also had a highly developed metaphysic of both the cosmos and humanity’s place in it.” (70) Biblical metaphysics also points to how all reality is moving toward an end or telos. History is “heading toward a restoration of what was lost, a restoration that will even supersede the goodness of the original creation.” (71)

How we know what we know is the domain of epistemology. Pennington shows how the Bible puts forward a consistent yet nuanced understanding of knowledge. In the ancient philosophical tradition, knowledge is experienced, practical and lived out (43). The garden shows how knowledge of God is experienced by walking with God. Yet sin through the fall obfuscates our ability to know God. The Old Testament establishes a pattern of “forgetting God and coming to know God again.” (44) The New Testament builds on this pattern by providing a pathway in Christ Jesus to truly know God. Our minds, clouded by the fall, are transformed through regeneration. “The knowledge of God the Father revealed in God the Son is only accessible through God the Spirit.” (73) This trinitarian formulation of biblical epistemology addresses how the all-encompassing nature of God – who is beyond our comprehension – can be knowns and experienced personally.

Epistemology leads to ethics, or an understanding of right and wrong. The heartbeat of ethical thinking in both the ancient philosophical tradition of the Greeks and Romans as well as the Bible is virtue. We’ve written at length about virtues and habits here at Educational Renaissance. And Pennington confirms the high congruence between ancient and biblical wisdom. “An ethics of virtue, which is shared by ancient philosophy and the Bible, focuses on the development of our sensibilities, values, and habits.” (47) Ethics is not about adherence to a set of rules or mere obedience to a command. Instead, the virtue ethic of the Bible is characterized by imitation and agency. “Virtue ethics focuses not just on the external issues of right and wrong but on our interior person and our development to be a certain kind of people. In the Bible, this means becoming more like God himself.” (75) It is clear, then, that ethical reasoning is highly dependent on one’s epistemology. True knowledge of God provides both insight into what it means to be good and direction about how to live out the good in our lives.

The fourth big idea considered from a biblical perspective is politics. Even though this word is perceived negatively in modern culture, there is a rich philosophical tradition standing behind the political structures of Western society. If we want human flourishing to occur in a stable and sustainable way, we need to consider the societal structures and institutions that are consistent with ancient and biblical wisdom. One of the principles Pennington brings out is that “humans need friends.” Even if we our metaphysics, epistemology and ethics worked out, if we are alone, we simply cannot experience the kind of good life we might otherwise experience in fellowship with others. Pennington writes, “This older, constructive aspect of ‘politics’ was a natural and crucial aspect of the ancient philosophical perspective because the philosophers understood that (1) flourishing is not possible apart from societal stability and structures that promoted beauty, goodness, and virtue; and (2) humans need each other to flourish.” (48)

Such ideas as the rule of law, justice and limited government stem from Hebrew political philosophy. In the ancient Near East as well as Greek and Roman societies, kings and emperors founded imperials cults, insisting on being worshipped as gods. But “the Hebrews’ ultimate allegiance was to God himself, not to the human king.” (49-50) In the New Testament, this idea gets expanded into what might be called “dual citizenship.” (166) We will expand on this in part 2 of this review. But for now we can point to a distinctively Christian political philosophy that promotes involvement in our earthly society, yet our allegiance lies with our heavenly kingdom. As worshipers of the one true God, we have a philosophy of “a politeia rooted in the just and good way.” (50) But the Bible does not promote some sort of separatist alternative society, it seeks the just and the good for all nations. Pennington writes, “This divinely revealed political philosophy was not just for the sake of the Hebrew people but was also a model for all the nations. It is a picture of how the true God has structured the cosmos and the means by which humans may experience flourishing or shalom.” (50)

A Synthesis of Ancient and Biblical Wisdom

Thus far we have covered almost half of Pennington’s book. In part 2 we will look at how will expands this basis of ancient and biblical wisdom bringing it into conversation with some of the big issues we face in our modern era. And as we think about what has been covered so far, a few considerations can already be formulated.

First, as a classical Christian educational movement, we have the obligation to bring together ancient wisdom and biblical wisdom. What Pennington highlights are the areas of congruence between ancient near Eastern, Greek and Roman philosophy and the Old and New Testaments. Now, we must be aware that not all we find in non-biblical and non-Christian sources will agree with biblical convictions. However, there is a synthesis we can achieve when we examine sources of knowledge with courage and humility, looking for truth wherever it may be found. The catchphrase, “All truth is God’s truth” is relevant here. Students trained with this impulse to search for truth wherever it may be found will have the tools to think biblically when encountering not only the great works of the Western tradition, but even interact with non-Western writings.

Second, the approach Pennington takes in arriving at his synthesis points to the whole-life relevance of ancient and biblical wisdom. The liability of placing such powerful texts in the hands of teachers and students alike is that the level of analysis remains abstract and theoretical. I know this is something I needed to overcome in my professional role in biblical studies. Analyzing the text with more and more sophisticated models of interpretation can stimulate the mind but can also leave the heart cold. The motto on my school’s crest reads veritas pro vita, “truth for life.” This is not merely truth for truth’s sake, but truth for the sake of living lives of meaning, purpose and direction. As we arrive at a synthesis of ancient and biblical wisdom, there ought to be practical wisdom that shows us how to live out the gospel day to day.

Finally, we cannot live out lives of meaning, purpose and direction apart from the one who calls himself the way, the truth and the life. Pennington’s formulation of Jesus as the great philosopher places our Lord and savior at the center of this grand synthesis of ancient and biblical wisdom. God has made his revealed wisdom personal through the incarnation of The Word. The personal nature of divine wisdom then is received in us through our encounter with Christ Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.

So, I clearly haven’t finished my review yet, but already you can sense how highly I recommend this book. If you are an educator who wants to contemplate how to bring together spiritual formation and classical curriculum, I think this book is well worth your time and attention.

The post A Synthesis of Ancient and Biblical Wisdom: Book Review of Jonathan T. Pennington’s Jesus the Great Philosopher, Part 1 appeared first on .

Bill & Maryellen St. Cyr

The first people you should listen to in 2021 are a husband and wife team, Bill and Maryellen St. Cyr. Together they founded Ambleside Schools International in 1999 to promote the educational approach of Charlotte Mason. There are quite a number of Ambleside schools throughout the US as well as in Africa, India and Austria.

Written about in the recent book Rare Leadership by Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder, the St. Cyrs exemplified an approach to educational leadership that is worthy of consideration. Bill explains that maturity is essential to the success of a school. Therefore he calls for emotional-relational maturity as the mission of schools, which often gets swept aside by performance goals. Warner and Wilder quote Bill:

“While efficient management of resources is essential, it is secondary to maintaining an optimal school atmosphere and ensuring teachers and students are thriving. Management must serve mission and the mission is maturity. Persons cannot be managed into maturity.”

Warner and Wilder, Rare Leadership (Chicago: Moody, 2016), p. 97.

Bill and Maryellen excel at teacher training, providing inspiration and motivation. Jason and I first met Bill and Maryellen in August 2009 when they provided teacher training on site at Clapham School in Wheaton. Their mentorship of teachers has had a lasting effect on us personally. Over the years, their teachings on the Charlotte Mason method has transformed my parenting, teaching and school leadership. Here at Educational Renaissance we’ve written extensively on Charlotte Mason’s educational principles.

The St. Cyrs started their podcast in 2018, and I have found it to be a great source of knowledge and inspiration. Episodes are compact and easy to listen to during a morning commute. If you are new to Charlotte Mason, I recommend listening to the episode on “The Method of a Lesson.” I also found Bill’s seminar “Educating with the Brain in Mind” a great expression of the ancient and modern synthesis that we are going for here at Educational Renaissance.

Jocko Willink

The next person you should be listening to in 2021 is retired Navy Seal Jocko Willink. The Jocko Podcast began at the end of 2015 and has been released weekly ever since. Jocko is a highly decorated veteran who fought in Iraq during the battle of Ramadi. After retiring from the Teams in 2010, Jocko started teaching the leadership principles he learned on the battlefield to business leaders.

I first accessed Jocko’s ideas in his book Extreme Ownership. There he lays out several essential principles of leadership, exemplifying them with stories from battle and then translating those principles to the civilian sector. As a school administrator, I find myself repeating and rehearsing these principles. At some point I plan to do a full exploration of these principles for the educational environment in a blog series. For now you can read Kolby’s article on educational leadership in which he explores principles by Brene Brown.

The Jocko Podcast explores principles of leadership through reading books. Many of the books Jocko reads through are military works, either memoirs of past wars or military field manuals. I thoroughly enjoy learning some of the military history as someone who has taught history previously. From time to time, Jocko will cover a book from our classical curriculum. For instance, you might find his take on Shakespeare’s Henry V (Episode 15) insightful. Jocko also reads Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (Episode 161) with some interesting approaches to leadership you could use in the classroom.

At various points Jocko discusses education and learning. Perhaps one of the most important episode that fully explores education is Episode 227 “Learning for Ultimate Winning.” Here he reads Marine Core doctrinal publication MCDP 7 on learning. It’s fascinating to consider how the military views and values learning. As Jocko interacts with this manual, he develops ideas about problem solving, critical thinking, analysis, mental imaging, synthesis, reasoning and creativity.

Seth Godin

The third person on my list is an entrepreneur and author who has massively influenced the way we think about marketing over the past decades. Godin originally made his mark during the dot com boom in the 1990s, but has since focused on writing and speaking. Godin has been particularly helpful in disseminating ideas like telling the difference between early adopters and the mass market, finding the smallest viable audience, and differentiating oneself by being remarkable. We’ll return to some of these ideas on marketing in a moment.

I first accessed Godin’s ideas through his book Linchpin. I delved into this book to learn more about business leadership and was inspired with his idea that the more value you create for your company makes you more indispensable. What really struck me though was his take on education. Godin is no fan of mass marketing, instead preferring what he terms permission marketing. What I found fascinating was how he connected the idea of the mass market to what we might call mass education. He does not have a high view of what he calls the factory model of education:

“The launch of universal (public and free) education was a profound change in the way our society works, and it was a deliberate attempt to transform our culture. And it worked. We trained millions of factory workers.”

Seth Godin, Linchpin (Penguin, 2010)

The factory model of education created a consumer culture and a workforce that is good at following instructions. Education pursued a race to the bottom, providing minimum standards to produce a proficient population at minimal cost. Godin’s critique of modern education resonates with our educational renewal movement, making him an interesting person to listen to.

Back to marketing for a moment. Small schools need marketing. I was originally resistant to marketing, feeling that the effort to market was futile and would erode the organic qualities of the grassroots educational renewal movement. Godin helped me reconsider my views on marketing, especially when I saw a marketing expert critiquing the ills of mass marketing. As an educator, he helped me frame marketing as teaching the wider community about what schooling can be when you care about quality learning environments. Godin trusts that if you provide your community with valuable content, you will be granted permission by that community to share more about your company or school.

So, in 2021 I encourage you to listen to what Seth Godin has to say. I was an early adopter of his podcast Akimbo, which started in 2018. Episodes are compact, usually centering on a key idea, and then concluding with Godin’s answers to listener questions. You might like one of his early episodes on Game Theory and the Infinite Game (Episode 7). I found his episodes on Solving Interesting Problems (S5E9)  and Organized Learning (S7E5) stimulating. You might not find yourself agreeing with all his conclusions, but here is someone who is problematizing several of the issues our educational renewal movement has with mass education.

Bonus Recommendation: The Educational Renaissance Podcast

This year Jason, Kolby and I started podcasting. We wanted to find a convenient way to provide our audience with high quality, long form content that augmented our weekly articles. So far the feedback has been positive, and we’ve enjoyed collaborating in this new format. 

This past fall we released the first several episodes of our podcast, tracing important themes we’ve written about in our blog articles, but in a conversational format, delving into more detail. You can find each of our episodes on our website or you can subscribe in any podcast app, such as iTunes or Spotify. 

Like some of the other recommended voices mentioned above, we aim to provide excellent content to support our educational renewal movement. We reach into the past to glean classical models of education while also making connections with recent discoveries in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and theology. Our greatest desire is to provide you with meaningful content to help you in the craft of teaching.

So with these recommendations in mind, hopefully 2021 will be a year of learning, inspiration and educational renewal for you, your students and your schools.

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Broadly speaking, I like how Waitzkin frames the book from the vantage point of the learner. As educators, we can become immersed in the headspace of the teacher as we work on our craft. This in itself is a good thing, since there’s much to practice and hone as teachers. But Waitzkin’s book provides a helpful reminder that the work of the student learning is our primary goal. He gives ample insight into his own learning, first as a chess player (he was the subject of the book and subsequent movie Searching for Bobby Fischer), then as a martial artist, becoming a world champion in Tai Chi. While Waitzkin is a top performer in multiple (and disparate) fields, the book focuses more on the process of learning, only incidentally referring to his accomplishments. As we’ll see below, process is way more important that results.

Jason has written extensively on the concept of flow.

(See The Flow of Thought series: Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom.)

This is a major concept that weaves through Waitzkin’s book. While some readers might not take on board some of his examples from Eastern mysticism, much of what he writes about illustrates and exemplifies how important flow is to top performance as a learner. (For what it’s worth, and perhaps this can be a future article, for almost every point at which Waitzkin draws upon Eastern ideas, I was able to think of a biblical passage that effectively communicated the same concept. For instance, Waitzkin beautifully describes the child-like nature of learning [p. 80], which reminded me of Matthew 18:3 “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”)

This book is a great read, and I encourage you to read it thoroughly for yourself. Here I will unpack four principles that are central to Waitzkin’s understanding of the art of learning. If you’ve been following Educational Renaissance for some time, you will hear many resonances with articles we’ve written elsewhere. The four principles are growth mindset, deliberate practice, discipline AND love, and routines.

The Art of Learning Principle 1: Fixed vs. Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck is best known for her book Mindset. So it was interesting to see Waitzkin draw upon her work to describe a key aspect of his own learning (Art of Learning, pp. 30-33). Dweck argues that individuals can be placed on a spectrum of views pertaining to their own intelligence. Those adopting a fixed (or entity) mindset view their intelligence as an innate quality. For instance, the student who thinks, “Well, I’m not good at math,” has adopted the fixed mindset. The liability is that the individual perceives herself as something that will be perpetuated into the future, which short-circuits growth. Contrast this with the growth (or incremental) mindset in which the individual takes on the view of self as in a state of development. It’s important to note that these mindsets aren’t adopted consciously, and an individual needs to be observed to determine where they fall on this fixed vs. growth spectrum. The reflective learner, though, once their mindset has been identified, can modulate towards the growth mindset.

Waitzkin draws out an important point from Dweck’s work, which is the learner’s response to failure. He writes:

Children who associate success with hard work tend to have a “mastery-oriented response” to challenging situations, while children who see themselves as just plain “smart” or “dumb,” or “good” or “bad” at something, have a “learned helplessness orientation.”

Art of Learning, p. 30

What Waitzkin is talking about is how fixed-mindset students want to avoid failure because it is received as a definition of their innate ability, whereas the growth-mindset student invests in failure because it reveals an area for growth–a place where the student is not at the level they want to be at yet. The “mastery-oriented response” means that the student sees initial failure as a challenge to work hard toward mastery.

At a later point, Waitzkin develops the idea of “investment in loss” that expands upon the growth mindset (pp. 107-113). It can be difficult to take on a growth mindset in part because it hurts when our pride gets bruised due to failure. We want to resist the learning process, finding it easier to adopt a fixed mindset and assume that’s just the way it is. He writes,

“In order to grow, he needs to give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win.” (p. 107)

Giving yourself to the learning process means that the learner must actually embrace loss and failure. Failure leads to humility as our pride is chipped away. Failure also leads to growth, step by step. Adopting the growth mindset means accepting the long journey to maximizing one’s ability in any given field. Yet more often than not, we are operating at suboptimal levels. That’s just the nature of life. As Waitzkin states,

“It is essential to have a liberating incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in a peak performance state.” (p. 113)

In other words, the growth mindset can simultaneously recognize that one is not working at the top level and still invest in the opportunity for growth.

A corollary to the fixed vs. growth mindset is the result vs. process approach. Waitzkin, who is a top performer in multiple fields, believes that results are harder to come by when you are results oriented. Instead, we should focus on setting up a “process-first approach” (pp. 44-47). I’ve heard other performance experts talk about setting systems rather than setting goals for long-term success. What I appreciate about Waitzkin is that he balances both result and process approaches. He writes,

“While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy.” (p. 44)

So as teachers, we can set small benchmarks to track progress, but these benchmarks should not detract from the sense that we are establishing a process or system.

The Art of Learning Principle 2: Deliberate Practice

Anders Ericsson is a pioneer in high performance research and is perhaps the first to express the idea that the key to expert performance rests not in innate qualities but in extended periods of deliberate practice. He writes in an article published in Psychological Review,

“We argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.” (1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, pg. 400)

Deliberate practice has obvious connections to the growth mindset, so it’s not surprising to find Waitzkin incorporating concepts of deliberate practice.

Learning effectively takes time. As Waitzkin describes sessions of deep absorption in the world of chess, he provides us with an image of the kind of learning students need to take on board in order to become really effective in any domain.

“Sometimes the study would take six hours in one sitting, sometimes thirty hours over a week. I felt like I was living, breathing, sleeping in that maze, and then, as if from nowhere, all the complications dissolved and I understood.” (Art of Learning, pg. 74)

The satisfaction and joy of understanding is a profound experience, but it only comes after time spent in deep work. Waitzkin expresses the concept of deliberate practice as “numbers to leave numbers.” When we are confronted with highly technical information, it needs to be assimilated in such a way that it becomes integrated into our intuition. A concert pianist doesn’t think about scales and arpeggios while performing on stage. This would detract from her expression. What we can assume when watching a virtuosic performance is that hours upon hours have been spent internalizing scale patterns so that the finger patters are simply part of her being. There is no thought of scales or of fingerings, simply of music. She has studied scales to leave scales, which is what Waitzkin is expressing here.

As teachers it can be difficult to help students catch the bug of deliberate practice, especially when our goal is not necessarily expert performance in one domain, but merely steady progress in multiple simultaneous domains. Our students are predisposed to be highly motivated in some subjects and less than motivated in others. The joy of understanding feels too remote and hours of deep absorption is the last thing they want to be assigned. Good coaching is one aspect (and we will delve into this below shortly). Another concept that will guide us is reduced complexity.

Waitzkin uses the concept of “smaller circles” to get at this essential idea:

“Over time expansiveness decreases while potency increases. I call this method ‘Making Smaller Circles.’” (p. 120)

Perhaps we can be forgiven of thinking of Mr. Miyagi training Daniel LaRusso with his “wax on, wax off” techniques. Mr. Miyagi was using “smaller circles” by breaking down karate moves to its component parts that were learnable through garden-variety exercises. The vast expanse of knowledge in mathematics, history, literature and science require deliberate practice in order to gain competence, let alone expertise. Such a task is way too overwhelming for a teacher, let alone so many students with different dispositions. Yet, breaking down the complexity into small steps provides a way to train students in deliberate practice. Additionally, some of the complexity occurs because we try to move quickly through content. Some skills, though, are built best when practiced slowly.

“We have to be able to do something slowly before we can have any hope of doing it correctly with speed.” (pg. 120)

As an example, for our students who will be taking AP tests in May, I have them practice a few problems slowly and deliberately early in the training process. This builds certain skills they will need with regard to understanding the nature of multiple choice questions, how to eliminate incorrect answer, how to avoid trick questions, etc. Later they can operate at a more rapid speed because we’ve taken the time to thoroughly comb over a few example questions multiple times. (For what it’s worth, I have mixed feelings about the whole AP enterprise. Forgive me for viewing the College Board as the Galactic Empire.)

A seemingly contradictory concept is “chunking” or “the ability to assimilate large amounts of information into a cluster that is bound together by certain information into a cluster that is bound together by certain patterns or principles particular to a given discipline” (pg. 138). Yes, we want to break massive complexes of information and skills down to small steps absorbed slowly, but we can also recognize that the mind works like a supernetwork to systematize all it knows into meaningful relationships. By letting new information bump up against other closely related information, the brain can absorb it more easily than if it is completely disconnected from everything else.

As educators, we can help our students capitalize on their natural interest in specific domains by connecting other areas of knowledge to those domains. Modern education fractures domains of knowledge into separate arenas. It is no surprise then that students become fractured beings, thinking of themselves as math people or art people. Therefore, we need to provide students a means of putting their being back together again, a unifying theory of reality and existence occurs when we understand all learning as interrelated.

The Art of Learning Principle 3: Discipline AND Love

Waitzkin describes many of his different chess teachers. Some challenged him to become more disciplined while others wanted him to express his natural game. There’s a balance between discipline and love that needs to be considered carefully. In describing his first teacher, Bruce, Waitzkin writes,

“He had to teach me to be more disciplined without dampening my love for chess or suppressing my natural voice. Many teachers have no feel for this balance and try to force their students into cookie-cutter molds.” (p. 9)

This is one of the great tensions all teachers face. We have a tendency to slip to one extreme or the other according to our personalities and propensities (especially when we ourselves are stressed). We need order and we need warmth in the learning environment.

I think the imagery Waitzkin provides by way of his mother beautifully describes the way we as teachers can build an alliance with students. He explains two ways of taming a wild horse. One way is to break it:

“The horse goes through pain, rage, frustration, exhaustion, to near death… then it finally yields.” (p. 86)

This dominance approach can be highly effective, but our response is that something damaging happened to that horse. It lost something of its nature by being broken. An approach defined by extreme discipline lacks love of the beautiful creature being trained.

Waitzkin’s mother, on the other hand, is a “horse whisperer.” The trainer creates an alliance with the horse by petting it, grooming it, stroking it.

“So you guide the horse toward doing what you want to do because he wants to do it.” (p. 87)

Notice that the horse whisperer hasn’t give up all discipline, but the discipline comes through love. Training students takes the same kind of indirect approach of leadership rather than manipulation. If students are going to operate at their best, the can be broken, submitting to the rigors of the system, or they can be groomed to desire for themselves their personal best. When we are growth minded and process oriented as teachers, we can help our students gain for themselves a growth mindset and process approach.

The Art of Learning Principle 4: Routines

The last concept I want to draw out from Waitzkin’s book is the concept of routines. Effective learning occurs when we have established healthy patterns. Imagine what a school day would look like if every student ate right, got to bed on time and ordered their books nicely each day. Waitzkin describes his involvement with the Human Performance Institute in Orlando. We associate the Institute with high caliber performers like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, so it is striking that they brought in a chess player to study high performance beyond athletics. One of the key concepts gleaned from his experience is the importance of routines.

High performers often incorporate routines as a means to maximize their effectiveness. We often hear of inspiring stories of top athletes who get to practice before their teammates to put in that many more reps that later pay off on the field. These athletes created a routine; the routine of getting to practice early. Effective routines enable top performers to get into the right frame of mind, especially when they have to operate under pressure. As a Chicagoan growing up in the Jordan era, I recalled that Michael Jordan would regularly ask for the ball in clutch situations. He wanted the ball when the game was on the line. He had a winning frame of mind that was cultivated through routines.

Students can create routines that help them to function at their best as learners. Waitzkin advises working backward from the desired state to identify a “trigger” that initiates a four- or five-step routine (p. 188). For example, a student experiences anxiety whenever a test is handed out. She wants to calm herself so that her anxiety doesn’t adversely impact her test. Working backwards from her desired state (calm), she decides that she will take a deep breath, after stretching her arms, after sharpening her pencil, after getting a drink of water. The trigger for this four-step routine is the transition to test time. By laying out this routine, she is taking control of her emotional state with the goal of being in the right frame of mind to do her best on the test.

What Waitzkin is describing here is very similar to what Charlotte Mason teaches about habit training. We gain a vision of some inspiring idea that we would like to attain (for example, focused attention). We delineate a few key steps to the habit. And then we practice that until it is internalized. This is obviously an overly simplified description of Mason’s philosophy, but as teachers one of our primary tools is habit training. We can lovingly enable our students to acquire the discipline to live masterful lives through our support.

Speaking of habit training, a couple weeks ago I finished writing my eBook on habit training! It should be coming out in the next few weeks. So stay tuned. There you will find a much fuller treatment of habit training from a Charlotte Mason perspective.

In the comments let us know how you are applying these concepts (growth mindset, deliberate practice, discipline AND love, and routines) in your work as an educator!

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The basic problem Wilson is trying to solve is a crisis in national public education. He reflects on the state of the public schools in the 1980s as producing students who lack rudimentary skills in reading, writing and arithmetic. Even more concerning is the detrimental effect this has on American society through cultural illiteracy. The expectation that a democracy is founded upon an educated citizenry has been eroded through misguided reform movements. Wilson proposes an alternative form of education founded on a biblical worldview and utilizing the ancient liberal arts model.

Having identified the problem of public schools as not providing the intellectual and moral foundation to enable a civil society to succeed, he identifies numerous attempts to reform public schools that availed little positive results, especially for the Christian. The public schools are a wasteland for the Christian. “So in this battle for the public schools, it is folly for the Christians to continue to lose and inconsistent for them to win” (39). What would it look like to gain a win in the public schools, when it is committed to a worldview of secular humanism? But is it more likely that our children will be turned out doubting their faith, intellectually malnourished, and fairly well indoctrinated in an anti-Christian worldview. Sure, a parent can devote extensive resources to countering what the public school has to offer. But what, then, is the value of an education that must be questioned, qualified and contested at every turn?

Wilson hints at a further problem in the reactionary approach taken by Christian schools in the latter half of the 20^th century. The solution to the educational crisis was not to build a Christian alternative to the secular public product on offer. The liability was essentially to Christen secular humanism. A more thorough reconsideration of an authentically Christian form of education needed to occur, which Wilson enters into in the heart of this work.

The first main section of Wilson’s book is to lay out a case for a distinctively Christian education. The biblical framework he provides rests on several biblical passages, including Deut. 6:4-9, Eph. 6:1-4 and Matt. 22:37. Taken together these passages speak to an education that is thoroughly imbued with scripture. Students should not simply have a Bible lesson once a day, or once a week. The entirety of the child’s instruction should be informed by a biblical worldview.  Wilson also frames Christian education in such a way as to caution us against thinking that education cannot save man. He delves into the theological paradigm of Adam, created in the image of God yet fallen. Our students come to us as offspring of Adam. It would be foolish and sacrilege to think that our cleverly devised curriculum could save. Only the grace of God saves through the accomplished work of Christ. Wilson states that “educational reformation must begin with the Biblical view of man” (74). This is why the Christian parent will struggle with the public schools. This is why the Christian parent must be discerning about even the Christian schools.

“So it is not enough to have a Christian curriculum, and Christian teachers. It is not enough for the school to meet in a church. The Biblical educator must not only have a Christian understanding of the material, he must have a Biblical understanding of the student. If he does not, then the result will be a hybrid Christian methodology employed to achieve a humanistic goal.” (76).

The Christian parent must be discerning, then, about the nature of the Christian education they are looking for. The Christian school must be diligent about its methodology. We cannot assume all students will have been recipients of God’s grace, thus our teaching is “preparation for those who have not received the grace of God, and godly instruction for those who have” (76).

The second major section of Wilson’s book lays out a model of classical education based significantly on Dorothy Sayers 1947 article “The Lost Tools of Learning” echoed in the title of this book. (You can see my own take on Sayers and the recovery of educational values from the past). The salient features of Wilsonian classicism are the selection of great books from the Western canon (83-85), engaging students in the “great conversation.” Latin language studies are essential for laying a foundation for understanding the English language, foreign languages, the scientific method and a host of other benefits (87-88). Wilson then explores the trivium both in the mode expressed by Sayers as corresponding to the stages of childhood development (91-97), but also as structures for how different subjects are taught (100).

Wilson points to his aims to promote a love of learning and a strict standard of discipline. These aims, however, receive very little treatment (a paragraph each on pp. 100-101). The method proposed for promoting a love of learning is to employ teachers who are enthusiastic about their subjects. The low student-teacher ratios maximize the teacher’s influence so that students catch the enthusiasm themselves. Regarding loving discipline, Wilson emphasizes order, a lack of disruption and submission on the part of the student. Corporal punishment is used according the guidelines of his school’s discipline policy. I think that many readers will have wanted more educational theory here, rather than an exposition of Wilson’s Logos school handbook.

An unexpected turn was Wilson concluding his section on classical schooling with a review of his school’s growth and academic performance. He is able to point to impressive numbers, as his school grew rapidly and students at the Logos school achieved exceptional scores on standardized tests. True, standardized tests can be a solid measure of academic goals. However, the book’s claims to a Christian educational ideal surely requires some different modes of measurement. Has there been a measurable impact on the stated cultural crisis that frames the book? Are graduates retaining their faith at a greater rate than their public and private school peers? Are graduates contributing to church and society in ways Wilson has expected as a result of this educational paradigm?

Wilson concludes this section with several explorations of the challenges of modernity. He covers works by Neil Postman, Allan Bloom and others to question the use of video in education and the quality of music children are exposed to. He notes the challenge of Christian anti-intellectualism. He also considers the question of whether parents should choose homeschooling or a classical Christian school. Wilson concludes by reviewing the crisis of modern education and reiterating his proposal of classical Christian education as the means to train up children in a biblical worldview.

In the nearly twenty years since its publication, the classical Christian movement has grown significantly as a movement in the United States, indebted in no small part to Wilson’s efforts. The movement has developed in theoretical sophistication, with many schools no longer adhering to Sayers’s stages-of-development conception of the trivium. More schools are now exploring STEM subjects as an integrated quadrivium of sorts. The question as to whether the trivium ought to be taught as distinct subject has shaped several schools, with Jason offering a critique of this view in consideration of the meaning of the concept of “arts” as “the ability to make something.” The liberal arts are not merely bodies of knowledge but a set of “highly complex skills that students needed to be trained in over a course of years.” Alongside the ACCS, other organizations have been founded such as Circe Institute and Society for Classical Learning that broadened the theoretical and practical discussions within classical Christian education.

Looking back on what amounts to a foundational volume for the classical Christian movement, I was surprised to find that the book was far more practical than philosophical. I appreciate the emphasis on biblical worldview applied to education, but one comes away wanting a more robust exploration of what this looks like within the liberal arts tradition and as an educational method. I think in The Liberal Arts Tradition by Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain (previously reviewed by Jason) one will find a more deliberate exploration of educational philosophy along these lines. Wilson rigidly positions the movement against progressivist educational reform. It is not that I don’t agree with his critique of modern education, but I wonder if there are insights that can be gained by studying developments in educational methodology stemming from such areas as neurology, cognition or psychology. All in all, I think Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning is a necessary read for those within classical education, but many will sense that the movement has developed in ways that make it less directly applicable today.

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