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

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

Quote 1:

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

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

Quote 2:

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

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

Quote 3:

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

-From Charlotte Mason and the Power of Ideas

Quote 4:

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

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

Quote 5:

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

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

Quote 6:

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

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

Quote 7:

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

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

Quote 8:

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

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

Quote 9:

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

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

Quote 10:

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

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

Quote 11:

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

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

Quote 12:

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

-From The Black Plague and an Educational Renaissance

Quote 13:

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

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

Quote 14:

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

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

Quote 15:

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

-From Education Is Life: A Philosophy on Education

Quote 16:

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

-From The Problem of Technicism in Conventional Education

Quote 17:

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

-From Teaching Confident Faith in an Age of Religious Uncertainty

Quote 18:

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

-From Habit Training During Online Distance Learning

Quote 19:

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

-From The Problem of Scientism in Conventional Education

Quote 20:

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

-From Summertime, and the Learning is Easy

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

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

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

End of 2019 Announcements

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

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

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

20 Memorable Maxims from 2019

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

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

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

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

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

-From Overcoming Procrastination

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

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

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

-From Excellence Comes by Habit: Aristotle on Moral Virtue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-From Educating Future Culture Makers

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

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

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

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

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

-From Liberating Education from the Success Syndrome

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

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

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

-From Why Luther Believed Christians Should Study the Liberal Arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-From Marketing, Manipulations, and True Classroom Leadership

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

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