Each cultural time period generates new challenges for this objective, and ours is no exception. While classical Christian education emerged in Christendom, an era of western history in which the Christian faith was the cultural paradigm, this is no longer the case today. The “Age of Faith” may continue to cast its shadow over western society, but Christianity has lost its cultural cachet.

What does it look like, then, for Christian schools to prepare students for this new era? We cannot simply look back to the last century, or the century before that, or even the millennium before that. The last one thousand years all share a quality that the two thousand twenty-sixth year of the Common Era (i.e. 2025) does not: they occurred in a time when the intellectual, political, and cultural powers of the day viewed Christianity as the authority. If Christian educators want to glean wisdom from the past that is relevant for today, they must go all the way back to the days before Christendom, a time when Christians lived as strangers in a pagan society. This would take them to the 2nd and 3rd centuries when the young Christian movement was finding its way under the persecuting yoke of the Roman Empire. 

This article will explore how the early church engaged its pagan world intellectually and culturally in order to offer insights for modern Christian educators. The reality is that the world we inhabit today is, in many ways, more similar to the 3rd century than it is to the 20th century. A new form of paganism has emerged–an odd amalgamation of modern science, romanticism, and modern politics. In order for Christian educators to prepare their students to engage a pagan world, they need to understand it, and consider how their Christian brothers and sisters engaged it before them.

A Modern Pagan Society

Do we really live in a pagan society? Surely this is an exaggeration. Paganism connotes the widespread practices of superstition, animal sacrifice, and the occult. Even if practices like reading horoscopes are on the rise, they are certainly not mainstream.

In Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church (Eerdmans 2024), Stephen O. Presley suggests that the secular direction our culture has trod is a new form of paganism. Referencing Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s renown work A Secular Age, Presley observes that Christianity has become intellectually suspect and morally bankrupt. In its place lies “expressive individualism,” a form of epistemological and moral relativism that prioritizes internal feelings over external norms. Not unlike the 2nd century, in which the Roman Empire permitted a plurality of religious options so long as one bowed the kneed to Caesar as Lord, so our culture celebrates a religious pluralism for each to worship as he or she pleases.

Interestingly, contemporary culture has somehow made peace between the materialism of modern science with the romanticist qualities of the expressive individualism mentioned above. Truth, we are told, can be found through the deliverances of the scientific method and the inner revelations of ”who one is inside.” In this way, our culture prizes the objective truth of modern science and the subjective truths of the psychological “self,” yet not in an internally coherent manner. A dizzying schizophrenic oscillation of the objective and subjective is the result, in which both are valued but not simultaneously. You can have Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, but not together. 

Christianity, on the other hand, is paradoxically where the objective and subjective meet. “In the Beginning was the Word,” the Gospel of John tells us, and “…and the Word became flesh.” Simon Kennedy, a research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia, makes this point in Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom (Lexham Press 2024). In this book, Kennedy argues for a new way of thinking about Christian worldview, underscoring that only God possesses the authoritative Christian worldview. Humans can develop a Christian worldview, subjectively speaking, but only through seeking a true apprehension of objective reality “that is obtained through the process of learning about God, the self, and the world (15). 

Even while the objective and subjective remain unreconciled in contemporary culture, there is a third ingredient we must consider: modern politics. One quality of a secular society, again, according to Charles Taylor, is the “buffered self,” the idea that cosmic and spiritual forces do not impact everyday life. If this is the case, there is an authority and power vacuum, one that is quickly being filled by modern politics. We could see this phenomonon in the most recent election: the desperation, angst, and fear-mongering that occurred throughout the process. Both sides of the aisle used rhetoric in a way to indicate that democracy was on the line and that only their ballot nomination could save us. Many people today longing for good news about peace and security look not to their churches, but to their political leaders. The new hope is in public policy, elected officials, and the preservation of democracy as we know it.

The effect of the amalgamation of expressive individualism (truth is found inside), scientific materialism (the physical world is all there is), and modern politics (only effective government can save us) is the new paganism. This paganism rejects a transcendent creator over and above all things, and replaces him with a worldview of immanence. This immanence takes normally good things in this world–the individual self, scientific method, and democratic government–and deifies them. In order to equip students to engage our neo-pagan world, let us now examine how the early church did so long ago. 

To Sanctify a Culture

In his book cited above, Stephen Presley argues that the early church’s model for engaging the pagan culture of the day was not isolation or confrontation, but sanctification. The earliest Christians were living in a world in which Caesar was king, and the empire promised peace through strength. Perpetual violence, sexual license, unbridled leisure, and oppression of the weak were core elements of this ancient culture. Christians were required to think prudently and biblically about how they would navigate such a world while being faithful to Christ.

Presley proposes that the posture these early Christians adopted was one of cultural sanctification. He writes, “Cultural sanctification recognizes that Christians are necessarily embedded within their culture and must seek sanctification (both personal and corporate) in a way that draws upon the forms and features of their environment to transform them by pursuing virtue” (12). In other words, Christians should continue to live in their local communities, engaging in normal cultural practices (so long as they are not sinful), even as they determine when to abstain, holding fast to their identity as pilgrims destined for an eternal home.

Presley then goes on to offer five ways the early church engaged in this “slow and steady process of living faithfully and seeking sanctification both personally and corporately in ways that transform the culture” (20). 

First, the early church crafted a distinct Christian identity. Through catechesis and worship, believers grew to understand who they were individually and communally as followers of Christ in a Roman world. They understood that even though they lived in a largely pagan society, Caesar did not lay claim to their ultimate identity.

Second, early Christians lived out a political theology in which they submitted to civil authorities and worked to be active citizens. They took seriously the teaching of Jesus to “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” even as they faithfullly worshiped God as the supreme authority over all things. Moreover, they understood that their ultimate citizenship is in heaven.

Third, the early church navigated the intellectual climate of its day with wisdom and eloquence. The church developed its own public intellectuals, equipped to evaluate the dominant ideas of the day and provide a defense for the Christian faith. These Christian intellectuals, such as Irenaeus and Origen, did not cave to the attacks on their faith, but instead provided persuasive arguments and responses.

Fourth, these believers engaged in public life with humility, compassion, and courage. They did not abstain from contributing to society in normal ways–having jobs, partaking in innocent leisure, having families, or even serving in the military. Rather, they participated in these societal functions with wisdom and virtue. In addition, they displayed exceptional compassion, caring for the poor and marginalized of society.

Finally, the early church was resolute in its hope in the coming kingdom of God. While their neighbors trusted in the glory of the Roman Empire, early Christians rooted their faith in the salvation they received through Christ and put their hope in the future resurrection. This hope served as a north star for them, guiding them through the complexities of living in a pagan society with a clear vision for the future.

Through these five avenues, early Christians avoided isolation, such as “the Benedict Option,” and confrontation, attempting to seize the empire for themselves. Instead, they learned to live under the authority of the Roman Empire and engage a contemporary pagan culture, while not abandoning their faith in Christ and commitment to Christian virtue. 

Seek the Welfare

In our modern pagan society, the church has a new opportunity to live out its identity in this way. The idea of cultural sanctification allows believers to approach culture, not as a world to flee or fight, but to help flourish. This approach is reminiscent of the Lord’s instruction to the Jewish exiles in Babylon back in the 6th century:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Jeremiah 29: 4-7 (ESV)

Here God commands his people to seek the welfare of the city, to contribute to its flourishing and success. Rather than waiting idly by for the eventual return to Israel, he instructs them to lead responsible lives, to engage in the culture, and to be productive members of the city. Moreover, he encourages them to pray for the city, remaining faithful to their Jewish identity even while they seek the city’s welfare.

In today’s pagan society, opportunities abound for Christians to embed themselves in culture while seeking to sanctify it. Christians simply committing to living virtuously will offer a stabilizing force for society and will set the church apart as a unique community. Engaging as active citizens and finding ways to serve in their neighborhoods is an additional way Christians can live out their calling to an unbelieving culture as God’s people. Finally, remaining conscious of prevailing ideologies of the day that run counter to Christianity, especially expressive individualism and what Carl Trueman calls the triumph of the modern self, will prove essential for preserving biblical doctrine.

These practices are all elements of an ancient Christian way of engaging a pagan culture, cultural sanctification, which “…sees Christians embedded within their culture but seeking sanctification so as to promote virtue and reject vice in their personal lives, in the church and in the activities and institutions of the surrounding world” (164). 

Insights for Christian Educators Today

What does it look like for Christian educators today to pursue this vision of cultural sanctification for their graduates?

Let me offer three suggestions.

First, Christian educators should reclaim the classical vision of education, which is the pursuit of wisdom and cultivation of virtue. The most important work teachers can do today, in partnership with parents, is to train students to be wise and discerning, both regarding intellectual ideas and practical day-to-day decisions. Presley’s observation regarding the virtuous lives of early Christians is profound, and yet, we must remember that virtue does not happen by accident. A virtuous persons is formed through the intentional cultivation of moral habits over the long-term. While grades, college acceptances, and accolades have their place, the cultivation of virtue must remain at the center of what Christian schools aim to do.

Second, Christian educators should equip graduates to grapple intellectually with the cultural ideas of the day. The way this occurred in the classical tradition is through training students in the liberal arts, the tools of learning. Modern education today is preoccupied with the pragmatic. Popular-level literature, worksheets, and 1:1 tablets is the strategy today for moving students from grade to grade. But for students to truly understand and evaluate competing ideologies, they need more than to study the “right answers.” They need to think through the ideas themselves, learn to define their terms, apply basic principles of logic, and debate opposing views.

Finally, Christian educators must infuse graduates with a theology of life that is grounded in scripture and tethered to a local church. It is no accident that Presley’s list regarding how the early church engaged culture begins with identity. If students are going to engage in cultural sanctification, they need to have clarity regarding their own life purpose. A robust theology of life provides students with the fundamentals of who they are in Christ, the different phases and stations of life they can expect to navigate, and a focus on the importance of staying connected to a local church.

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In this article, we will develop a framework for the classroom centered around the idea that each class is a team. This framework revolves around two general concepts: strong relationships and strategic routines. These might seem either obvious or overly general. But we shall see how essential both are if we want to foster a successful culture in the classroom.

A Good Apple: Cultivating Relational Safety

In his book The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle describes how organizations can create cultures that flourish based on studies of various teams such as the Navy SEALs, the San Antonio Spurs and the Brain Trust at Pixar, to name a few. Coyle structures his book around three skills essential to culture creation: build safety, share vulnerability, and establish purpose. Each of these skills address ways individuals connect to a shared culture, which can be expressed in several diagnostic questions.

When we are aiming to build safety, we can ask a few important questions. Does every individual feel safe to share?  Is there a bond of connection that everyone feels? Is there a sense of identity individuals sense by belonging to this group? Perhaps the most important of the three skills is creating relational connection.

In his chapter entitled, “The Good Apples,” Coyle describes how an experiment was run in Australia studying group dynamics. Planted inside a number of four-person groups was an individual who was intentionally supposed to sabotage the group. This person was a bad apple, attempting—and usually succeeding—in reducing the quality of each group’s performance. Yet, in one instance, a group involved an individual named Jonathan, who effectively checked the attempts of the bad apple. Jonathan—dubbed the good apple—exhibited subtle characteristics that made everyone in the group feel welcomed and valued. Every gesture and statement made by Jonathan enabled the group to feel a connection with the others in the group.

Coyle lists a number of patterns that Jonathan—and other connectors like him—practiced that cause this feeling of safety and connection. He notes “close physical proximity, often in circles” as well as “profuse amounts of eye contact.” There are “lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches)” along with “lots of questions” and “humor, laughter” (Coyle 8). These patterns make a group “sticky.” Members of these groups come to feel a sense of belonging through many reinforcing patterns and practices. While it can be difficult to manufacture such cultures, we can note these patterns and implement them strategically. For instance, when I want to initiate a project, I will call a class to huddle up. American football has made this such a recognizable practice, that my student immediately circle up in a hunched over position. I can give simple pointed instructions and generate excitement, connection and buy in by this “close physical proximity, often in circles” pattern. “Okay, guys, we need to put away all the chairs from assembly. What’s our strategy?” In the huddle, I let them share their ideas and then we get down to work. Moments like this create a culture of belonging and connection. Find simple ways to incorporate patterns like this into your day.

Later in the same chapter, Coyle dives into the work of Pentland to break down five factors of optimal team performance. Like the list of patterns above, these can be implemented to cultivate a sense of teamwork and build culture. Coyle writes:

“1. Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short.

2. Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.

3. Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader.

4. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team.

5. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others.”

Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code (Random House, 2018), 14-15.

Notice how much culture is built around quick moments of conversation. As teachers, we are often inclined to stop side conversations. These can be distracting and show a lack of attention towards the subject at hand. Yet, when our goal is building culture, we actually want a good amount of intra-group dialogue to occur. What this means is that we ought to train our students to shift between focused attention and then side-to-side group engagement. Coach students in topic-driven discussion. Provide feedback on roundtable debates and dialogue. This entails that our classrooms are not dominated by mono-directional instruction, such as lectures. Instead, we must become effective at practices like dialogue, debate and discussion.

Another feature of these factors is what we could call distributed leadership. Sure, as teachers we are the leaders of the classroom, often giving orders and instructions and always guiding the class throughout their learning. However, there are ways we can empower students to become champions of the culture we are building. This can occur by training them in how to lead discussions. We can give them rules for effective debate and argumentation. Break down the big group into platoons of teams, assigning different groupings and team leaders each time. These moments of empowerment get the students invested in the creation of a culture that has the stamp of their personalities. While it might feel like this detracts from the teacher’s leadership and authority, when done correctly, the teacher actually accumulates more leadership capital through guiding, coaching and correcting these young, emerging leaders.

The concept of “go exploring” can also feel risky. But notice how that is likewise a major contributor to empowerment and buy-in. The teacher as leader gives clear instructions as to what ought to be explored and what information would be worth sharing. This can be done in the classroom by having students scan back through the chapter for identify beautiful word choices of an author. Students can be assigned the task of coming up with discussion questions for the next chapter. Young students love exploring and finding specimens in nature study. They come back to the teacher and the group with a joyful, “Look what I found!”

I highly recommend reading through all of Coyle’s book whether you are a teacher or administrator. Learning the tools to guide and shape culture enable you to have intentionality in what is built but also a “stickiness” that makes your culture hard to resist. My thesis here as I interacted with Coyle’s first chapter is that we as leaders in our classrooms and schools can be the “good apples” promoting the safety and connection that makes culture possible.

A Champion Culture: Principles and Practices

Here at Educational Renaissance, we really like Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion. Now that he has come out with a new edition, we need to navigate a world where there are great qualities that are the domain of his 2.0 edition as well as new insights published in his 3.0 version. One of the greatest frameworks he provided in the 2.0 version was a write-up of “Five Principles of Classroom Culture”: Discipline, Management, Control, Influence, and Engagement (342-347). Here we’ll walk through a few of these principles and spell out some key practices to implement to build a thriving culture.

Lemov is spot on when it comes to a description of discipline. I am reminded of the classical sense that Latin root discipulina means instruction (much as the Greek word for disciple, μαθητής, means “learner” or “pupil”). Discipline is not about punishment, but about inculcating what Lemov calls “self-discipline.” Charlotte Mason connect this idea to habit training. “There is no habit or power so useful to man or woman as that of personal initiative,” Mason claims (Home Education 192). True freedom comes when we are able to hold ourselves accountable to what we know to be true, good and just.

The second principle Lemov elucidates is management. Unlike what many might expect, he does not promote a system of rewards and punishments. Instead, he equates management to relationship building. He writes:

“To truly succeed, you must be able to control students—that is, get them to do things regardless of consequence, and inspire and engage them in positive work. You also are building relationships with students that are nontransactional; they don’t involve rewards or consequences, and they demonstrate that you care enough to know your students as individuals.”

Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0 (Jossey-Bass, 2015), 344.

This really is Leadership 101. If your class is going to have a healthy culture, there must be a strong relational connection between student and teacher. This relationship serves as a bridge that must hold the weight of coaching, training, instructing and counseling.

Third is control, with Lemov describes as “your capacity to cause someone to choose to do what you ask, regardless of consequences.” Notice how this overlaps with management. There must be a safe and connected group dynamic such as Coyle describes where the teacher can call students up firmly and confidently. This comes from what Lemov expresses as “faith in students’ ability to meet expectation” (Lemov 345). We are not lowering expectations to make it “easy” on the students. Instead, the teacher supports students to reach high and offers support to get there.

The relationship building inherent in management and control leads to the fourth principle, influence. “Influence gets them to want to internalize the things you suggest” (Lemov 346). The control principle is all about the teacher believing in a student’s potential to reach high. Influence now gets the student to believe in herself. This comes through celebrating victories, reflecting on challenges overcome, and setting new goals to reach even higher.

Finally, the principle of engagement centers on compelling lessons. We must be careful here to avoid mere entertainment. A teacher might be gifted in sparking laughter or eloquently delivering lectures. But if the material itself is not appreciated for its intrinsic value, the whole culture can crumble. Exciting lessons are often associated with challenge and complexity. It is fascinating to see how children enjoy trying to solve interesting problems. Reading great books, writing effortfully, and calculating complex problems can be a pathway to flow for students. Engaging students in meaningful work is how to build a culture of excellence.

This philosophical introduction to the late chapters of Teach Like a Champion 2.0 lead to numerous techniques that help build classroom culture. Here I will highlight a few that can maximize your leadership as a teacher. We begin with “Strategic investment” combined with “Do it again.” In both of these you lead rehearsals of the routines, procedures and practices of the classroom. Here you can show exactly how things get done in the classroom, and then repeat the practice until it meets expectations. Consider how this framework leads to organized desks, clear routes for classroom traffic, homework steno checks, hand-raising, or rules for proper discussion.

You as a teacher project something of your personality and authority into the classroom. These next techniques leverage that presence you have in the classroom. From “Be seen looking” to “Firm calm finesse” and “Strong voice,” you convey to the classroom that you are in control of the environment—creating a safe and connected culture—through your ability to notice when students are doing what is expected and calling them up when they fall below standards. Being at peace in the presence of your students lets them know that you are both happy to be with them, but also not ruffled when things get a little out of control. You can bring them back with your strong voice. Now this is not yelling or raising your voice. Instead, you are clear, pointed, and confident in what you have to say.

The words we use make such an impact on the culture we are building. The techniques “Precise praise” and “Joy factor” go a long way towards building up a culture of excellence. With both of these techniques, we avoid phrases such as “good job” or “well done,” instead preferring to specify exactly what was praiseworthy. “Great job raising hands to share your thoughts, class.” “I really appreciated how you supported your claim with evidence.” By being precise, you clearly identify actions that are praiseworthy. This removes mere affirmation of the individual while demonstrating your watchfulness for the excellent standards that are central to your culture. Hard work and new understandings ought to be celebrated, not as a reward but as the natural consequence of the joy intrinsic is such things. Make these moments tangible for your students and provide a framework for taking satisfaction in their work.

As the leader in the classroom, you become the champion of the excellence that will mark your culture. We can be the good apples that create the safe and connected culture where students can thrive. By applying the principles and techniques outlined here, you can create a classroom culture that is a delight.

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A new book landed on my desk around the beginning of the school year. Robert Greene’s Mastery (New York: Viking, 2012) touches on a number of points that are worthy of exploration and consideration. It reads like a mix of historical biography and self help by a writer who is a master of his craft. I first came across Robert Greene when I listened to his 48 Laws of Power (New York: Viking, 1998) as an audiobook. At that point I largely dismissed Greene as a relevant voice in my life due to how Machiavellian his self-help advice came across. Yet, in Mastery one finds solid career advice based on the apprenticeship model from the Middle Ages. Intermingled in his delineation of one’s journey toward mastery, Greene chronicles the careers of past masters such as Leonardo, Mozart, Einstein, Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Curie, Carl Jung, and a host of others.

In this article I would like to delve into the second section of Mastery to explore the three phases of apprenticeship as spelled out by Greene. Because the book reads as advice given to an individual embarking on a new career, there is some translation that needs to occur to nuance Greene’s apprenticeship for a school environment. I will endeavor to examine Mastery from three vantage points: 1) the classroom environment as a locus of apprenticeship, 2) the teacher as apprentice, and 3) the work an administrator can do to create a culture of apprenticeship.

The Three Phases of Apprenticeship

Let us begin not with the three phases, but with the master idea of apprenticeship: transformation. Greene writes:

“The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character–the first transformation on the way to mastery.”

Robert Greene, Mastery, 55.

I cannot help but hear echoes of Romans 12:2, “be not conformed to this world, but be transformed (μεταμορφόω) by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Our spiritual apprenticeship to Christ Jesus is modeled upon the disciples journeying with Jesus. Our minds and our character undergo a metamorphosis through long years of following Christ. I cannot imagine Greene has this in mind when he writes this, yet the profundity of the truth is well worth noting. The journey of the apprentice in whatever field we might consider is to become someone who is disciplined and focused.

The first phase of apprenticeship is what Greene calls “deep observation.” He lays out two broad categories that one observes in an apprenticeship.

“First, you will observe the rules and procedures that govern success in this environment – in other words, “this is how we do things here.” . . . The second reality you will observe is the power relationships that exist within the group.”

Robert Greene, Mastery, 57

I find Green to be fairly Machiavellian here, especially by framing his second category around power. Now it is true in an educational environment that there is an authority structure – the teacher-student dynamic. It might also be true that certain students wield a kind of power. I find the insights from Jordan Peterson helpful to temper power as the singular characteristic of hierarchies. He would contest that a framework of competence might be a better understanding of group dynamics. Now, competence is a form of power, the power of expertise, but it is different than the form of power that often gets expressed as dominance and unfair privilege.

Okay, so apart from that little diatribe, what Greene lays out is a phase of apprenticeship that features learning the skills of observation, focus, attention, and noticing things. Observation includes the social environment and human interactions. I like how he begins with noticing before making judgments. In education we often want to move quickly to analysis and judgement. Perhaps this is a liability in discussion-based learning. But there is genuine benefit to cultivating the simple skill of noticing things. One of the best tools for cultivating the skill of observation is the practice of narration.

The second phase of apprenticeship is what Greene calls “the practice mode,” which he defines as “practice toward the acquisition of skills.” (58) I think this is the phase that amounts to the biggest portion of apprenticeship, which does not mean it is the most important phase, but it stands to reason that much of our time on task occurs in this phase. Greene spells out what we might call a mimetic form of instruction.

“The natural model for learning, largely based on the power of mirror neurons, came from watching and imitating others, then repeating the action over and over. Our brains are highly suited for this form of learning.”

Robert Greene, Mastery, 59

Watching, imitating and doing over and over is the most visible part of the master’s workshop. Imagine the activity of the great workshops of the Renaissance where apprentices look over the shoulder of the master, go to their own station and practice repeatedly, often with the master then looking over their shoulders.

While there is much that we learn that gets expressed in language or numbers, Greene spells out how there are certain kinds of information that amount to “tacit knowledge” or knowledge that is difficult to put into words. The Medieval model of apprenticeship enabled the learner to put into practice this tacit knowledge, accumulating the 10,000 hours, a la Anders Ericsson, which might take a decade to master. Imitation and practice, then, is a significant idea derived from this second phase of the apprenticeship as Greene describes it.

Furthermore, practice develops over time. As an individual increases in skill, there is an effect Greene describes as the “cycle of accelerated returns” where practice becomes both easier and more rewarding. This correlates well with what Cal Newport shares about passion, enjoyment and interest coming after the accumulation of skill. For something like math, it might take years of work and training to get to the point where true enjoyment emerges. The same is true with excellent literature that demands considerable attention to detail and understanding of literary conventions. We might experience the opposite of joy and passion when encountering these domains early in our apprenticeship. Yet when we gain the requisite time on task, joy and passion emerge.

The third phase of apprenticeship is what Greene calls “experimentation” or “the active mode.” In this phase the apprentice attempts to work independently. Greene writes:

“As you gain in skill and confidence, you must make the move to a more active mode of experimentation. This could mean taking on more responsibility, initiating a project of some sort, doing work that exposes you to the criticism of peers or even the public. The point of this is to gauge your progress and whether there are still gaps in your knowledge. You are observing yourself in action and seeing how you respond to the judgments of others. Can you take criticism and use it constructively?” (62)

Robert Greene, Mastery, 62

Some of the words that stand out to me in this description of the active phase are “responsibility” and “criticism.” In earlier phases of apprenticeship, you can imagine the apprentice working almost mechanically. At one level there is observation where the apprentice is soaking everything in. At the practice stage the apprentice is building the habits over and over accumulating skill. Then at this level there is genuine ownership, a sense of personalization of the task at hand. When one takes personal responsibility for one’s own work, there comes with it a vulnerability or exposure of one’s weaknesses. This is why the goal of this phase is to learn how to take criticism well.

I am reminded of the growth mindset. Carol Dweck describes a form of constructive criticism, “Growth-minded teachers tell students the truth and then give them the tools to close the gap.” (Mindset, 203) As students work at the cutting edge of their knowledge and skill, honest and forthright communication enables them to have an accurate picture about what they are doing well, but also about what they are not doing well. Yet the child cannot be left there, they must then be given the tools to improve. In the apprenticeship mindset, we can add to Dweck paradigm that a significant part of education ought to be teaching students how to find for themselves the tools to improve, so that when they get to the active stage, they can receive criticism and then creatively explore ways they can improve.

Greene goes on to dig deeper into the emotional detachment one must learn in the final phase of apprenticeship.

“It is always easier to learn the rules and stay within your comfort zone. Often you must force yourself to initiate such actions or experiments before you think you are ready. You are testing your character, moving past your fears, and developing a sense of detachment to your work–looking at it through the eyes of others.”

Robert Greene, Mastery, 63

Stepping out of the comfort zone can occur at all stages. I think about students who question whether the answer they produce in my Geometry class is correct. I begin to shift that assessment back onto them. How do you know? Have you checked your work? What if the textbook is wrong? Can you be confident that you have gotten the right answer even if it doesn’t match what others have produced? The answer is either correct or incorrect. If the student is able to assess that on their own, they begin to have a detachment from relying on others to tell them the answer is correct – as though correctness is some mystery only revealed by the text or the teacher.

Greene concludes his delineation of the three phases of apprenticeship by relating it to the nature of work today. We are moving beyond the industrial factory-model of work. Everyone can be a creative by writing blog, producing videos or podcasts, hosting webinars, or starting a business. The apprentice mindset enables individuals to not view themselves as cogs in an economic machine, but to explore new possibilities for creative careers. He writes:

“In general, no matter your field, you must think of yourself as a builder, using actual materials and ideas. You are producing something tangible in your work, something that affects people in some direct, concrete way. To build anything well – a house, a political organization, a business, or a film – you must understand the building process and possess the necessary skills. You are a craftsman learning to adhere to the highest standards. For all this, you must go through a careful apprenticeship. You cannot make anything worthwhile in this world unless you have first developed and transformed yourself.”

Robert Greene, Mastery, 64

The apprenticeship model Greene develops points to the fact that we cannot view the work of our students (nor our own work for that matter) as fixed. If we view ourselves as capable of transformation, the apprenticeship model provides a pathway to enact coaching and skills formation as a natural part of life.

Apprenticeship in the Classroom

When we are working with our students in the classroom, the three modes or phases of apprenticeship provide a helpful framework for the different kinds of work we are doing. I think it is important to keep in mind that these modes of apprenticeship are not strictly sequential, nor are they bound to long spans of year before one moves into another phase.

Beginning with deep observation, the first phase, I would encourage teachers to utilize the concepts of atmosphere and habit training to coach students in “how we do things here.” This is true with regard to how we carefully read texts or patiently observe something in nature. There are procedures and routines that must be learned, such as sitting in a ready position or having a moment of silence after the reading of scripture. Then there is the emotional/social intelligence component, where one of the ways we are training students is to have facility in relating with all kinds of people in different kinds of situations. This argues for a teacher’s direct involvement in breaks and lunch, in order to coach students well in the hugely important task of cultivating social skills.

Narration, or telling back, is essential to the task of deep observation. We cannot tell back what we have not given our attention to. While we tend to think of narration as part of a method, it is in and of itself a skill to be cultivated. Students can grow in the ability and capacity to narrate with greater attention to detail, to more fully convey the meaning of the author by utilizing his or her language and style, and to follow with greater nuance the sequence and order of thought in an episode. When we think about deep observation, the depth with which we are able to assimilate texts, music, artwork and nature provide a foundation for the next phases of apprenticeship.

The second phase, the practice mode, is where the bulk of the work occurs in a student’s life. We are wise not to consider this solely as homework. Much of the most effective practice a student or apprentice ought to do occurs under the watchful eye of the teacher. This provides greater scope for demonstration (“watch how I do it”) and correction (“instead try it this way”). Here I think the concepts in Make It Stick are invaluable. Spacing and interleaving are preferable to massed practice. At the heart of deliberate practice is a faithful guide – a master – who is able to place before the student the correct number of problems that will accomplish the most growth for the apprentice. This might entail a reduced number of practice problems in math or shorter writing assignments so that greater focus can be placed on discrete skills.

The active or experimentation mode, the third phase of apprenticeship, sees the students exploring their boundaries. We might hear a student ask, “What if I tried it this way?” or say, “I got the same answer but my steps were different.” A wise master poses open ended questions that force the student to be creative, considering an issue from a different angle. Teachers can provide a class with a problem to solve that requires teamwork, collaboration and may involve trial and error.

The big takeaway from thinking through the apprenticeship model in this way is that all phases are relevant to the group of students in your classroom. It could be a lesson weaves together observation, practice and experimentation. The phases might move back and forth between practice and observation with experimentation coming days later when the requisite knowledge and skill can be unleased on an interesting problem, issue or question. Perhaps a unit can be structure around this broad series of phases. I could see a quiz or exam structured accordingly. The key is to see how guiding students towards mastery involves all three: observation, practice and experimentation. Our role in this is to establish these guiding principles and then to be the master in the workshop alternately demonstrating and then providing feedback.

Teachers as Apprentices

The bulk of my thoughts has centered on the classroom environment. However, I think it is equally important to view our task as teachers as a craft. Whether you are in your early years as a teacher or have been in the classroom for decades, take as many opportunities as you can to observe other teachers. One of the brilliant tools available with TLAC is that there is video content where techniques and best practices can be watched. Some of the most important skills a master teacher deploys are actually quite difficult to put to words. We develop intuitions about which student needs attention, when to raise or lower a voice, whether to turn my back when writing on the board or where to position myself when the class returns from PE. It’s quite another thing if one sees another teacher doing these things. We catch much by way of osmosis. What this points to is getting outside your classroom to catch by any means available a glimpse into a colleague’s room.

Practicing lessons is most often done when a teacher is in college. They practice lessons, do a semester or year-long placement, and then are launched into their career. Daily teaching is indeed a form of practice, but it might not be deliberate practice. We might very well reinforce rather bad teaching habits unless some planning or focused attention on some technique is applied. Here I think a wise teacher will insert into lesson plans notes about techniques they will practice. I might note to myself, “walk up and down the rows in my classroom” or “use cold calling today” or “wait for more hands during history class.” Narrowing the aperture in this way gives us more leverage to cultivate discrete skills and perhaps track our growth in certain areas.

Talk with your supervisor about techniques you are working on in your classroom. Invite him or her to come observe you, telling them that you are trying something different today and would like their feedback. This is where you are simultaneously practicing the craft of teaching but also experimenting with the edges of your comfort zone.

You don’t have to be far into your tenure as a teacher to take another teacher under your wing. Oftentimes our pathway to mastery lies not in practicing in isolation, but in taking opportunities to coach and mentor other teachers. This doesn’t need to be formalized in any way. I have seen teachers only a few years into their careers come alongside new faculty to “show them the ropes.”

Creating a Culture of Apprenticeship

Observation, practice and experimentation should be encouraged amongst the faculty, and if you are an administrator there is much that can be done to plan training around the apprenticeship model. Here are a couple of ideas that I have implemented at various times and hope to build on in the future.

First, the most impactful thing you can do as an administrator is to observe your teachers. When I go into a classroom, I literally open a new Word document and simply type what I see and hear. I have told my teachers that I am here to learn and not to judge (a technique I learned from Jason). I need to be able to see what is happening in the classroom to understand the “teacher personality” of the teacher. I am often surprised to hear the teacher’s voice while teaching, which can be quite different than their voice when interacting one on one. I need to see how the students are behaving. I look at the décor and the arrangement of the furniture. I catch the major transitions and subtle looks between the two students in the corner. Untied shoes, untucked t-shirts, but also kind words, helpfulness and genuine thoughtfulness all get noted. I try to spend fifteen to thirty minutes in the classroom, which is quite a lot of time. Before I leave, I send a copy of my notes to the teacher. I include items of feedback and advice in and amongst the notes. I send my notes without expecting any reply, but sometimes I will get a good interaction going. Sometimes I will ask the teacher to interact with the notes during our next one-on-one meeting. The big idea here is that observation with feedback supports the teacher as he or she strives towards excellence in their craft.

Second, do what you can to enable teachers to observe one another. This is professional development gold! You yourself might need to sub or to hire subs to make this happen. At my previous school I devoted a week to peer observation, scheduling peer observations like a round robin tournament. Some preliminary planning sought to identify individuals that might have a technique or practice that would benefit another teacher. Some of the pairings were simply serendipitous. What I found was that peer observation injected a potent shot of energy into our work as teachers. Conversations around teaching practices lasted weeks after the peer observations. What’s more, it significantly boosted the culture of mutual learning I had wanted to implement for years. Why had I not attempted this peer observation things sooner?

Finally, my most recent experiment involves short practice lessons in small groups of teachers. By teaching other colleagues in a compressed format, we get outside the daily routines with the students and get highly valuable feedback from our peers. The format I used was to have groups of four teach lessons in five to seven minutes (which means it has to be short and to the point, likely a portion of a lesson), and then for three to five minutes the other teachers provide feedback (similar to my observation model above). Each teacher gets roughly ten minutes in the “hot seat” and then at the end we all discuss some of our big takeaways. It’s a fifty to sixty minute exercise that gets us into the mode of deliberate practice with one another. It also provides an opportunity for experimentation, the third mode of apprenticeship.

Hopefully this short interaction with Robert Greene’s book Mastery has stimulated your thinking about how an apprenticeship approach can impact your classroom or school. As I’ve reflected on this book, I find myself viewing my vocation as simultaneously one of an apprentice moving toward mastery and a master coaching apprentices. If this idea of apprenticeship has sparked your imagination, I would like to direct you to a resource created by my colleague, Jason Barney – the apprenticeship lesson plan. In this free resource, you will discover ways in which you shape your lessons around coaching and apprenticeship derived from Comenius’ method of teaching.

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‘Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life’––is perhaps the most complete and adequate definition of education we possess. It is a great thing to have said it; and our wiser posterity may see in that ‘profound and exquisite remark’ the fruition of a lifetime of critical effort.

So writes Charlotte Mason, educational philosopher and herald for a new-but-old way of approaching education. Many would follow in her footsteps, championing the simplicity of the notion that an endeavor as complex as education can be defined using three basic elements: atmosphere, discipline, and life. 

If Mason is correct, then all approaches to education, even ones we would not fully endorse here at Educational Renaissance, incorporate, in some way, these elements, or as Charlotte Mason called them, instruments. Let us take “life,” for example. All educational methods promote aspects of life. Rousseau insisted upon the uninhibited natural development of a child. Montessori highlighted her individual creativity. And Dewey prioritized learning through experience.

For Charlotte Mason, the instrument of life refers to the life of the mind and its need for nourishment through ideas. For a growing mind, facts and information simply will not do. It is ideas, and ideas alone, that will capture a child’s imagination and inspire a love for knowledge and life-long learning.

How about atmosphere? Again, if Mason is correct, then all methods of education implement some element of the instrument of atmosphere. The question is: what kind of atmosphere? You can imagine the atmosphere of a Victorian-era classroom in which the taskmaster-teacher institutes order throughout his tiny kingdom, yardstick in hand. Or the atmosphere of a freshman 101 course, crammed with students in a cavernous lecture hall as they await for their wiry old professor to take the stage.

In both cases, the instrument of atmosphere is present and has an impact on the educational method being deployed. We might describe the first atmosphere as strict, orderly, and intimidating.. We could describe the second as crowded and distant, yet full of energy.

In contrast to these two sketches, in this article, I will explore what sort of atmosphere Charlotte Mason had in mind as she defined education as “an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” Through this exploration, we will learn how to create an educational atmosphere befitting of persons, which will serve as a foundation for relationships to emerge and a conduit for passing on a Christian “paideia.”

An Atmosphere for Persons

Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education hinges on the premise that children are persons. So much so that if one could prove that children are not persons then her whole philosophy would fall apart. So what does Mason mean by “persons”? I think she has three big ideas in mind.

First, children have genuine thoughts and ideas about the world. School is not the first time they gain knowledge or begin to engage in intellectual activity. As soon as children are born, they engage the world in which they are born and seek to understand it. They are not empty buckets to be filled with grains of sand of information. They are living, breathing people created with the capacity to dynamically interact with God’s created world. 

Second, children possess an internal and psychological capacity that requires development. Specifically, children are created with affections that desire and wills that choose. Both affections and wills can and are shaped over time through outside influences. Therefore, we can say that children have real agency in this world and cannot simply be set aside as robots. 

Finally, children are creatures of relationship. Like all of us, they long to belong, to be affirmed, and to contribute to something greater than themselves. Consequently, all activity, especially education, contains a relational dimension. Education, therefore, is the science of relations, another way Mason defines the term. Real knowledge is touched with emotion and part of a wider web of relationships. 

Built for Relationship

Now that we have Mason’s view of children as persons in view, we can begin to think about an educational atmosphere that would be appropriate for such persons.

In For the Children’s Sake (Crossway, 1984), Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, an early promoter of Mason’s philosophy, writes, “When teachers value and trust the individual, a special atmosphere is created. Here it is possible to have structure and yet suitable freedom. The atmosphere can be friendly, purposeful, relaxed. In fact, it can be an oasis for the child who finds it the only place where he is able to have a satisfying life” (73). 

Here we see that an educational atmosphere befitting of persons begins with trust and respect. So often, a modern classroom can feel like either an industrial factory or amusement park. Extreme restriction or entertainment. But what if an atmosphere fit for persons offers a different way? We have all experienced managers who either do not care about their employees or do not want to take time to develop them. They become heavy-handed task masters constantly on the look out for errors or simply nowhere to be found when support is needed. Classrooms can feel like this, too, when teachers are too harsh on the one hand or disinterested to come alongside their students on the other.

Bill St. Cyr, founder of Ambleside Schools International, captures the heart of the caring teacher with the phrase “It is good to be me here with you.” In this relational context, an atmosphere emerges that will shape the child’s affections more than anything else. As Bill puts it, the children inhale the atmosphere that their teachers exhale. More than whatever the teacher has planned for the lesson today, the desire for goodness, truth, and beauty will be caught within the atmosphere, not taught. In short, a child will admire what the teacher admires.

Of the three instruments of education, it can be argued that atmosphere is the hardest to get right. Bobby Scott, a long-time leader at a Charlotte Mason school, points out in When Children Love to Learn (Crossway, 2004) that while discipline and life can be transplanted, atmosphere can only be built up over time. It is an atmosphere of relationship that begins with how we interact and treat children (73). It is then strengthened over time as teacher and students together engage in inquiry through their studies and love for God and His creation.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that while relationships are the core of an atmosphere, we cannot dismiss the significance of physical space. The thinking today is that a classroom’s physical atmosphere should match the maturity of the child. This is why modern classrooms are often decorated with cartoonish posters, glittery pictures, and the like. But if we begin with the premise that children are born persons, as Charlotte Mason encourages, then we will be led to build a different kind of space: one of beauty, nature, and order–an extension of real life, rather than an environment manufactured for children.

Passing on a Christian “Paideia”

In the classical tradition, education was always about passing on a particular culture. As Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain note in The Liberal Arts Tradition (Classical Academic Press, 2019), “The word the Greeks used for education was paideia, which meant not only learning intellectual skills, but also the transmission of the entirety of the loves, norms, and values of a culture” (211).

In fact, in Paul’s oft-quoted command in Ephesians 6:4, “Fathers, do not provoke your children, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord”, the Greek word translated “discipline” is paideia. For the apostle Paul, parents have a responsibility to promote and pass on a God-centered culture as one of their parental duties. By extension, Christian schools come alongside parents by promoting and transmitting this culture as well.

There are several ways to think about what a God-centered paideia might look like, including fruit of the Spirit, membership in a local church, the centrality of scripture, a heart for evangelism, and a transmission of church tradition. Behind all of these, I want to argue is the concept of atmosphere. Teachers who want to engage in real paideia, should begin not with curriculum, but with atmosphere–how they relate to their students and what sorts of values and ideas they will promote in their classrooms.

In the last several decades, we can see how the obsession with testing in schools has led to a decline in real learning. To be sure, assessments are important and master teachers regularly check for understanding through both formative and summative methods. But a truly Christian paideia, I believe, is undermined when the greatest purpose of the classroom is test performance or competition. To truly form lifelong disciples, teachers do better when they build the sort of atmosphere in which hard work is celebrated, questions are praised, and the unified goal of the class is to grow in wisdom and love for all that is good, true, and beautiful.

Conclusion

Teachers can use the instrument of atmosphere in their classrooms to promote relationship, goodness, and a genuine love for learning. As we have seen, all classrooms effuse a particular atmosphere. The question we ask ourselves is “What kind?” and “For whom?”. The best classrooms I have seen are ones in which genuine belonging is detected, emanating from the teacher, and students are called up to do their best work as they seek to live out their identity as creatures made in God’s divine image. As we seek to pass on a particularly Christian paideia to the next generation amidst a growingly secular world, we can begin with the instrument of atmosphere.

Want to learn more about implementing Charlotte Mason’s principles in the classroom? Join my virtual workshop this fall, provided through the Society for Classical Learning. You can also subscribe to our Educational Renaissance weekly blog.

Thanks for reading!

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A few years later, Collins wrote Good to Great and the Social Sectors (2005). In this companion monograph, Collins draws out five key issues leaders face when applying the seven characteristics of great companies to nonprofit organizations like churches, hospitals, and schools. One issue, which I addressed in my first article, is that businesses and nonprofits evaluate success differently. Whereas businesses almost exclusively evaluate success by financial output, nonprofits measure success by how effectively they are achieving their mission. This sort of evaluation is admittedly more complex, Collins writes, but it is possible when leaders gain clarity on desired outcomes and establish metrics they can rigorously track. 

In this article, I will examine an additional issue nonprofit leaders face when applying Good to Great principles: getting the right people on the bus amidst social sector constraints. I can imagine school leaders nodding already. They know how difficult it is to recruit, hire, and retain faculty and staff, especially in light of tight budgets. Despite this challenge, I contend that it is possible to attract and retain great teachers through cultivating the right culture and selectively choosing the right people. For Christian educators, these people will be self-motivated, humble men and women who are devoted to Christ and love both children and learning.

First Who, Then What

Before I consider the unique constraints educational leaders are under when staffing their schools, I will first summarize what Collins means by “First Who…Then What.” Essentially, what he is getting at here is that before leaders settle on their final business model, or organizational strategy, they need to first get the right people on the bus. This may strike you as counterintuitive. While it is reasonable to expect that establishing the new vision would logically precede hiring the right people–indeed, attracting the right people through the vision–this is not what Collins and his team found. They discovered that with the right people onboard, the organization as a whole becomes stronger–more versatile and more driven to succeed–even before the new direction is set (41).

In fact, for Collins, it is precisely this ordering of “First Who, Then What,” that differentiates a “Level 5” from a “Level 4” leader. Whereas a Level 4 leader sets the vision and hires a crew to help make the vision happen, the Level 5 leader builds a superior executive team and together they figure out the best path to institutional excellence. The vision and people could be the same, but the emphasis is different. The Level 4 approach is leader-dependent, while the Level 5 approach is team-centered. For this reason, it is even more important to get the right people on board.

On the sensitive topic of people decisions, Collins is careful to point out that the “great” companies made efforts to be rigorous in cultivating a culture of discipline, but they were not ruthless in how they treated people (52). They consistently applied exacting standards at all times and at all levels, to be sure, but not in a capricious sort of way. These companies were clear and predictable in their expectations as well as thoughtful in performance evaluations. Employees, therefore, could trust their supervisors and need not worry about their positions when the going got tough. In fact, six of the eleven good-to-great companies recorded zero layoffs, and four recorded one or two layoffs, for years on end. Conversely, the comparison companies suffered innumerable layoffs and incessant restructuring over time (54). The path to greatness, it turns out, is not by the swing of the ax, but the careful use of the pruner.

The Question of Compensation

So how can school leaders get the right people on the bus? It is time to address the question of compensation. Certainly, compensation plays a role in attracting talent. Teachers, like all humans, need to provide for their families and livelihood. They ought to be compensated reasonably for their work. All too often, unfortunately, private Christian schools are known for low compensation and meager benefits. While it is outside the purview of this article to address a solution in depth, I do want to assure readers that it is possible to compensate teachers well and enable the institution to be profitable when the right financial structure is put in place.

However, even if schools can offer reasonable compensation packages, it is simply the case that compensation is not going to be the primary driver for attracting great teachers. The best teachers are not in it to make a competitive salary, but to make a difference. Thus, the key advantage schools have in attracting talent, over and against the business world, is the invitation to join a mission infused with meaning. The mission for Christian, classical educators is to impact the lives of young people, helping them thrive as image-bearers and equipping them with the knowledge, virtues, and skills to serve society and Christ’s kingdom. It is ultimately the distinctiveness of this kind of mission that is going to attract great teachers.

Compensation is not only used to attract talent, of course. It is also used in many industries to incentivize good performance. This is growing more and more common, not only in the business world, but in schools. However, Collins and his team discovered some good news for organizations with tight budgets: compensation is not an effective motivator for producing long-term excellent results. Collins writes,

The comparison companies in our research–those that failed to become great–placed greater emphasis on using incentives to “motivate” otherwise unmotivated or undisciplined people. The great companies, in contrast, focused on getting and hanging on to the right people in the first place–those who are productively neurotic, those who are self-motivated and self-disciplined, those who wake up every day, compulsively driven to do the best they can because it is simply part of their DNA. (Social Sectors, 15 ).

As school leaders consider how compensation impacts attracting, retaining, and motivating great teachers, Collins’ research offers both encouragement and a subtle challenge. The encouragement is that schools can attract great teachers apart from extravagant compensation packages. They offer a truly unique benefit: the opportunity to invest in a life of meaning and purpose by helping young people and serving Christ’s kingdom. The subtle challenge, nonetheless, is to practice rigorous financial prudence, taking advantage of the best budgetary practices in independent school management, in order to compensate teachers fairly so they serve at their schools with a general sense of financial peace.

Attracting and Retaining the Best 

If compensation is not going to be the primary attraction for great teachers, how can schools attract the sort of self-disciplined and self-motivated people that Collins describes? How can school leaders effectively draw the right men and women to join the mission?

First, Collins advises a rigorous and selective hiring process. If school leaders are going to find the very best, they need to develop a way to evaluate what they mean by “best.” Once this process is created, they need not fear deterring top candidates from too rigorous of a process. In actuality, the sort of candidates schools should be after will be drawn to the challenge. These exceptional men and women will be interested in working somewhere that shares their values for excellence and hard work. A rigorous selection process sets the tone for what sort of culture the school maintains. Top candidates will pick up on this immediately.

Second, Collins recommends early assessment mechanisms. These mechanisms will enable school leaders early on to determine whether the faculty member is a long-term fit. In this approach, the first six-twelve months function like an extended interview. As Collins writes, “You don’t know a person until you work with them” (15). In this way, early assessment mechanisms will avoid delaying the determination of a bad fit. Unlike companies, which typically follow strict evaluative processes for determining the retention of an employee, schools can struggle to let people go. After all, schools, unlike businesses, are communities united around a greater purpose. Members of these educational communities share core values that bond them together in a unique and transformative way. Consequently, it can be very difficult to part ways with teachers after years of serving in the trenches together. By implementing clear and objective assessment mechanisms early in the teacher’s employment, there will be immediate clarity on how things are going. Moreover, these assessments will communicate the culture of support and discipline the school seeks to maintain. As teachers who are not good fits experience this culture, they will often self-select out (14). 

With all this talk of rigorous selectivity, assessment mechanisms, and the desire for institutional excellence, it is important as Christian educators to remember an important truth. While school leaders are ultimately responsible for creating a strong faculty plan and culture, in no way is this license to discourage or objectify members of faculty and staff. Regardless of abilities and outcomes, practices pertaining to attracting, assessing, and retaining teachers must align with the broader educational philosophy of our Christian commitments. This includes treating teachers as persons and mentoring them to pursue wholeheartedly God’s will for their lives.

Sample Interview Questions

If recruiting the right people is a top priority for schools, then it becomes crucial to discern who these people are during the hiring process. In The Ideal Team Player, author Patrick Lencioni identifies three core traits that ideal team members possess: humility, hunger to do one’s very best, and smartness as it pertains to connecting with people (think EQ). To this end, here are some sample interview questions Christian school leaders might ask to discern whether the candidates possess these traits.

1. What motivates you as a person? Would you consider yourself self-motivated? Why or why not?
2. Describe how your faith in Christ impacts your daily life. What role does the local church play?
3. Share an example in which you actively sought to help or serve someone. What motivated you to step in and help?
4. Share an example in which a student encountered struggle in your classroom. How did you respond? What was the result? How did you include the student’s parents in the process?
5. Have you ever worked with a difficult colleague or boss? How did you handle that situation? 
6. What is the hardest you have ever worked on something in your life?
7. Provide two examples of colleagues you enjoyed working with. What did you appreciate about them? What did they contribute to the team? 

Of course, a rigorous and selective hiring process for schools is going to include more than an interview or two. It could also include lesson demonstrations, meetings with potential colleagues, essay responses, and the like. Whatever a school decides, the point is to not shy away from taking the time to find the right people. For, according to Collins, getting the right people on the bus makes all the difference.

Conclusion

There is much more that could be said in this article on the topic of attracting, hiring, and retaining the right teachers. We must remember in this discussion that people who go through the life cycle of being an employee at a school are not objects, but men and women made in God’s image. They are not mere human resources to be manipulated or discarded at the school’s will. Whether a teacher becomes a long-term member of the school community or not, school leaders would do well to treat each teacher with dignity and respect. The lure of institutional excellence is enticing. Noble is the aspiration to advance the kingdom of God through classical, Christian education. But only when core values are upheld, especially a firm commitment to treat all members of the school community as persons, will an institution thrive for the good of society and the glory of God.

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Of these groups, which is most critical for the success of the school? While a compelling case could be made for each one of them, I have come to believe that the answer is faculty. Faculty are the front line workers and first responders of the school. They are not only expected to interface with school customers (parents) on a regular basis. They are responsible for facilitating the day-to-day service (curriculum and instruction) of the organization. In short, their role is indispensable for the success of the school. 

For this reason, it is crucial for school leaders to recruit, retain, and professionally develop their teachers. And while factors like compensation, workload, and administrative support are important, I contend that it is the faculty culture that is most pivotal for the overall flourishing of individual faculty members. In this blog, I will offer some ideas regarding what makes for a strong faculty culture and conclude with questions administrators can ask themselves as they seek to lead the faculty culture in the right direction.

A Positive Work Culture

Recently I was speaking with a friend of mine who works for a financial services company. His job is to help people manage their money prudently and effectively. In our conversation, he shared that his company consistently ranks nationally as a place where employees love to work. Having now worked for the company himself for about a year, he could confirm the positive report personally. 

I pressed my friend on the secret to his employer’s success in this area, and his response was simple: culture. The culture of the company, he observed, was supportive, encouraging, and full of integrity. It therefore provided a place where employees loved to work. When describing the company, my friend shared that the financial advisors are trained to always do what is in the best interest of the client. Additionally, each advisor is valued and therefore equipped and empowered to excel at their jobs. Leadership ensures that each employee is reaching their full potential. These factors combined contributed to a strong work culture in which employees were happy, fulfilled, and committed to doing as best they could for the company.

The Wells Fargo Scandal

What my friend shared may sound like common sense when it comes to company culture, but it is rarer and harder to achieve than it sounds. Consider what happened with the Wells Fargo account fraud scandal in 2018 as a counter-example. The New York Times reports:

“From 2002 to 2016, employees used fraud to meet impossible sales goals. They opened millions of accounts in customers’ names without their knowledge, signed unwitting account holders up for credit cards and bill payment programs, created fake personal identification numbers, forged signatures and even secretly transferred customers’ money.

In court papers, prosecutors described a pressure-cooker environment at the bank, where low-level employees were squeezed tighter and tighter each year by sales goals that senior executives methodically raised, ignoring signs that they were unrealistic. The few employees and managers who did meet sales goals — by any means — were held up as examples for the rest of the work force to follow.”

Can you hear the difference? At my friend’s company, the needs of the customer are always put first. At Wells Fargo, serving customers became a means to an end. As a result, employees began to cut corners, going so far as to create fraudulent accounts in order to make more money. But it was not even merely about the money. The management of the company became so constrictive that employees felt that the only way to meet their sales goals, and keep their jobs, was to lie, cheat, and steal. 

In contrast to a culture marked by support, encouragement, and integrity, this culture had become toxic. It became marked by high demands, no support, unrealistic expectations, and a vacuum of values.

School as a Service Industry

While schools and financial service companies are very different industries (to state the obvious), I do think there are insights here we can glean as we seek to build a strong faculty culture.

For example, it can be helpful as a thought exercise to think about school as a service industry. Classical schools exist to shape and develop students into particular types of people. This service is performed at a price agreed upon between school and family called tuition. At the end of the day, parents with children enrolled at our schools are looking to see evidence that their children are growing. 

One important way schools can increase the quality of this service is by being very specific about the ways in which our school programs are helping students grow. At Christian, classical schools, growth is not only measured by academic output. There is more to being human than cognitive firepower. Teachers at our schools are helping students grow holistically–in mind, yes, but also in virtue and wisdom, in body and soul. We need to keep putting this vision before teachers and parents, educating them in the “service” we provide. To do so most effectively, I have learned, requires a robust philosophy of our students, viewing them as persons made in God’s image.

It is also important to let core values guide the school’s approach to instruction. In the Wells Fargo example, the work culture’s decline merely followed the path of its lack of values. Employes were given unrealistic goals and harsh threats, prompting many of them to cut corners by creating artificial accounts to meet deadlines. Values of honesty, integrity, and humility were replaced by a Darwinian survival of the fittest mentality. It was only a matter of time before a collapse would occur. 

At our schools, we need to lead with our core values. What do we care most about? What are we measuring? Regardless of outcomes, what approach to work are we committed to? These are the questions school leaders need to ask in order to build a strong and healthy faculty culture.

Reforming the Formers

Of course, there are limitations to thinking about school as a service industry or as a company. The purpose of a school, after all, is not to maximize profit, but to achieve the mission of the school. And in order to achieve an organizational mission, we need to help teachers understand the role they play in this mission.

In You Are What You Love (Brazos Press, 2016), James K.A. Smith proposes that teachers should be thought of as “formers.” His general thesis of the book is that humans are, in essence, embodied affective creatures. That is, we are lovers who are shaped over time by what we do. 

Education, in light of this view of humans, is not primarily a project of knowledge-transfer, but in love formation. Teachers are not primarily instructors, lecturers, or information disseminators. They are formers and shapers, leading students in a process to become particular types of people. In the classical tradition, this vision is rooted in virtue. We seek to grow and help our students grow in virtues, that is, the objective moral ideals that God has woven into the very fabric of the universe.

Smith writes,

“Since education is a formative project, aimed at the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, then the teacher is a steward of transcendence who needs to not only know the Good but also to teach from that conviction. The teacher of virtue will not apologize for seeking to apprentice students to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. But she will also run up against the scariest aspect of this: that virtue is often absorbed from exemplars” (159). 

Smith goes on to offer four communal practices for reforming the formers at our schools: eating, praying, singing, and thinking and reading together. While these practices are not directly related to teaching per se, they are doing something even more important: creating a culture. By taking time to eat together, worship the Lord, and grow in understanding, schools communicate to teachers that they care more about bottom-line outcomes. They care about all constituents of the school growing as persons, including faculty. This emphasis, more than anything else, is what is going to shape a strong faculty culture for years to come.

Questions for Continuing the Conversation

As school leaders seek to build a strong faculty culture in their schools, they need to consider how they can best shape, support, and encourage each faculty member. Instead of pressuring teachers with unrealistic goals guided by a “win-at-all-costs” mentality, school leaders need to lead with core values, provide strong support, and make time for practices oriented toward helping teachers grow themselves as humans in wisdom and virtue.

To this end, here are some closing questions I pose to school leaders as they think about faculty culture:

1. Are the goals and benchmarks we set for teachers specific and realistic?
2. Are we providing appropriate support for them to reach these goals?
3. Are we taking time to celebrate victories as a faculty? 
4. How are we showing that each employee at the school is valued? 
5. Are we cultivating a faculty culture in which every decision is made in the best interest of the student (without being child-centered)? 
6. How are we appropriately (and inappropriately) incentivizing faculty members?

May God guide and strengthen you as an educator as you seek to not only achieve particular organizational outcomes, but contribute to a culture that is growth-oriented, teacher-supportive, and ultimately, a small taste of the coming kingdom of God.

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Telling better stories requires a mastery of language, one of the keystone benefits of a liberal arts education. Language is perhaps the most under-appreciated gift that God has given His creatures. We often do not grasp language’s necessity until we are in need of it: when we are stranded in a foreign country or trying to communicate with a one-year old. Language is important because it unites us like no other medium. It serves as the vehicle for communicating how we feel, what we think, and why we are acting the way we are. Additionally, language has the rare ability of integrating the disparate strands of life, indeed of lives, into a unified whole. Language is the precondition for story, and story-telling is the foundation of culture.

In this blog, I will make the case that the liberal arts, especially the mastery of language, are crucial for preserving and transmitting a culture. Without language, formative stories are lost, and cultures fall into decline. Of course, not all cultures are worth preserving. For example, it is a good thing that the culture of the late Roman Empire passed out of existence. The hunger for world domination, degradation of human life, and lust for pleasure became propagations of Rome that made our world worse, not better. On the contrary, our mission as Christian, classical schools is to cultivate future culture makers, moored in biblical values, and heralds of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Training in the liberal arts will equip our students to tell better stories, and in turn, cultivate more attractive cultures, superior to the ones contemporary secular society can possibly offer.

Studying Latin: An Act of Resistance 

Let me begin with the study of Latin, a well-known curricular emphasis in classical liberal arts education. One of the most frequent questions I receive as an administrator at a classical, Christian school is “Why Latin?” After all, our modern world has been highly successful in passing on the metaphor that Latin is a “dead language.” Moreover, using a modern rubric of utility and innovation, it is difficult to discern any clear benefit of studying a language that is no longer spoken in the public square.

Amongst classical schools, it has become fashionable of late to please the modern demand for utility by citing the correlation between Latin and high SAT scores or to remind prospective parents that derivatives of Latin are present in 60% of English words. The usefulness of Latin relieves us moderns temporarily from the fear that all the time invested in an ancient language may not pay off in the real world. 

Of course, this perspective assumes a particular definition of “the real world,” namely, the world of professional advancement, wealth accumulation, and personal success, all measured against the performance metrics of the 21st century. But what if “the real world” encompasses more than our present century? What if the surest way to educate students who will shape future cultures is to ensure they have an acute grasp of the histories and ideas of the past? What if the key to a treasure-trove of wisdom accumulated over millennia is available only through the long-lost language of Latin?

If the answer to these questions is in the affirmative, then the study of Latin should be recovered as an act of resistance. At the risk of overstating my point, this can be illustrated in the stunning image (and example) of Tank Man. Tank Man, the moniker for the courageous unnamed citizen who protested the totalitarian regime in communist China, boldly stood his ground the day after the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators on June 5, 1989.

While studying Latin may not threaten one’s life (some students may disagree), it remains an act of sacrificial resistance in its own way. With the growing skepticism regarding the value of reading old books, coupled with the excellent English translations that are easily accessible today, doubt remains whether the study of Latin is worth it.

What we must remember is that Latin is a portal to “the real world” properly conceived. Contra popular opinion, the universe did not simply pop into existence one hundred years ago. Human civilizations across the globe have existed for millenia. Latin is one entry point into one prominent civilization that has served as the seed ground for the modern conception of human rights, modern science, and the development of the western church.

By studying Latin, students receive a rare gift: the ability to directly access the geniuses of this tradition: Virgil, Cicero, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, and John Calvin, to name a few. We read these authors as faithful trustees of the Great Conversation, listening carefully to these voices that we might preserve the insights of what is good and true for future generations, while also correcting them in places where they were wrong or misguided. This process of preservation and correction is crucial for the project of creating future cultures.

The Privilege of Studying the Arts

Lately, I have been reading and writing on the life of John Adams, a Founding Father of the United States. Adams kept up a faithful correspondence with his wife Abigail, despite years of living overseas in Europe. In one particular letter to Abigail, Adams shares his multi-generational vision for education and the development of culture. He looked forward to the day when his children and grandchildren would not be preoccupied with war, but instead, would have the freedom to build a culture of goodness, beauty, and order.

Adams writes,

“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

Here we gain a rare glimpse of how one cultural architect envisions building and transmitting a culture. Adams adopted a long-term mindset with regards to his role in the development of American society. He understood the pathway to freedom and order in society and that it runs through war and governance. Once a free and orderly society is established, the next phase of study, composed of STEM subjects like navigation and agriculture, is used to build on the foundation. Finally, it becomes the responsibility of those trained in the arts to create a beautiful and good culture, leading to a better world.

Unfortunately, many schools today have lost sight of this long-term vision by focusing exclusively on the urgent: career-readiness. We forget that careers only exist in the first place in a free, orderly, and cultivated society. The best way to prepare students for their future career, is ironically, to help them gain mastery in more rare and valuable skills: the liberal arts.

A Babylonian, Classical Education

Oddly enough, the ancients seemed to grasp the power of the liberal arts for culture building better than us moderns. In the book of Daniel, we see that the powerful Babylonian Empire followed a process for their territorial expansion: invade, capture and assimilate. 

After laying siege and destroying Jerusalem in 586 BC, King Nebuchadnezzar captured members of the Jewish elite to assimilate them into Babylonian culture. These members of Jewish nobility were “…youths without blemish, of good appearance and skillful in wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competent to stand in the king’s palace…” (Daniel 1:4). The chief servant of the king was instructed to train these men in the language and literature of the Chaldeans. They were to be educated for three years, eating the food of the city and, more importantly, imbibing the Babylonian culture. 

Why were the Babylonians so set on educating a group of captive youth? They understood that the key to transmitting a culture was forming the mind through the liberal arts. By introducing Daniel and his friends to the gods, stories, myths, and values of Babylon, they would assimilate these young Jewish men into the culture. In fact, these young Jewish men were even given new names, with theological significance, branding them as citizens of the Babylonian Empire.

As we know, however, Daniel and his friends refused to be assimilated. They continued to use their original Jewish names and refused to eat the king’s food. Instead, they ate only vegetables, being careful to live within the dietary restrictions of the Mosaic Law. In return, God blessed them both intellectually and physically. God granted them “learning and skill in all literature and wisdom, and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams…. And in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom” (Dan 1:20). 

The story of Daniel is a sober reminder, both of the perceived power of the liberal arts and the blessing of obedience to God’s Word. While the Babylonians sought to promote their mighty culture through the liberal arts, only God’s plan for this world would endure.

Telling the Greatest Story

Ultimately, for Christians, the most powerful, culture-shaping story we pass on to future generations is not about western civilization, the founding of a particular nation, or Babylonian mythology (I would surely hope not!). The most transformative story is the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news that our loving Creator sent his Son to offer forgiveness of sin and life through the Spirit, and ultimately to usher in the kingdom of God. The culture we seek to build and transmit must be rooted in this great story.

Our learning communities, whether at school or at home, need to gather each day and remind one another of the story of the gospel. We can do this in a few ways.

First, we can begin each day in worship, singing songs that promote an understanding of the glory of God, the fallenness of humanity, and the need for a savior.

Second, when we teach classes on the Bible, we can lead students into deep dives in biblical studies, while also helping students see the grand narrative of the gospel that unites all of scripture. We can also leverage insights from other domains, for example, reading the Bible as literature, in order to engage the imaginations and hearts of students.

Finally, we can integrate the gospel in our approach to student discipline. The gospel is not a self-help manual to equip students to fix their problems on their own. Nor is it a legalistic tome, denoting each and every expectation God has for human behavior. Rather, it is the grand story of God’s grace in our lives and His restorative plan for creation. The gospel allows us to guide students in moments of discipline to utter the words, “I cannot do this on my own. Lord, please help me,” and restore them into the classroom.

Conclusion

The stories we tell are powerful for transmitting a culture, and the surest way to tell stories infused with meaning and persuasion is through training in the liberal arts. In the post-Christian western world in which we live, our society needs to hear the good news of Christ anew. By training our students in mastery of language and the arts, we are equipping students to not only have careers, but to be leaders of the future cultures of society. May God grant us much wisdom as we continue in this important work.

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Along the way, I was impressed by the unity of thought among the Educational Renaissance writers, as well as the presence of quite a few memorable maxims in the midst of all that dense (or playful) educational theory and practice.

A maxim is usually defined as a short pithy statement that expresses a general truth or rule of conduct. Since many of you have joined the Educational Renaissance community in late 2019, I thought a review of some of the most memorable maxims of 2019 might inspire you to read through old articles to find something of value for your educational work as you enter 2020. Now admittedly, some of these “maxims” are pithier than others, and I had a lot of high quality contenders with 29 articles to date, so it was very hard to decide on the best ones. I’ve put them in order of the sequence in which they were published.

But before our list of maxims we have a few announcements to share with the community as we close out the year.

End of 2019 Announcements

As a team we reviewed our work since August in a meeting last week and one of the things we were most proud of was keeping our commitment to produce a quality new article every week. With the demands of teaching and administration and our standards for quality, this was no easy feat, even with the three of us now laboring away together. Our goal has been to publish every Saturday morning to give you a consistent source of inspiration every weekend to prepare you for the next week of educational work. If you aren’t receiving our weekly updates, be sure to sign up for that through our pop up form.

For 2020 we’ve got a lot of exciting plots and plans for promoting a rebirth of ancient wisdom about education in the modern era. For instance, Patrick is working on a new eBook on implementing habit training in the classroom. This will be a great pairing with Jason’s very successful eBook on implementing narration. Likewise, Jason plans on turning his Flow of Thought series into an eBook and continuing to write and share more on narration through other venues, and either through revising the narration eBook or turning it into a full length treatment of the practice. Kolby’s still thinking through options for a longer work and connecting with venues. Lastly, earlier this month we had our first podcast recording session and had a blast recording together a long discussion on the idea of an educational renaissance and a short discussion of Aristotle on excellence. We don’t plan to launch the podcast for some time, but stay tuned for more announcements about that in the coming months.

Please let us know of any exciting ideas or suggestions you have for Educational Renaissance as a community member. We’d love to work toward building more of a community around our unique message of ancient wisdom for the modern era. If you haven’t followed our page on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, take a moment to do that, and share articles and resources you really like through social media; it really helps us get the word out. And now without further ado…

20 Memorable Maxims from 2019

1. Like “the air we breathe” the culture and curriculum of a school can either endorse the beauty and dignity of self-mastery, or subtly undercut it through neglect and cynicism.

-From Educating for Self-Control, Part 1: A Lost Christian Virtue

2. The classical tradition made virtue the main goal of education and let the chips fall where they may on less important matters.

-From Educating for Self-Control, Part 2: The Link Between Attention and Willpower

3. We want a sense of satisfaction and great mastery to propel students to see that hard work can be meaningful and satisfying rather than an obstacle to a trivial reward.

-From Overcoming Procrastination

4. Freedom and obedience are not dichotomous, but flow from each other.

-From Authority and Obedience in the Classroom: Reading Charlotte Mason’s Philosophy of Education

5. The customs and culture of a school or home are not a neutral factor in a child’s education, if moral excellence is our goal.

-From Excellence Comes by Habit: Aristotle on Moral Virtue

6. Knowledge of God is not just first in sequence, but first in rank of importance.

-From Easier Than You Think, Yet Harder Than You Think: Teaching the Bible to Children

7. The training of the mind through the classical liberal arts and sciences is thus the antidote to the natural disorder of the mind.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake

8. Starting a new chapter is an excellent time to take stock of your core principles.

-From New to School: 5 Principles for Starting the Year Well

9. Only after developing due reverence for a child’s existence-as-person, can we then properly ascertain methods for her education.

-From Educating Future Culture Makers

10. A strong pedagogy trains students to become independent learners as they engage in deliberate practice rather than simply fact-crammers for an upcoming test. 

-From Strategic Instruction: Optimizing Classroom Instruction for Small and Large Classes

11. Too many classroom “learning activities” focus too much on what the teacher is doing as entertainer, while students sit back passively.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 3: Narration as Flow

12. There is no standardized test for faithfulness. Faithfulness is a quality that is measured in time spent being obedient to a calling.

-From Liberating Education from the Success Syndrome

13. Of course, the highest intellectual motive is that of curiosity, which should be aroused and cultivated in any way possible.

-From Attention, Then and Now: The Science of Focus Before and After Charlotte Mason’s Time

14. But we must not forget, as Luther cautions us here, that the greatest asset of any society is not its physical infrastructures or technological developments, but the minds, hearts, and souls of its members.

-From Why Luther Believed Christians Should Study the Liberal Arts

15. Habit training as a spiritual exercise enables us to live in Christ, to have Christ as our habitude.

-From Christ Our Habitation: A Consideration of Spiritual Habit Training in Education

16. Thinking along the lines of the liberal arts is more like a mental game than a utilitarian bid for power, money or success.

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

17. When we apply ourselves to deep and meaningful work, getting in the flow and cultivating valuable skills along the way, a certain lasting joy and fulfillment is the result throughout the process.

-From In Search of Happiness, Part 1: The Road of Virtue

18. Meaningful, complex and important work requires the kind of attention that can cut through distraction.

-From Habit Formation: You, Your Plastic Mind, and Your Internet

19. The move of turning conversation into a learnable skill puts it back in the realm of education, where it ought to have stayed.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 5: The Play of Words

20. The behaviorist can with consistency treat children as mere animals to be poked and prodded with carrots and sticks, but the Christian must lead souls and inspire hearts.

-From Marketing, Manipulations, and True Classroom Leadership

Hope you enjoyed these memorable maxims! Let us know which is your favorite in the comments, and be sure to share quotes and articles with your friends and colleagues.

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As classical educators seeking to retrieve the treasure trove of wisdom and insights about education from the western tradition, we do well to proclaim the Judeo-Christian view of our students, namely, creatures endowed with inherent worth and made in the image of God. Contra popular secular narratives, it is precisely this high view of humanity, along with ancillary beliefs about knowledge and the cosmos, that led to paradigmatic shifts in society and education during the modern era.

However, at times, we can feel lost by this giant phrase “image of God.” What exactly does it mean to bear God’s image? How do we treat people (our students) with inherent worth? Too often we pay lip service to this important Christian doctrine without taking the next step of seeking to understand what it means at a deeper level.

Students as Culture Makers

One helpful way to think about the doctrine of imago dei is in terms of what author Andy Crouch calls “culture makers.” The students in our classrooms–the children, teenagers, and young men and women sitting before us–are present and future culture makers. They have been equipped holistically by their Creator with the minds, hearts, and bodies sufficient for making something of the world that can have real and lasting impact.

Contrast this emphasis on culture making for a moment with what has dominated the scene in Christian education since the latter half of the twentieth century: worldview analysis. Worldview analysis refers to a strategy adopted by Christian schools and ministries in the last forty years for training youth how to respond to secularism and other ideologies that run counter to the Christian faith. It is primarily an intellectual program, insofar as it offers students tools and resources for identifying various worldviews and responding to them with arguments for the veracity of the Christian worldview.

Now there is nothing wrong with training students intellectually for the religious landscape they’ll encounter in what current sociology calls the post-Christian West. I myself have benefited greatly from the likes of Francis Schaeffer and Nancy Pearcey, along with several worldview-focused organizations. But worldview analysis fails as a holistic outworking of imago dei, in so far as humans are not at the core disembodied cognizers, or thinkers. They are breathing, feeling, loving, embodied creatures. They are therefore not reducible to the beliefs they hold or even values they live by. Consequently, an exclusively intellectual program cannot possibly train such creatures with any degree of adequacy. It will consistently fall short and leave the student oddly misshapen–strong in areas of argumentation but weak in areas of aesthetics and formation of the physical world.

Moreover, the nature of worldview analysis being primarily reactive rather than proactive (it must have an object to analyze) leaves it dependent on what others are already doing or making. On this point, Crouch aptly notes,

“The risk in thinking ‘worldviewishly’ is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which ‘worldview thinkers’ are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside. But culture is not changed simply by thinking.” (64)

Rather than adopt a view of humans and how they interact with culture as primarily an intellectual enterprise, Crouch argues that culture is shaped by culture makers: men and women seeking to create and cultivate new goods and artifacts that will bring fresh meaning to the world and enhance the shared experience of humans as embodied inhabitants of this earth. This view seems to me to be a richer, more holistic, and more accurate portrayal of the human experience. It envision humans as bearers of the divine image to take up a noble calling–not merely as sacrosanct philosophers, but as co-creators with the divine, using their minds, hearts, and hands to make something of the world as God intended them to.

What is Culture?

To understand Crouch’s idea of culture making at a deeper level, let’s first get clear on what exactly he means by culture. For instance, he does not mean ‘high culture’: the activities and interests pursued by society’s cultural elite. Nor does he mean ‘pop culture’: the invisible forces in society that proclaim from on high the current fads and trends for the masses to adopt. Culture can include these elements, to be sure, as well as elements from ethnic, political, and religious cultures, but Crouch is adamant that culture as an abstract cannot be so narrowly defined. Culture, as he conceives of it, is nothing more and nothing less than “what we make of the world” (23). It is the ongoing result of human beings striving to take the world as received and making sense of it through making something of it. Crouch writes,

“The human quest for meaning is played out in human making: the finger-painting, omelet-stirring, chair-crafting, snow-swishing activities of culture. Meaning and making go together–culture, you could say, is the activity of making meaning.” (24)

As you can see from the examples he lists, Crouch is steering us away from a view of culture as merely an abstract, ethereal idea floating through history. Rather, culture in the abstract always comes from specific, concrete human acts of cultivation and creativity. And not just contributions of creativity from the arts, mind you. While great works of art, literature, and music certainly have cultivated the world (or “remade” it, as Crouch likes to say), culture-making is engendered whenever goods are produced that prompt reflection on what the world is like and what is possible within its horizons.

These goods, or artifacts, defy simple categorization: they can be anything as complex as the U.S. interstate highway system to something as mundane as cracking a few eggs in a skillet. They can be concrete and physical, like the examples just given, as well as abstract and immaterial, like a musical score or economic theory.

Culture, then, is what happens when human creativity is actualized in the real world. It is the culmination of order and cultivation, two potential states of the good creation God called humans to steward. As the world is enculturated, it flourishes–physically, socially, and spiritually–as God intended it.

Educating Culture Makers

If the students in our classrooms are created to bear God’s image, which as I’ve been emphasizing in this blog, involves making something of the world, we must next ask ourselves: what implications might this have for education?

First, we must not rush to educational methods too quickly. British educator Charlotte Mason famously cautioned educators from misstep In her sixth and final volume on education. Mason writes,

“People are too apt to use children as counters in a game, to be moved hither and thither according to the whim of a moment. Our crying need to-day is less for a better method of education than for an adequate conception of children…” (Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series, 45)

She goes on to champion the idea that the very first task of an educator is to contemplate the profound mystery and value a child has qua person. Only after developing due reverence for a child’s existence-as-person, can we then properly ascertain methods for her education.

Mason’s caution is particularly important for us to hear as we live in the late modern era. Part of the problem in modern education is a reduction of the child to materialistic and pragmatic ends. When children are reduced to brain-animated workers, the educational program is stripped of anything with lasting value. Education is reduced to the inculcation of students with information and skills necessary to hold a job. This is precisely what Josef Pieper warns against in Leisure: the Basis of Culture. Pieper, a philosopher writing post-World War II, observed a sociological shift in the West to “total work.” He laments,

“A new and changing conception of the nature of man, a new and changing conception of the very meaning of human existence–that is what comes to light in the modern notion of ‘work’ and ‘worker’.” (23)

For Pieper, the problem is that work has eclipsed leisure as the primary maker of meaning. No longer do humans work to live, but instead they live to work. Human value is determined and evaluated by modern metrics of utility and activity, supplanting the classical metric, if we can call it that, of eudaimonia: physical, spiritual, and yes, vocational flourishing.

Second, as we consider educational methods, we ought to value a broad and varied curriculum over a narrow, specialist-oriented one. From a culture making perspective, one reason for this is that as educators we do not know what the future holds for our students. While certain subjects or skills might elicit noticeable strengths early on, it is very difficult to predict what a student will be doing five, ten, or twenty years down the road. The best we can do in the present is to prepare our students for a life of learning and doing, thinking and making, so that no matter what station of life in which they may find themselves, they are equipped to contribute in unique and creative ways.

Another reason a broad and varied curriculum is preferred for the image-bearer as a culture maker is because each student’s mind is unique, containing specialized interests and affinities. As Charlotte Mason observes, “He is an eclectic; he may chose this or that; our business is to supply him with due abundance and variety and his to take what he needs” (59). Here she is referring specifically to ideas, the food for a living mind.

One of Mason’s basic educational principles is that teachers ought not force-feed their students with preselected bits of information anymore than they should force predigested food into their mouths! To do so would remove them of not merely their agency, but their creative capacity to think, ponder, and know for themselves. Connecting this to culture making, students are equipped properly to make something of the world when they are given the opportunity to explore it for themselves. For this formative learning to occur, educators must recognize both the freedom and bounds of their role. And this recognition begins with the implementation of a broad and varied curriculum that allows the students to joyfully explore and discover what interests them.

The Calling of the Teacher in Culture Making

In this article I’ve made the argument that until we begin to see our students properly as divine image-bearers, and seek to understand what this means at a deeper level, our practices in the classroom may fail to take seriously their inherent value and purpose. Through thinking of the doctrine of imago dei in terms of culture making, though, our imaginations are stirred to view our students, not merely as thinkers or workers or something else, but as dynamic creators and cultivators, endowed by God to bring order and beauty to his good creation.

It is my contention that this little insight has the potential to change everything about the school day for the teacher. It affects how we decorate our classrooms, choosing to fill them with beauty and inspiration rather than with cheap trinkets and glossy posters. It changes the way we approach noteworthy events in history, opening our eyes to see how the brave men and women who have gone before us, shaping culture within their own time and place. And it challenges us to see the vast potential in our students and push them in their studies–not just the ones at the top of the class, but all our students–for their very existence and calling was nothing short of God’s idea. When we see this truth and let it guide what we do in the classroom, we as educators our realizing our own calling, alongside our students, as culture makers, shaping classrooms and the students in it for the good of the world and for the glory of God.

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