On his return to Lystra during his second missionary tour, Paul had his eye on a potential companion to work alongside him. Previously, Paul had worked closely with Barnabas, but had parted ways at the outset of his second journey. Even though he had brought Silas along with him, a vacancy remained. So when he arrived at Lystra, he identified a young man full of faith to join in this gospel ministry. Timothy represents in many ways the central point of the book of Acts. The Jerusalem council had just met to delineate exactly how to blend new gentile believers into the church comprised mostly of Jewish believers (Acts 15). Timothy was of mixed parentage. His father was Greek. His mother was a Jewish believer (Acts 16:1). Raised in the faith of his mother and grandmother, Timothy would have already been familiar with the scriptures of the Old Testament. As one of the disciples from Paul’s previous visit to Lystra, what Paul found upon his return was a young man of profound faith. We cannot know for certain his age, but it seems likely that Timothy was still only a boy, around sixteen or seventeen years old.

Timothy joined Paul and Silas on their journeys, traveling throughout Macedonia and Greece. At times, Paul entrusted Timothy with the care of local churches, such as at Berea or Thessalonica. We can picture, though, that Paul valued Timothy as a close companion, referring to him as his “true child in the faith” (1 Tim. 1:2). At various points, Paul commends Timothy to various churches, such as when Timothy was sent to minister at Corinth (1 Cor. 4:17 and later 16:10), or when he was sent to minister at Philippi (Phil 2:18-23). Timothy was included as a co-author of several of Paul’s letters, including 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Colossians, 1-2 Thessalonians, and Philemon. From all of this we gather that Timothy was a gifted and capable companion, even during his earliest days traveling with Paul.

What Timothy exemplifies is a young person exhibiting spiritual gifting in a powerful way. Later in his life, even after many years accompanying Paul, he was still a young man when Paul advised him to “let no one despise you for your youth” (1 Tim. 4:12). The point I am making here is that spiritual gifting can be evident and powerfully expressed by young people. Therefore, I believe that we can begin exploring gifting during the high school years, enabling students to begin a process of discernment and practice that will put feet to their faith in powerful ways.

Learning about Spiritual Gifts

In this year’s Bible class taught to freshmen, we walked through 1 Corinthians 12-14. Here we get one of several lists of gifts in the New Testament. Compare, for instance, the list in 1 Cor. 12:7-11 with that in 12:28-30 as well as with those in Romans 12:4-8, Ephesians 4:11 and 1 Peter 4:9-11. Each list contains different gifts. This means that no single list is comprehensive or exhaustive. So the first lesson to learn about gifts is that they can be tricky to pin down and define with exactitude. This points to the need for discernment and dependence. By discernment, I mean the process of continually asking the Lord for clarity as to how he desires to work through someone to edify the people of God. And by dependence, I mean that the gift itself is not actually the most consequential part of what we are learning. Instead, using a God-given gift is really the training ground for prayerfully and faithfully connecting ourselves to his work in and through us. 1 Corinthians 13 shows us that the gift itself will pass away (13:8-10). It is the love that is expressed through the gift that will endure forever.

Walking through the three chapters of 1 Corinthians 12-14, we are presented with three major ideas. First, we learn the nature of spiritual gifts in chapter 12. Here we get a couple listings of the gifts, but also ideas such as the unity of the body of Christ and the empowering of the Holy Spirit. In chapter 13, we learn about spiritual gifts as the “homework” we receive to practice loving one another. Paul anticipates that we will one day see our Lord face to face, so our current practice should be a training ground for learning how to live a serving and sacrificial love towards our brothers and sisters in Christ. Then in chapter 14, Paul teaches about how gifts ought to be exercised in an orderly and considerate way. Here we get the principle that gifts are meant to build the church up (14:12).

There are challenging points of discussion that accompany these passages. It can be difficult to walk through these chapters without tackling one or two of the controversies contained in them. For instance, we encounter topics such as the availability of all gifts today (some Christian traditions view the miraculous gifts such as tongues and prophecy as no longer available). There are topics pertaining to authority in the church, which can erupt into differences in church polities in a multi-denominational setting. Perhaps the most difficult controversy to tackle is the roles of women in the church. A teacher resource I found to be extremely helpful is D.A. Carson’s Showing the Spirit. He carefully lays out different theological positions and proposes reasonable solutions to thorny issues.

Learning to Own One’s Faith

One of the chief goals in learning about spiritual gifts is to help students make the connection between their emerging biblical faith and the practical outworking of that faith in their lives. To accomplish this, it is imperative to lay a strong biblical foundation. One must know what one believes. Some students will have a very detailed and robust knowledge of the Bible and theology, while others will have less knowledge. So, I advise a program whereby students come away with a good grasp of the storyline of the Bible and the essentials of the faith. As high schoolers, students can be entrusted to read on their own and begin practicing disciplines such as daily prayer, regular Bible reading, and so forth. Learning about spiritual gifts, then, gives them further ownership of their faith and new avenues to put feet to their faith.

Having students take a few spiritual gifts tests is the next step in their learning. After laying a strong foundation in the biblical text, we then have them explore by way of tests some potential giftings the Lord may have bestowed upon them. Here are two tests I found online. The website Spiritual Gifts Test is run by the ministry of Jeff Carver. I like this site because it has a test geared towards youth. To take this test and receive results, students must create an account. I found that this site has really solid definitions of the gifts for students to learn about their personal gifting and connect that to solid biblical teachings. Another site is giftstest.com, a free online tool produced by the Rock Church in San Diego. There are other tests available out there, but these are two good examples of questionnaires aimed at elucidating an individual’s possible gifting. I want to emphasize the word “possible,” because no single test can definitively tell a person what the Holy Spirit is accomplishing within a believer.

This is why we need to spend time reflecting. Once students have taken a couple tests, they have some results to read and digest. They now begin a process of writing up what they think their gifting is by listing the top results and using scripture to clearly define their gifting as best as they can discern. For students who may not have had much opportunity to serve in any ministry context, it is important to consider moments when they have experienced genuine joy, or times when others have commented on their potential gifting. I also spend time working one-on-one with them in order to hear their thoughts and provide my own insights.

I also have students write up plans they can make now that they have discern one, two or three possible giftings. These plans might be along the lines of learning more about spiritual gifts, or speaking with a youth pastor about spiritual gifts. They might consider opportunities to use spiritual gifts in a ministry at church, or to join a missions trip. In other words, having considered what the Lord is doing through them, they should now follow Paul’s teaching that these gifts are for the edification of the church.

Learning about Life’s Mission

Having spent the better part of a decade providing college guidance, the major framework I use with students is to consider their life’s mission. I can think of no better way to think about college than to view those years than within a context a long-range vision of why God has placed this person on the planet. It can be difficult for students to have a clear vision of this life mission, so it takes time and good counsel to draw this out of them. Here’s where I think learning about spiritual gifts can be a moment of clarity for students. By gaining an insight into their relationship with God, and a sense of where God wants them to serve, they begin to understand that their life has a mission, and that whatever kind of schooling they do, it should be intimately tied to that mission. It is imperative that counselors use effective questions to draw out of students their own values and sense of their life mission. We must restrain ourselves from inserting our own vision or coaxing them into a preconceived notion of what they ought to want in their lives. Only when they have come to their own conclusions can they genuinely be satisfied with this vision of their mission in life. Some of the questions I ask have to do with what kinds of values to they hold, what kind of person do they want to be when they are 20, 30 or 40, and what kind of parent would they want to be.

This does not mean that one’s spiritual gift is somehow tied to a college major or career. That being said, it could be that discerning a spiritual gift could lead some students to pursue training in ministry. For many or even most students, they can start to map out a mission where their interests, talents, and giftings come together into a clearer life plan. The aspiring architect can now see how their talent in physics intersects with their interest in design as well as their spiritual gifting of mercy. How these come together is very personal and unique to that person.

Whether a unit on spiritual gifts is explicitly connected to college guidance or not, teaching students about spiritual gifts can be a key moment in their growth as young Christians. During the high school years, most of these students will learn how to drive and work their first job. Shouldn’t we also hand them the keys to a deeper walk with Christ that gives them a start in how to practically live out their faith. Just like Timothy was entrusted with responsibility at a young age, we can likewise guide our students toward a mature faith.

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There’s a lovely edition of Saint George and the Dragon written by Margaret Hodges and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman that is an excellent book for young readers or reading aloud as a family. It is a retelling of the famous rendition of the story in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. A story that connected Saint George to English royalty. With the coronation of King Charles III this weekend, we will see many symbolic representations of Saint George as he has been venerated as the patron saint of England since the Middle Ages. From the England’s Saint George flag (red cross on white background) to the stained glass window in the nave of Westminster Abbey depicting George fighting the dragon, there are emblems that keep alive the memory and significance of Saint George today.

We see the story of Saint George appear frequently under different names. Take, for instance, the story of Harry Potter saving Ginny Weasley from the Basilisk in the second novel in the Harry Potter series. Here Potter plays the heroic Saint George role. This interpretation has been posited by Jordan Peterson. He writes:

“She [Ginny] is the maiden—or the anima, the soul—forever incarcerated by the dragon, as in the tale of St. George. It is up to Harry, orphaned hero, to wake and rescue her.”

Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (Random House, 2021), 79.

Peterson has been an important intellectual voice raising our attention of Carl Jung, an individual who provides a wealth of insight into the heroic individual. Viewing the heroic stories of figures such as Harry Potter, Bilbo Baggins and Saint George, Peterson sees how the heroic archetype emanates from the ultimate heroic figure: Jesus Christ. Peterson writes:

“In the desert, Christ encounters Satan (see Luke 4:1-13 and Matthew 4:1-11). This story has a clear psychological meaning—a metaphorical meaning—in addition to whatever else materials and metaphysical alike it might signify. It means that Christ is forever He who determines to take personal responsibility for the full depth of human depravity. It means that Christ is eternally He who is willing to confront and deeply consider and risk the temptations posed by the most malevolent elements of human nature. It means that Christ is always he who is willing to confront evil.”

Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Random House, 2018), 180.

It is important to note that Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology, has interpreted this passage from a psychological standpoint. He leaves open a more theological understanding of these passages and the nature of Christ. For this reason, we can see how Peterson’s psychological read of Christ is not in conflict with the theological conviction that Christ dies for sins as an atonement.

Having brought up Saint George, the dragon and Jordan Peterson, we are well situated to understand the relevance of Carl Jung to literature, history, mythology, psychology and philosophy. In this article we will explore Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and how it plays out in archetypes we see in narratives, myths and dreams. Once we have a good grasp of Jung’s framework, we can then consider what role Charlotte Mason’s method of narration might play relative to this framework.

Jung and the Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. He is best known for his theories of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and the psychological complex. His work has had a profound influence on modern psychology and psychiatry, as well as on philosophy, anthropology, literature, and religious studies. A protégé of Freud, he later broke away from his

Jung first presented his theory of the collective unconscious to the public through his essay “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious,” published in 1936. He begins his definition by differentiating the collective from the personal unconscious. He writes:

“While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity.”

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1 (Princeton University Press, 1969), par. 88.

So, the personal unconscious can be understood as a storehouse of material that was once conscious for the individual. But the collective unconscious was never any individual’s personal consciousness. Jung goes on to state:

“In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature . . . there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes.”

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1 (Princeton University Press, 1969), par. 90.

To be clear, individuals experience this collective unconsciousness but it does not reside in any individual, but is a shared set of forms that Jung calls “archetypes.” Jung first studied this concept by analyzing the dreams of patients, a practice his predecessor Freud had likewise analyzed. As such, one of the primary methods deployed by Jung to identify archetypes of the collective unconscious was to analyze dreams. And while this method can be both fascinating and productive, I want to quickly move on to other avenues of study pursued by Jung. By this I mean the archetypes found in mythology and fairy tales. Jung writes in his essay “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”:

“Another well-known expression of the archetypes is myth and fairytale. But here too we are dealing with forms that have received a specific stamp and have been handed down through long periods of time.”

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1 (Princeton University Press, 1969), par. 6.

What this means is that archetypes have a mythological character that appear over and over again in literature and artwork. This is exactly what we see in the story of Saint George and the Dragon, a mythological archetype that gets re-packaged over and over again in literature under new guises—such as Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker—but connect to something heroic in human potential. We see this spelled out in detail in a stunning passage from one of Jung’s last works Mysterium Conjunctionis:

“In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon, not the one who is devoured by it. And yet both have to deal with the same dragon. Also, he is no hero who never met the dragon, or who, if he once saw it, declared afterwards that he saw nothing. Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the “treasure hard to attain.” He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives him faith and trust, the pistis in the ability of the self to sustain him, for everything that menaced him from inside he has made his own. He has acquired the right to believe that he will be able to overcome all future threats by the same means.”

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 14 (Princeton University Press, 1970), par. 756.

For Jung, the dragon resides within and must be confronted in order for the individual to truly know oneself and valiantly face the trials of life. One might be tempted to hear in this a form of self-realization that runs counter to faith in Christ for salvation; for Jung plays up the “faith and trust” in self. And while we must recognize that Jung was not friendly to the Christian faith, he saw how many of his concepts were actually grounded in Christian ideas. For instance, he identifies how the concept of archetype relates to the Imago Dei. One the subject of archetypes, he marshals evidence from both Irenaeus and Augustine to show how God has placed these archetypes of his divine nature within us. (see The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1 (Princeton University Press, 1969), par. 5.)

To express this all succinctly, what Jung posits is that our imaginative enterprises from ancient myths to modern literature express something deep within us that connects to a transcendent reality. The more we understand particularly the heroic archetype, the more capable we are as individuals to encounter the chaos of our world and the struggles we confront within. To put it another way, the ancient quest for happiness or eudaimonia is the hero’s journey for which we are best equipped by reading and assimilating this heroic pattern from the great works.

A Note on Jungian Interpretation of Literature

Reading literature in light of Jungian archetypes can be both enlightening and fun. I have introduced Jung to high school students in my Modern World Humanities class. It can be eye opening to see beloved characters from in a new light. Take, for instance, a few characters from the Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We have a complex of characters that are archetypal. Victor Frankenstein is a tragic hero who we see leaving the home, pursuing new avenues of scientific discovery, and then needing to protect his one true love from the monster he created. Victor’s father is the wise old man, giving sage advice at various points to Victor. Elizabeth Lavenza is at various points the damsel in distress and the nurturing mother. And the monster is the villain that the hero must confront to protect the damsel in distress. Seeing these characters in this light adds meaning to our reading of the text and can bring insight into the message of the novel.

Furthermore, there can be productive discussion about Jung’s concept of the shadow self. Jung describes the shadow as a dark part of one’s inner self that must be confronted to become a whole person. He writes:

“But if we are able to see our own shadow and can bear knowing about it, then a small part of the problem has already been solved: we have at least brought up the personal unconscious. The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness.”

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1 (Princeton University Press, 1969), par. 44.

In the case of Victor Frankenstein, the monster represents his shadow self. He must confront that shadow and attempt to reconcile himself with it. Returning to the narrative of Saint Peter, we could then say that the dragon is not only an external force that must be confronted, but the dragon resides within. There is something profoundly Christian about this insight that residing within all of us is the villain we must heroically confront. And yet we are incapable of defeating the dragon apart from the help which God provides in Christ. I hear echoes Luther’s famous dictum simil justus et peccator “at once justified and a sinner.”

For Jung, literary criticism only played a small part of his understanding of the collective unconscious and the interpretation of archetypes. Yet he produced a brilliant essay on the matter written in 1922 entitled “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry.” In this he looks not only at poetry but at all forms of art as a means of expressing the collective unconscious for that era. He writes:

“The artist seizes on this image, and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.”

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 15 (Princeton University Press, 1971), par. 83.

By “this image” Jung means something primordial or ancient in nature that wells up within the artist from this collective unconscious into a specified consciousness through the artist. We might refer to this as the artist’s muse to capture the idea using more classical language. When we are analyzing artwork, we are really getting at the message of the piece and how it communicates not only to the specific context in which it arose, but if it has enduring value, then also the transcendent values that still speak to us today.

We must be careful not to collapse all readings of literature and art into a reduction of Jung’s archetypes, a tendency all too easy to follow when we first learn of the archetypes. Dawson comments on this tendency:

“Take a text. Read the surface narrative. Stamp an archetypal pattern on to it. Assume its significance. Indulge in some woolly generalization. Case closed.”

Terence Dawson, “Literary Criticism and Analytical Psychology” in The Cambridge Companion to Jung (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 286.

The temptation is to hear only one story repeated over and over instead of hearing how the great metanarrative becomes expressed in unique detail and complexity generating insights that cannot be generalized. So, while I highly recommend reading literature with Jungian archetypes in mind, do so with the caution that such a method helpfully unlocks the potential meaning of the text rather than making all texts say exactly the same thing.

The Assimilation of the Heroic

Thus far I have focused almost entirely on Jung and now I must introduce him to another character, Charlotte Mason (1842-1923). Or perhaps I should say I should introduce Mason to Jung, for she precedes him by a generation. It is clear that Mason was deeply interested in psychology as each of her six volumes on education refer to the subject in some manner. She shows an astonishing awareness of figures in America and Germany, with William James (1842-1910), Johann Herbart (1776-1841) and Friedrich Fröbel (1782-1852) featuring prominently. She shows know awareness of the Vienna School inasmuch as no references to Freud or Jung are to be found in her writings. (A piece with some references to Freud was commissioned for the The Parents’ Review written by Sir Maurice Chaig entitled “Some Aspects of Education and Training in Relation to Mental Disorder” and was published in 1924, one year after Mason’s death).

Mason shows herself to be competent if not groundbreaking as it relates to the field of psychology, especially as it relates to childhood development and learning theory. It should be noted that her forward thinking about neuroplasticity—a term she never used but referred to with phrases like “a mark upon the brain substance” (vol 6, 100)—was eventually validated almost 100 years later through neurological studies as recently as the 1990s. I mention all this to indicate that it does not seem to be a stretch to consider Mason’s writings on educational philosophy highly compatible with the roughly contemporaneous works emerging in the field of psychoanalysis on the continent during her lifetime.

Much could be made regarding the psychological significance of her philosophy of education, especially concepts such as viewing children as whole persons or training children in habits. What I want to dig into though from a psychological perspective is narration. While this might seem a wholly academic process, I contend that it has psychological significance in light of Jung’s insights about the collective unconscious. To that end, let’s explore some of Mason’s thoughts as it regards the impact narration has on children.

We begin by understanding how narration is fundamentally about assimilation and not memorization. Central to Mason’s method of narration is cultivating the child’s power of attention to be properly deployed on living texts. She writes:

“He will find that in the act of narrating every power of his mind comes into play, that points and bearings which he had not observed are brought out; that the whole is visualized and brought into relief in an extraordinary way; in fact, that scene or argument has become a part of his personal experience; he knows, he has assimilated what he has read.”

Charlotte Mason, A Philosophy of Education (Living Book Press, 2017), 16.

Narration, then, bring the full power of the mind into contact with the rich details of the text, enlivening the imagination to picture or visualize the scene at hand. Note how she recognizes that this power of attention assimilates something into the child’s personal experience. By reading something like Saint George and the Dragon, the child assimilates that narration into himself as though it was a personal experience. That child becomes well practices in the heroic encounter with the forces of evil. She differentiates this from memorization, which lack this power of assimilation.

“This is not memory work. In order to memorise, we repeat over and over a passage or a series of points or names with the aid of such clues as we can invent; we do memorise a string of facts or words, and the new possession serves its purpose for a time, but it is not assimilated; its purpose being served, we know it no more.”

Charlotte Mason, A Philosophy of Education (Living Book Press, 2017), 16.

There is a place for memory work, not doubt, but it cannot bring into the character and development of the child with the same force as narration. This helps us understand an intangible aspect of narration. When we narrate, the goal is not to somehow quickly memorize the text in order to tell it back. Instead, the goal is to powerfully visualize the text, to take it into oneself so that the telling back is actually to share something that is becoming very personal to the reader. This personalization process entails an emotional and aesthetic quality that we as educators must be mindful to cultivate as students grow in the art of narrating.

Mason advises us to be rather choosy about the books we place before our young readers. we are to guide them away from “twaddle” (Vol 1, 176) and bring them into contact with “living books” (Vol 6, 154). She views what we read as the food of the mind. It feasts on ideas. And so our reading should be full of living ideas. As we grow healthiest with nutrient dense foods, so our reading should be dense with these living ideas. We are not merely interested in giving them intellectual power, we must also present to our children living books that cultivate their character, their duty, and their industriousness. She writes, “The great tales of the heroic age find their way to children’s hearts.” (Vol 6, 181) So, the prerequisite to narration having the outcome of plugging into the collective unconscious that Jung elaborates is to curate a wide array of living books from “a liberal range of subjects.” (Vol 6, 156)

This process of narration cultivates the wellbeing of children with the goal that children grow to have what Mason describes as “unity” and a healthy relationship of “oneself with oneself.” This links up nicely with the Jungian sense that the heroic encounter with dragons is an internal process of encountering the darkest parts of ourselves. Mason recognizes that her method has a psychological effect for children. She writes:

“They are curiously vitalised; not bored, not all alive in the playing-field and dull and inert in the schoolroom. . . . There is unity in their lives; they are not two persons, one with their play-fellows and quite other with their teachers and elders; but frank, fresh, showing keen interest in whatever comes in their way.”

Charlotte Mason, School Education (Living Books Press, 2017), 62-63.

How often have we seen students taking on different personality traits in different contexts? Mason contends that schooling that enables children to have an encounter with living ideas promotes the kind of unity of character that enables them to be the same person wherever they find themselves.

Ultimately, it is the internal battle we must enable our students to fight with valor. Mason in her volume The Formation of Character envisions this internal struggle. She writes:

“Modern scientists have added a great deal to the sum of available knowledge which should bear on the conduct of those relations of oneself with oneself which are implied in the terms, self-management, self-control, self-respect, self-love, self-help, self-abnegation, and so on. This knowledge is the more important because our power to conduct our relations with other people depends upon our power of conducting our relations with ourselves. Every man carries in his own person the key to human nature, and, in proportion as we are able to use this key, we shall be tolerant, gentle, helpful, wise and reverent.”

Charlotte Mason, The Formation of Character (Living Books Press, 2017), 86.

This encounter with the self is fundamental to individual wellbeing. And, as she notes, only when we have truly reconciled accounts internally can we conduct ourselves masterfully with the external world.

Hopefully this walk through Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and Mason’s method of narration has stimulated your thoughts on educational philosophy. One of the reasons I have elaborated this particular connection is to prepare myself to speak on this topic at the Charlotte Mason Centenary Conference in Ambleside, England this summer. I am honored to present at one of the expert panels on day 3 of the conference. There is a profound sense of privilege to walk the town where she spent a significant portion of her life a century after her passing.

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

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

Training the Emotions

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

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

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

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

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher, 95

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

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

Training New Citizens

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher, 171

Training in Happiness

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

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

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

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher, 193

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mentoring as a Program

When we think of mentoring programs, we often picture something like Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA), a non-profit organization that pairs adult volunteers with youth. Para-educational programs such as this have been the focus on numerous studies conducted over decades and show various results. For instance, the 2011 study published in the journal Child Development found mixed results in the BBBSA program.[1] Students tended to improve academically, and yet these improvements were limited with students not sustaining higher academic performance after the first year of mentorship. Mentoring programs like this also tended to have little impact on behavioral issues.

Another study aggregated over 5000 mentoring programs in a meta-analysis of over 73 studies on mentoring programs directed at children during the decade 1999-2010. The study, published in 2011 in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, found that mentored youth exhibited positive outcomes whereas non-mentored youth showed declines in outcomes.[2] This seems reasonable enough and is what we might expect. When non-parental adults invest in youth, that investment predominantly yields positive returns in the life of the child. We can conclude that mentorship of youth, even if it results in modest social, emotional and intellectual gains, is superior to the alternative: leaving children to their own devices.

As I think about mentoring programs, much of the emphasis found in modern studies of mentorship focus on para-educational programs. But mentorship does not depend on an outside organization, it can happen within a school by training teachers who help establish an atmosphere of learning. The implementation of mentorship within a school utilizing teachers strikes me as a way to leverage the benefits of mentoring without the encumbrance of an outside organization. The idea here is that if teachers are the mentors, we create a culture of mentorship that leverages the relationship between student and teacher.

On Permissiveness and Micro-managing

So what is the opposite of an atmosphere of mentorship? It strikes me that there are two opposite kinds of atmospheres. One atmosphere that is easy to create is one of permissiveness or a laissez faire approach to the care of students. When a school is oriented solely toward the delivery of course content, the teachers are not inclined to reach students in the hallways, playground or cafeteria. The permissive approach is a justifiably rational approach. For one, the faculty already devote so much time to planning, teaching and grading, that it feels a burden to have them spend more contact hours with students. This approach has also been justified on the rationale that if students are going to leave for college and have an abundance of independence and self-direction, shouldn’t they be given lots of freedom now in order to succeed at the next level. In this way of thinking, only students who are struggling academically or morally receive interventions, whereas the rest are left to their own devices.

While there are many studies on mentorship programs, there are very few studies on permissive environments. The difficulty is that permissiveness in the school environment has to be evaluated through self-report. For instance, one study examined students in government schools in Faridabad, India.[3] Schools were deemed to be permissive based on the self-reports of students. With a study comprised of 400 students, the conclusions must be taken cautiously. But the findings of the study showed that there is a significant correlation between permissiveness in the school environment and underachievement in the field of science. As I read this albeit limited study in a field that rarely gets analyzed, it seems that the strategy to bolster science achievement by allowing students to follow their desires has not been corroborated by this evidence. When it comes to achievement in academic subjects as well as social and moral domains, mentoring seems to be the better strategy to foster success.

A very different environment seeks to root out any deviancy or failure by micro-managing students. Rules and procedures are carried out with exacting regularity. It’s possible to get high performance in this situation, but it is equally difficult to have a deep and lasting impact in the hearts and minds of students. As much as we would want to shield students from deviancy or failure, we must understand the child as a whole person who has an independent and autonomous will. The best conditions for learning occur in an atmosphere where failure or error are met with grace. Often times it is failure and error that provide the most productive avenues for growth. An atmosphere that helps students learn how to learn is essential. You can read more about the concept of ratio in Kolby’s series on Teach Like a Champion.

I really like how Jason put it during our podcast, the optimal learning atmosphere occurs in the “moral and authoritative presence of a caring, thoughtful and wise adult.” (Episode 10, 39:58). So, what we are suggesting here is that mentoring is the golden mean between a laissez faire approach to school atmosphere and a strict, rules-based approach to atmosphere. When we place students under the masterful care of adults who are well trained to mentor and disciple their students, the opportunity for success in multiple domains of life is promoted.

Mentoring and Habit Training

As we think about establishing an atmosphere conducive to mentorship, it is helpful to turn to the concept of habit training. The method that Charlotte Mason spells out provides good avenues for mentorship to occur. In her Towards a Philosophy of Education she writes:

“There is no other way of forming any good habit, though the discipline is usually that of the internal government which the person exercises upon himself; but a certain strenuousness in the formation of good habits is necessary because every such habit is the result of conflict. The bad habit of the easy life is always pleasant and persuasive and to be resisted with pain and effort, but with hope and certainty of success, because in our very structure is the preparation for forming such habits of muscle and mind as we deliberately propose to ourselves.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 101-102

From this we learn that mentorship invites a certain kind of conflict. The child becomes internally conflicted in a battle of will. The good habit will only be established through self-discipline all the while the bad habit offers all the allurements of pleasure. Mentorship offers support to the child by providing strength to the child’s will to fight the good fight. Mason continues:

“We entertain the idea which gives birth to the act and the act repeated again and again becomes the habit; ‘Sow an act,’ we are told, ‘reap a habit.’ ‘Sow a habit, reap a character.’”

Philosophy of Education, 102

An atmosphere of mentorship has in view the moral and spiritual formation of the child. And this occurs through the steady and regular influence of teachers who themselves have godly character and the mindset to disciple the children given into their care. Mason goes on:

“But we must go a step further back, we must sow the idea or notion which makes the act worthwhile. The lazy boy who hears of the Great Duke’s narrow camp bed, preferred by him because when he wanted to turn over it was time to get up, receives the idea of prompt rising. But his nurse or his mother knows how often and how ingeniously the tale must be brought to his mind before the habit of prompt rising is formed; she knows too how the idea of self-conquest must be made at home in the boy’s mind until it become a chivalric impulse which he cannot resist. It is possible to sow a great idea lightly and casually and perhaps this sort of sowing should be rare and casual because if a child detect a definite purpose in his mentor he is apt to stiffen himself against it.”

Philosophy of Education, 102

Habit training begins with inspiring ideas and helping the child gain a vision of themselves as mature human beings. Mason cautions against habit training or mentoring originating on the basis of the convenience or manipulation of the teacher or parent. A child can sense this and will stiffen against it. Along these lines, Mason concludes her thoughts by cautioning teachers against permissiveness:

“When parent or teacher supposes that a good habit is a matter of obedience to his authority, he relaxes a little. A boy is late who has been making evident efforts to be punctual; the teacher good-naturedly foregoes rebuke or penalty, and the boy says to himself,––‘It doesn’t matter,’ and begins to form the unpunctual habit. The mistake the teacher makes is to suppose that to be punctual is troublesome to the boy, so he will let him off; whereas the office of the habits of an ordered life is to make such life easy and spontaneous; the effort is confined to the first half dozen or score of occasions for doing the thing.”

Philosophy of Education, 102-103

My hunch is that permissive environments occur when we grown ups feel uncomfortable with the authority we have. When we are at peace with our authoritative role, however, we can mentor children because we can see how we have been placed in this child’s life to help support his or her betterment. The best part of the child wants to be punctual, and we are here to support that. Permissiveness comes in when we shy away from supporting the child due to our own fear of manipulation or a sense that by challenging the child we are somehow not loving the child.

Train Up a Child

Raising children today is no easy task. Mainstream culture is a factor we all have to deal with, and good parents and teacher will come to different decisions about how much exposure to the artifacts of culture (television, movies, music, social media) to let into the home or classroom. Proverbs 22:6 advises parents to “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” A well-trained child is one who knows the right way to go. The path of life is laid out before them, and they stay the course. I am reminded of the quote by Miyamoto Musashi, “If you know the way broadly, you will see it in everything.” True mentorship of children and youth provides them with insights about the nature of life and how to live a life with meaning and purpose.

As we train up children, we must have a genuine picture of what it means to live life. Because life is full of adversity, pain, suffering, challenge and failure, it is important to prepare children to meet these on the battlefield of life. In addressing the nature of life in this way, the value of genuine happiness, true friendship and the strength of conviction are magnified. We need to be careful not to shelter children from the challenges of life. Instead, we should walk alongside them to so that they can meet the challenges they face with grace and dignity. I want to highlight a great insight Jason shared in our podcast on atmosphere. He says,

 “Many of us unfortunately, and for understandable reasons, have the sheltering issue completely backwards we have flipped it on its head. We’re sheltering them from the wrong things so that they won’t have to face the pain and suffering and challenge of the world but can have things handed to them and life just smoothed and eased for them. But we are not willing anymore to shelter them from the bad moral and spiritual influences in their lives, which is exactly what we should be sheltering them from until they’ve got the training and are standing on their own two feet as mature Christians. I think the idea that we would send out our children to be missionaries in public schools, that’s not how the New Testament, as I read it, thinks about missionaries. You send your solid, spirit-empowered, well-trained and discipled apostles out to be missionaries to the world and to proclaim the gospel to them. You don’t send weak, frail, young-in-the-faith children out to be gobbled up by a world that is completely contrary to where they are coming from.”

Educational Renaissance Podcast, Episode 10 – “Atmosphere,” 46:14

The impulse to shelter our children from pain, suffering and challenge is understandable. We want what is best for our children. But it is far better to train children to be strong to meet life’s challenges rather than keep them safe from them, or to exist in ignorance of the many challenges that surround them.

As I mentioned above, we want children to encounter genuine life, which means they must experience pain, suffering and challenge. C. S. Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain reasons, “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” From this idea I would advise educators to consider the following two ideas. First, we as teachers must be people who are experienced at encountering life in its manifold nature – full of pain, yes, but also full of deep and profound joy. It is really only from this position of genuine living that we can hope to mentor the young ones given into our care. I am not saying that we share every struggle and burden with them, quite the opposite. What I am saying is that as mentors, there is a mantle of genuineness that becomes part of the learning atmosphere when we have partaken in real life. In a word, we must be mature. Second, we as teachers must be prepared to seize the opportunities that present themselves regularly to meet our students at the moment of challenge or pain to support them. We cannot shelter them from all challenge and pain. So we must therefore help them to encounter challenge with courage and perseverance.

May the Lord uphold you in this high calling. And may you take deep and profound joy in this work.

[1] Herrera, Carla; Jean Grossmen; Tina Kauh; Jennifer McMaken. “Mentoring in Schools: An Impact Study of Big Brothers Big Sisters School Based Mentoring.” Child Development 82 (1): 346–381.

[2] DuBois, David L., Nelson Portillo, Jean E. Rhodes, Naida Silverthorn, Jeffrey C. Valentine. “How Effective Are Mentoring Programs for Youth? A Systematic Assessment of the Evidence.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 12 (2011): 57-91.

[3] Kapri, Umesh C. “A Study of Underachievement in Science in Relation to Permissive School Environment.” International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology 4 (2017): 2027-2032.

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At Clapham School, where I serve as an administrator, we were able to hold a small, in-person ceremony for our graduates. As I composed my commencement address, I was struck by parallels with the class of 1919, which had graduation ceremonies cancelled or postponed in various locations due to the Spanish Influenza pandemic. In this message, I try to bring perspective to graduates this summer, that the challenges we face due to Covid-19 may go a long way toward shaping the outlook of this next generation, if one embraces the opportunity a catastrophe provides. In many ways, this speech is a sequel to my article on the Black Death in the 14th century.

Here I’ve shared my commencement address in the hope that perhaps this message will be meaningful to you as a teacher and leader in your school.

Commencement Address – Class of 2020

Good evening, class of 2020. I am so grateful that we can meet this evening with a small gathering of parents, siblings, teachers, relatives and friends. Little about the past several months has gone according to plan, so it is that much more satisfying to have planned this event, bringing a little order in the midst of chaos.

The “Greatest Generation” is a term used to describe the Americans who experienced both the Great Depression and World War 2. What characterizes these Americans is that they lived through some of the greatest hardships of the depression and exhibited the will to win on the battlefields of Africa, Europe and Asia. Of the 16 million who served in WW2, only about half a million remain today.

When we look back on the Greatest Generation, we can observe that such a generation is forged by the harshest of trials. You can’t engineer such a generation. There’s no recipe or lab manual. There were attempts to create great generations. Warren G. Harding called for a return to normalcy in 1920, a phrase that anticipated “Make America Great Again.” What is normalcy? And can normalcy be created through public policy?

The post-war 1950s represented another attempt at social fabrication of a great generation. The idea was social conformity. The picture of suburban docility was promoted on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post with weekly prints of Norman Rockwell paintings. What, though, are we striving for when we call for conformity? Can social pressure create a great generation? This is a highly relevant consideration in light of the dominant position social media has taken since the early 2000s.

My thesis, and the point that I want to make for our graduating seniors, is that great generations are forged through unexpected hardship, and cannot be made by the will of cultural engineers. And what has 2020 been, but a year of hardship after hardship. This pandemic gives me pause to ask whether we are experiencing the kinds of conditions that will contribute to the making of a new great generation. To assess this hunch of mine, I want to take us back to 1918 and 1919.

The Great War, or WW1, was drawing to a close after years of stagnation. The US was ultimately drawn into the conflict as the decisive force, bringing victory to the allied forces against the central powers. One of the unexpected consequences of American soldiers serving overseas was that they brought back the Spanish Influenza, which hit pandemic levels in the fall of 1918. Schools closed in September and October of 1918. Homecoming events, a fairly new annual celebration in the early 1900s, were cancelled that fall. We can empathize with some of the experiences from that pandemic that swept the nation. For instance, students in Los Angeles remained at home and were sent assignments by teachers through mail-in correspondence.

There were subsequent spikes of the Spanish Influenza in January of 1919 and then again in the April-May timeframe later that year. This meant that graduations were cancelled or delayed in various hotspots throughout America. The class of 2020 seems to have similarities with the class of 1919. There were no vaccines or treatments available, so the only protocols to follow were isolation, quarantine, washing hands, disinfecting surfaces, and canceling or limiting public gatherings. If nothing else, it’s good to know we are not alone. Mark Twain is reputed to have said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Well, sometimes it sure seems like it does repeat itself.

For reasons we don’t particularly know, the Spanish Influenza just went away. It took researchers until 2008 to fully understand the genetic makeup of the H1N1 virus, colloquially termed the Spanish Flu. Side note: the Spanish Flu did not originate in Spain. Spain became associated with this virus simply because they remained neutral in WW1, and were therefore able to provide unbiased reporting about this new virus during the war, a service which ultimately associated their national identity with a virus. The Spanish, by the way, referred to the virus as the French Flu.

The parallels between the Spanish Flu and the Coronavirus interest me for this simple reason. The Spanish Flu is something we can regard as the first in a series of hardships that impacted the generation who would subsequently experience both the Great Depression and WW2. Yet, few ever associate that pandemic with the ensuing events. But could it be that the Influenza pandemic served as an initial crisis in a string of events creating the greatest generation?

And so I ask you now, our graduates, a compelling question. Will our pandemic serve as an initial crisis that will forge the next greatest generation? I don’t know what the future will hold. I can’t promise you that depressions and world wars will further galvanize your generation. But perhaps if the mantle is born with only this one catastrophic event, the work of making a next great generation is accomplished here and now.

The temptation will exist to dive deeply into social distractions. We could be on the verge of the next roaring 20s. But I trust that the books that you’ve read here at Clapham, the discussions about what it takes to live life with meaning and purpose, will have prepared you to fully embrace the opportunity now made available to you in our current traumatic experiences.

Let me be clear about my charge to you. I do not spell these things out to you to place a burden of expectations on you. It matters not whether you become labelled a great generation. Instead, what does matter is to notice that your class has had a bit of rubbish luck when it comes to your graduation. And I say, good for you! That’s now part of your story. That’s something that becomes part of your perspective on life. That’s something that marks your graduation as something unique and special. And if you can own that and truly embrace it, you will find joy and blessing.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plan for wholeness and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Jeremiah 29:11

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One of my favorite podcasters, Brian Johnson who put out a great series of YouTube videos called Philosophers Notes, had this tagline on his podcasts: “Isn’t it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live?” This idea always resonated with me, not because we need an extra class on living, but because the idea of how to live should be resonating throughout all of our classes. Educators have often missed the fact that math, science and history are to be learned in order to know how to live. If math, science and history don’t seem like subjects where you would learn how to live, then you’re probably like me, having been raised in a system of education more focused on functional outcomes (getting into the best colleges or getting into the best careers) than on living meaningful and purposeful lives. 

You might be skeptical, and rightfully so. The dominant mode of education, the one we see in mass media, is all about the systematic approach — a conveyor belt of educational product. But consider my geometry class. The major goal of the class is to see our world differently, especially those parts of our world that appear most obvious. Why ought we to do proofs? Why transform polygons? Why inscribe triangles within circles? To help us to grapple with the world around us in fascinating new ways. We live in a three-dimensional world that is often depicted in two dimensions. Let’s get to the bottom of that. And in so doing gain insight into what it means to live in this space. Now you kinda want to take geometry again, don’t you?

In this article I want to go beyond just academic subjects and consider the entire enterprise of education as it pertains to life. There are many dimensions to this, so I don’t expect I will fully extract every morsel in this essay, but hopefully it will provide you with some suggestive avenues to stimulate your own thinking about life. Additionally, I would like to relate these thoughts to our current response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

(One more thing, before diving in. A justification of a seemingly inadequate title. You might think that I’m missing an indefinite article, since you know my heartfelt devotion to Charlotte Mason. Yes, she states, “Education is a life,” and by that she means that the child’s mind is fed on living ideas. I’m extrapolating that idea to demonstrate that there is another level of understanding Mason’s claim. Furthermore, you will notice the preposition “on” instead of “of.” Many teachers are asked to express their philosophy of education, in which they will describe their teaching techniques and practices, sometimes elaborating on their view of the child as a whole person. What I am doing here is not really a philosophy of education in that sense. I am instead thinking about education as a whole and its place in life. Maybe the preposition “on” will rattle a few feathers. Thus ends the deconstruction of an inadequate title.)

Two Forces: Achievement or Inspiration

To begin with, I think it is important to make a distinction between two competing forces in education. These aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do exist in tension with one another. The first force is what we might call achievement. Students, parents and teachers want what’s best for their child, and this often gets translated into measurable categories. The grade in a class is a measure of the student’s achievement. The class rank, SAT score, National Merit selection index number and a plethora of other measurements let everyone know how this particular student stacks up against all others. It’s actually really valuable to incorporate measurement in education, but it’s really difficult to measure what really matters.

I’ve written elsewhere that most of our educational measurements select only a few areas of learning and growth, solely because they are easy to measure. Unfortunately, much of what we measure has little value in predicting future success. Our tools simply cannot measure determination, the ability to hold pleasant conversation, kindness toward others, piety, resilience, or delayed gratification. So we need this first force — achievement — but it is a force fraught with fallacies.

The second force I will call inspiration. My hunch is that most teachers go into education because they want to inspire students to love subjects they themselves love. Most teachers look back at their own education and can point to a few teachers that inspired them. They want to make a difference in the lives of their own students. Unfortunately, there are far too few teachers who retain this high level of inspiration for the entirety of their career. Teaching is a demanding job, calling for long hours preparing lessons, learning technology, sitting in staff meetings, and grading homework. Teachers who truly want to inspire students find the nature of their work rather intense, because it means you need to bring massive energy to every lesson, you have to work with struggling students, you need to motivate fringe students, you need to coach and counsel both students and parents, and sometimes you need to flex your schedule to reach those students who need extra help. The first force – achievement – can also steal from the second force. The most inspirational teacher can get caught up in tracking the measurements, not only as a way of looking at her students’ success but also to measure her own success. Don’t get me wrong, we shouldn’t be graduating a group of fantastically inspired students who are complete and utter failures. We need achievement. But we also need inspiration. Both forces are necessary. If I’m honest with myself, though, I greatly lean toward the force of inspiration, sometimes wishing the other force could go away. 

These thoughts on two forces have lived with me for quite some time. So when I came across this quote by Charlotte Mason, I felt it was time to really wrestle with it philosophically for a while.

“It seems to me that education, which appeals to the desire for wealth (marks, prizes, scholarships, or the like), or to the desire of excelling (as in the taking of places, etc.), or to any other of the natural desires, except that for knowledge, destroys the balance of character; and, what is even more fatal, destroys by inanition that desire for and delight in knowledge which is meant for our joy and enrichment through the whole of life.”

Charlotte Mason, School Education, pg. 226

The strength of Mason’s feelings is matched by the power of her vocabulary. The character of learners is “destroyed” when education becomes focused on the desire for wealth or success. The only sure educational desire is for knowledge. She calls it fatal to base education on anything else. The word “inanition” means that a thing is emptied of all of its nourishing content. Take your bleached grains, your generic white bread, with its crusts cut off, and try living off just that. That’s the picture Mason paints for education when the focus is shifted away from the life-giving enrichment of knowledge. I would guess that Mason sides more with the force of inspiration than the force of achievement, too.

Mason, however, was very much aware of the force of achievement, and most definitely saw that a good education entailed success at such things as examinations (Vol. 3, pg. 301). So we can’t minimize the role achievement plays in education. There remain standards that must be met in order to be considered a well-educated person. But Mason also recognizes that our standards ought to be measured against what truly matters in life.

“But the one achievement possible and necessary for every man is character; and character is as finely wrought metal beaten into shape and beauty by the repeated and accustomed action of will. We who teach should make it clear to ourselves that our aim in education is less conduct than character; conduct may be arrived at, as we have seen, by indirect routes, but it is of value to the world only as it has its source in character.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 129

Achievement, then, is not only necessary, it is of fundamental importance. It is actually the goal toward which inspiration aims. The two forces that tug at each other actually cohere elegantly when put together properly. If our aim is on top marks, a 4.0 GPA, college entrance, merit-based scholarships, and the like, our aim isn’t truly aligned. What Mason is articulating is that true achievement is a life so well lived that the world is made a better place. This life of great value is achieved through character. Here is achievement that is truly inspirational.

The Classroom is a Microcosm of Life 

The vision of a life well lived is our ultimate goal of achievement. But that vision seems so far off that it feels impractical on a daily basis. Time presses upon us each day holding in our faces the immediacy of the lesson at hand, the upcoming assessment, or the report card soon to be released. Achievement snaps into focus, pushing inspiration out of the picture.

We need to start viewing the classroom differently. The classroom is the place where life occurs. The temptation is to think about life as truly occurring outside the classroom. Students feel this way, since home is where they most often eat, rest and play. Their youth group, sports team or the Starbucks where they hang out with their friends feels more like the locus where life occurs than the classroom does. School is where they have to go to do the work that’s required of them. How often do we get sucked into that way of thinking as well? But life occurs in the classroom all the same, even if students don’t place the greatest importance on that aspect of their life. To be clear, I don’t think one can say one sphere of life is more or less important than others. Our existence as living beings transcends time and space, and we are unified beings no matter what space we inhabit. To view ourselves as more alive in one place than in others begins to disintegrate the coherence of our being. In light of this, we must strive to breathe genuine life into the atmosphere of our classrooms, lest we cause real harm to ourselves and others.

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. This means that teaching that doesn’t connect to their multi-dimensionality will actually not get assimilated because it isn’t fundamentally important to their existence as living beings.

But wait, you might say, aren’t there things you just have to learn, even if there isn’t an emotional, social or spiritual connection? Let’s consider a recent geometry lesson. We are just starting to learn trigonometric functions. This is hard stuff when it’s brand new. I could see the look of frustration on their faces. Lurking in the background is a feeling that if this doesn’t relate to real life in some way, what’s the use of putting in the effort to figure out when, how and why to use inverse sine? In this very moment, though, real life is happening before our very eyes.

What I did was take a step back from the lesson about the law of sines, to help them grapple with their encounter with things that are difficult to learn. “You are feeling the fog right now, aren’t you?” I helped them to see that some things we learn aren’t fully clear at the outset. This might have been true when they first learned long division in early grammar school. This might have been true when they learned factoring in algebra 1. I was connecting them to their emotional state. “Hey, we’re all experiencing this together.” It is very common for us to feel that we are the only one who doesn’t get it. But when there’s a recognition that we are doing something together, a deep bond is formed. The “ah-ha” moments become a group celebration. Learning is a social and relational thing. I was connecting them to their social state. “This seems pretty out there, doesn’t it?” The deeper you go in mathematics, the more abstract and esoteric things become. In this moment, I was showing them that they were exploring something almost mystical. I could relate this to something as practical as navigating an airplane. But the practical application will actually compound their frustration in the moment. Instead, I helped them to see how their imaginations were gaining new tools. I was connecting them to their spiritual state. Real life was occurring in a specific learning environment. The temptation was to think in terms of achievement. “We’re not getting it. Our grades will suffer. I won’t go to the best school. I won’t get a good job. I’ll likely be homeless for the rest of my life!” Instead, we thought in terms of life and saw geometry as a field of endeavor in which we can gain an understanding of meaning and purpose. (I might add that these students have done well using trigonometric functions. As an experienced teacher I knew the fog would dissipate through more practice.)

What does this mean for you as a teacher? We must become observers of life. We only get a relatively small amount of time with the students God gives into our care. By being watchful for real life occurring in our midst, we position ourselves to seize every moment we can. The little arguments that erupt between students, the games that are played on the blacktop, the struggles to learn new concepts, the disorganized backpack. All things are avenues into genuine life connections.

Application of Education is Life to COVID-19

If we agree that education is about life, then this COVID-19 epidemic presents a huge teaching and learning opportunity. We are confronted with the frailty of our humanity. A few weeks ago I compared our present epidemic with the black plague in the mid-1300s. A confrontation with death and our own mortality is not a topic we should shy away from. We ourselves as teachers might be wrestling with new emotions and concerns about safety. We must also assume our students are wrestling with the reality and implications of COVID-19. Their world just got turned upside down.

Because one of the forces of education is inspiration, I think now is the time to inspire our students with a deep and profound vision of what life really means. There are some students who miss their interactions with friends through daily contact. Students presently feel a deep sense of loneliness and isolation. Many students miss the life-structuring order of our daily schedules. We can share with them how all of these feelings point to their yearning for meaning and purpose in their lives. Our texts and discussions can take on new importance if we are forthright in our response to the impact of COVID-19 on them and us right now. You may have a chance to model for them how your faith is upholding you in this moment, or what practices you’ve incorporated during this time of social distancing.

As an example, I teach a health class for sophomores and juniors. We spent time this week talking about meditation and mindfulness as a Christian practice. When I planned this unit, coronavirus was not in my thinking. Now that we’ve gotten to this unit, I opened up about how just a few minutes of quiet meditation in the morning helps me to calmly approach my day. I contrasted this to mornings when I opened up a news feed and saw how many new cases and deaths there were. They were able to see how I was responding to COVID-19, and then I asked them to share their own responses to the epidemic. We explored how stress can impact our health and well-being.

Clearly there are boundaries that we need. I am always careful not to make a class about me, my feelings or my viewpoint on current matters. I am also careful not to traumatize my students by forcing them to talk about raw feelings or controversial matters. Yet we should be open to teachable moments when we can provide insight through our transparency. We should equally be open to discussing matters that are hyper-present in their minds. How odd it would be for a teacher not to mention COVID-19 or social distancing.

Application of Education is Life to Online Learning

Speaking of social distancing, online learning has meant that we are all accumulating new technological skills. You are using student management software in new ways, or you are becoming masters of Zoom or Skype, or you are learning how to use Google Classrooms or MS Teams. Your students are also accumulating new technological skills. If you’re like me, they are learning these skills quicker than you. You might be asking them questions about how to upload assignments or share your screen. With this in mind, don’t be afraid of being a learner. Show them that you are learning how to do some new things. Ask them questions. There’s something empowering when a student is able to teach a teacher. If we are promoting life-long learning, then there are moments when we need to let our guard down so that our students can see that we ourselves are life-long learners.

My other piece of advice as we dive deeply into technological solutions to educating amidst social distancing is to make sure the techniques and technology of education don’t drown out our experience of life. I have told my students how much I miss them at the end of our Zoom sessions. There’s something about being able to see them eye-to-eye in the hallways. I can casually ask them how they’re doing, and they can see the care in my eyes. The technology enables us to connect, but our pixelated, two-dimensional connection is no replacement for embodied presence with one another.

Teach Like Life Depends on It

Someday — hopefully sooner rather than later — we will return to classrooms. We will return having learned some lessons about the nature of education. My hope is that one of the enduring lessons is that education is about life. My hunch is that the reason you come to our humble website is that you get this concept, and that you are striving to provide an education that nourishes the lives of your students. Let me encourage you that I think it will be teachers and schools that feed their students’ souls who have the best hope of surviving this epidemic and even thriving during and after this epidemic. Why do I think this? It is because when people confront forces like our frailty and mortality, we begin to ask questions of meaning and purpose. Parents and students will be looking for this kind of education, one that engages the mind and the soul. Now more than ever is the time to teach like our lives depend on it.

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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. The pope issues indulgences for both those who must practice social distancing as well as for those who are deceased. 

The parallels are stunning. It’s truly hard to tell if we’re talking about the 14th century or the 21st century. The parallels, though, enable us to comprehend our own situation by analyzing a previous situation. In doing so, we can start to plan for an uncertain future by considering new possibilities that are likely to emerge in a post-COVID-19 society. After taking stock of the outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1348 and its impact on European society thereafter, we can then consider some of the similarities and differences between then and now. The goal is to identify how we can anticipate changes in education that are likely to emerge after COVID-19. Last week Kolby wrote an excellent article that looks at our present situation, giving guidance for how we can best approach education while we are social distancing. This article looks to the past to help us consider a possible future.

The End of an Era

It’s important to recognize that the people of the middle ages didn’t think of themselves as the people of the middle ages. It is a label we’ve placed on a rather long era from the fall of Rome (476) to the fall of Constantinople (1453). There was no headline, though, in 476 that stated “The Middle Ages has Begun.” It is difficult to argue that the middle ages is indeed a coherent label for the 1000 year span. So much developed during that time frame that the label becomes meaningless. Yet when we think of three major eras: the ancient world, the middle ages, and the modern world, we can see how the middle ages functions as a bridge from the ancient world to today. The bubonic plague is one of the major events that demarcates a change in era. Europe in 1347 looked and operated very differently than Europe after 1453. We could say, then, that the bubonic plague began the end of an era.

What was the bubonic plague? The strain of bacterium called Yersinia pestis was carried by fleas and rats transported from the East to the West on trade ships. It is not surprising that Genoa and Venice were the epicenters of the European pandemic, as they were the most eminent trade ports in the 14th century. Marco Polo, for instance, was a Venetian who opened up new trade with the East. Venice dominated trade and became a center of massive wealth. The communication between the far East and the West directly led to new ideas and innovations pouring into Europe. But it also opened Europe up to a new infectious disease, and Europe was not well positioned to meet the challenges of Yersinia pestis. Something like 20,000,000 people (or roughly 30% of the population) in Europe died of the bubonic plague during the 1350s. One can only imagine the fear that spread throughout Europe as everyone was either directly or indirectly impacted by the plague.

The structure of society shifted drastically, eventually leading to massive economic, political, religious and social changes. The feudal system of lords and serfs eroded as the decrease of property value diminished the power of the lords and as labor shortages encouraged serfs to leave manors in search of higher wages. Confrontation with death and mortality caused many to become cynical and many others to become religious. The hegemony of the Roman Catholic church in European society slowly broke up. Many priests who were called upon to give last rites themselves contracted the disease. New priests were rapidly ordained with less training, leading to an erosion of theology and an increase in corruption within the church. Simultaneously, major centers of learning began producing new thought leaders questioning the authority of the church.

The Protestant Reformation can be seen as a consequence of the shifts in society caused by the Black Plague. Education turned away from the authority of the church and toward human reason and the autonomous individual, namely humanism. (Too often humanism is viewed as an anti-religious philosophy; however, I see no evidence that humanists were anti-religious. Instead, humanists examined religion critically as they did every element of society. When we look at the art of the humanists, they were as inclined to treat religious themes as any other.) The end of Christendom meant the emergence of new political configurations, approximating something like the nations we now know in Europe. In other words, many of the trends that demarcate post-medieval Europe from the middle ages can be traced directly or indirectly to the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the 1350s. The 1350s may not have been the end of an era, but it was at least the beginning of the end of the era.

An Educational Renaissance

The impact of the bubonic plague on education was significant. Almost immediately after the outbreak of the plague, students vacated centers of education, such as the new universities that had popped up in northern Italy, Paris and Oxford. The loss of enrollment and qualified educators led to the decline in the quality of education between 1350 and 1380 (See William J. Courtenay. “The Effect of the Black Death on English Higher Education.” Speculum 55 (1980): 696-714.) However, given the massive decline in the general population due to the plague, it’s all the more surprising to find that enrollment at places such as Oxford increased already by 1375, so much so that Oxford established New College in 1379. It is interesting to note that four colleges at Cambridge were established during the heart of the bubonic pandemic – Pembroke (1347), Gonville and Caius (1348), Trinity Hall (1350), and Corpus Christi (1352) – perhaps indicating that a flourishing of education was already underway concurrently with the plague.

The long-term increase in enrollment against the backdrop of a decrease in population is a curious matter. All the more curious is the increased enrollment in theological programs at Oxford. Courtenay (“Effect,” 713) looks at several economic reasons why enrollment in theology flourished after the pandemic of the 1350s. A significant factor was the increased mobility and improved conditions of the European peasantry, especially in places like Italy and England. Families who would have never imagined a university-bound son were now able to place their child in the path of learning. This began in the local feeder or prep schools, where children learned basic writing, English and Latin grammar, as well as hymns and songs to support the weekly mass. Parish children would have learned in monastic schools. Boys as young as 13 could expect to sit entrance exams for the universities.

Obviously society didn’t experience a complete upheaval, and the peasantry of the 1300s didn’t become like the middle class of today. But enough people were able to take advantage of the economic circumstances of the post-plague situation to enroll in theological studies. Apart from economic circumstances, I would venture to guess that the plague inspired theological reflection in light of the confrontation with death and mortality. A yearning for theological insight seems to be a natural response to a global pandemic.

The implications of this new rise in enrollment at local schools and universities led to an educational renaissance and in time to the historical Renaissance. We can see how the devastating impact of the bubonic plague cleared the ground for new people and new ideas to emerge. Concern for society and the role of the individual led to Humanistic ideas. I’ve written previously about how in the unsettling events of the 14th and 15th centuries people looked to the past for guidance in making a new future. The classics were read once more, with profound political and religious movements emerging, most notably the Protestant Reformation.

Our Plague and Our Educational Renaissance

More and more figures are speaking out that there will be no return to normal after COVID-19. When we look back on the bubonic plague in the 1350s, there was no return to normal. There are many significant differences between then and now. They were dealing with a bacterium, and we are dealing with a virus. They had terrible standards of hygiene. We have a superior medical system. But there are some lessons we can learn that may help prepare us for what is to come after our plague.

First, we should be prepared for an overturned society. My family is fortunate that we can all work from home. My children can do online learning at home. My wife and I can work remotely. But what about those who can’t work remotely. I think about those people who have to work at the factory to make the face masks, the hand sanitizer, the toilet paper, and the respirators that we need. Will there be economic trends that enable the poorer segments of our society to be more upwardly mobile? I hope so. Will we classical Christian schools be prepared to receive new enrollment? We should have already been marketing our educational model to communities who assume their kids don’t belong at our schools. But if we haven’t been, now is the time to make ourselves known in under-served segments of our society.

Second, we should expect new interest in theological and spiritual reflection. Whenever we are confronted by death and our own mortality, a window of opportunity opens for gospel proclamation. The dance macabre image at the top of this article is a portion of a larger painting by Bernt Notke from St. Nicholas Church in Estonia. The church in the 1300s was able to conceptualize the seriousness of the pandemic, while also playfully addressing our human nature. Yes, we are frail, but we are not left without hope. The cross and the resurrection are ours to proclaim. We can expect greater cynicism about God and faith. The more people question biblical Christianity, the more we need to be prepared to teach. I would anticipate that a post-COVID-19 world will see people dissatisfied by secular mass schooling. Small schools teaching biblical Christianity will become more attractive in the wake of our plague.

Third, we should anticipate a turn to the past to chart the future of our global society. A global pandemic is likely to disrupt our trust in modern society. Schools like ours that have taught the classics, Western history, and the great books will be well positioned to meet the needs of society in ways that other schools aren’t. So many modern schools have abandoned the past and will not be able to easily retool themselves to glean the insight our society needs to feed our collective imaginations and address our deepest concerns.

Our plague will lead to our educational renaissance. This is a time when we should highlight our unique features as classical Christian schools. Most of our schools have shown we can handle the rapid transition to online learning environments. So many children are starved for learning with meaningless assignments, while our students are doing meaningful work. As we provide meaningful, purposeful and valuable education, we position ourselves well to gain the trust of those who will be looking for more substance in a post-COVID-19 world.

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I am consciously borrowing from the title of an immensely important book in my life written by Kent Hughes. Pastor Hughes was close to retirement when I had the privilege of joining the pastoral staff at College Church. In the short time I worked with Kent, I gained so much from him in terms of leadership principles, homiletical theory and shepherding a congregation. I pored over Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome while serving at College Church, which helped me to see how Kent operated as senior pastor in a deeper light, but also assisted me in my fledgling and brief career as a vocational pastor. The principles from my time at College Church have lived with me beyond my time there and are nicely encapsulated in Kent’s book. I have since spent over a dozen years in education and have found that his principles carry over to schools.

How Do We Measure Success?

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” is a famous dictum of management guru Peter Drucker. Most have taken this to mean that success must be measured in clearly defined terms that are trackable over time. There is tremendous wisdom in Drucker’s phrasing, but as often occurs to great ideas, they become applied in awkward ways. Education has suffered from an unthinking application of this principle. In my March 2019 article covering speeches given at the Education 20/20 series, I brought out the educational policy of the 1990s as Yuval Levin described it. There was a bipartisan coalition that based education policy around standardized tests. Here was something measurable that could be managed.

About the same time that policy setters were promoting standardized testing as the means to educational reform, serious doubts were being raised about the effectiveness of standardized testing. James Popham’s 1999 article “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Education Quality” describes one aspect of the problem:

“The substantial size of the content domain that a standardized achievement test is supposed to represent poses genuine difficulties for the developers of such tests. If a test actually covered all the knowledge and skills in the domain, it would be far too long.”

Standardization of knowledge means chopping off a wide array of knowledge domains. Anything not showing up on the tests receives less funding, credit hours, etc. But even the knowledge domains that do show up on the tests are pared down to the bare essentials.

Standardization not only reduces knowledge, it emphasizes the average human experience. It proposes to predict future ability and achievement by comparing all test takers to a mean. In their 1998 Journal of Higher Education article “Are Standardized Tests Fair to African Americans?,” Jacqueline Fleming and Nancy Garcia look at SAT data to evaluate whether disadvantaged minorities are evaluated fairly, raising the question of the predictive validity of the test. Human beings are complex creatures and evaluating according to an average standard blunts all the colorful variety every individual possesses.

Yet the standardized test has remained one of the chief measures of success for schools. The stakes are high. College admissions and scholarships are on the line. The standardized test has held a prominent position as the gatekeeper for college and career pathways. The pressure for success has led teachers and administrators to pour time and resources into test preparation. The result can be great scores, a roster of National Merit Scholars, and placements at selective colleges. But have we really measured the success of education in the life of the student?

Student enrollment is yet another measure of success. Over the past decade many schools have struggled with enrollment. A 2017 article in the Wall Street Journal reported that enrollment in private schools had dropped by 14% between 2006 and 2016 (WSJ Dec. 29, 2017). This nationwide struggle continues today as private schools compete against each other as well as against public schools, homeschool coops, and online schools. The recession appears to have been a major factor causing many families to make educational decisions based on cost analysis over other values, such as religious affiliation or academic achievement (see the 2017 study by Lamb and Mbekeani). Is it the case, though, that all schools that have seen a decline in enrollment are unsuccessful? The inverse is equally worthy of consideration. Ought a school with increasing enrollment to be deemed a success?

Whether we look at test scores or enrollment numbers, measures of success that are based solely on numerical data often don’t tell the whole story. For Christian schools, these forms of data might even distract from the measures of success we would actually want to track. Instead of test data and enrollment numbers, we might want to track how biblically literate our students are, how involved in church and service our students are, or whether graduates have remained in the faith during college. Answers to these kinds of questions are hard to come by and rarely provide convenient measurements of yearly trends. But if the true measure of success lies in these domains, we are best served by shifting our focus to key values that are consistent with the school’s mission and vision.

Measure What Really Matters

In Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, Hughes narrates a period in his early ministry where he almost walked away from the pastorate. He experienced the “dark night of the soul” during which he recognized how he had been caught up in the drive for success evaluated along numerical lines. Church growth models of ministry define success based on attendance and membership. The feeling of failure when things don’t go according to plan is palpable. These dark feelings will be familiar with educators who are questioning the success of their schools by similar means. In response to this struggle for success, Kent and Barbara Hughes committed themselves to study the Bible for answers:

“We made a covenant to search the Scriptures and learn what God had to say about success. We fiercely determined to evaluate our success from a biblical point of view.” (31)

Their study of the Bible helped develop key biblical principles that shifted the definition of success to ideas that matter more than numerical factors.

To measure what really matters, one must detach from the game of counting heads or examining test results and reconnect with core values. Hughes reconnected himself with scripture to answer the pressing internal conflict between his passion for ministry and his drive for success. What he found was that there was “no place where it says that God’s servants are called to be successful” (35). Repeatedly in the Bible we can think about times where God worked through apparent failure to accomplish his good plan. Narratives abound along these lines. The murder of Abel, the enslavement of the Israelites, their exile at the hands of the Babylonians, the betrayal and denial of Jesus by the disciples, the sufferings and imprisonment of Paul… all point to apparent failure through which God worked.

God does not depend on human success to carry out his good plan. Instead of success as the key to ministry, Hughes says, “We discovered our call is to be faithful” (35). Faithfulness matters greatly in ministry and in life. For Kent this meant faithfulness to expositing scripture. God’s revealed word is so precious that he devoted his effort to studying and preaching scripture, which later saw him as a principal figure in the establishment of the Simeon Trust that promoted expository preaching. Kent also saw faithfulness as shepherding the people God has brought into your care. Faithfulness to God’s word and faithfulness to God’s people were concepts I learned over and over again during my time with Kent at College Church.

Faithfulness, though, is not easy to measure numerically. You can’t bank faithfulness. It doesn’t show up as a line item on a report. There is no standardized test for faithfulness. Faithfulness is a quality that is measured in time spent being obedient to a calling. Even if my ministry isn’t cranking out eye-catching numbers, I can assess my success based on the number of days I have spent faithfully carrying out the work of ministry. Faithfulness is a key concept in education. A teacher must faithfully adhere to the texts, the truths, the ideas and the wisdom that must be imparted to students. A teacher must also be faithful to the students God grants to him or her, to teach them fully and holistically, without prioritizing students with good scores over those with lower scores.

Measuring What Is Difficult to Measure

Many of the most important values in education are difficult to measure. Returning to Drucker’s notion that we need to be able to measure these core values in order to see growth in them, we must consider the nature of our educational values with a view to articulating what it means to succeed in these areas. In Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, Hughes shows what success looks like in many spiritual areas. Spirituality is hard to measure, but looking at one example will illustrate for us how to apply the proper mindset to growth in our core values.

Prayer is essential to a godly life. But it is difficult to set aside time for prayer in our intensely driven and distracted culture. Huges calls for discipline in our prayer lives, noting that prayer holds a place of primacy in the Christian walk. He quotes Ephesians 6:18, “With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit…” (77, emphasis his). Prayer is a highly valued practice, but how do we measure something like this? Even asking this question raises a thorny theological issue. If we were to measure our prayer lives, would we fall into the trap of legalism? Hughes addresses this very question.

“There is an eternity of difference between legalism and discipline. Legalism has at its core the thought of becoming better and thus gaining merit through religious exercise. Whereas discipline springs from a desire to please God.”

Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, 78

To grow in prayer, we need to have the right mindset. A mind set on exacting measurement, with the hope that it will meet some divine standard, is prone to legalism. But a mind set on maintaining a consistent, faithful communion with God will reap the benefits of a disciplined lifestyle. I can measure this consistency by setting some parameters. “I’d like to pray every day, so I will check each day I pray, with the goal of never missing more than one day, should I miss a day.” This sets a few rules by which I can track my consistency. It’s focused on a long-term goal of gaining the discipline of daily prayer. The true goal, though, is a deeper communion with God. So one could enter an additional parameter: “At the end of each day I will record a reflection on how prayer has connected me with God for the day.” A review of this daily record will give a sense of whether one is achieving success in the long-term goal of attaining a prayerful life.

Measuring True Educational Success

Many of the tools employed in education, such as standardized tests, report cards, and transcripts, measure specific areas of a student’s education, focusing almost solely on academic achievement in core subjects. Even though these areas are important, they are a very narrow slice of the student’s full education. When we understand the transformative nature of education on the whole person, it becomes clear that academic achievement is not the only area to be measured, nor is it obvious that academic achievement is the best measure of a student’s true education. One of the key reasons academic achievement receives undue focus is because it is simply easy to measure. Here we’ll explore some areas that are equally worthy of measurement, despite the fact that they are difficult to measure.

As educators, we ought to embrace the growth mindset. What this means for measuring success is that overcoming obstacles and failure is a key component of a student’s education. In mathematics, for instance, I have taught students who intuitively understand new concepts quite easily. They often receive high grades simply because the concepts come easily to them. Compare this to a different student who struggles to learn a new concept. This child has encountered an obstacle. To overcome this obstacle, the student must apply previous skills in creative new ways to assimilate and utilize the new math concept. Eventually the student arrives at the same place as the intuitive learner, but along the way the child has not received the same grades as the intuitive learner. However the student has potentially learned it at a more sophisticated level because the obstacle forces the student to examine the new concept from various alternative angles. Imagine this student struggling in multiple subjects compared to the intuitive learner. One report card shows one student to be superior in academic achievement, but there’s a fuller narrative for the other student that might actually show a more thorough learning has occurred that isn’t reflected on the report card.

One method for measuring this is to allocate a growth narrative assignment in a class. Here a student is given a chance to articulate specific avenues of growth which would then be reflected in the course grade. A method used at the schools I’ve worked at are narrative reports on report cards. This enables the teacher to share information about obstacles overcome. More and more colleges are shifting their focus away from the matrix of GPA and SAT numbers to a more narrative-influenced approach. Student essays and teacher recommendations are great ways to communicate student success in overcoming obstacles.

Difficult educational processes such as narration or discussion can be difficult to measure when compared to tests and quizzes where answers are either right or wrong. It is important, though that students aren’t simply examined on problems that have only one correct answer. Helping them articulate perspectives on complex issues or understand the depth and complexity of an author’s point can be extremely valuable to the student’s true educational growth.

Jason Barney, in his ebook available on our website, describes the art of narration. This is a practice that involves focused attention on a reading and understanding what was perceived by remembering the author’s language, the sequence of ideas and the details of the text. Every component of narration is an area of development for the child. They are called upon to narrate difficult passages and sometimes fail to ascertain all the complexity of the text. And yet through narration, each child assimilates a vast array of knowledge that is not easily tested in a standard format. Narration, then is both an educational tool for assimilating knowledge as well as a means of assessing whether students have acquired knowledge from the text.

Again we are confronted by the fact that narration doesn’t fit neatly into the categories provided by tools such as report cards and standardized tests. Narration is both extremely immediate and also of long-term consequence. By this I mean that in the very moment of learning, a student either shows they’ve assimilated knowledge or they have not fully ascertained the text, perhaps through lack of attention or because the student hasn’t fully grasped it yet. At any given point a student can know fully, partially or not at all as revealed by narration, and this fluctuates based on a variety of factors. Yet, when we look at the long-term impact of narration over the days, weeks and years of the student’s training, there is a deep and lasting impression made on the child’s mind through focused attention and assimilated knowledge. Jason writes,

“Because of this it has all the possibilities of an assessment for informing a teacher’s interventions to promote further learning. For instance, after the narration a teacher could correct a student’s narration at a key point, clarify something the child didn’t understand or ask questions to bring out a deeper understanding of the content. Modern education has called this a formative assessment, because it is intended to form or shape the ongoing process of learning, not simply to judge a student’s accomplishment for the purpose of an abstract symbol system like a grade.”

Educational success, then, should be measured not only by the final letter grade received, but through the formative processes that promote learning. Too often the formative assessment gives way to the final assessment as a measure of success, so we need to be careful that the one informs the other.

Finally, personal character is as much a part of educational formation as the acquisition of subject content knowledge. The means of measurement available to us in report cards and standardized test cannot access the character of the student. Yet if we are helping the student to life lives of meaning and purpose, personal character is tremendously valuable to their success in life. I recently came across the US Marine Corps Fitness Report that evaluates “a Marine’s performance and is the Commandant’s primary tool for the selection of personnel for promotion, augmentation, resident schooling, command, and duty assignments.” (USMC Fitness Report, pg. 1). Each Marine is evaluated according to mission accomplishment, individual character, leadership, intellect and wisdom, and fulfillment of evaluation responsibilities. I was struck by how holistically this tool comprehends an individual Marine. Under individual character, the Fitness Report evaluates courage, effectiveness under stress and initiative. Here is the definition of courage for the Marine:

Moral or physical strength to overcome danger, fear, difficulty or anxiety. Personal acceptance of responsibility and accountability, placing conscience over competing interests regardless of consequences. Conscious, overriding decision to risk bodily harm or death to accomplish the mission or save others. The will to persevere despite uncertainty.

USMC Fitness Report, pg. 2

Several aspects of this definition pertain to the combat soldier who places himself in the field of physical danger, which are beyond what would be expected of a student. But the key idea here is that courage is clearly defined. There are aspects of this definition that I would want to put before students, such as “Moral or physical strength to overcome fear, difficulty or anxiety,” “personal acceptance of responsibility and accountability” and “placing conscience over competing interests regardless of consequences.” Now we are all clear on what is expected when we talk about courage as an area of character to be developed.

The Fitness Report provides a scale to evaluate the Marine’s courage. The baseline is that the Marine would “demonstrate inner strength and acceptance of responsibility.” Here the Marine does what is expected, which is to be brave in the accomplishment of any mission. But beyond this is the second tier where the Marine “exhibits bravery in the face of adversity and uncertainty.” Here the Marine’s courage has been tried and tested, revealing that the inner conscience is guiding actions. The highest tier of the evaluation shows not only a “capacity to overcome obstacles” but also to “inspire others in the face of moral dilemmas.” Here the Marine looks not only to his own situation but guides others to have courage in the face of competing interests. This tool goes a long way toward measuring the success of something that is difficult to measure but is clearly a core value to have for a Marine.

There are many virtues that can be developed along these lines, from intellectual humility to compassion to perseverance. Success in these areas comes only through clearly articulating expectations, paying attention to the concept in various circumstances, and then providing feedback along the way. I might tell a student, “Remember how we talked about having compassion. I noticed that you shared part of your lunch with your classmate who forgot his. That’s exactly what we’re going for here.” Once again, this tends not to show up on the tools we regularly use for measuring educational success. Thus finding a means of reporting on personal character is essential if our goals are to be transformative in the lives of the students given into our care.

In closing, I hope I have helped you to overcome the persistent problem schools have in focusing so much on our typical measures of academic success. When we liberate ourselves from this undue focus, we can start to examine what truly matters as we educate our students. To be faithful to our calling as teachers, we need to identify our core values and then seek to think differently about how we measure success. Most of what we would want to measure is actually quite difficult to measure. But let’s not allow this to simply fall back on what is easy to measure, but instead apply creativity to the problem of how to promote these core values in students’ lives. We’d love to hear more about ways you’ve attempted to shift the focus away from the typical tools that measure educational success in the comments below.

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I am joining a new school this fall, moving from Providence Classical Christian Academy in St. Louis to Clapham School in Wheaton, Illinois. Truth be told, it’s not exactly new to me. I will be returning to Clapham where I previously taught for five years. Although it’s not entirely new, five years have passed, and I return in a new administrative role. I have felt the new school feeling as a student, a teacher and an administrator.

Starting a new chapter is an excellent time to take stock of your core principles. Doing so helps to stay true to who you are as well as transition into the new environment with some semblance of equanimity. Perhaps these thoughts will help you at the start of a new school year, whether you’re new to a school or returning for another school year. 

Principle #1: Maintain the Long-term View

Whenever beginning a new endeavor, it is important to take the long view. We want to contribute something meaningful and of lasting value in this world. To start and flame out in just a year would be a failure. So we must ask ourselves, what does it look like to succeed at this long term? What can I do now to establish a legacy? What can I work on now that will be of lasting value?

I am a huge Liverpool FC fan. For the uninitiated, the Reds are a British football team. They almost won the Premier League last year (coming in second place to Manchester City), but did win the Champions League (the biggest club competition in Europe). At the helm of this footballing juggernaut is Jürgen Klopp, a German manager who has transformed LFC from a team living off the fumes of its former glory to a team that is competing against the best teams in multiple competitions. In his first press conference after joining the Reds in October of 2015, Klopp provided a perspective on his tenure that I quickly jotted on a sticky note on my computer desktop.

“It’s not important what people think when you come in, but what they think when you leave.”

As I was closing out my time at Providence, this quote lived with me as I increased my effort during the waning months of my time there. I wanted to leave a legacy at Providence and close out strong. I’ve seen too many times people decrease their effort at the end, they are already halfway into their next position. This can harm relationships and tarnish the good work one has done for the organization. The lingering impression after walking it in is that the organization has finally gotten rid of dead weight. I remember my track coach telling me to race past the finish line, not to it. We relax right before the finish line when we race to the finish line, allowing a competitor to slip past. In this vein, I intentionally gave 110% not just to the last day, but even beyond; making myself available to support the administrators replacing me. If Providence continues to succeed, then it says something about the quality of work I did there, especially in mentoring those who remain.

Now that I am starting a new position at Clapham, Klopp’s quote takes on new insights. It will matter very little what I accomplish in the first few days, weeks and months of my tenure at Clapham, if I don’t finish well and build something of lasting value during my time at Clapham. Building something of lasting value takes time and never happens solely on the effort of the new guy. One must listen carefully to the people who have been there, building relationships of trust. Obviously coming in new means that changes will be introduced, but it has to be consistent with the mission and values of the organization as it currently stands. One of the most valuable things you can build at a new organization is a sense of teamwork. The new academic standards, or the updated handbooks, or the new program initiatives should stem from a sense of everyone working together as a team, not as something that is dictated from on high by the new guy.

As I join Clapham, I recognize that the organization has had a life without me before I got here, and the organization will be around after my time is done. As much as I might hope to contribute to raise the game at Clapham, I will only play a small part in Clapham’s story. This idea is a powerful check to my ego and positions me well to think in terms of the broader aims of the organization. It’s counterintuitive, but the best way to establish your legacy is to check your ego and pour yourself out for the benefit of the higher cause.

Principle #2: Build Relationships as Your Primary Purpose

Being new to school can feel lonely. You don’t have the background that others have and you are entering into an environment where everyone seems to know each other. It can be hard to break into a group where strong relationships have already been formed.

However, one of the primary purposes for joining a new organization is to build relationships. And the best way to build relationships is to go back to the basics. First, you must listen effectively. You’re listening not only to what people are saying, but you are also paying attention to important topics of conversation, you’re listening to how people talk with you and with others. By paying attention as a listener, you can learn how to speak the language of the new organization. It can feel a bit like learning a foreign language. The better you can speak that language, the more you can accomplish in the environment. Second, you must speak simply and clearly. Make your points succinctly and without too much flowery ornamentation. There will be time for your personality to come through over time, but be careful not to overwhelm others with showy speeches. Third, seek opportunities to help others on their projects. You might think it’s important to get started on your top priorities. But because building relationships is of primary importance, you can quickly build a sense of teamwork and common purpose by helping others. This also fast tracks your acquisition of institutional knowledge. You are also likely to see connections between their work and your work and how they both contribute to the mission of the organization.

Ultimately, you are building bridges of trust. Trust takes time to build. And like a bridge, trust must carry freight in two directions. People want to know that you can be trusted, just as you want to know that you can trust your new colleagues. Every replied email, congenial conversation, completed project and positive social encounter lays down another plank on the bridge of trust. Working as a team requires multiple layers of trust between several people. A great way to destroy trust (and trust bridges are easily broken), is to talk behind the backs of others. Hopefully conflicts won’t arise in the early days at a new organization, but they are bound to come up. Instead of letting conflicts break down trust, use conflicts to reinforce trust. By being proactive to resolve conflict, people will learn that you are a team player who fights to maintain good rapport with everyone.

Whether you are coming in as the new boss or in an entry level position, it is helpful to remember that we are all under authority. There is always some else up the chain of command you answer to. In order to accomplish whatever goals you might have in your new position, it is essential to form good relationships up and down the hierarchy. A boss who doesn’t trust you won’t assign the exciting new initiative to you. But if you start by building trust, more and more responsibilities will be thrown your way. It’s not only your boss, but your peers, those who report to you, and even those who are further down on the org chart. Every person in the organization plays an important role and deserves your full commitment to building relationships of trust.

Principle #3: Contribute to Something Greater than Yourself 

The great thing about working in a school is you are immediately connected to a project greater than yourself. How inspiring is it to influence a new generation through the daily work of training and mentoring students whom parents have entrusted to your care?

Simon Sinek, in his book Start with Why, calls us to begin thinking not about what it is we do, or how it is we do it, but why do we do it in the first place (this is my very poor summation of an excellent book, but see Jason’s later article “Marketing, Manipulations and True Classroom Leadership” for more development of this idea). More recently in his podcasting and YouTube videos, he has begun referring to a “just cause” that your company, or in our case your school, takes on as its fundamental reason for existing in the first place (here’s a video of him talking about “just cause”, complete with bed head). This idea replaces the overused and somewhat mundane expression of the mission statement. There’s a reason this school exists – its just cause. The “why” is something we need to reconnect to consistently and regularly (dare I say daily, even hourly). Our just cause is to make a deep and lasting impact in the lives of students. I don’t know of an industry that has a much higher calling outside the church itself.

Charlotte Mason has been a source of inspiration for me as a teacher. The model I was raised in centered around the teacher in what I call the lecture-and-test method. The student is largely a passive listener until the testing time comes, and must snap into action to regurgitate the previously disseminated information. As a student I found this tedious and ineffective. As a teacher I found this exhausting. What joy it was when I was introduced to Charlotte Mason! She taught that children as whole persons had the capacity to interact with ideas and knowledge. It is not the teacher’s duty to spoon feed children this knowledge as though our students were baby birdies needing prechewed worms. (See Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 8-20).

Instead, as teachers we guide our students to ideas and knowledge through great books that inspire them. I am not the focus of the students’ attention, but the book is. I am merely the guide. Teaching became something like taking a child on an adventure through all kinds of wonderful vistas of literature, poetry, history, music and artwork. I could set them loose in these fields and then bask in their wonderment, correct their errors, celebrate their breakthroughs and interact with their understandings through discussion. Instead of students who hated school because it was boring, I encountered students who were excited to learn despite the fact they were the ones putting in the greater part of the effort to learn.

When we are connected to the higher values of our learning environment, not only are we inspired, but our students catch that spark of inspiration too. We all get that sense that we are working on something that is both meaningful and fraught with purpose. This kind of work transcends the individual. When you are caught up in something greater than yourself, you begin to lose yourself in your work. And yet at the same time find that you as an individual are being made better. The meaning and purpose of higher value work adds value to our own lives. Unlike the downward spiral of menial work that takes from the individual his best energy, so that he needs to spend his non-work time recovering, the upward spiral of inspirational work feeds the soul of the worker.

Principle #4: Work Smart, Not Just Hard

Teaching and leading in a school is hard work and requires energy . . . significant energy. It’s a challenge to maintain work-life balance. Even if you finish lesson planning and grading during the school day (and few are able to accomplish that), we still bring home our concerns about certain students or are trying to solve classroom management problems. There’s often a school event to attend or a student who wants you to attend their recital or game. It isn’t any one task that makes teaching hard work, but all together it can be a job that is physically and mentally demanding.

If we’re connected to our inspiring motivation, our mindset should be to get after it with an aggressive attitude. However, it can be helpful to think through our top priorities, whether as a teacher or a leader. What is the most important work to be done each day, each hour, each moment? There are many tasks to be done in the day: from mentoring a new teacher to checking emails, from writing lesson plans to teaching today’s lessons, from grading math homework to making copies for tomorrow. The task list can be long. So what should be chosen? Often times we choose the tasks that require time and effort without thinking about long-term strategy or high level values.

It was difficult during my first few years as an administrator to prioritize the most important things. Everyone else’s fires would dominate my day, and most of my high value tasks went undone. There were many authors (Stephen Covey, David Allen and Tim Ferris to name a few) who taught about prioritizing your tasks and literally scheduling them like a meeting. One of my highest values was investing in the teachers. I began to schedule items on my calendar like, “Observe math teacher” and “give feedback to teacher.” By investing in the teaching staff you immediately solve other issues like student discipline, student retention, parent satisfaction, test scores, teacher retention, etc., etc. I could solve some of my long-term strategies (hire, train and retain the best faculty I can) by prioritizing time to observe and mentor my teachers. This is what it means to work smarter, to rise up out of the mentality to just get the work done in order to make sure the work you are doing is synchronized with your highest values.

It is not always obvious which task is the highest value. Here’s where the 80/20 principle, or Pareto’s principle, comes into play. For most of the work we do, usually only 20% accomplishes 80% of what needs to be done. Leveraging this concept helps us to see that some tasks are more obviously attached to, say, teaching a class, whereas several tasks have no obvious connection to teaching a class. So if my goal is to be about the business of teaching a class, why would I attempt the tasks that have little to do with teaching? If I applied my best energy to the 20% most associated with teaching, I could have a more productive and more satisfying day. This kind of thinking helps divert energy away from making copies, arranging the classroom, and checking email first thing in the morning. Instead, my 20% might include strategizing about a struggling student, finalizing the plan for an upcoming field trip or reworking a classroom system. Save some of those lower priority tasks for later when you have less energy and creativity, and perhaps they can be delegated to students (arranging the classroom at the end of each day) or to a parent offering to help after school (making copies).

Sometimes it’s difficult to see which tasks are the highest priority when we are immersed in all of the various areas of work. As an administrator, this was an area where I loved helping teachers out. Some would admit, “I’m stuck!” and offer several tasks that needed to be done. I would simply asks questions based on value and long-term strategy, and they would often be able to see for themselves what needed to be done. I was able to do this because I myself wasn’t immersed in their task list, so I had separation to be able to examine value. I enjoyed helping teachers in this way, but they often didn’t even need me. Separation can be created through sleeping on a decision or stepping out of the classroom for a moment. My advice to administrators is to constantly preach the highest values of the school, which will ultimately help the teacher remain connected to those values when they are making decisions about what to do each day.

Principle #5: Lean into Difficulties and Problems

Despite the planning and efforts to maintain focus on our highest values, fires do need to be put out. Problems and difficulties show up all the time. If you’ve ever watched downhill skiers, you’ll notice as they approach the gates – the obstacles on their course – they lean into them. We can do the same thing, aggressively tackling the difficulties that come our way. 

There is a temptation to avoid problems or somehow plan them away. However, it’s almost impossible to root out difficulties and problems altogether. We know they will arise, so the best approach is to plan for your plans to go awry. Embracing this concept can help alleviate the stress-inducing aspect of the fires that come our way. We know they are coming, so why fret about them? By being prepared for problems, we actually open ourselves up to a problem-solving mindset.

One of the ironies of life is that the pathway to joy passes through patches of challenge. If there were no challenges, difficulties or issues, there would be less opportunity to encounter joy. Teaching is a vocation full of meaning and purpose, but it comes at a cost. We suffer for our art by dealing with the messiness of life. Teaching students brings us into contact with the child’s capabilities and limitations. It involves us in the family’s life, albeit tangentially. The school brings together families with vastly different perspectives, interests and standards. Problems are bound to arise in such an environment. But as we work with our peers, our students and our families, we can cultivate profound joy through our engagement in the problems that come our way. 

The benefits of taking on our most challenging problems is that they provide a context for creativity and the exchange of ideas. Trying to figure out a class dynamic (every class is different and what worked last year likely won’t work this year) forces me to be creative and opens me up to listen to ideas generated by my peers, my boss and even the students themselves. We might fear exposing an area of personal weakness or ignorance, but the fastest way to acquire new growth is through humble admission that I am a person in need of growing. We can cultivate a growth mindset in our classrooms through our own commitment to growing our skills. 

Resources

There are many great books and articles out there on leadership, although very few on educational leadership. The following are a few books that have been foundational in my thinking.

Covey, Steven, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Hughes, Kent. Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome.

Sinek, Simon, Start with Why.

__________. Leaders Eat Last.

Willink, Jocko, Extreme Ownership.

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Truth

Peterson grounds truth in the biblical conception of the Divine Logos as the creative force behind the universe.

“In the Christian tradition, Christ is identified with the Logos. The Logos is the Word of God. That Word transformed chaos into order at the beginning of time. In His human form, Christ sacrificed himself voluntarily to the truth, to the good, to God. In consequence, He died and was reborn. The Word that produces order from Chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity.”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 223

As a consequence, truth is what orders the universe. To live in harmony with the universe is to encounter truth, brutal as that may be at times, and to abide by truth in speech and conduct. Peterson takes us to the prison camps, both Soviet and Nazi, through the accounts of Solzhenitsynn and Frankl (pg. 215) to see that truth often comes at great personal expense, and that untruth corrupts at all levels of society. For both the individual and society, “lies war the structure of Being.” (pg. 215). Knowing the truth will set us free, according to the words of Jesus in John 8:32, who calls us to abide in his Word. Centering our lives around truth is not easy, but the alternative is a life that lacks freedom, even though lies entice us through the deception that we can attain freedom through them. Peterson’s advice in rule 8 is “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” As educators, this advice orients us to assisting our students in the acquisition of truth, and challenging them to root out deception.

Educators often fall prey to the urgent needs of the moment. Grades are due, the students need to be prepped for the annual performance, or we’ve simply fallen behind in our unit. We figure delivering content efficiently is the best solution. Content delivery, that is the teaching of the facts and figures in our curriculum, is not the same as centering our classroom on truth. Surely, we are telling true things to our students, but the content is more likely to glance off the surface of their minds. To be truly centered on the truth, we must recognize the transformative nature of truth. Truth needs to be reflected upon. Truth needs to be expressed. Truth needs to be committed to. These are necessities that take time and effort in order for truth to take its full effect in the lives of students. I appreciate Peterson’s vulnerable self-reflection, recognizing how to detect truthfulness and deception within himself.

“If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness, when you are misbehaving and misspeaking. It’s an embodied sensation, not a thought. I experience an internal sensation of sinking and division, rather than solidity and strength, when I am incautious with my acts and words. It seems to be centred in my solar plexus, where a large knot of nervous tissue resides. I learned to recognize when I was lying, in fact, by noticing this sinking and division, and then inferring the presence of a lie. It often took me a long time to ferret out the deception. Sometimes I was using words for appearance. Sometimes I was trying to disguise my own true ignorance of the topic at hand. Sometimes I was using the words of others to avoid the responsibility of thinking for myself.”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 224

My mom taught me something similar to what Peterson describes here. She called it the “uh-oh” feeling. I now call it my conscience. Our students need to learn how to feel and respond to their consciences, and to know when they are exhibiting the strength of truthfulness or are succumbing to deception. This takes time, and peace, and quiet. It also requires of us a level of commitment to the student that is challenging. We often want to detach ourselves from our students at the most opportune moments for learning to take place: namely lunch and recess. But these are the moments when we most get to live together with our students in meaningful ways. We’ll explore meaning a bit further below.

In the classroom, though, we can be mindful of two pillars that ground study in truthfulness. First, is the assumption that others have something to teach us. Peterson’s 9th rule states, “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.” Intellectual humility is a virtue our society desperately needs. Intellectual humility is the disposition a thinker has that recognizes the limited nature of the individual’s knowledge. It is learned in the classroom not only when we read new texts. In some ways a student is more willing to listen to the books we read because there is an innate trust they have that the school will put before them something valuable. Beyond this, though, is the interchange between students through discussion and debate. Helping our students to listen effectively to their classmates is so important to developing an awareness that they don’t know everything. I would love for students to even know that they barely know anything at all, but that would be asking too much. Even while I say that, I also recognize my own need to listen effectively to my students, because there are plenty of times that the ethereal knowledge comes through the mouths of babes.

The second pillar of truthfulness is to mark the words you speak very carefully. Peterson’s 10th rule is to “be precise in your speech.” The classical tradition of liberal arts education promotes this ideal. The three forms of the trivium – grammar, logic and rhetoric – trained individuals to become competent language users through the acquisition of the mechanics of language, thought and persuasive speech. Precision in language gives us a means of accurately perceiving the world around us. Peterson describes Adam in the garden naming the animals. In an exposition on Genesis, he makes the point that “We can’t really get a grip on something before we have a name for it.” Precision in language helps us come to terms with the world that already exists around us. But it also affords us the creative potential to make something of the world around us. Language is the means by which we create narratives and poetry. Words can alter our perception of reality, creating order where once there was chaos.

Clear language is the heart of excellent teaching. This idea is similarly expressed by John Milton Gregory in his The Seven Laws of Teaching. His third law — the law of language — is condensed into the statement, “Use words understood by both teacher and pupil in the same sense — language clear and vivid alike to both.” The words we use in our lessons should be precise, and we then look for precise language from our students. This pertains not only to academic stuff, but also to our general speech. I don’t permit loose words in my classroom. Any students who drops a fake swear word will be guided to consider what it truly means and why one would choose to use it. These have become a rarity simply because they know they have to be careful in their speech, or at the very least will have a lengthy conversation about the etymology of their colorful language.

Meaning

Precise speech not only enables us to accurately perceive the world around us, but it also assigns meaning to our reality: “We don’t see valueless entities and then attribute meaning to them. We perceive the meaning directly” (Peterson, 12 Rules, 261). This leads us to a consideration of life as meaningful. We teach not merely so students can learn facts. The words we learn aren’t merely a set of definitions. Our students are acquiring the ability to make sense of their world and to find meaning through their experience of the world. The last rule we will consider in this series is Peterson’s rule 7, “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).”

There really are two alternatives for each and every one of us. One can do nothing except that which would enable one to keep doing nothing. Or one can do something. Once that choice is made, you are either on a path of nihilism or on a path of meaning. The most frustrating thing to encounter as a teacher is the student who chooses the first path. We want all the best for them, but dance, sing, cajole as we might, they will only be satiated by their own wants and desires. The homework is unfinished yet again, only to find out they spent the better part of the evening playing video games. Or the child falls asleep in the middle of class yet again, only to find they stayed up most of the night binge watching an inane series on Netflix. The child clearly doesn’t care. There may or may not be concerned parents equally mystified by the behavior. Prodding doesn’t work. Rewards don’t cause lasting change. What’s to be done? Probably nothing. Nothing is what they’ve chosen.

Fortunately, this rarely occurs to the greatest extreme. But we see gradations in all of our classrooms. “Life is suffering,” Peterson states right at the outset of the chapter (pg. 161). One way to cope with that reality is to simply live for the moment.

“Follow you impulses. Live for the moment. Do what’s expedient. Lie, cheat, steal, deceive, manipulate – but don’t get caught. In an ultimately meaningless universe, what possible difference could it make?”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 162

The lure of meaninglessness beckons our students more and more. Hours can be spent on meaningless scrolling through memes and YouTube videos. Time has passed and nothing meaningful has been done.

“There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient. There is no careful observation that actions and presuppositions matter, or that the world is made of what matters.”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 200

The subtle lie behind the choice to live according to expedience is that you get to avoid suffering. That can never be.

We must be careful as educators to not shy away from meaning. Every class and every subject holds great potential for our students to encounter meaning. How sad it would be to come away from reading Homer without the student understanding in a personal way what it means to live a heroic life through personal sacrifice! History shows us over and over that tyranny must be opposed by people who value life and liberty. What just cause will capture our students hearts, propelling them into the world to make it a little bit better as they see it? Unfortunately, our students aren’t evaluated according to virtue or wisdom on their standardized tests. Yet, the quality of their lives most corresponds to their sense of value and worth. My concern with the state of education today, borrowing from the outdated factory model, is that its chief end is employment. But life is so much more than a job.

Education ought to be transformative in the lives of our students. As young people, they already experience suffering. If school is to truly equip them for life, we ourselves as teachers must be in touch with matters of vital interest to our students in acquiring for themselves a life of meaning. This only comes about by caring about something. Charlotte Mason’s educational method is founded on living ideas. We present to our students a vast array of possible interests about which they can develop care.

“We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room,’ should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking––the strain would be too great––but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care?”

Charlotte Mason, School Education, 170-171

Bringing students to a place where they care for a great many things sets them on a course to experience a life of meaning. Will they still suffer in life? Most assuredly. But will they find purpose and meaning through the suffering? Absolutely. And they will be better people for it.

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