In this series on Slow Productivity in School, we’ve been exploring the paradox of festina lente (“hasten slowly”). When it comes to the work of learning, sometimes you must go slow to go fast. Or, perhaps more accurately, you must slow down to be truly productive. Taking our cues from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout, we are applying his three principles for slow productivity to our teaching practices in classical Christian schools (1. Do Fewer Things, 2. Work at a Natural Pace, 3. Obsess Over Quality). 

After first diagnosing the problem of pseudo-productivity in modern schools, analogous to the hustle culture of modern work environments, we then explored the well-known Latin phrase multum non multa (“much not many things”) under the principle of doing fewer things. The key takeaway is that rather than cutting down on “subjects” to the bare essentials, this principle really applies best to the number and quality of “assignments.” Students in our classical Christian schools can read and study widely without suffering through busywork. Second, we explored the need to work at a natural pace as an explanation of how we can recover school as scholé or leisure. The point is that there are rhythms to ideal learning and racing through worksheets and covering pages of textbooks like the wind isn’t necessarily the best for deep understanding and long term retention.

In this final article, we’re focusing on the principle that we might call the main goal of it all: “Obsess over quality.”  In a way, doing fewer things and working at a natural pace are pointless if they don’t lead to an increased focus on quality. At the beginning we set out the idea that what really lurks behind the phrase multum non multa is a prioritization of depth over breadth and quality over quantity. Slowness is not an end in itself but is meant to serve the real or genuine productivity. Newport describes this final principle of obsessing over quality this way:

“Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term” (173). 

For those of us who work in classical Christian schools, as I have argued elsewhere (see Rethinking the Purpose of Education), the true purpose of our educational efforts should be the cultivation of moral, spiritual, and intellectual virtues in our students. If that is the case, then haste can be the enemy of progress. Instead, as master craftsmen, we teachers and educators need to take the necessary time to cultivate mastery in our students. Slipshod, shoddy work, rushed through quickly, without attention to the details and to a host of minor improvements necessary for quality do not “move the needle.” 

There is a real mental shift that must occur here for many of us. We have had the rat-race of school so ingrained in our psyche, that we feel like we are wasting time if we’re not completing a worksheet or a powerpoint buzzer quiz every 20 min. Our media-saturated world too has reduced our attention span and given us ADD for the type of focused effort that actually forges increased quality.

Another culprit to our busyness of attitude is the knowledge-transfer vision of education, as opposed to the traditional liberal arts approach. We tend to envision the main part of education as a process of information download, rather than students developing mastery in handling certain well-worn tools. When we view K-12 education instead through the lens of helping students hone their artistry in the liberal arts, then we will focus more on the students producing high quality interpretations, arguments, and persuasive compositions. 

Students would then develop an artist’s eye for quality and mastery in the creative productions of the liberal arts, including of course in math and science. This focus then multiplies labor by making their own independent reading and thinking that much more effective. They are then able to hasten along the path of lifelong learning with ease, because the way has been smoothed for them by mastering the fundamental skills.

What does this all mean practically for teachers working with students in the classroom? In her book Home Education, Charlotte Mason proposed the habit of perfect execution as a major guiding vision for training young children. She explained,

‘Throw perfection into all you do’ is a counsel upon which a family may be brought up with great advantage. We English, as a nation, think too much of persons, and too little of things, work, execution. Our children are allowed to make their figures or their letters, their stitches, their dolls’ clothes, their small carpentry, anyhow, with the notion that they will do better by-and-by. Other nations–the Germans and the French, for instance–look at the question philosophically, and know that if children get the habit of turning out imperfect work, the men and women will undoubtedly keep that habit up. I remember being delighted with the work of a class of about forty children, of six and seven, in an elementary school at Heidelberg. They were doing a writing lesson, accompanied by a good deal of oral teaching from a master, who wrote each word on the blackboard. By-and-by the slates were shown, and I did not observe one faulty or irregular letter on the whole forty slates. (110-111)

If what Mason says was true of Victorian England, how much more would she note “the Habit of turning out Imperfect Work” in 21st century America. Her example demonstrates that this feature is to a large extent cultural, and may have to do with our Rousseauian focus on children’s “personality” and “developmental readiness.” Our teachers may make excuses for failing to hold out the standard for careful execution of work based on how large the class is (“I simply can’t get around to all sixteen students!”), but this German class of forty puts us to shame.

To be fair, Mason does have a category for setting the bar too high for students. It is possible to obsess over the wrong details or expect a type of detailed quality that is not yet attainable by a young novice. Mason explains, 

No work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly, and then perfection should be required from him as a matter of course. For instance, he is set to do a copy of strokes, and is allowed to show a slateful at all sorts of slopes and all sorts of intervals; his moral sense is vitiated, his eye is injured. Set him six strokes to copy; let him, not bring a slateful, but six perfect strokes, at regular distances and at regular slopes. If he produces a faulty pair, get him to point out the fault, and persevere until he has produced his task; if he does not do it to-day, let him go on to-morrow and the next day, and when the six perfect strokes appear, let it be an occasion of triumph. So with the little tasks of painting, drawing or construction he sets himself–let everything he does be well done. An unsteady house of cards is a thing to be ashamed of. (111)

It can be seen from this that Mason endorses explicitly the principles of doing fewer things at a natural pace, in order to enable an obsession over quality. Clearly she wants students to internalize the mindset of mastery from an early age. 

It’s important to clarify that this is not the sort of perfectionism that expects to never make mistakes in the first place. She is endorsing rather the type of growth mindset that believes that every child can produce high quality and accurate work, if they are given the time and held accountable for doing so. This mindset actually functions to empower the student and enable progress. Filling a slate with incorrect strokes does not improve a student’s handwriting, but tends to solidify bad habits. As my gymnastics coach drill in to us when we were young, “Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.” 

This paradoxical focus on perfection by actively attending to and correcting mistakes is characteristic of what Daniel Coyle calls deep practice. As he explains, “struggling in certain targeted ways–operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes–makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them–as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go–end up making you swift and graceful without you realizing it” (The Talent Code, 18). This provides a helpful counter to a misunderstanding of Mason’s insistence that “no work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly,” which might lead us to ease the way too much and avoid appropriate challenges. We have to read in to her version of “cannot” a much stronger belief in the capability of children than we tend to have.

The practical applications of this habit of perfect execution and obsession over quality are endless and as varied as the nature of the many subjects and arts that we teach. So, instead it might be more helpful to open out our gaze again to all three principles, and provide a series of practical applications to the classroom that fuse a holistic vision for slow productivity in school through 1) doing fewer things, 2) working at a natural pace, and 3) obsessing over quality.

Practical Applications of Slow Productivity in School

First, emphasize deep engagement with material over superficial coverage. This will involve a reduced workload, time for contemplation, and the ability to marinate in the knowledge and skills they are gaining.

• Reduced Workload: Instead of assigning a vast quantity of assignments to complete, or having students race through reading the textbook at home, teachers should prioritize fewer, more substantial readings, projects, and discussions. This reduced workload will allow students to delve more deeply into the material rather than skimming or memorizing for tests.
• Time for Contemplation and Reflection: Working at a natural pace means allowing sufficient time for students to truly wrestle with ideas, formulate their own thoughts, and engage in meaningful discussions, rather than rushing from one topic to the next. This leisurely approach coheres with the movement’s emphasis on school as scholé or leisure and the necessary slowness for true contemplation. The time spent discussing and thinking through ideas, even if it includes some rabbit-trails and dead-ends will be time well spent for students making these ideas their own.
• Marinating in Knowledge: Learning isn’t always linear, but has its natural ups and downs, periods of lying fallow and moments for break-throughs. A natural pace acknowledges that some concepts require time to “marinate” in the mind. Teachers should schedule in times of review and moments to pause and revisit challenging texts or ideas over time, allowing for deeper understanding to develop organically.

Second, in agreement with a mastery mindset focus on artistry, teachers should encourage Deep Practice with a focus on correcting mistakes to develop mastery. This will involve favoring perfect execution over speed, process-oriented learning, and slow reading with commonplacing.

• Perfect Execution Over Speed: Instead of rewarding quick completion, focus on mastery of skills and concepts. This might mean allowing students to re-do assignments until they achieve a certain level of understanding, or providing ample practice opportunities without the pressure of a ticking clock. It’s important to remember that education is a not a one-size-fits all: one student may need to repeat the same assignment until it is correct, while other students have gone on to the next. A misplaced emphasis on “fairness” can get in the way of the real goal of coaching each student to mastery.
• Process-Oriented Learning: Emphasize the learning process itself, including research, careful thinking, revision, and refinement, rather than just the final product. Ironically, this aligns with the “obsess over quality” principle. It’s not that the end destination doesn’t matter, but when we let students focus on just getting an assignment done, rather than getting it right, quality gets lost. When we’re willing to linger in the details with a student, then the genuine questions and focus on accuracy make the whole experience that much more meaningful to student and teacher alike.
• Slow Reading and Commonplacing: Encourage students to engage in “slow reading” of classic texts, marking up pages (when possible), asking questions, copying out quotations into a Commonplace Notebook, and truly grappling with the author’s arguments and literary artistry, rather than speed-reading for information. This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of how many Great Books you’re actually trying to get through in that course. At the same time, it’s important to remember that it is possible to go too slow, and so every delay should be qualitatively meaningful. Festina lente (“hasten slowly”) can help the teacher navigate this dance.

Third, we should protect unscheduled time for intellectual play and the pursuit of meaningful interests. There is something to be said for us trying to accomplish too much in school and that backfiring, as students become overly dependent on the structure of school for their ongoing learning. This will look like preserving time for independent exploration both at school and at home and reducing the homework burden by prioritizing the completion of quality work at school:

• Time for Independent Exploration: A natural pace includes periods of less structured time for students. Students need unscheduled time for independent reading, creative pursuits, exploring ideas that pique their interest, and simply thinking without a specific assignment. The idea that “Every minute matters” (popularized by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion) is not without merits, but it depends on the culture into which it is speaking. In low-achieving communities it might bring helpful discipline, but in suburbia with our overscheduled, oversaturated lives, this approach can make children high-strung. Teachers shouldn’t feel the need to cram every minute of every school day but should embrace a proper sense of leisure. This will help to foster the type of genuine curiosity and intellectual growth in students that is not solely dependent on the teacher.
• Reduced Homework Burden: A slow productivity approach means that we should re-evaluate our homework policies and aim for fewer, more meaningful assignments that take a longer time to complete. Our goal should be to reinforce learning rather than simply creating busywork. Also, many of the challenging assignments that we would give them, like writing assignments, should be started in class with the teacher walking around to assist, double check for errors in spelling, punctuation, proper formation of cursive letters, etc. Even in the upper grades a return to this sort of artistic writing process under the guidance of a teacher can help avoid issues with plagiarism and AI-dependence that are only becoming more and more prevalent in our age.

Finally, a focus on slow productivity in school should foster a culture of patient endurance rather than an obsession with a quick fix and short-term results. This will look like embracing the long-term vision of classical education, recognizing that some of the best growth in students occurs over the course of years rather than months, and therefore fostering resilience and grit in students and parents alike:

• Long-Term Vision: Classical education plays out as a long game, building a strong foundation over many years. A natural pace reinforces the idea that significant intellectual growth is a marathon, not a sprint. Slow productivity sees the results of genuine accomplishment over the course of the whole K-12 sequence, rather than week, month or quarter of the school year. This long-term vision helps us sit patiently in the here and now and focus on mastery of the basics in a given area where a student struggles, rather than giving up or opting out.
• Resilience and Grit: By allowing for a natural pace, students learn that challenges take time to overcome and that persistence, not frantic effort, leads to genuine accomplishment. The insistence on facing our mistakes and learning from them, rather than fleeing to easier tasks, develops a resilient attitude that will serve them well for life. Ultimately, a slow productivity mindset makes kids gritty, while also giving them adequate recovery time to maintain the long trek of their education.

I hope you enjoyed the Slow Productivity in School series. I’m planning a webinar and consulting pathway to follow up on these ideas and help your teachers apply multum non multa, festina lente and the habit of perfect execution or coaching in deep practice in your school.

The post Slow Productivity in School: Part 4, Obsess Over Quality appeared first on .

In this series, I am taking my cue from Cal Newport’s helpful book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout and applying his insights to our expectations for student work in classical Christian schools. Like the modern office, forms of pseudo-productivity dominate the modern school system–a fact that explains how children can spend more time on school and edutainment than ever before and yet scores and cultural literacy continue to decline. 

The problem is that the quantity of easy assignments, like worksheets or entertaining presentations or videos, has crowded out the quality of learning. We have sacrificed depth to a shallow breadth and traded long term learning for an easy-to-teach, easy-to-grade hamster wheel of activities. 

In our last article we explored Cal Newport’s first principle for slow productivity: do fewer things. Resonating with the Latin saying, multum non multa (much not many), this principle is best interpreted as calling for fewer assignments of higher quality rather than fewer subjects in a day. We supported this classical application of the principle from no less revered a source than the Roman oratorical teacher Quintilian, who argued for, not against, wide reading across many subjects. But this doesn’t mean we can’t cut down on busy work and focus on the highest value activities for deep learning.

Part of the point of this assertion is that there may actually be an inverse relationship between the sheer number of assignments in school (or projects at work) and the real production of value or quality. As Newport explained near the beginning of the book, “The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that ‘good’ work requires increasing busyness–faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours” (7). But this busyness itself becomes a drag on true productivity because of the “overhead cost” as Newport has called it, of each new project or assignment.

This overhead cost leads to a waste of labor in the hurry through activities that are not effective in creating value, which in our case would be the durable learning and cultivation of intellectual virtues in a student. Busywork does not develop the mind of a scholar. 

These considerations lead us naturally in to Cal Newport’s second principle: work at a natural pace. The connection is obvious because the important work that does transform a student into a scholar requires a certain slowness of pace to be effective. Focusing too much on efficiency may cause us to short-circuit the process, leaving the student no better off than when she started. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day. True achievement takes time. You can’t rush greatness.

Newport unpacks his second principle of slow productivity for knowledge workers by calling for a sustainable and almost luxurious approach:

“Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.” (116)

His encouragement not to rush is made possible because crucial time has been preserved by doing fewer things. This move enables our work to be of higher importance. Students likewise will experience increased motivation when they sense that assignments are more naturally significant or meaningful. Busywork, on the other hand, demotivates a student, since he can feel its intrinsic pointlessness.

We should pause to note that just because a project takes a long time does not ensure it is important or meaningful. Teachers seeking to apply this principle in their classical school should consider what skills of hand and eye will be honed, what intellectual virtues like wisdom and understanding, will be developed before launching a time-consuming project that is ancillary to their curriculum. One litmus test might be whether it integrates the liberal arts with the common arts, while solidifying meaningful knowledge, as Chris Hall advocates for in his book Common Arts Education.

Cal Newport draws from the examples of ground breaking scientists to make the point of what a “sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity” ought to look like. He explains,

“These great scientists of times past were clearly ‘productive’ by any reasonable definition of the term. What else can you call it when someone literally changes our understanding of the universe? At the same time, however, the pace at which they toiled on their momentous discoveries seemed, by modern standards, to be uneven, and in some cases almost leisurely.” (111)

Newport’s use of the word “leisurely” resonates remarkably with an emphasis of the classical Christian education movement: recovering school as leisure. The Greek word from which school is derived, scholé, meant something like “leisure.” Christopher Perrin of Classical Academic Press has helpfully advocated for a recovery of scholé in school, drawing from Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Perrin defines scholé as “undistracted time…” in his book The Scholé Way. Likewise, Newport’s description of “settings conducive to brilliance” resonates with the classical education movement’s emphasis on beauty and aesthetics for the school environment. What could be more inspiring than the idea of restful learning at a natural pace in a beautiful and uplifting atmosphere!

Newport and Perrin are both quick to clarify that the feeling of intensity for work should vary. Productive school work, like scientific discovery, will have periods of intense effort, as well as restful or leisurely contemplation. Working at a natural pace means that we as teachers are attentive to these ups and downs. We don’t try to force an unnatural sameness, either of rigor or rest. There is a natural rhythm to quality accomplishment and genuine learning that God has built into the fabric of existence. Just as the Sabbath principle governs work in general, so too must peaceful learning and restful contemplation balance out more strenuous learning activities.

It might initially feel like a cop out to give more time in class to a challenging activity like writing. But it may be that it ultimately pays itself back in the genuine progress made by the student. After all, their minds are likely freshest for that type of focused effort during the school day. And teachers can actively assist in the process of coaching when they are present. Are we really surprised that students turn in poorly written essays, when they are forced to do it in the energy trough of the afternoon or the mental haze of the late evening? 

Still some will decry the loss of productivity. But the secret is opening out our vision of student productivity to a longer time horizon. As Newport discerns from the case of those leisurely scientists,

“Timescale matters. When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the efforts of historic thinkers like Copernicus and Newton can seem uneven and delayed. When instead viewed at the slow scale of years, their efforts suddenly seem undeniably and impressively fruitful.” (113)

This perspective shift undergirds another influential Latin saying, festina lente (“hasten slowly”), which calls for a paradox of slow hurry. There must be a purposeful movement in a meaningful direction at the same time as a willingness to delay over the details to ensure quality and a student’s developing mastery. Great teachers can discern when to slow down and when to hasten on.

Part of this is because skill development benefits naturally from providing activities with the proper challenge. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyiy, the famous positive psychologist called this the flow channel, which is characterized by an avoidance of boredom because of the challenge being too low on the one hand, but also by preventing the anxiety caused by too high a level of challenge. Within this channel we are much more likely to experience the flow state, where time passes in effortless focus as we are absorbed in a meaningful activity. This modern discovery is part and parcel of the joy of learning as I have written extensively elsewhere. 

For our purposes, we can note that flow comes in many forms, both vigorous and contemplative, but more recent discoveries have shown it to be only one step in the flow cycle, which includes both a struggle phase beforehand while getting into flow and a recovery phase after which allows the mind needed rest for entering the flow cycle again (see Rian Doris, flowstate.com). One cannot be “on” all the time, so there should varying types and levels of focused effort throughout the school day and throughout the weeks and months of a school year.

While he may not personally connect flow state with his ideas of deep work or slow productivity, Newport does connect his thoughts back to Aristotle’s vision of eudaimonia (“flourishing or happiness”) and the contemplative life:

“In the Nicomachean Ethics, which would have been familiar to any serious thinker from the time of Copernicus onward, Aristotle identified deep contemplation as the most human and worthy of all activities. The general lifestyle of the scientist, by this logic, had a worthiness of its own, independent of any specific accomplishments in the moment. Little value was to be gained in rushing, as the work itself provided reward. This mindset supported a Renaissance-style understanding of professional efforts as one element among many that combine to create a flourishing existence.” (115)

What this masterful quote adds to our discussion so far is the intrinsic value of meaningful work. In addition to its practical value in transforming the student, learning should be done for its own sake and as its own reward. The hustle and bustle of modern schooling necessities against this more natural and humane approach. Meanwhile it fosters grade grubbing and the worst type of pragmatism in education. 

In the next and final installment, we’ll explore Cal Newport’s final principle of slow productivity, “obsess over quality” and wrap up the series with a summary of practical applications from all three principles. Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

The post Slow Productivity in School: Part 3, Work at a Natural Pace appeared first on .

“A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.” (41)

In this series of articles we’re unpacking and reapplying Newport’s insights to see how they bring to light some of the core principles of classical education. For instance, the phrase multum non multa has often been used to emphasize an approach similar to his principles: depth over breadth, and quality over quantity. The phrase comes from a letter of Pliny the Younger 7.9-15 and originally refers to his advice for a student to read much, not many things. This could be taken to mean that he read the right books or the best books over and over again rather than simply reading more. It thus stands for an important classical prioritization of the quality of material read or studied, over simply checking the box of more subjects or books, regardless of their importance or enduring value.

In this article we’re going to unpack Cal Newport’s first principle of doing fewer things and apply it to the students’ work of learning in school. Along the way we’ll discuss some of the complex problems around what this means for the number of subjects, the structure of the school day, and the type and number of assignments we give to students. Let’s dig in.

In the context of knowledge work on the job, Cal Newport explains how his revolutionary idea of doing fewer things might play itself out:

“Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.” (53)

As I’ve said before, Newport’s book will likely be helpful and inspiring to classical school administrators as well. The dizzying variety of demands involved in running a small school can be overwhelming. Cal Newport’s not alone in the business and productivity workspace to argue for focused effort on the work that matters most and the ruthless elimination of secondary obligations that are really distractions. It’s almost a mantra, even if still widely unpracticed. For instance, in their book The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth behind Extraordinary Results, Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan made the best-seller lists by arguing that “success isn’t a game that’s won by whoever does the most,” but that instead people should ask themselves, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” In this context, Newport’s “Do fewer things” feels almost modest and more realistic in its understatement. 

Doing fewer things perhaps resonates most obviously with the multum non multa saying. I like to think of it most of all as embracing depth, not breadth. If you try to do too much in work or in school, you will often end up doing shallow, incomplete work of questionable quality. Committing to doing fewer things feels scary, as if we are abandoning the societal value accorded the sacred claims of “productivity” in the first place. But it actually enables the type of focus and attention necessary for the true productivity or accomplishment that moves the needle (to invoke a worn-out business cliche…). As Newport’s explanation reminds us, some projects matter more than others, and it can easily be demonstrated that this is the case in school too. 

Busyness and relentless activities do not produce great students. In the tradition there was a recognition that certain studies would serve as the foundation of other studies. The liberal arts were the “tools of learning,” according to Dorothy Sayers, that would enable the student to work as a craftsman of general learning and knowledge and therefore continue learning well for life. The problem of modern education was focusing on teaching “subjects” rather than these tools, and thus wasting labor. We can see how one of the central clarion calls of our educational reform movement (Sayers’ “The Lost Tools of Learning” essay) resonates with the call to do fewer things. What are those things we should do, according to Sayers? Grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. And all the subjects that you might choose are merely grist for the mill. The focus of the educator should be on the students’ accomplishment or productivity in handling these tools. 

This is one helpful way of approaching the challenge, but it requires the consistent intentionality of the teacher to work against the grain of her culture in a purely mental way. If the curriculum writers and designers consistently pull her back to the rigmarole of manyness over muchness, it is worth questioning how much has really changed here. This has led some classical education leaders to radical proposals like putting everything on block periods and cutting classes down to the bare minimum of “classical subjects.” The obvious problem with this is which subjects to cut. It may be easier in the upper grades to collapse history, literature and Bible or theology into one another through an integrated humanities course, as does the Omnibus series of Veritas Press. But in this case, we have not really saved time or done fewer things; we have simply combined or grouped these areas of study together. In the meantime, we have actually added to the number of subjects or courses studied by introducing philosophical texts into K-12 education, along with logic and rhetoric courses. 

In the lower grades we might ask what we are cutting with equal, if not stronger, force. Surely, we are not cutting phonics or grammar, penmanship or composition, history, literature or Bible? Perhaps we should cut mathematics and science? Or the unnecessary fine arts, like music and drawing? Are there any advocates for cutting PE? How about recess? What does “do fewer things” and multum non multa practically mean in a modern school? Is it really classical to have fewer subjects? 

My answer to the last question, and the answer of at least one stream of the classical tradition, is no. The problem is not the number of subjects but the approach to assignments and the pace and quality of student work. Quintilian, the famed Roman rhetoric teacher of the 1st century, provides the most ancient and authoritative voice for this embrace of manyness in subjects, if not in assignments. In his Institutes of Oratory Quintilian commends the importance of early training from the grammarian, and in that context emphasizes just how many subjects of books the student should read and learn from in his early years:

“Nor is it sufficient to have read the poets only; every class of writers must be studied, not simply for matter, but for words, which often receive their authority from writers. Nor can grammar be complete without a knowledge of music, since the grammarian has to speak of meter and rhythm; nor, if he is ignorant of astronomy, can he understand the poets, who, to say nothing of other matters, so often allude to the rising and setting of the stars in marking the seasons; nor must he be unacquainted with philosophy, both on account of numbers of passages, in almost all poems, drawn from the most abstruse subtleties of physical investigation, and also on account of Empedocles among the Greeks, and Varro and Lucretius among the Latins, who have committed the precepts of philosophy to verse.” (1.4.4; Translated by John Selby Watson, edited by Curtis Dozier and Lee Honeycutt.)

When Quintilian says that “every class of writers must be studied,” he encompasses the breadth of a humane and liberal education, not a bare-bones trivium training (without sufficient “grist for the mill”; let us give Dorothy Sayers her due…). We can hear the liberal arts categories, especially the quadrivium, endorsed explicitly in his mention of music and astronomy. And he specifically goes beyond those categories even to embrace the reading of philosophy, not after formal study of grammar and then rhetoric is completed, but before and during. 

It’s passages like these that show how insufficient a bare bones view of what it meant for ancients to study the trivium is, from the point of view of what we in modern times call “subjects.” Quintilian’s grammar stage (if we can call it that) embraced wide and humane reading across the subjects. We might even say that it encourages breadth over depth in reading, contrary to the apt phrase of Pliny the Younger. 

If any would claim that we are overstraining Quintilian’s context to apply it to the argument about the number of subjects for young students, we can point to an even clearer context where Quintilian specifically endorses sending our young orator in training to the teachers of grammar, music, geometry, acting and dance, and then answers the common objection of his day: 

“It is a common question whether, supposing all these things [grammar and music and geometry and acting and dance] are to be learned, they can all be taught and acquired at the same time, for some deny that this is possible, as the mind must be confused and wearied by so many studies of different tendency for which neither the understanding, nor the body, nor time itself, can suffice. Even though mature age may endure such labor, it is said, that of childhood ought not to be thus burdened.” (1.12.1)

Here we see him specifically take up the number of “subjects” studied at one and the same time, i.e. the question of a student’s course load, as it were. The supposed confusion and weariness might mimic our own concerns for leisure, contemplation and restful learning. His answer is so stunning and helpful that it is worth reproducing in full:

“2. But these reasoners do not understand how great the power of the human mind is, that mind which is so busy and active and which directs its attention, so to speak, to every quarter so that it cannot even confine itself to do only one thing, but bestows its force upon several, not merely in the same day, but at the same moment. 3. Do not players on the harp, for example, exert their memory and attend to the sound of their voice and the various inflections of it, while at the same time they strike part of the strings with their right hand and pull, stop, or let loose others with their left, while not even their foot is idle, but beats time to their playing, all these acts being done simultaneously? 4. Do not we advocates, when surprised by a sudden necessity to plead, say one thing while we are thinking of what is to follow, and while at the very same moment, the invention of arguments, the choice of words, the arrangement of matter, gesture, delivery, look, and attitude are necessarily objects of our attention? If all these considerations of so varied a nature are forced, as by a single effort, before our mental vision, why may we not divide the hours of the day among different kinds of study, especially as variety itself refreshes and recruits the mind, while on the contrary, nothing is more annoying than to continue at one uniform labor? Accordingly, writing is relieved by reading, and the tedium of reading itself is relieved by changes of subject. 5. However many things we may have done, we are yet to a certain degree fresh for that which we are going to begin. Who, on the contrary, would not be stupefied if he were to listen to the same teacher of any art, whatever it might be, through the whole day? But by change a person will be recruited, as is the case with respect to food, by varieties of which the stomach is re-invigorated and is fed with several sorts less unsatisfactorily than with one. 6. Or let those objectors tell me what other mode there is of learning. Ought we to attend to the teacher of grammar only, and then to the teacher of geometry only, and cease to think, during the second course, of what we learned in the first? Should we then transfer ourselves to the musician, our previous studies being still allowed to escape us? Or while we are studying Latin, ought we to pay no attention to Greek? Or to make an end of my questions at once, ought we to do nothing but what comes last before us? “

“7. So much more easy is it to do many things one after the other, than to do one thing for a long time.” (1.12.2-6, 7; pp. 61-62)

In this passage Quintilian makes a lock tight argument for our common practice of packing in subjects in period blocks and shifting a student’s attention from one to the other to make determinate progress in one, only to break off as fatigue begins to set in and start onto something new. While we may decry the school bell, as savoring of the factory, there is a sense in which this practice of the periodization of school into discrete subjects is both classical and incredibly powerful. Charlotte Mason had likewise repeated the Victorian proverb, “A change is as good as a rest.” It may even have been derived from this context, as Mason herself found an endorsement of narration in the early pages of Quintilian and her own familiar analogy of food and appetite for student learning, with variety as increasing the appetite or curiosity of the student. This is Quintilian’s early take on the science of human attention, as we have since explained through neuroscience: novelty increases both motivation and attention.

Does this mean block periods are bad? Not necessarily. The nature of the complex tasks, like socratic dialogue or writing, may actually benefit from longer stretches of work, especially for older students. But it is worth questioning whether the productivity claims of focusing on one project over multiple hour blocks apply to the education of children. As Quintilian concludes, it is easier to do many things, one after the other, than to persist in a single activity or project for a long time.

If, then, we have dismissed the spurious application of “Do Fewer Things” to cutting the number of subjects and the periods of modern school, what does that leave us with? Cut busywork! Cut the number of assignments down and instead ensure that students complete quality, complex work. Replace the endless hamster wheel of worksheets with written narrations and essay responses. Instead of coloring in preprinted outlines, have students develop an eye for careful copywork and artistry of their own. 

In the next articles on working at a natural pace and obsessing over quality, we’ll explain further what this application of “Do Fewer Things” looks like as we embrace depth over breadth in our approach to work, rather than cutting important subjects from K-12 education.

The post Slow Productivity in School, Part 2: Do Fewer Things appeared first on .

I recently read Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport, which was fascinating for its practical application of this principle to the pseudo-productivity so common in our working world today. Emails, app channels, meetings, and looking busy dominate the landscape of office work, to the detriment, all too often, of not only true productivity, but also appropriate margin and work-life balance. While I found the book personally helpful and encouraging for school administration, I was also struck by the phrase “slow productivity” and its helpfulness for conveying the classical approach to our students’ work in school. 

In this series of short articles, I want to unpack Cal Newport’s principles for slow productivity and apply them, instead, to pedagogy at a K-12 classical school. My thesis is that teachers should guide students in the kind of slow productivity in school that optimizes durable learning and cultivates the intellectual virtues. But first we should uncover the analogous problem to our modern office woes. 

Like the office, too often modern educators are fooled by various types of pseudo-productivity that end up undercutting the goals of our educational programs. Time is filled up with “busywork” for students, we race through books regardless of their value for deep learning, and plan “learning activities” that actually undercut the development of genuine intellectual virtues while favoring ease of implementation for student and teacher alike. Minutes and hours crammed with edutainment (I can’t believe that’s even a word…) mirror the hustle and bustle of the office, with little to show for all this supposed productivity. 

What is going wrong here in educational terms? We are focused less on the quality of student work, than on the quantity of filling time with easy-to-apply learning activities. Worksheets, coloring sheets, entertaining educational videos, and flashy, lowest-common-denominator “literature” are filling up the precious educational hours of our students. The inevitable outcome of such fast and easy productivity is low quality and low expectations. What is lost on many modern educators is how all this twaddle and twaddling activities (I am borrowing and reapplying Charlotte Mason’s preferred term for poor quality, childish reading material…) is harming the development of our children. 

When we compare the educational value of, say, a student writing a paragraph or two in cursive of their own volition and drawn from their own memory of a rich text they have read, with any of the aforementioned activities, which are so common in modern education, we can see how much of modern education is best classified as pseudo-productivity. Considered from the vantage point of student attainment, filling out single word answers in a pre-packaged worksheet doesn’t hold a candle to the intellectual virtues honed and developed by, for instance, a written narration. Why is it that we settle for pseudo productivity at school? 

There are likely multiple culprits, but one of them has a similar origin to the historical backdrop of knowledge work pseudo-productivity that Newport describes in his book: the factory mindset. The idea of “productivity” itself rings of the revolution in efficiency brought about in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. As Newport explains, 

There was, of course, a well-known human cost to this emphasis on measurable improvement. Working on an assembly line is repetitive and boring, and the push for individuals to be more efficient in every action creates conditions that promote injury and exhaustion. But the ability for productivity to generate astonishing economic growth in these sectors swept aside most such concerns. (17-18)

Efficiency experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor applied this science in factory settings to great effect. Such gains captured the imagination of the world, including managers of knowledge workers and educational leaders and curriculum designers. The problem is that assessing or judging quality ended up being so much trickier in the knowledge and learning sectors.

This lure of efficiency is part of why Bloom’s Taxonomy often ends up backfiring in a management-centered approach to education. The efficiency of systems of grading, quick completion of “assignments” and tying “learning activities” to standards crowd out the need for careful judgment and high standards. Even if Bloom’s Taxonomy was intended to push educators toward more complex cognitive skills on the hierarchy, it is nevertheless possible to make students perform an easy or shallow “synthesis” task, as it is a knowledge task. Narration as a complex and multifaceted “learning activity” might seem to rank as merely a knowledge task, but it engages the creativity, memory and artistry of the student, while solidifying their understanding of the new story or history they encountered. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy has tried to treat knowledge work in school, just like steps in an assembly line. One part at a time, building up to higher levels of complexity. The only problem is that the brain and knowledge work, simply do not work best like that; isolating bits of information and steps in tasks to their lowest or most basic level (except at the very beginning of something new) can tend to stereotype and bore the minds of our students. They race through “material” without really learning or understanding it, and quickly forget the little that they have learned. Slow productivity in school is the only real productivity.

Cal Newport defines the solution to pseudo-productvity as slow productivity, explaining it as 

“A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.” (41)

In the following articles of this series, we’ll unpack each of these three principles and see how they might apply to student work in school. In the meantime, share in the comments section how you have seen pseudo-productivity invading modern schooling, as well as any ideas or proven methods for ensuring student work is deep and of high quality.

The post Slow Productivity in School, Part 1: The Problem of Pseudo-Productivity appeared first on .