Author: Jason Barney
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The Soul of Education, Part 4: Epicureanism and the Material, Atomistic Soul
In our series on the soul of education, we are investigating historical views of the soul that have an impact on both the purpose and the methods of education, maintaining the thesis that our anthropology will inevitably influence our pedagogy. Having engaged with the profound but often fragmented dualism of Plato and the integrated hylomorphism…
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The Soul of Education, Part 3: Aristotle’s Hylomorphic Soul and the Virtuous Mind
In our series on the soul of education, we’re investigating historical views of the soul that have an impact on both the purpose and the methods of education. Our overarching thesis is that our anthropology will inevitably influence our pedagogy. But when we are unaware of the jumbled mix of assumptions we have about ourselves…
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Slow Productivity in School: Part 4, Obsess Over Quality
In this series on Slow Productivity in School, we’ve been exploring the paradox of festina lente (“hasten slowly”). When it comes to the work of learning, sometimes you must go slow to go fast. Or, perhaps more accurately, you must slow down to be truly productive. Taking our cues from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The…
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Slow Productivity in School: Part 3, Work at a Natural Pace
In this series, I am taking my cue from Cal Newport’s helpful book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout and applying his insights to our expectations for student work in classical Christian schools. Like the modern office, forms of pseudo-productivity dominate the modern school system–a fact that explains how children can spend…
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Slow Productivity in School, Part 2: Do Fewer Things
In my last article we discussed the problem of pseudo-productivity in school. Popularly called busywork, this pseudo-productivity of the factory model of education presents a fairly straightforward analogy to the pseudo-productivity of the office. In his book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport diagnosed the problem of our crazy busy…
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Slow Productivity in School, Part 1: The Problem of Pseudo-Productivity
Classical educators can often be found touting the Latin phrase multum, non multa, in favor of various revolutionary proposals to adopt quality over quantity, depth over breadth, much over many things. (See for instance this article on Memoria Press by Andrew Campbell, or Christopher Perron’s lecture on Classical Academic Press.) The phrase comes from a…
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The Role of Imagination in Education
Imagination. The word brings so much to mind for us today. If there’s one thing that everybody can agree on for children, it’s the need to help them develop a vivid imagination through school, play, and well… everything they do. Or perhaps, ‘develop a vivid imagination’ is the wrong way of putting it. “Every child…
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The Soul of Education, Part 2: Plato’s Immortal and Tripartite Soul
In the introduction to this series, we explained how our view of the soul, or nature of a human being, will necessarily impact our practice of education. In our modern world we are bombarded by so many competing views of the soul, both implicit and explicit, that we operate in a confused mess. From behaviorism…
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The Soul of Education, Part 1: What Is a Human Being?
Every educational philosophy necessarily relies on a pre-existing view of the human person. Anthropology informs pedagogy. Many of the problems that classical Christian educators have identified in conventional education have their roots in a false or insufficient view of human beings. The factory model of education, for instance, underrates certain aspects of human development and…
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Counsels of the Wise, Part 9: The Limits and Transcendence of Prudence
We have come full circle in this series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom. Prudence is one of those forgotten gems of the classical educational tradition. Its proper flowering is the result of early instruction, long reflection and the blooming of rationality in man. Discipline, early training in habits, examples and good…