Welcome Summer Conference Attendees to Educational Renaissance

The major classical Christian education conferences are now upon us. We begin with the Society for Classical Learning conference with the theme Recovering Beauty in Education June 15-18. This is quickly followed by the ACCS Repairing the Ruins conference June 22-25. Both conferences are in Dallas, and, if you are planning to attend in person, we would love to see you!

UPDATE: We’re podcasting every day this week during the SCL Conference. Listen to our Reflections from the Pre-Conference:

Here is a rundown of who is speaking when:

• Kolby Atchison, “Equipped to Learn: Practical Strategies to Promote Self-Education in the Classroom,” 11:00-12:00 (Central) on Friday, June 17^th (learn more at the SCL Conference site).
• Patrick Egan, “In Pursuit of Arete: Connecting Deliberate Practice and the Growth Mindset to Classical Virtue,” 11:00-12:00 (Central) on Saturday, June 18^th (learn more at the SCL Conference site).
• Jason Barney, “Narration as a Progymnasmata: Turning a Text into a Student Speech,” 4:10-5:10 (Central) on Thursday, June 23^rd (learn more at the ACCS Conference site).

UPDATE: If you would like to gain virtual access to the SCL Conference, you can still register at https://societyforclassicallearning.org/events/2022-summer-conference/. The cost is $190. If you would like to access the ACCS Conference online, you can still register at https://repairingtheruins.org/registration/. The cost is $175.

Whether you are a long-time follower of Educational Renaissance, or have just learned about us, we would like to welcome you to Educational Renaissance and make you aware of some of the great materials available to you.

Weekly Articles

We invite you to read through the many articles that have been posted here over the years. We aim to provide a new article every week, linking thoughts from our classical Christian heritage to new ideas emerging in our own day about education, psychology, neurology and philosophy. Here’s a recent sampling:

To Save a Civilization, Part 1: Conditions for a Decline

Recently Kolby Atchison began a series looking at Western civilization with a view to determining how our educational movement can contribute to the rebirth of our declining society. With insights from Augustine and Irish missionaries, learn how we can regain what was lost.

Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

Jason Barney has been exploring the idea of apprenticeship as a model for applying Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues in the classical classroom. The connection between intellectual skill, technical knowledge and moral training come together as we take on the viewpoint of craftsmanship. This article takes you back to the start of a five-part series.

What is a Learner?: Reading Charlotte Mason through Aristotle’s Four Causes

This article by Patrick Egan explores the connection between Charlotte Mason and classicism by applying Aristotle’s four causes to our understanding of the nature and characteristics of a learner.

The Educational Renaissance Podcast

Many people like to get their content on the go. If that’s you, then you might like to subscribe to the Educational Renaissance Podcast. It’s the same great content, but in audio form. Listen to our recent episode, “Reflections on Christian and Pagan Literature,” where we consider the relationship between cultivating a Christian worldview and reading pagan literature. It strikes at the heart of what our educational renewal movement is all about, both the classical and the Christian components.

On-Demand Webinars

You can take your training to the next level with Educational Renaissance webinars. Find topics from all of the Educational Renaissance authors from narration to habit training to implementing Teach Like a Champion all with a view to practical skills you can apply in your classroom or school.

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Educational Renaissance Books

Our new Educational Renaissance Bookstore carries a select list of recommended reading from titles you regularly find in our articles and talks. Among the titles you will find are books published by our Educational Renaissance authors. This year’s highlight is Jason Barney’s new book A Short History of Narration available now on Amazon.

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One of the best aspects of conventions is the opportunity to meet new people and deepen old friendships. The Symposium began with guests arriving and mingling with one another over coffee.

Emma Foss, music teacher at Coram Deo Academy, let a time of worship to kick off the event. She structured the time of worship around Paul’s triad expressed in Colossians 3:16 to “sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”

The first keynote address entitled “Cultivating the Joy of Learning in the Classical Classroom” was given by Jason Barney. He developed his thinking about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow. He based many of his thoughts on his book The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education, but also extended his thinking to apply flow in practical ways.

Participants could choose topics in the first breakout session, with tracks catering to teachers or school leaders. After a catered lunch, Patrick Egan presented the second keynote address on “Cultivating Virtue through Habit Training.” He connected the dots between Aristotle’s conviction that virtues are cultivated through habits, the biblical mandate to “train up a child in the way he should go” (Prov. 22:6), and Charlotte Mason’s method of habit training.

A second breakout and guided discussion session preceded the final event; a panel discussion with all three Educational Renaissance authors moderated by David Seibel, Head of School at Coram Deo Academy. It was a discussion about discussion-based learning. The group differentiated discussions from other methods of learning and considered some practical applications for different grade levels and subject areas.

We are grateful for all the participants in this inaugural event. The staff at Coram Deo Academy did an excellent job hosting the event. We look forward to next year’s event. Stay tuned for further information about the date and location for the Educational Renaissance Symposium 2022.

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It’s time once again for the summer conferences. Whether you attended in person or remotely, many of you will have discovered Educational Renaissance for the first time during either the ACCS Repairing the Ruins conference last week or the Society for Classical Learning conference this week. We welcome you summer conference attendees to explore the resources available here at Educational Renaissance. You can learn more about our past and future projects below.

You may have navigated to our site to download Jason’s eBook on implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration, Patrick’s eBook on implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of habit training, or Kolby’s eBook on applying Teach like a Champion 2.0 in the classical classroom. Thank you so much for you continued interest in our content offers. In an effort to serve you better, would you consider filling out a quick survey?

We invite you to read through the many articles that have been posted here over the years. We aim to provide a new article every week, linking thoughts from our classical Christian heritage to new ideas emerging in our own day about education, psychology, neurology and philosophy. We also have a new podcast. Look for The Educational Renaissance podcast on whatever platform you listen to. Here’s our link on Spotify.

We’re glad you found us, and we look forward to providing you with content that will inspire you and help you to grow in the craft of teaching. You’ll find a plethora of materials that draw upon the ancient wisdom that is the hallmark of our educational renewal movement, but also delves into recent research from experts in the fields of brain science and psychology. You clearly care about your craft since you attended a summer conference, now you can take your skill to the next level by learning from the resources we’ve made available.

What’s Next for Educational Renaissance?

We are entering our fourth academic year as an organization. Every year we try to enhance what we can offer to our audience. And to that end, we are already planning webinars that will enable our listeners to go deeper on a wide array of topics. We think this will enable us to engage more teachers, school leaders and homeschool parents who want a deeper level of training and coaching. To that end, if you haven’t done so yet, take a moment to fill out the survey above to let us know what kinds of materials we could produce that would most serve you.

Highlights from the Past Year

Patrick wrote a six-part series on “Training the Prophetic Voice” which explores concepts of discipleship and rhetoric. You can listen to our podcast on the Prophetic Voice on Spotify. This was followed by a three-part series exploring “Human Cognitive Development.”

After writing a series on Teach Like a Champion 2.0 and producing his eBook, Kolby has written several articles exploring theology in the classroom. Check out his articles “Three Premises for Teaching Theology” and “Educating for a Christian Worldview in a Secular Age.” Recently Kolby has started a new series reading through Plato’s Republic. Begin with his first reflections on justice in Book 1.

Jason had the opportunity last fall to produce a class for ClassicalU with Classical Academic Press. In preparation for that he shared a sneak peak on his class about narration. In conjunction with this, he wrote a multi-part series on the “History of Narration.” More recently Jason has been developing a thoughtful interaction with Bloom’s taxonomy, proposing an alternative informed by Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. You can get started with the first article in the series.

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These are longer block quotes that will whet your appetite for exploring old articles you may have missed. If you’re new to Educational Renaissance (as many of you are), think of this as a cliff notes guide to some of the core ideas in education we’ve been recovering during these past 6 months. The longer format of these quotations gives our authors a chance to develop an idea more fully than the memorable maxims of last year.

If you missed our Summer Conference Edition article, check that out, especially if you’re new, for some updates on where Educational Renaissance has been and where we’re going. Hope you enjoy these quotable quotes!

Quote 1:

“The Roman world is one we can readily recognize because it contains so many of the trappings of our day. How many students moaned to go to school (ludum) because it meant they couldn’t play games (ludos)? What a peculiar word, then, to describe these two seemingly dichotomous things? Unless, of course, the word itself reveals that “school” and “game” are not after all dichotomous. If school is actually a place to play, and play is a place of learning, maybe the word ludus reveals something we are prone to miss about the reality of education.”

-From School Is a Game: Finite and Infinite Games in Education

Quote 2:

“A sense of piety, of duty or obligation to one’s family, city, culture and the divine, would properly recognize the individual as coming into the world dependent and situated within the broader story of the culture, within which the family and individual find their place. This contrasts sharply with the quest for “self-discovery among a buffet of potential selves” that characterizes modern individualism (Clark and Jain 22).”

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians

Quote 3:

“As Charlotte Mason observed, there is nothing quite like the experience of being struck by an idea. The experience is equivalent to being the recipient of some unexpected treasure. Ideas loosen our grip on holding a thin view of the world. They open our minds, especially through narration, to connections previously gone undetected and stir our imaginations to explore further up and further in. Ideas light the fire beneath us to learn, search, and discover.”

-From Charlotte Mason and the Power of Ideas

Quote 4:

“The hardest part of writing is staring at a blank page. The biggest hurdle is putting pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard. Making the cursor move forward is a major victory. What is it that keeps us from starting? It is the internal editor. Before we’ve even begun writing, our internal editor is already criticizing our work.”

-From The Writing Process: Sentences, Paragraphs, Edit, Repeat

Quote 5:

“The first step in recovering the love of science is to strip away the sense of impersonal system hanging about it. One of the reasons we tend to discount the idea of being an amateur scientist—engaging in the work of science simply for the love of it (amateur coming from the Latin word for ‘love)—is because of science being conceived as an impersonal system for determining objective truth.”

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 7: Recovering Science as the Love of Wisdom

Quote 6:

“Children are not be treated as mere cattle on a farm or products on an assembly line. They enter this world with immense potential to think, create, explore, write, observe, perform, analyze, and more. As a result, the sort of work we give children to do in the classroom ought to activate and strengthen these capacities to the limits of each child’s potential.”

-From Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 1: Mapping a Harmony

Quote 7:

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

-From The Art of Learning: Four Principles from Josh Waitzkin’s Book

Quote 8:

“Christ’s yoke may be easy and his burden light to the one who has taken it on himself (see Matt 11:30), but this is only so for the one who has taken up his cross to follow the master to the place of his own brutal execution. Even for Socrates, the love of wisdom was a “practice of death” (Phaedo 81a). So perhaps I should rather urge you to read philosophy not for flow and pleasure, but for pain and death, and because you must, not because you will want to. Such is the minimum commitment necessary of one who would be a philosopher-teacher.”

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers

Quote 9:

“So if one central aspect of classical education is the cultivation of the life of the mind, Charlotte couldn’t agree more. Her insistence that children read from a broad and liberal curriculum fits right in with the broader liberal arts tradition. In particular, her recommended practices of narration, transcription, dictation, and recitation all cultivate a healthy intellectual life for the child, regardless of upbringing, social class, or ability.”

-From Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 2: Educating the Whole Person

Quote 10:

“The love of learning is not watching some namby pamby cartoon with its prepackaged tasty morsels of information. It’s the exhilaration felt after facing your fears and wrestling that monster in the dark, or slaying the dragon of chaos just beyond the order of your understanding. It’s struggle and suffering in the pursuit of a meaningful goal. Learning, like life, is not all roses and cupcakes, even or especially when you love it.”

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 9: The Lifelong Love of Learning

Quote 11:

“This calling is found in scripture, for example, when the apostle Paul instructs fathers in the Ephesian church to bring up their children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4 ESV). Discipline, or training, requires dedicated effort and intentionality on the part of both parent and child. It does not come by accident. And effective instruction, the meeting of minds around wisdom and knowledge, requires the instructor “to know that which he would teach,” as educator John Milton Gregory put it in The Seven Laws of Teaching (26). Most importantly, the discipline and instruction Paul refers to is to be “of the Lord,” that is, God-centered and in line with scripture.”

-From Cultivating and Community: Wisdom for Parents Educating at Home Amidst the Present Crisis

Quote 12:

“An infectious disease causes a pandemic that decimates the major urban centers in northern Italy. Doctors are recognized by their masks. The economy is disrupted through the loss of a workforce. The social order is overturned. Many turn to religion as a response to the pandemic, yet dogmatic norms are questioned.”

-From The Black Plague and an Educational Renaissance

Quote 13:

“If you’re looking to “optimize” the effectiveness of your teaching, focusing on forming relational connections with students is ironically one of the best investments. Students are eager to learn from a teacher they trust and admire; even the best students struggle to learn well from a cold and distant instructor.”

-From The Benefits and Drawbacks of Online Learning: 6 Hacks to Mitigate the Drawbacks

Quote 14:

“Curiosity is content without certainty and knowing all the answers. It is not concerned with saying the right thing or knowing ahead of time how people will react. Instead it remains focused on rumbling with vulnerability, embracing the unknown, and pursuing further knowledge in order to lead most effectively.”

-From The Importance of Courage and Curiosity for School Leaders Today

Quote 15:

“So what does it mean when I say life occurs in our classrooms? For one, it means that our students are whole persons. We are not just interacting with our students’ minds. Students are also emotional, social and spiritual creatures, just like we are. All dimensions of their personhood come into the classroom. All dimensions of their personhood are being trained and cultivated.”

-From Education Is Life: A Philosophy on Education

Quote 16:

“This holistic vision of a wisdom education in the vein of Proverbs requires much of the teacher. In classical education, likewise, the teacher must be a magister of the arts, a sage, a philosopher; must be a participant in the Wisdom that comes from above. Only then can the teacher cultivate wisdom in the young and simple. Only then will the teacher wisely order techniques, practices and assessments to the right ends.”

-From The Problem of Technicism in Conventional Education

Quote 17:

“As we think about nurturing confident faith in our youngest children, we must not begin with lofty arguments, but instead, the very best stories. These stories will shape the moral imaginations of students, filling their souls with a rich feast of ideas, characters, stories, poems, and fables.”

-From Teaching Confident Faith in an Age of Religious Uncertainty

Quote 18:

“So, what is the future of habit training? As we explored habit training in an online distance learning environment, we saw that the heart of the method hasn’t changed. My prediction is that habit training will remain the same. The method I have outlined here was essentially the same in Charlotte Mason’s time, and look how many technological and cultural shifts have occurred since the early 1900s when she wrote her six-volume philosophy of education. What this means is that investing in this method even now will reap benefits in your life as a teacher for years to come.”

-From Habit Training During Online Distance Learning

Quote 19:

“The only lasting solution to scientism in education is ultimately an entire Renaissance project in which we return ad fontēs (“to the sources”) in an effort not simply to generalize a definition of what classical education is, but to distinguish between the different visions and practices of the multifaceted tradition. In so doing we will have to be prepared to not like everything we see; we may be forced to engage in some negative judgments on some aspects of the tradition, even as we are inspired and challenged by others.”

-From The Problem of Scientism in Conventional Education

Quote 20:

“One aspect of the joy of learning is addressing this concept of humility. As human beings, we are limited, frail and fallible. Frequently we attempt to cover this up, to hide what we truly are behind the smoke and mirrors of our expertise and accomplishments. True human growth, though, only occurs when we uncover our true nature and deal with it. As an individual confronts an area of lack, there is a transformation that can occur, whereby something about us becomes strengthened.”

-From Summertime, and the Learning is Easy

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It’s a busy summer . . . of staying home. In previous years you may have traveled to take in several of the summer conferences that are part of our classical Christian schooling movement. This summer everyone’s staying home and attending conferences virtually. Many of you will have discovered Educational Renaissance for the first time through one of Jason’s talks at either the ACCS Repairing the Ruins conference last week or the Society for Classical Learning conference this week. We welcome you summer conference attendees to explore the resources available here at Educational Renaissance. You can learn more about our past and future projects below.

You may have navigated to our site to download Jason’s eBook on implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration. You can click on the banner above and find it under the Charlotte Mason heading. Perhaps you came here having read Patrick’s recent three-part series on the Circe Institute’s blog. You can find his eBook on implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of habit training, also under the Charlotte Mason heading above.

We invite you to read through the many articles that have been posted here over the past two years. We aim to provide a new article every week, linking thoughts from our classical Christian heritage to new ideas emerging in our own day about education, psychology, neurology and philosophy. If you appreciate this approach to linking the best of the past and the present, you might like delving into Jason’s new book, available on Amazon about flow entitled, The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education.

We’re glad you found us and we look forward to providing you with content that will inspire you and help you to grow in the craft of teaching. You clearly care about your craft since you attended a summer conference, now you can take your skill to the next level by learning from the resources we’ve made available.

What’s Next for Educational Renaissance?

We are entering our third academic year as an organization. Every year we try to enhance what we can offer to our audience. And to that end, we have already begun recording audio for the Educational Renaissance podcast. We think this will enable us to reach more people with high quality content for teachers, school leaders and homeschool parents about education.

We plan to continue writing in-depth articles every week and to publish books and ebooks on a regular basis. We are also exploring ways that we can provide training online through webinars and lessons.

As social distancing requirements start to go away, you may want to have a more personalized training experience at your school. If you are interested in scheduling a speaking engagement, consultation or teacher training event, you can email us through our contact page.

Highlights from the Past Year

One of the biggest highlights for the academic year was the addition of Kolby Atchison. It was great to add an energetic, thoughtful and godly man to the team. Like Jason and Patrick, he’s been deeply impacted by Charlotte Mason’s pedagogy and how it enhances the aims of the classical Christian movement. He produced a great two-part series exploring the relationship between Charlotte Mason and classical education. You can read the series “Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition” here: Mapping a Harmony and Educating the Whole Person. You might also like his brief series on happiness and virtues with these articles: The Road of Virtue and The Way of Wisdom, renditions of which were published on the CLT blog. Currently he is working on a series of articles on the integration of classical education with techniques from Teach Like a Champion 2.0.

Patrick produced the eBook “A Guide to Implementing Habit Training” earlier this Spring, which you can download for free here. If you’d like to read more about habit training, he wrote some further articles on spiritual habit training, habit training in the internet age, and habit training during online distance learning. You might also like his exploration of teaching the writing process with these articles: Writing on Purpose and The Writing Process.

Jason produced both “How to Implement Narration in the Classical Classroom” an eBook available for you to download for free here, and The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow Through Classical Education available for purchase from Amazon. You can learn more about his book here. You might also like some of the articles Jason has written, such as his article on Teaching in the Arts vs. Teaching Science, or his most recent thoughts on problems in conventional education whether it be technicism or scientism.

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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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Look for our first post to drop next weekend!

Welcoming Kolby to the Team

We’d like to welcome Kolby, the newest member of the team! You can read more about Kolby on our bio page. After getting to know Kolby over the years, I knew that there was a likemindedness that made him an ideal contributor to Educational Renaissance. All three of us are teaching within the classical, Christian education movement. All three of us are applying Charlotte Mason’s pedagogy in the classroom. And all three of us are reading today’s research and bringing it to bear in our unique educational environment.

Sign Up for Our Newsletter 

One way we feel we can add value for our readers is by providing regular updates in our monthly newsletter. Just enter your email address and you will receive updates each month and notifications of each new blog article.

Our mission is to promote a rebirth of ancient wisdom about education in the modern era. And we think the best way to do that is by providing high quality content for teachers, school leaders and homeschool parents about education. As educators head back to school, we hope that our articles will inspire you in your own educational work, and give you the resources you need to promote that rebirth in your own context.

For everyone who signs up in August, we’ll send you a free copy of Jason’s new eBook entitled, “How to Implement Narration in the Classical Classroom.” He’s really excited about this project he’s been working on since being contracted to visit the Geneva School in Orlando area this August 7-8 to train their Grammar School faculty in the teaching practice of narration. As they head back to school, they are implementing Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration.

What new practices are you planning to implement as you head back to school this year?

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It’s the end of the 2018-19 school year. Most of you are on vacation now, or at the very least your work at the school can be done without students present. That said, a good many of you will roll right into summer school, or you’ve taken on a summer job, because – let’s face it – teachers just don’t make enough. This is an excellent time, no matter what your situation, to take stock of another year done and to look forward to next year.

For Jason and Patrick, this will be the last post of the school year. We will start back up with a back-to-school post in August. In the meantime, we’d like to leave you with a few thoughts and announcements as we wrap up the school year.

This summer is a transition for Patrick. He will be leaving his position at Providence Classical Christian Academy in St. Louis, MO to rejoin the team at Clapham School in Wheaton, IL. The five years spent at Providence have been a fruitful time to learn and grow as an administrator. It has been a joy to assemble a great team of teachers and provide them with a vision of what middle school and high school can be when we think holistically about students as persons. It has been one of my goals to establish an environment of collegiality among the faculty and staff as well as enable the faculty to teach their subjects with skill and enthusiasm, drawing out the best students have to offer. The investment made in two of my faculty over the past several years now sees them move into administrative positions, so that there’s a sense that whatever good I have done here will carry on in the capable hands of those I leave behind.

One of the benefits of joining Clapham is the ability to work more closely with Jason, operating in the same school and being located closer together to facilitate our writing goals. There’s already a great leadership team and the faculty are fantastic. There’s much I will need to learn in this new environment (although not so new, since I worked there previously), but I also have the opportunity to share lessons learned at Providence to take the school to new levels.

This summer Jason and his wife Ashley are expecting the arrival of their new baby boy Atticus sometime in early July. He will also be busy working on some major projects and planning for the year for Clapham School.

Together our goals are to expand on what was a great first year blogging. There’s much we’ve learned about providing long-form content on the art of teaching. We’d like to provide you our readers with more great content that will help you whether you are a classroom teacher, an administrator or a homeschool parent. One project Jason and Patrick are working on is a full-length book on the topic of the Bible and education. In this we’re exploring what we are calling the apprenticeship model of education. We look forward to the time when we can share with you more details. In the meantime, Jason will be adding some new social media avenues to interact with us. Plus, we are exploring whether to create content through either a podcast or videocast format. If you’d be interested in listening to or watching content from us, we’d appreciate getting feedback from you about your preferences.

Finally, a thought. Teaching is challenging work. One thing I’ve learned is that teaching is an art form. And like most other artists, we suffer for our art. This art form requires much of us from managing a classroom and delivering excellent content to marking papers and interacting with parents. There is a deep and profound joy we gain when each of these areas of our art work well. But we are also our own harshest critics, pushing ourselves to get deeper into our material or to forge better connections with our students. Now that it’s the summer time, it’s a great time to recharge for the new school year awaiting us in August. It’s time to pan out to the big picture. What inspires you as a teacher? What is the grand purpose God has placed you on this earth to accomplish as a teacher? What did you accomplish this year that has propelled you forward in your journey as a teacher? Where could this take you next year? Taking time to reconnect with the lofty and inspiring values you have is the best way to recharge. There will be time for rejigging your lesson plans later. Now is the time for the soul work.

We hope you have a great summer. See you when the new school year begins.

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Here you will find thoughtful engagement with educational ideas. Jason and I have devoted ourselves to the craft of teaching, accumulating hours in the classroom (sometimes together), providing oversight and mentoring as administrators, and exploring important ideas as speakers. We believe educational renewal can occur as we thoughtfully understand the great thoughts of past educators and engage with the educational ideas of today. Thanks for joining us, and we hope you find our contributions helpful as you work on your own teaching as a craft.

Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education. — Charlotte Mason

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