The Epicurean doctrine of the soul stands as a direct challenge to classical Christian education, as it provides the most comprehensive philosophical ancestor to modern materialism. We might almost see the entire secular modern zeitgeist, so entrenched in the western world, as merely the long shadow of Epicureanism. This fact alone gives the lie to modernism’s grandiose claims of progress, enlightenment and deliverance from medieval superstition. Little do its adherents realize that they have unwittingly adopted the views of one ancient Greek philosopher against the others! 

How true it is what the writer of Ecclesiastes said, that there is nothing new under the sun, a statement that applies more often than we might think in the realm of ideas. As a side note, this fact provides a potent rationale for introducing our students to the Great Conversation in our classical Christian education model.

Epicurus (c. 341–270 BC) follows right after Aristotle as the founder of a new school called “The Garden,”the counter to his contemporary Zeno of Citium, the originator of Stoicism. The vast majority of Epicurus’ writings have been lost to us, with the exception of a few letters by Diogenes Laërtius, a list of maxims, and some scraps preserved in the arguments of later writers. He taught that the highest good is ataraxia (tranquility, or freedom from fear) and aponia (absence of pain), and he aimed to deliver his followers from the superstitious fear of death and the gods through his claims of a materialistic and atomistic universe.

The Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius (c. 99 – 55 BC) provides the fullest exposition of Epicurean thought through his 6 book didactic poem De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”). In it a pseudo-scientific vision of the universe as made up entirely of atoms is used to unravel the “superstition” of traditional religions, as well as the immortality of the soul. As could be imagined, the implications of his views for morality are immense. While he ends book 4 with a diatribe against romantic love and sexual desire as a source of immense suffering and madness, and a distraction from rational philosophical pursuits, it is hard to remove him from the charge of nihilistic amoralism, or at least unfettered hedonism. There is a reason the biblical quotation, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” becomes associated with Epicureanism (see Isaiah 22:13; Proverbs 23:35; Luke 12:19; 1 Corinthians 15:32).

While we must ultimately reject its conclusions regarding morality and mortality, we will, following the ghost of these ideas into the courtyard, glean valuable warnings as well as helpful insights regarding the educational impact of our fundamental beliefs and the intimate connection between the soul, the body, and the process of learning.

The Material and Corporeal Soul

The Epicurean soul is defined by its substance: it is material and corporeal. This atomistic view directly opposes Aristotle’s hylomorphism, discussed in the last article, which held the soul to be the form or the “first grade of actuality” of a natural body. In contrast, the substance or essence of the soul, for Epicurus, is not form but fine particles. In his De Anima, Aristotle had spent a whole section demolishing the atomic view of the soul propounded by Democritus long before. Epicurus revived this view of the mind or soul as minute particles spread throughout the body 

Epicurus maintained a strictly materialist (atomic) view of the soul, the gods and the eternal universe as a whole and so might be the first progenitor of the leading myth of modern secularism. The mind (animus) and the soul (anima) are a corporeal aggregate of atoms. Lucretius specifies that the soul is formed of “very minute, fine, and tiny particles” (p. 112) This corporeal nature dictates the soul’s function during life, defining the relationship between the body and mind:

“Now I say that mind and soul are held in union one with the other, and form of themselves a single nature, but that the head, as it were, and lord in the whole body is the reason, which we call mind or understanding, and it is firmly seated in the middle region of the breast…. The rest of the soul, spread abroad throughout the body, obeys and is moved at the will and inclination of the understanding” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III., p. 110).

According to Lucretius, the soul is intimately united with the body, being inextricably “linked on throughout veins, flesh, sinews, and bones” (p. 211). It’s hard not to be somewhat impressed by this stunning anticipation of the nervous system, even while we object to the ultimate conclusions of his philosophy.

The Soul as Biological Mechanism

Though the Epicurean view of the soul fails to account for the transcendent or divine aspect of the human person (the imago Dei), its emphasis on the materiality of the mind offers a surprising parallel to the modern discoveries of neuroscience and the physical substrata of cognition and sensation. It’s important to give the devil his due. Of course, we now locate the seat of the mind in the head rather than the chest–a view argued for later on by Galen, the 2nd century AD physician and philosopher, but the physical similarities of a central nervous system command center (animus – mind) and neural networks of a similar nature distributed throughout the body (anima – soul) are not inconsequential.

As the source of motion, the mind must be nimble because, as he explains, “Nothing is seen to come to pass so swiftly as what the mind pictures to itself coming to pass and starts to do itself.” This nimble nature means the mind “is very fine in texture, and is made and formed of very tiny particles”(pp. 112-113). Moreover, the mind is seen to act physically upon the body:

“This same reasoning shows that the nature of mind and soul is bodily. For when it is seen to push on the limbs, to pluck the body from sleep, to change the countenance, and to guide and turn the whole man—none of which things we see can come to pass without touch, nor touch in its turn without body—must we not allow that mind and soul are formed of bodily nature?” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III., p. 111).

This description of the Mind (Animus) acting as the “monarch of life” (p. 119) that instantly initiates motion throughout the limbs highlights the importance of the physical mechanism of the body (what we now term the nervous system) in sensation and thought. The Epicureans, forced by their materialism to account for all consciousness through physics, explain that mental activity requires a delicate, highly mobile, and well-functioning corporeal nature. The fact that the mind is “distressed by the blow of bodily weapons” reinforces the inseparable bond between body and thought (p. 112).

Even without the benefit of magnetic resonance imaging, we can imagine how the experience of sensation itself might lead an ancient person to this conclusion. There must be some substance connecting my thoughts and will to my limbs. By comparison, Plato’s entirely non-material soul seems a bit farfetched and shadowy, while Aristotle’s hylomorphic soul might feel overly academic, with its complex distinction between form and substance. In a way it’s not surprising that the atomic conception of the soul survived Aristotle’s dismantling into the less philosophical Hellenistic era.

Mortality and the Pragmatic Pursuit of Tranquility

Epicureanism’s insistence on a proto-scientific and thoroughly materialistic account of the human soul serves a primarily pragmatic picture of death. The mind stuff simply disintegrates when the physical bonds holding it together are severed at death. Consciousness, an emergent phenomenon of life, which itself arose on its own, evolution-like, from an eternal, infinite universe full of swirling atoms, will simply cease with death.

The Epicurean position is absolute mortality. Since the mind and soul are material, they are subject to death and dissolution, contradicting the Aristotelean assertion that the rational soul or mind (nous) is “separable, impassible, unmixed and alone is immortal and eternal” (Aristotle, On the Soul, III. 5; p. 179). Lucretius argues that since the mind “can be changed by medicine,” it “has a mortal life” (p. 123).

An early adopter of the conservation of matter, Lucretius claims that the soul is “dissolved” into its constituent atoms upon death:

“Now therefore, since, when vessels are shattered, you behold the water flowing away on every side, and the liquid parting this way and that, and since cloud and smoke part asunder into air, you must believe that the soul too is scattered and passes away far more swiftly, and is dissolved more quickly into its first-bodies, when once it is withdrawn from a man’s limbs, and has departed.” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III., p. 209)

This doctrine aims to banish the “old fear of Acheron” and the “close bondage of religion” by confirming that death is nothing to us (p. 107).

Although there may be gods or a God, they are uninterested in us, and there is no afterlife, no Hades, and no eternal punishment. The fate of the atomic soul, therefore, establishes the profound ethical difference between Epicureanism and its philosophical predecessors, not to mention Christian theology. Right and wrong are not enforced by an impartial law of justice; there is no transcendence or final righting of wrongs, but only a hedonistic justification for virtue rather than vice as the most beneficial path. Yet, the Epicurean dedication to mental peace (ataraxia) does reveal a pragmatic insight that is nevertheless valuable to educators.

The Value of Physical and Mental Tranquility for Study

The Epicurean goal is pleasure (hedone), defined as the “absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul” (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus). While pleasure here is an end in itself, the means by which Epicureans achieve this—the dedication to study (for him primarily natural science)—does not devolve into all-out moral dissolution. This vision of ataraxia (tranquility) for the sake of pleasurable contemplation offers a positive pedagogical mandate: cultivating tranquility is necessary for serious intellectual work.

Lucretius urges his student, Memmius, to approach philosophy correctly:

“For the rest, do thou (Memmius), lend empty ears and a keen mind, severed from cares, to true philosophy, lest, before they are understood, you should leave aside in disdain my gifts set forth for you with unflagging zeal” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura I., p. 62).

The acquisition of knowledge is explicitly linked to the maintenance of pleasure, in a way that is similar to Aristotle’s view of the contemplative life as the happiest. Of course, for Lucretius this vision is corrupted through his anti-religious bias: knowledge of nature (philosophy/natural science) is essential, as it banishes the fears of the gods and death, providing the highest pleasure. The ultimate success of philosophy is to save us from the “high seas and thick darkness, and enclose it in calm waters” (p. 186) This emphasis on intellectual calm, when recontextualized, provides a compelling ideal for classical Christian educators to encourage a state of mental quietude in their students, necessary for the contemplative work of learning.

Modern research has observed a loss of higher-order thinking during an emotional crisis of fear, referring to it as stress-induced prefrontal cortex downregulation, which impairs executive functions like planning and logical judgment. This impairment occurs because a perceived threat triggers Sympathetic Nervous System activation and an amygdala hijack, forcing the brain to divert resources away from the complex thought processes of the Prefrontal Cortex and towards immediate survival responses. Essentially, the emotional, primal brain overrides the rational brain to prioritize fight-or-flight, leading to a temporary but significant cognitive deficit.

In a similar way, intense desire and craving activate the brain’s dopaminergic reward pathway, effectively causing reward-induced executive dysfunction where the subcortical reward centers override the rational Prefrontal Cortex; this results in a loss of top-down control and a short-sighted focus on immediate gratification over long-term consequence. The transcendent insight here, from Epicureanism to modern research, is the importance of cultivating a tranquil mind for the deeper and more lasting intellectual joy in learning. A lifestyle of emotional swings and sympathetic or dopaminergic overload is, after all, not a recipe for eudaimonia or human flourishing. As Charlotte Mason also emphasized, cultivating a vibrant life of the mind can be an important way of helping children avoid a life of moral debauchery imprisoned to less honorable sensual passions.

Furthermore, the Epicurean focus on a calm physical well-being highlights the importance of the material body for the work of learning. Epicurus teaches that “independence of outward things is a great good, not so as in all cases to use little, but so as to be contented with little if we have not much” (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus). This sober reasoning, aimed at securing “health of body and tranquillity of mind” is a pragmatic recognition that physical pain or excessive bodily wants are a hindrance to the sustained mental effort required for wisdom. We might see an agreement with Charlotte Mason’s insistence on the harmful effects of manipulating students into learning through a fear of punishments or the promise of rewards, as these actually undermine higher order thinking and genuine curiosity which has its own reward.

The Epicurean Legacy and the Materialist Ghost

Despite these practical insights regarding the physical substructure of sensation, the value of tranquility for study, and its limited moral applications, the Epicurean framework remains fundamentally flawed, leading directly to the philosophical dead ends that continue to haunt modern secular education.

The Epicurean reduction of man to mortal atoms necessitates a rejection of divine purpose, leading Lucretius to attack the teleological view of nature. The universe was created, not by a “foreseeing mind,” but by the chance “movements and unions of every kind” of atoms (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura I., p. 101).

If the soul is merely material, the quest for truth is limited to the pragmatic aim of avoiding fear and pain. This contrasts sharply with Aristotle’s elevation of the rational soul to contemplate necessary, unchanging truth (epistēmē and nous), culminating in philosophic wisdom (sophia). The reduction of the soul to mechanics anticipates the modern trend of reducing soul, mind and spirit to the mechanics of the amygdala, frontal lobes, and dopaminergic system. We do not contest these physical and physiological discoveries, but the philosophical (and religious!) claims are just that. The fact that there are connected physical processes underlying cognition do not and cannot prove that nothing spiritual or immaterial is present as well. 

And this is not even to mention that strict materialism has no way to account for truth itself or the mind’s perception of it. Philosophically, Epicureanism (like its descendant of secular materialism) provides the intellectual equivalent of a man climbing onto a large branch, facing the trunk of the tree, only to begin sawing off the branch he is lying on. How can material man, a mere jumble of atoms, perceive immaterial truth correctly? Epicurus simply abandoned Plato’s problem of accounting for the transcendentals; he did not solve it.

Likewise, the Epicurean system struggles to maintain objective morality, arguing that virtues are necessary only insofar as they prevent the individual from experiencing temporary breakdowns in the pursuit of his own pleasure. Justice, according to Epicurus, is not intrinsically good:

“Injustice is not in itself an evil, but only in its consequence, viz. the terror which is excited by apprehension that those appointed to punish such offenses will discover the injustice.” (Epicurus, Principal Doctrines)

If morality is merely a “compact” or a convention, it lacks the objective weight necessary for the integrated formation of the soul, which Plato defined as the pursuit of justice achieved through the proper ordering of the rational, spirited, and appetitive parts. Relativism in ethics follows hard on the heels of skeptical materialism.

Pedagogy and Warning: Lessons for the Classical Christian Educator

The Epicurean view serves as a powerful cautionary tale, highlighting how prioritizing mortal pleasure over transcendent purpose undermines the classical Christian mission.

While the Epicureans offered a remarkably acute understanding of how sensation and thought are linked to physical motion and the “fineness of texture” of the body’s material components, the reduction of the entire soul to this atomic mechanism is where the system collapses.

The materialist emphasis, though supporting the importance of attending to the physical health and nourishment of the body for learning, cannot account for the part of the soul (Aristotle’s nous) that is “incapable of being destroyed” and alone is “immortal and eternal”. By reducing the soul to a destructible material form, Epicureanism limits the student’s telos to the mortal pursuit of individual pleasure, contradicting the Christian view of the human person as being made for eternal communion with God and bodily resurrection.

Similarly, the Epicurean ideal of tranquility (ataraxia) is a desirable precursor to focused intellectual study, which the classical Christian educator can and should affirm under the general tradition of schole or leisure (see e.g., Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture or Chris Perrin’s The Schole Way). However, when this is made the ultimate end of life, it leads to the dangerous avoidance of necessary conflict and labor.

The Epicurean wise person limits desires and seeks simple, easily procured pleasures to “remove the pain of want” and “avoid conflict.” This stands against the classical ideal of training the soul (especially the spirited part) to embrace “physical training to endure pains and sufferings” and the toil necessary for growth. If we prioritize the elimination of distress above all else, we risk producing “unrighteous men, enslaved to their own prejudices and appetites,” who are unwilling to enter the labor and conflict required for both intellectual mastery and moral virtue. The Epicurean philosophy, by grounding the soul in atoms, ultimately confines humanity within the “deepset boundary-stone” of mortality, forever hindering the spiritual revolution of the mind required for true human flourishing.

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Aristotle. On the Soul. Translated by J. A. Smith. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed October, 2025. http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/soul.html.

Epicurus. “Letter to Menoeceus.” Translated by Robert Drew Hicks. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed October, 2025. classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html. 

Epicurus. “Principal Doctrines.” Translated by Robert Drew Hicks. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed October, 2025. classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/princdoc.html. Lucretius. Lucretius on the Nature of Things. Translated by Cyril Bailey. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1910.

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A fascinating and yet easily misunderstood area of research is cognitive load theory. Our brains are set up with systems to retain and use vast amounts of knowledge, and yet they all have systems to reject as much unnecessary knowledge in order to conserve energy. By understanding brain functions as delineated in cognitive load theory, we can apply certain strategies aimed at effective learning. In this article we will set out the theory in basic terms and provide some practices that you can use in the classroom.

Cognitive Load Theory in a Nutshell

Our brains are high efficiency machines. They consume a lot of calories to do things like see in color, plan for the future and organize complex systems of information. If you’ve ever put in the effort to learn a new language, you can literally feel the energy your brain is consuming. For me, there’s a special kind of tired that goes with learning something new. The brain does a lot of work to manage its energy consumption by doing a lot of work up front to discard much of what it deems unnecessary. And this is what has lead to the conceptualization of cognitive load theory.

John Sweller, an educational psychologist at the University of New South Wales, originally launched his understanding of cognitive load theory in the 1980s. The idea is that instructional design should conform to the contours of the brain’s process of information gathering and information storing. In essence, the brain uses working memory to temporarily store information before moving the information it wants to keep into long-term memory. Studies have shown that working memory is quite limited in terms of the amount of information it can hold at one time. If the goal is to get the highest value information into long-term memory, then one has to deal with the limitations of working memory.

Alongside the model of information processing is the idea of perceived mental effort. The amount of effort it takes to get pieces of information into the working memory slots can tax the energy of the learner. For instance, if a student has, say, five slots available in their working memory and the teacher intends to have the class learn five pieces of information, there’s a good match between the effort it will take to get those pieces of information into the working memory slots. However, if there are other stimuli vying for attention, this can interfere with the slots available in the learner’s working memory. Obviously, a distracting environment with stimulating colors and noisy classmates can cause this kind of interference. Yet, even accounting for this, there are other kinds of interference based simply on the way the information is presented. If a learner has to expend energy just to sort out the information from the context it is embedded in, the energy stores of the learner may be depleted before ever putting the information into the working memory slots.

This kind of information gathering effort is referred to as cognitive load. Theorists break cognitive load into three categories: intrinsic, extraneous and germane. Intrinsic load pertains to the level of challenge associated with any given subject being learned. For instance, a math problem has its own intrinsic cognitive load due to the effort it takes to calculate each step. Extraneous cognitive load amounts to any aspects that are irrelevant to the thing being learned. Factors that contribute to extraneous load are poor layout of information, confusing explanations, distracting environments, topics that are tangential, and so forth. Some of these factors are unavoidable, but a teacher who can identify causes of extraneous load can help navigate a student towards the most pertinent topic at hand. Germane cognitive load has to do with the process of moving information into long-term memory by way of the working memory slots available. We could think of this as the neurons at work inside the brain.

There are two take aways from this very basic overview of cognitive load theory. First, when we are working with learners, the more we understand the pathway to long-term memory by way of working memory, we can begin to work with the brain instead of fighting against it. Simply knowing that working memory only has a few slots available makes us that much more aware of what it is we are trying to get into the young person’s brain.

Second, we need to come to grips with different kinds of effort. We should not be afraid of effort or challenge. In fact, as we will see below, we ought to be challenging our students because this is the pathway to growth. Instead, we need to be choosy about what kinds of effort we place in front of our students. It’s the old adage that we need to work smarter, not harder. Some educators who get fixated on the concept of “rigor” have difficulty with this. The perception that students are working hard meets the criteria of “rigor,” but we need to evaluate whether we are accepting wasted effort under the guise of “hard work.”

Reducing Effort through Chunking

The mind can only hold a few pieces of information at once in working memory. Some people with extremely adept working memory can hold up to seven pieces of information, but most people can only hold on average four pieces of information. In Uncommon Sense Teaching, the authors advise using “chunking” to compensate for the limitation of working memory:

“Most students can hold a maximum of four pieces of information in working memory at a time. When working memory can’t keep up, students shut down and tune out. Instead, break your content and skills into bite-size, digestible chunks.” (243)

Let’s illustrate this with a diagram. In the following diagram, the number of blocks is difficult to apprehend.

But with a simple reorganization of the blocks, we can chunk the information so that it is easy to know how many blocks there are.

You can easily see four groups of three blocks plus a group of two blocks to make fourteen blocks in total. The number of blocks didn’t change, but our ability to easily see a pattern did change. You may have felt the difference in mental effort trying to count the first disorganized set and the relative ease with which the “chunked” set could be counted.

Now think about other areas of knowledge from foreign language vocabulary words to scientific terms. If a student perceives these things as a disorganized set of random factoids, they have to spend an inordinate amount of mental effort to “push” this information into their heads. There is no “hook” to hang these things on. It feels arbitrary and that some amount of luck goes into retaining certain pieces of information. But if the student can have the information reorganized or “chunked” so that related concepts are linked together and attached to already known concepts, then there is far less organizational effort, and therefore all the brain effort can be allocated to assimilating the information.

There are two approaches to consider with chunking. The first approach is the teacher-chunked delivery method. This is particularly helpful when something is accessed for the first time. For those using a narration-based lesson plan, the “first little talk” is an excellent time to chunk concepts, lowering the barrier to access for what is about to be read and narrated. The second approach is the student-chunked receiving method. Here we teach students how to break things down. Helping students take something that might seem disorganized and reorganize it for themselves helps them to practice a skill that will enhance their future learning.

Good Effort, Bad Effort

One of the common misconceptions about cognitive load theory is that learners should not experience cognitive effort. This could not be further from the truth. Instead, we should think about how to maximize the effort of learning, distinguishing good effort from bad effort. We might think to ourselves after assigning fifty new vocabulary words that the effort being put in is automatically worthwhile because we want our students to learn how to meet rigorous challenges. However, if we haven’t put in the work ourselves to differentiate the types of effort that need to be put into the task of learning, then we might have just assigned a lot of bad effort, creating massive inefficiencies in student learning.

To get at this, we need to think about our goals. What is the aim we are looking for in learning this set of new vocabulary words? We might say it is to have good recall of the meaning of these words with the ability to use them regularly in the activities we will be doing over the next several weeks. Notice that the goal is not to spend hours pouring over a list of random words. If student effort is devoted to this latter goal, the student puts in maximal effort reading and rereading a list of words with low retention and usefulness. They experience frustration because they don’t have a sense of what this all means in the grand scheme of things. A wise teacher, though, understands that the goal is good recall and usefulness. So she puts in some initial work on behalf of the students to help group vocabulary words by way of synonyms, antonyms, common parts of speech, cognates, etc. The initial work that organizes the raw list into comprehensible units paves the pathway for students to put in more effective work when they review their vocabulary. In the coming classes, the teacher builds in practice not through rote memorization of the words, but by cuing these word groups, by asking for mnemonic devices, or by having them illustrate and act out the new vocabulary words. Their effort is directed towards the goal, making the effort highly productive and therefore more satisfying to the learner.

So, we are not talking about learning without effort. We are talking about learning with the best possible effort while eliminating as much as possible non-productive effort. Think of this as finding the pathway to cognitive efficiency. With this in mind, we can borrow from the world of high performance to consider what effective practice looks like. We could think of athletics or music in this sphere. When an athlete practices their running stride, free throw, or golf swing, doing lots and lots of practice without consideration of technique and correct form will only reinforce bad habits. The same goes for a musician working on the fingering of a difficult passage. Careful, slow progression on the most difficult sequences is how top musicians improve. It’s all about focused practice to improve the weakest areas and then deliberate concentration on high quality repetitions. This is challenging, but notice how it is efficient effort.

Effort-full Learning

Top athletes and musicians are able to perform actions marked by beauty, grace and elegance. It looks effortless. Behind these performances are hours of effort-full practice. Returning to the learning environment, we can model cognitive effort on insights gained from the world of high performance. We actually want our students to engage in effort-full activities that grow their capacity to know and think. Let’s explore a four approaches that can be used in the classical classroom.

First, we want to read the best books possible. Most of the best books have certain challenges in them, whether it is the complexity of the plot, density of language or philosophical ideas that require deep thinking. Charlotte Mason suggests that these books should be a feast of ideas that delight the reader and are deeply interesting. And yet there ought to be some heavy lifting involved as well. Think of the weightlifter who needs to consider how to maximize intensity by choosing a heavier load or additional reps. When thinking about cognitive load theory, we actually want there to be a good dose of intrinsic load in order to enhance the brain effort that will help the learner’s mind grow. And yet, we must clear away any extraneous load that would get in the way of the reader accessing the rich ideas in the text. Here I think of the “little talk” we train teachers to use in a narration-based lesson. The little talk is there to increase interest as well as clear any hurdles that might hinder the reader from making full use of the text. It is not about no-effort reading, but instead reading that is optimizing quality effort.

Second, coach students in what effective learning looks like. This gets into concepts of metacognition, where the learner understands for themselves how they learn. They can be introduced to effective strategies so that they choose for themselves processes that they find most effective in knowing and using what they learn in class. Take the idea of chunking in this article. This is a skill that can be learned and coached. Help students find patterns for themselves. Give them feedback and do debriefs where they work towards mastery in learning strategies.

Third, deliberate practice is a necessary condition of high performance. Therefore, we need to not be afraid of effort and challenge in our classrooms. Yes, we want to eliminate as much extraneous cognitive load as possible. However, our minds and bodies respond positively to challenging stimulus. The authors of Make It Stick spell this out beautifully when they write, “The effort and persistence of deliberate practice remodel the brain and physiology to accommodate higher performance” (184). In fact, what they advise is devising particular kinds of challenge to force the brain to encounter effort to enhance learning. These practices can be summarized with the phrases spaced practice, interleaved practice and retrieval practice. Each of these practices gives the brain a challenge to overcome the mechanism of dropping information out of working memory. By connecting to material in these ways, you are giving your brain opportunities to move information from working memory to long term memory. The authors of Make It Stick conclude their chapter where they introduce deliberate practice by stating, “It comes down to the simple but not less profound truth that effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capability” (199).

Finally, narration as a deliberate practice is one of the most effective and efficient ways to maximize attention and effort. A narration lesson is structured to eliminate extraneous cognitive load through the “first little talk” by simultaneously stimulating interest and by clearing any hurdles in what is about to be read. Then the reading of the text occurs in a manageable amount, what Mason called “an episode”—the ideal amount to pay attention well while also having some amount of challenge involved. Then the learner retells without looking, recalling what has just been read. This kind of challenge exercises working memory and gives an initial stimulus to start moving that knowledge into long-term memory storage. Narration is a pedagogical instrument that works well across the curriculum and can be utilized as an operating system to stimulate the effortful learning described in Make It Stick.

Bring the practice of narration to your school by having one of our trainers work with your faculty. Visit our consultation page to learn more and schedule your free 90-minute meeting to discuss how we can help your school achieve excellence.

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In 1750, for example, it took 4-6 weeks to sail by ship from New York to London. By 1850, with the advent of the steam engine, the trans-Atlantic journey was reduced to around 1 week. Today, we can fly from New York to London in just 8 hours.

This acceleration in travel illustrates a new value that has emerged for us in the modern world: speed. “Time is money,” we are told and the finance report does not lie. The litmus test for the quality and success of an endeavor is how fast we can complete it. For the sooner we can cross a task off our list, the more quickly we can move on to the next task. Then the next task. Then the next task. Only here’s the catch in a knowledge economy: the list is infinite. 

In education, this obsession for speed materializes in daily schedules, pacing charts, and lesson plans. We move from subject to subject, concept to concept, and assignment to assignment at the speed of light. But is this approach best for students? Is it cultivating virtue? Are they actually developing mastery over what they are learning? Or are these moments of quick exposure creating the illusion of learning instead? 

Festina Lente: Make Haste Slowly

In The Good Teacher (Classical Academic Press, 2025), Christopher Perrin and Carrie Eben argue that it is not. Of the ten principles for great teaching they present in their book, the first is “Festina Lente, Make Haste Slowly.” They propose that instead of engaging in the rush to cover content, it is better to master each step in a lesson, setting a pace that is fitting for the time available. 

Perrin and Eben go on to provide two examples of this principle in our world today. The first is drawn from Aesop’s beloved fable, “The Tortoise and the Hare.” In this well-known tale, two creatures, a quick-footed hare and a contemplative tortoise, engage in a foot race. While the hare is expected to win with its focus on speed, it is actually the tortoise who wins the race. The upshot is that while the hare was certainly faster, its pace was not sustainable. The tortoise, on the other hand, moves at a slower yet sustainable pace, making haste slowly, and ultimately becomes the victor. 

The other example is Jim Collins’ “Twenty Mile March” concept in Great by Choice (Random House, 2011). Imagine two hikers setting out on a three-thousand mile walk from San Diego, California, to the tip of Maine. One hiker commits to twenty miles a day, no exceptions. Whether the conditions are fair or poor, the itinerary is the same. The other hiker adjusts his daily regimen to the circumstances before him. Depending on weather, terrain, and energy levels, some days he may walk 40 miles, other days he may not walk at all. Like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable, the winner of the race is the hiker committed to the wise, disciplined journey, choosing sustainability over speed. 

Now, it must be pointed out that every analogy has its limits. Not every speedster struggles with the overconfidence exhibited in the hare or the weak will of the second hiker. It is possible to be both fast and virtuous.The key insight is not that we need to choose between the two, but in our present culture’s emphasis on speed, we would do well to slow down, resist the lure of speedy completion, and focus on a process that will instill virtues of diligence and perseverance.

Connecting the twenty-mile hike example to teaching, Perrin and Eben write,

Classical education can be compared to the long journey in this story. Each segment should be intentional, planned, and exercised wisely, with ample allotted time. Students, like the winning hiker, should use time well, as they are guided and modeled along each segment of their academic journey. (p. 24)

Working at a Natural Pace 

Interestingly, Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email, is on to a similar idea in his latest book, Slow Productivity (Penguin Random House, 2024). 

Newport observes that we as a culture have succumbed to what he calls pseudo-productivity, “the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort (22). So we work longer hours, send more emails, and complete more projects, all in the name of productivity. The only problem is that we burn ourselves out, ultimately accomplishing less and at a lower quality. 

Newport’s solution is to adopt a different philosophy of work, one in which we accomplish tasks in a sustainable and meaningful manner. His three principles for this approach are:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.

My colleague at Educational Renaissance, Jason Barney, has written extensively on these principles for the classical educator in this blog series. I encourage you to check out all four articles as he interacts with the likes of Aristotle, Quintilian, Charlotte Mason, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyiy, and others.

Regarding our present focus on how to manage time in the classroom for the sake of virtue formation, Jason writes, “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.”

Rather than sending students off to work on a frenzy of assignments at once, moving from one worksheet to the next, it is better to slow down and hone in on one worthy assignment that will lead students toward a greater depth of understanding.

True Mastery: Getting the Practice Right 

Here we come to a key distinction that must be made. Thus far, I have been encouraging teachers to focus on virtue over speed, process over outcome, and mastery over pseudo-productivity. But what does true mastery look like? And how is it achieved?

I suggest that mastery is achieved when a student can repeatedly demonstrate a particular skill or lucidly explain a concept on demand. In The Good Teacher, Perrin and Eben are adamant that until this happens, teachers should not move on to the next objective, whether it is moving on from addition to multiplication or 3rd to 4th grade (21-22). They are also careful to identify a distortion of festina lente, namely, using the principle as an excuse to focus too long on one concept at the expense of others (27). 

The key clarification I want to make as we seek to implement a mastery-focused approach is regarding the type of practice we ought to implement to meet this end. It would be natural to assume that if the focus is mastery, teachers should engage in what is called massed practice: practice over and over a specific skill until it is mastered, and only then move on to the next skill. Make haste slowly, right?

In Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Belknap Press, 2014), the authors draw upon cognitive science to argue that this sort of practice can only take you so far. They seek to dispel of the myth that the focused, repetitive practice of one thing at a time is the way to mastery. 

They write:

If learning can be defined as picking up new knowledge or skills and being able to apply them later, then how quickly you pick something up is only part of the story. Is it still there when you need to use it out in the everyday world?…The rapid gains produced by massed practice are often evident, but the rapid forgetting that follows is not. (p. 47)

Interestingly, the authors of Make it Stick are putting their finger on the same concern as Perrin and Eben: prioritizing speed over mastery. Instead of practicing one skill over and over again until students can demonstrate mastery, they suggest mixing up the practice. 

In a past article, I write more about this topic, unpacking three key ways from Make it Stick to practice toward mastery:

Spaced Practice: Instead of intensively focusing on one skill for a single, extended session, space out the practice into multiple sessions. Work on it for a while and then return to it the next day or week. The space allotted between each session allows for the knowledge of the skill to soak into one’s long-term memory and connect to prior knowledge. Revisiting the skill each session certainly takes more effort, but that’s the point.

Interleaved Practice: While we experience the quickest gains by focusing on one specific skill or subset of knowledge over a period of time (momentary strength), interleaving, or mixing up the skill or concept you are focusing on in a practice session, leads to stronger understanding and retention (underlying habit strength). It feels sluggish and frustrating at times, for both teachers and students mind you, because it involves moving from skill to skill before full mastery is attained, but it leads to both a depth and durability of knowledge that massed practice does not (50).

Varied Practice: Varying practice entails constantly changing up the situation or conditions in which the skill or concept is being applied. It therefore strengthens the ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it to another, requiring the student to constantly be assessing context and bridging concepts. Because this jump from concept to concept triggers different parts of the brain, it is more cognitively challenging, and therefore encodes the learning “…in a more flexible representation that can be applied more broadly” (52).

To be clear, these forms of mixed practice will be more difficult for students and the practice sessions will take longer. But that is the point. To “make haste slowly” when it comes to practice, you want to support your students in meaningful practice that will lead them toward long-term, not temporary, mastery. 

Conclusion

As classical schools, we are playing the long game as we seek to instill wisdom and virtue in our students. In our fast-paced world, this commitment will surely be misunderstood. We are told that a school’s effectiveness ought to be measured by the number of students enrolled, the number of accolades of its graduates, and the impressiveness of test scores.

But if our goal is true mastery for a life of virtue, instilled with the principle of festina lente, then we need to think more like the tortoise than the hare. We need to be intentional with practice, focus on depth over breadth, and mix it up in order to strengthen the durability of the knowledge gained. This is no doubt the harder road, but with our own perseverance at work, we trust that over time it will bear much fruit.

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The idea behind positive psychology is contained in the adjective “positive.” It’s not about trying to be positive or optimistic. Positive psychology is an intentional departure from a focus almost solely on diagnosing and treating psychological pathologies. This shift saw research begin to investigate concepts like wellbeing, excellence and human flourishing. Instead of viewing every human as containing a set of psychological pathologies, there emerged a view that a human could be coached and counseled towards a better version of themselves.

In this article, we will consider the history and key figures of positive psychology and relate this work to some practical practices we can use in our classrooms. In many ways, positive psychology promotes many of the ideals of classical education and some of the tenets of a biblical worldview. Yet, there may be ways in which we should critically examine this work to capture what is most valuable, while clearly defining points of tension with a Christian perspective.

History of Positive Psychology

We can actually trace the main concepts of positive psychology back to the work of ancient philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle. These philosophers sought to articulate what it means to live a good life, which is aimed at achieving happiness or eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία). In the Phaedrus, Plato shares the story of a charioteer driving two winged horses each having an opposite character. The charioteer must train the noble horse so that the horse full of vices cannot lead the chariot astray. Similarly, Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics lays out the pathway to eudaimonia via the acquisition of virtues which are acquired through the practice of habits. These virtues or excellences (aretai) leading to a life marked by happiness or joy is what modern positive psychology seeks to promote.

Maslow’s Hierarchy

Abraham Maslow, famous for the hierarchy of needs, set a course towards health in his groundbreaking work Toward a Psychology of Being (1968). In this he notes that psychology had up to that point been inclined to treat “sickness.” In the Freudian framework, the individual and the therapist ask the question, “How do I get unsick?” But what if the interior person can be aimed towards higher values and principles? Can a person be pointed towards a new question, “How do I get healthy?” Maslow famously quipped, “It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half” (Toward a Psychology of Being 5). Aiming towards health is a worthy aim and a good corrective to the dominant model of psychology of his time.

What Maslow developed was a theory that aimed to explain human motivations towards peak experiences. Why do some people aim for excellence and actually achieve satisfying results? Most people languish in a state of unfulfilled potential despite having a sense of motivation towards certain goals in life. He developed a hierarchy of needs, depicted with a pyramid in most expositions of his model. The five levels begin at the base with physiological needs like food and shelter. Above this are safety needs such as job security. He identifies love and belonging as the next level, which includes family and friendship. Esteem is the penultimate level including concepts such as respect, status and recognition. Finally the tip of the pyramid is self-actualization where an individual achieves meaningful goals. Maslow did not consider that one progress linearly through this hierarchy, nor that the categories were rigid. Multiple levels of needs can be satisfied, for instance, by landing a job that fulfills physiological and safety needs while also being an achievement of one’s potential.

Christians have not been entirely comfortable with Maslow’s work. The hierarchy of needs, where one must address basic need before arriving at a place of self-actualization seems to miss the mark when it comes to understanding our nature as fallen beings in need of salvation accomplished by another individual—Christ Jesus. McCleskey and Ruddell critically evaluate Maslow’s theory of motivation from a biblical worldview. In their assessment, they find his theory actually offers little of actual help. “So, there is no real hope in Maslow’s approach beyond a vague belief in a secular, utopian, theoretical possibility” (“Taking a Step Back—Maslow’s Theory of Motivation: A Christian Critical Perspective,” JBIB 23 [2020] 14). A fundamental flaw seems to be the individualistic paradigm. Even though connection to others is included in the hierarchy, family and friendship seem to be expressed as a need that support personal achievement. A biblical vision of life fulfilment seems to reverse this, as a deepening walk with Christ brings one closer to God and others.

In fairness to Maslow, he was not aiming to develop a theory that adhered to Christian theology, and in some respects, we can perceive that some basic elements of his theory can be connected to Christian practices. The Bible showcases a variety of personal spiritual disciplines—such as prayer, meditation, fasting, and giving—that foster spiritual growth and a deeper connection to Christ. There seems to be a simplified hierarchy of the disciplined life at the base and greater freedom at the pinnacle. Interestingly, the Christian disciplines seem to promote abstinence from elements of Maslow’s hierarchy—fasting, solitude, humility—on the journey to spiritual fulfilment.

Seligman and Peterson on Core Virtues

A different take on human flourishing was articulated by Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson in the book Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004). Here they apply historical and cultural analysis to identify six core virtues that seem to have a high amount of similarity across different cultures. These core virtues—courage, justice, humanity, temperance, transcendence, wisdom—aggregate other similar virtues, such that we might consider these master virtues that entail other excellence qualities. Whether we fully agree with the listing or definitions of these core virtues, it is interesting to see a shift towards values that would be appreciated within both classical and Christian spheres.

The six core virtues are spelled out in detail by Seligman and Peterson. Courage is “the capacity to overcome fear” (Character Strengths 36) that is manifested not only in the physical sphere, but also in the moral and psychological spheres. They note that courage is not only seen in single acts of courage but also in persistent or chronic spans of courageousness. Additionally, courage is readily seen in heroic examples of the soldierly type, however it is most often an internal state pertaining to things like motivations and decisions.

Justice connotes fairness that is often associated with equity and equality. This virtue can manifest itself differently in collectivist versus individualistic cultures. Concepts of justice can skew towards merit-based reward systems and need-based systems. What seems to transcend this cultural divide is that justice is prevalent in traits like “fairness, leadership, citizenship, and teamwork” (37).

Seligman and Peterson classify the third virtue as “humanity,” defining this as “the virtues involved in relating to another.” Concepts such as generosity and altruism are central to this virtue. They write, “We are quite capable of and often willing to engage in acts of generosity, kindness, or benevolence that are consensually recognized and valued and that elevate those who witness them” (37-38).

Temperance is “the virtue of control over excess.” Seligman and Peterson include in this virtue concepts pertaining to abstinence from various appetites such as eating, drinking and sex, general self-restraint, and the ability to regulate one’s emotions. “Thus,” they write, “temperance is a form of self-denial that is ultimately generous to the self or others—prudence and humility are prime examples” (38). I think their inclusion of the word “generous” provides a positive hue to what might otherwise be construed as potentially harmful to self.

Transcendence can be difficult to define. Seligman and Peterson borrow from Kant and call this “the connection to something higher—the belief that there is meaning or purpose larger than ourselves” (38). People can feel this when they look up at the expanse of stars in the night sky or stand on the beach by the ocean, feeling a sense of the immensity of the universe and our own smallness within it. There is a sense of awe, however, in this perception of one’s insignificance that has an uplifting effect.

Wisdom is a virtue that has classical and Christian traditions associated with it. Seligman and Peterson call wisdom “a form of noble intelligence” that can be described as “knowledge hard fought for, and then used for good” (39). The enumerate strengths included within this virtue such as creativity, curiosity, judgment and perspective.

The turn to virtues as a marker of human flourishing has been found to be more consistent with a biblical worldview than what we found with the hierarchy of needs. We see similar kinds of character traits listed in the virtue lists of Paul’s letters (e.g., Col. 3:12-13). There is a practical wisdom that connects the biblical tradition with the same kind of classical virtue ethic of the ancient philosophical tradition we investigated earlier.

Csikszentmihalyi on Flow

A final figure who has contributed significantly to our understanding of positive psychology is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “me-high chick-sent-me-high”). Famous for the term “flow,” he has studied the internal experience of high performance. Instead of looking at the character traits we are aiming for (virtues) or the pyramid of requisite conditions to achieve high performance (hierarchy of needs), by looking at the feeling of optimal performance, he has attempted to articulate a common human experience. We often think of high performance as the domain of peak experiences, such as winning a tournament or being awarded a Nobel prize. However, getting “into the zone” is something children experience when they are absorbed in play. This differentiates achievement from the cognitive state of high performance.

It’s one thing to describe a common shared experience, and another to figure out how one can enter into this state. Flow is a state of complete immersion in an activity such that one experiences a state of effortless concentration and timelessness. Some of the factors the lead to a state of flow come from 1) the optimization of requisite skill and perceived challenge, a state described by Vygotsky as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), and 2) the amount of personal motivation to engage in a task. In other words, this is a goal-oriented activity that matches skill to challenge. As Csikszentmihalyi describes it:

“The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forgoes everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives” (Flow 6).

Notice how the word “struggle” implies that at times there might be feelings of strain or even pain in the experience. Csikszentmihalyi describes how a swimmer might feel aching muscles whilst fully absorbed in training. An author might feel a sense of mental strain while fully absorbed in typing out the next moment in the emerging plot of a novel.

Csikszentmihalyi himself sees connections between the classical tradition and what he calls “the flow of thought.” Jason Barney, in his book The Joy of Learning, expands on this with a view to how to incorporate the concepts of flow in the classical classroom. In many respects, the work being done on deliberate practice stems from the idea of flow. The sense of effortless absorption in a task actually comes through applied effort in skills development.

Practices for Classical Educators

Having looked at the history of positive psychology, especially through an examination of three prominent figures, we can make some generalizations that will be helpful for classical educators. To begin with, the idea that psychology has something to contribute to our understanding of healthy internal processes provides us with some grounding to move away from solely viewing the person as a set of potential psychological disfunctions. Many students and parents self-diagnose things like ADHD, anxiety and depression. Understandably, many people react to negative feelings by trying to understand what is going on at a mechanistic level internally. Regrettably, individuals who lock in on such concepts can rely on misconceptions of these disorders, blaming them for deficiencies in knowledge and skills, and then limit their full engagement in productive practices that would cultivate positive feelings about their work and their selves. This does not mean that we would caution individuals from seeking help from qualified professionals. But interestingly, these professionals would actually prescribe some of the very practices associated with positive psychology—techniques to enhance singular focus, quite meditation, and deliberate practice.

Practically, there are several ways we can bring concepts of positive psychology into our classrooms in highly productive ways. First, cultivate virtues through well-planned habit training. For instance, when we think about temperance, it is rather difficult simply to tell students to be more self-controlled. So we need to put in the work of articulating what this looks like in daily life. We might choose some daily practices like sitting in “ready position” or organizing their locker. We support their efforts by succinctly describing the habit (two feet on the floor, back straight, energetic face) and reinforcing this consistently over the span of several days and weeks. It’s wonderful to see how a positive feeling about their work emerges as they are coached in what it looks like to work effectively in a classroom. Self control leads to self satisfaction.

Second, the disciplined life leads to higher orders of freedom and privilege. I think this may be what Maslow was attempting to describe, even though I think his hierarchy of needs is flawed in many ways. There’s something biblical about a shift in our thinking. The person who disciplines themselves to read scripture and pray daily gains the privilege of a closer walk with God and experiences freedom in Christ more consistently. The same can be said for more mundane aspects of life. The person who learns to effectively budget their income gains freedom to spend their money according to the plan they’ve set out. The athlete who has disciplined their body through regular training can run faster and farther through less effort. So, when we are training our students to “show their steps,” this disciplined approach in mathematics leads to great freedom in understanding mathematical processes and the privilege of working on higher orders of mathematical concepts.

Third, being more rigid on skills development up front leads to the experience of flow later. There are indeed better ways of doing things, and teaching these ways early assist students to fly higher long term. For instance, teaching students how to create flash cards on paper and being insistent on regular daily review is a skill that helps students learn things like vocabulary, math formulas and historical information in a thorough way. I used to think this was a nice add on for students to use if they had time and inclination. But over the years, I’ve seen the pattern that students who really thrive have put this tool into practice regularly. So this, for me, is no longer a nice add on but a first-order practice. You can think of other practices like showing steps in math, formatting a page in MLA format and sentence diagramming that cause early sweat but aim towards mastery, which entails greater ease and joy later.

It is interesting how positive psychology has championed the cause of encountering challenge and doing hard things. An impression some might have of positive psychology is that people need to boost their internal attitudes artificially by maybe telling themselves they’re great. Instead, much of the literature points toward how valuable challenge, grit and discipline are in cultivating a life of ease and happiness. Hopefully this brief overview of positive psychology gives you a few insights and practical tools that helps you to explore this field more.

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In this case, we are like the haunted house in Pliny that only the Stoic philosopher Athenagoras can liberate by following the ghost to the courtyard and digging up the bones of an ancient murder. This tactic requires an approach that is both open and critical to the great thinkers of the past who have contributed to the jumble of ideas about the soul in contemporary culture. In the last article we responded mostly positively to Plato’s tripartite view of the soul, though of course we rejected the idea of the soul’s preexistence as inconsistent with a biblical worldview. But there is a dark side to Plato’s understanding of the soul that has cast its long shadow on western tradition.

In the article on the soul in Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon, that masterful guide to the Great Conversation, the perennial question of the soul is framed around a central dispute: Is the soul a distinct substance that inhabits a body, or is it inextricably bound to the body it enlivens? This is not merely an abstract debate. As educators, our answer determines whether we see our task as training a “ghost in a machine,” or as cultivating an integrated, living person. Plato gave us the classic dualist image of the soul as a prisoner longing for release from its bodily cage. This was a helpful, if limited reaction to the materialistic atomism that preceded him in Greek thought. But it is Plato’s student, Aristotle, who offers a third way—a profoundly unified vision that grounds our entire educational project in the rich soil of embodied reality.

From a Christian perspective, Plato’s view might resonate well with the soul’s ongoing existence after death (a truth that Aristotle is also able to account for), but it falls short in accounting for the resurrection of the body, and therefore in what it means to be human from a biblical perspective.

For Aristotle, the soul is not the body’s prisoner but its very principle of life. His psychology (a word originally derived from the Greek for ‘soul’ – psyche), laid out in De Anima, is therefore the necessary foundation for his ethics and thereby his view of proper education. To understand how to cultivate the virtuous mind, we must first understand the living form of the human person. Aristotle’s hylomorphic view of the soul provides the essential framework for understanding and cultivating his five intellectual virtues. In this way, we can shift our pedagogy from the fragmented focus on either mind or body, so common in the modern world, to the integrated formation of the whole person.

A Soul Needs a Body: The Hylomorphic Revolution

Aristotle’s great innovation was to reject both the pure dualism of the Platonists and the crude materialism of the atomists. He charted a middle course known as hylomorphism (from the Greek hyle, “matter,” and morphē, “form”). As scholar Christopher Shields notes, Aristotle saw the soul not as a distinct substance, but as the “principle of organization of a body whose matter has the potentiality for life” (Shields, 2024). In short, the soul is the actuality of a body that has the potential for life. It is the substantial form that makes the matter of a body a living, unified thing.

Aristotle’s own language in De Anima emphasizes this unity with a decisive analogy:

Therefore, we have no need to inquire whether soul and body are one, just as we have no need to inquire whether the wax and its shape are one, nor in general whether the matter of a thing and that of which it is the matter are one. (De Anima, Bk. II, Pt. 1)

This hylomorphic vision is revolutionary for educators. It means we teach embodied souls. The physical world of the classroom—the beauty of the art on the walls, the order of the desks, the posture of the students—is not incidental to learning. It is part of the architecture of the soul’s formation. Because all knowledge begins with the senses, the body is not a distraction from the life of the mind but rather its gateway to the world.

The Ladder of Life: Aristotle’s Ascent and the Imago Dei

Once Aristotle establishes that the soul is the form of the body, he spends the rest of De Anima investigating what this form looks like across the vast spectrum of living things. His method is empirical and observational; he builds his argument from the ground up, starting with the simplest forms of life and ascending to the most complex. This “ladder of life” not only provides a brilliant taxonomy of the natural world but also offers a profound parallel to the biblical account of creation and the nature of man. In a way that mirrors the progression of the days of creation in Genesis, Aristotle’s argument ascends through three fundamental levels of soul, or life-principle.

First, he observes the nutritive soul, the power shared by all living things, from the humblest plant to man. Its functions are the most basic: nutrition, growth, and reproduction. This is the soul in its most foundational sense, the biological urge to sustain oneself and to generate new life. This resonates powerfully with God’s first commands to his creatures in Genesis 1. To the plants, the sea creatures, and to mankind, the imperative is the same: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:22, 28). For both Aristotle and the biblical authors, life’s primary and most universal impulse is a good and ordained principle of flourishing. It affirms the goodness of our createdness and our participation in the fundamental rhythms of the cosmos.

Next, Aristotle identifies the sensitive soul, which belongs to animals and, by extension, to humans. This faculty adds to the nutritive powers a new set of capacities: sensation, appetite (desire and aversion), pleasure and pain, and locomotion. This is the realm of the passions and corresponds to the lowest part of the soul in Plato’s tripartite conception. Here we see the raw material for what the Apostle Paul calls the “flesh”—the seat of desires which, since the Fall, are disordered and at war with the spirit (Gal. 5:17). Yet these passions are not inherently evil; they are God-given capacities for experiencing and navigating the world. The capacity to feel pleasure is a gift that allows us to enjoy God’s creation; the capacity for anger can be a righteous passion against injustice. The Christian life is not about the Stoic eradication of these passions, but their right ordering. As educators, our work in habituation and character formation is largely the work of disciplining and directing this sensitive soul, training our students’ loves so that their desires are aligned with the good.

Finally, at the pinnacle of the earthly ladder, Aristotle arrives at the rational soul, which is unique to human beings and immortal in its essence (see De Anima, Bk. 3, Pt. 5). This is the power to think, to reason, to use language, and to grasp universal truths. It is here that Aristotle’s philosophy most profoundly intersects with the biblical doctrine of the Imago Dei. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion…'” (Gen. 1:26). While the Imago Dei is a rich and complex concept, it has always been understood to include this unique human capacity for reason, moral deliberation, and relationship with God. Our ability to abstract the form from the matter, to contemplate the eternal, and to order our lives according to a known good is the echo of our Creator’s rational nature. The ultimate goal of a Christian education is the redemption and sanctification of this power—what Paul calls being “transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2)—so that our reason is no longer a tool for self-service but an instrument for knowing, loving, and serving God.

This ascent from the nutritive to the sensitive to the rational provides the essential psychological map for our work. We are tending to whole persons, honoring their physical needs, training their passions, and ultimately, guiding their reason toward its proper end. It is the perfection of this rational soul, working in concert with the lower powers, that Aristotle identifies as virtue.

The Soul’s Toolkit: Forging the Intellectual Virtues

In the Great Conversation, a key question about the soul concerns its powers or faculties. Aristotle provides a brilliant taxonomy, showing how the soul’s capacities build upon one another, from the basic nutritive powers we share with plants to the sensitive powers we share with animals, culminating in the rational power unique to humans. It is within the rational soul that the intellectual virtues reside. Aristotle subdivides our reason into two functions: the calculative part, which deliberates about contingent reality (what can be otherwise), and the scientific part, which contemplates necessary reality (what cannot be otherwise). Our task is to bring both to their peak form.

The Virtues of Making and Doing: Technê and Phronēsis

The calculative part of the soul works on the world of action and production, using the data provided by our senses. The two virtues that perfect it are technê and phronēsis.

• Technê (Artistry/Craftsmanship): As we explored in the “Apprenticeship in the Arts” series, technê is the excellence of making, “involving a true course of reasoning” (NE 1140a). It is the virtue of the artisan who can see the form of a chair in a block of wood and guide his tools to bring it into being. When we teach students the technê of grammar, rhetoric, or even long division, we are doing more than transferring skills; we are habituating their souls to reason productively, bringing order and form to matter.
• Phronēsis (Prudence/Practical Wisdom): While technê produces a good product, phronēsis produces good action. This is the master virtue discussed in “Counsels of the Wise,” the “reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man” (NE 1140b). Phronēsis cannot be learned by abstract rule-following. It requires experience—a deep reservoir of memories built from sensory engagement with the world—to perceive the particulars of a moral situation and deliberate well regarding what is best. We cultivate this by immersing students in history, literature, and scripture, training them to see the world with moral clarity.

The Virtues of Knowing and Contemplating: Epistēmē, Nous, and Sophia

Beyond the changing world of action lies the unchanging world of truth, the domain of the scientific part of the soul. Aristotle argues this highest human faculty, the intellect (nous), is unique among the soul’s powers, describing it as something divine and immortal.

This intellect is separable, impassible, unmixed… and when separated from the body it is that only which it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal… and without this nothing thinks. (De Anima, Bk. III, Pt. 5)

This power of the intellect is what allows us to move from seeing particular examples to grasping universal truths. The virtues that perfect this power are epistēmē, nous, and sophia.

• Epistēmē (Scientific Knowledge): This is knowledge of necessary truths through logical demonstration (NE 1139b). It is the virtue at work in a Euclidean proof or a scientific syllogism.
• Nous (Intuitive Intellect): This is the direct, intuitive grasp of the first principles from which demonstrations begin (NE 1141a). It is the moment of insight, the “seeing” of a self-evident truth that cannot be proven but only understood.
• Sophia (Wisdom): Sophia is the pinnacle of intellectual virtue, the union of nous and epistēmē (NE 1141a). It is the comprehensive understanding of the highest truths, seeing both the foundational principles and the logical conclusions that flow from them. This is the ultimate aim of a classical education: to equip students for the contemplation of ultimate reality.

The Aristotelian Classroom

Aristotle’s answer to the great question of the soul provides us with a fully integrated model for education. Our work is the patient cultivation of the living form, moving students up the ladder of their own God-given capacities.

An Aristotelian classroom begins with rich sensory experience, recognizing the body as the foundation of learning. It proceeds through disciplined apprenticeship to form the virtues of making (technê) and acting (phronēsis). Finally, it guides the student in the joyful work of demonstration (epistēmē) and the profound act of contemplation (nous), all in the service of wisdom (sophia), which finds its ultimate fulfillment in the knowledge and love of God.

References

Adler, Mortimer J. “Chapter 85: Soul.” The Great Books of the Western World, vol. 3: The Great Ideas II. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by J.A. Smith. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed August 26, 2025. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.mb.txt.

Shields, Christopher. “Aristotle’s Psychology.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/aristotle-psychology/.

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In the final book of the Ransom trilogy, That Hideous Strength (Scribner, 1945), C.S. Lewis presents his readers with a stark contrast between two communities: the residents of St. Anne’s on the Hill and the conspirators of the N.I.C.E. in Belbury. In doing so, Lewis offers two pictures of humanity. One is characterized by relationship, nature, and beauty, while the other is marked by bureaucracy, cold rationality, and deception. 

To explore these contrasting visions, Lewis follows Mark and Jane, a married couple, in their individual journeys for meaning, belonging, and ultimately, redemption. Mark is a trained sociologist and fellow at the fictitious Bracton College. Despite his marriage to Jane and successful academic career, Mark is lonely and unfulfilled. In the opening pages, he takes immense pleasure in simply being included in a clique. Meanwhile, Jane, an academic herself, regrets the toll her marriage has taken on her academic career, and the current state of her and Mark’s relationship. She is bitter, hopeless, and discontent with the cards life has dealt her. 

In this article, I want to briefly sketch out some pivotal moments in the novel and then offer some insights for educators today. For while this story’s plot is thick enough to stand on its own, Lewis shares in the preface that there is more to the story, so to speak. He writes, “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man” (7). Let us proceed with seeking to uncover this “point” to see what Lewis what might teach us.

Surprised by Joy

Early in the novel, Mark is brought into an exclusive group of the college, the Progressive Element, and eventually invited to join the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) itself. Through this process, his desire for belonging is quenched, though never fully, as he makes his way further and further into the inner circle. Still, it is a painful process. Despite repeated attempts to understand his job description and the reporting structure of the institution, his requests are constantly pushed aside. The deputy director John Wither is evasive and dismissive, despite regularly referring to the N.I.C.E. as a family. 

Meanwhile, Jane finds herself being drawn to a very different kind of community. Despite the men and women at St. Anne’s on the Hill referring to themselves as a “company” and “army,” they live together in a beautiful and spacious manor, fulfilling the vision of family that the N.I.C.E. allegedly claimed to be. In her first visit to the manor at St. Anne’s, she walks through a beautiful garden, teeming with life and beauty. Later, she meets with the director of the community, Dr. Ransom, and leaves overflowing with joy (149). 

Interestingly, the source of her joy when meeting with Dr. Ransom was not the conversation they shared together, but the transcendent experience of encountering his divine and royal aura. For the first time, her soul had touched the heavens, as it were, awakening in her a desire for beauty that had grown dormant over the course of her life. Suddenly she gained new eyes for the beauty of nature, from rays of sunlight to grazing wildlife. She longed to hear the chorales of Bach again and read the sonnets of Shakespeare afresh. She cherished the speech of her cabinmates in the train and rejoiced in her hunger and thirst for buttered toast and tea. Her conversion had begun.

Isolation and Objectivity

In contrast, Mark’s progress through concentric circles of exclusivity in Belbury finally leads to his own isolation as he sits alone in a cell awaiting his training in “objectivity.” Professor Augustus Frost, a leader in the innermost circle of the N.I.C.E., shares with Mark his vision for humanity as a race of pure mind and liberated of emotional preference. He desires to destroy all human instincts for what is right, noble, and beautiful. Interestingly, Mark’s training takes place in a room of disproportion with a ceiling covered in specks at irregular intervals. On the walls of the room are pictures, many of them with scriptural themes, yet each of them distorted through bizarre elements of horror and strangeness. Professor Frost’s goal is clear: destroy all of Mark’s intuitions for what is natural, normal, and right. 

To Frost’s surprise, however, the room soon began to have the reverse effect. The striking abnormality and ugliness of the room engendered in Mark a longing for the straight, whole, and normal. The narrator Lewis writes, “As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else–something he vaguely called the ‘Normal’–apparently existed” (296). In the end, Mark finds himself choosing a side, aligning himself with the mountainous pull towards the moral universe, and rejecting Professor Frost’s vision for objectivity untethered from objective value.

And yet, the ultimate test was yet to come. For, in a pivotal moment of the training in the objective room, Professor Frost, with demonic calculation, instructs Mark to trample on a full-sized crucifix and insult it. Unlike the moral defense against the other exercises that had risen inside of Mark, this was different. There was nothing about the wooden figure nailed to the cross that was inherently straight and normal. Though Mark is not a Christian, his conversation was already underway, and he realizes that the crucifix is…”what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight–what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross” (333). In this decisive moment, this test of tests, Mark refused to desecrate the image.

Hope for Redemption

In the end, both characters encounter elements of redemption, not only for their marriage, but for their moral and spiritual salvation.

Jane’s struggle with pride, most visibly manifested in the novel through her repudiation of traditional gender norms, is overcome as she realizes the goodness of being a creature under the authority and care of God. And yet the divine goodness she accepts comes at a high price: control. She must give up herself to another, to God himself, and let him mold her as he sees fit (316). The universe now appears to her much larger than she imagined. It is massive, stormy, beautiful, and unbending, existing independently of any human emotion or idea. She must embrace the truth that this reality is greater than herself by recognizing she is a creature of God.

Mark’s conversion is different. Though he exhibits the moral courage to resist Professor Frost’s training in objectivity, he has not had the benefit of being formed by the community at St. Anne’s. Only in the end does he begin to recognize his own shortcomings as a husband and lover. His fear is that it is too late, that what would be best for Jane at this point is to move on. But then, in the last available moment, love strikes him as only the goddess Venus can, and his soul is saved.

Insights for Schools Today

There are so many layers to this story, from the redemption of Mark and Jane to the heavenly presence of Dr. Ransom to the demonic nature of the N.I.C.E. It truly is a battle for the abolition of humanity.

In The Abolition of Man (Harper Collins, 1971), Lewis warns against a dystopian future in which humanity abandons traditional moral values in the name of scientific progress. Though he is clear that his argument is not against science itself, in his context he can see that the many successes of modern science have created a lure to conquer nature completely. In the end, all that will be left is to conquer human nature. He writes, “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won” (59).

Inspired by That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, I will conclude this article by offering three suggestions for schools in order to resist the coming abolition.

1. Create communities of joy and hospitality.

One of the most endearing elements of the story is the community of St. Anne’s. While I did not focus on the themes of comradeship and belonging so much in this article, it is well worth study and imitation. It can be easy to think that the abolition of man is ultimately a philosophical debate and therefore will take place at an intellectual level. But the reality is that strongest way we can retain our humanity and moral values is through creating beautiful spaces of belonging for learning to occur. From filling our schools with beautiful art and nature to building time for deep relationships to thrive, our schools can become their own manifestations of the idyllic St. Anne’s community.

2. Champion the reality of objective moral values.

Certainly Lewis’ greatest warning in The Abolition of Man, manifested in the N.I.C.E. at Belbury in That Hideous Strength, is the rejection of traditional moral values, what Lewis calls the Tao (pronounced “Dao”). As Alasdair MacIntyre addresses at great length in After Virtue, the modern West has traded out objective moral belief for mere emotional preferences. Ideas of virtue and duty have been reduced to mere subjective responses that cannot be used for moral evaluation. In this framework, a solder sacrificing his life to save his squadron is a story that can engender emotions of high praise, but it is not representative of a deeper truth that we are morally obligated to imitate.

But as Lewis argues through different means in both books, moral truth, goodness, and beauty does exist independently of human perception. In their own journeys, Mark and Jane encountered what Lewis described as a mountain–an entity that existed apart from themselves that is firm, immovable, and embedded in the universe itself. This is natural law, or what Mark experienced as the Straight and Normal.

Our schools need to cling to and proclaim the reality of objective goodness, truth, and beauty, for the future of humanity is at stake.

3. Connect the study of science to worship of our Creator.

There is a warning in both books regarding the dangers that emerge when modern science, or any discipline for that matter, is untethered from moral and biblical truth. In the case of Belbury, the scientific activity literally became demonic. While it is important to equip our students with understanding of the scientific method, steps for conducting a successful lab experiment, and other elements of modern science, we should regularly connect our study of creation to worship of our Creator. For scripture commands us to subdue and cultivate creation, not conquer it out of human arrogance and pride.

It is this temptation toward human arrogance and pride that is the “hideous strength” of which Lewis warns. As the inhabitants of Shinar sought to make a name for themselves through erecting a great tower at Babel, so the temptation to be our own gods resided in Mark and Jane, as well as in us today.

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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.

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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!

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“Umm,” you begin.

“It’s the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric.”

“It’s…classical art and music. Like Beethoven and Mozart. Plus math and science.”

“It’s the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty. And Latin.”

Now I would not say any of this is incorrect per se, but as Chuck Evans, author of Wisdom and Eloquence, has noted, the focus is on the features, or the “how” of classical education, not the “why.” The “why” of a movement or organization is going to be its ultimate purpose, cause, or belief. It will be rooted in a story that generates a visceral reaction.

To explore the “why” of classical education, this article will focus on a a pivotal time in the development of Western Civilization: the Golden Age of Greece.

What is Civilization?

Before I examine the history of ancient Athens, it is important to reflect briefly on the nature of civilization. As I discussed in my previous article, civilizations are difficult to create and even harder to preserve.

Historian Will Durant defines it as such:

“Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end.

For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.” 

Notice the defining feature of civilization: cultural creation. When the four elements Durant identifies are present, the resulting outcome is creativity and constructiveness for what can then become, what we will see in the Greek’s case, a free and flourishing society.

The Beginning of Democracy

In light of these insights about civilization, let us now to turn to the development of ancient Athenian society, specifically how democracy emerged in this context. To be clear, the Athenians did not necessarily weigh the different forms of government—dictatorships, aristocracies, and democracies—and choose democracy. Rather, they stumbled into it, classical warfare style.

In 507 B.C., a conflict broke out as Athenians sought to overthrow the tyrant Hippias. While the Spartan king Cleomenes was able to defeat this tyrant, he soon set up a pro-Spartan oligarchy, essentially a proxy state for Sparta. But then, in a surprising turn of events, an Athenian named Cleisthenes rallied his people and was able to take over control of Athenians, setting up equal rights for all citizens within a democratic structure.

Cleisthenes was instrumental in setting up ten districts, replacing a familial clan structure, in order to mitigate bias and align loyalty with the new democracy. Each district selected fifty representatives by lot to serve on the Council, which would submit proposals for approval or rejection by the Assembly, the gathering of all citizens, to make laws and resolve civil disputes.

Incidentally, Cleisthenes also introduced the idea of ostracism, whereby one could be banished for up to ten years with a vote of 6,000 citizens (of about 43,000 citizens total). In a tragic case of irony, we are told that Cleisthenes himself was ostracized at one point.

Now it is helpful to clarify here that the Greek view of citizenship was not rights-based. That is, citizenship was not grounded in natural human rights as we understand them today. Citizenship was based on one’s heritage. Both men and women could be citizenship, but only men could vote. So, as we can see, this Athenian democracy was far from perfect, but it was a step in the right direction for with citizenship comes responsibility, and responsibility implies freedom. Indeed, as Will Durant puts it, “Never before had the world seen so liberal a franchise, or so wide a spread of political power” (Will Durant, The Life of Greece, 267).

Democracy is Threatened

But would this nascent democracy last?

In 490 B.C., the Persian king, King Darius I (not to be confused with King Darius from the Bible), attempted to conquer Greece, a conglomerate of city-states such as Athens, Sparta, Argos, Syracuse, and so forth. But surprisingly, the Greeks held them off at the Battle of Marathon. The “Great King,” as he would be known, apparently did not realize that he was opposed by men who “owned the soil they tilled” and who “ruled the state that governed them.” They were free citizens, and with freedom, it turns out, comes fierce responsibility. 

As the story goes, after the Athenians won, one soldier, covered in blood, ran a far distance on foot back to Athens in order to share the news and declare victory. Upon arrival, he praised the goddess of victory, Nike, declaring “Rejoice, we have conquered!”, before falling over dead. This endeavor would inspire both the “marathon,” a long-distance foot race, and the name for a particular modern athletics company.

After his defeat, King Darius retreated back to Persia and was eventually succeeded by his son King Xerxes (known as King Ahasuerus in the Book of Esther). King Xerxes sought to conquer Greece again, this time with an alleged two million soldiers. He defeated the Spartans at the famous Battle of Thermopolae, despite the courage and sacrifice of King Leonidas and his three hundred men.

Ultimately, at the decisive Battle of Salamis, the Athenians were able to give the Persians a final blow. By assembling a massive naval fleet, they soundly defeated the Persians. The story goes that Xerxes watched his ships burn to the ground from a distance, left a lieutenant in charge, and retreated back to Persia. The Persians would not return for over 1,000 years, during the rise the Ottoman empire.

With the Persians soundly defeated, the Athenians were now able to focus on creating and constructing their civilization. They rebuilt their city and set up a strong naval defense through founding the Delian league, uniting city-states across Greece, and moving the treasury to Athens.

This pivotal time in history would allow for one of the earliest and certainly the most well-known democracies of the ancient world to flourish. It would be marked by rule of the people, not a dictator. In fact, the military victories that occurred during the Greco-Persian Wars are so crucial for the future of Western Civilization that John Stuart Mill, the great economist, once stated the following:

“The Battle of Marathon, even as an event in British history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings.” -John Stuart Mill      

The Golden Age of Greece

With the Persians dispelled, the golden era was ready to begin. It would be characterized by the rise of free peoples and an experiment for a short while in the exercise of individualistic freedom over communal dependence.

This era would also be known as “the Age of Pericles,” named for the great statesman who led many of the reforms and historic architectural feats. He built strong defensive walls around the city of Athens, strengthened the navy, and secured thirty years of peace with the Spartans.

It was during this time that an explosion of creativity occurred, including the building of the Parthenon, the great temple in honor of Athena, on the Acropolis. The arts, architecture, literature, mathematics, history, and philosophy all experienced historic creative innovations during this time.

Some examples of the art and architecture include:

Luminaries of this brief eighty-year period includes names such as:

• Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aristophanes (Literature)
• Anaxagoras and Hippocrates (Math and Science)
• Herodotus and Thucydides (History)
• Parmenides, Democritus, and Socrates (Philosophy)

The Centrality of Education

In addition to all of this innovation in the arts, sciences, and learning, the Athenians also knew how important education would be for this civilization to continue.

If Athens was going to be ruled by the people, that is, citizens, not a group of oligarchs–or worse, a tyrant–then the citizenry needed to be educated. They need to think carefully about what makes for just laws, along with the virtues to promote, and vices to suppress. What leaders of character, called archons, to elect. How to ensure the right laws were well-argued for and represented in the assembly.

Freeborn boys were educated from age six to sixteen. They were brought to school by slaves called pedagogues where they were then taught by their teachers. The curriculum had three main divisions—writing (reading and math), music (the lyre), and gymnastics (wrestling, swimming, and using the bow or sling), and later drawing and painting.

Higher education was provided by professional rhetors and sophists, who offered instruction in oratory, science, philosophy, and history. These instructors were quite expensive, and would later be critiqued by Socrates as disingenuous at times, but they did their part of educating the citizenry to represent themselves well in assembly. For if a civil dispute occurred, citizens had to represent themselves in court before a jury of peers.

After age sixteen, boys were trained for military service and civic participation as soldier-youths. Through physical training and instruction in democratic governance, literature, music, geometry, and rhetoric, they were preparing for full-freight citizenry. At age 21, they would be formally admitted by taking a solemn oath to the state, ancestral faith, and legal order (Durant, 291).  

Thus the seeds of the liberal arts, the tools for a free people to create and construct, were born.

Conclusion

Although the Golden Age of Greece, manifested through Athenian democracy, only lasted around eighty years (480-399 B.C.), it would impact the future of civilization for centuries to come. Due to war with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and encroaching Macedonian invaders led by Philip II, the Athenian democracy would eventually end. Historians often point to 399 B.C., when Socrates was tried and convicted in the assembly for impiety and the corruption of youth, as the turning point in this crucial age.

To be clear, the Athenian democracy was not perfect. Nor was Greek morality. It is important to note that there was a separate, and even more important civilization developing, which ran parallel to the Greeks at this time: the call of Abraham, the nation of Israel, the giving of the holy scriptures, and ultimately, the coming of Christ.

The eventual meeting of Athens and Jerusalem would become the great nexus of Western Civilization. With the fusion of the legacies of these two cities, this civilization would spark a new era for humanity. It would go on to produce some of the world’s first hospitals, orphanages, and universities. And it would promote distinct values of objective truth, human rights, equality, compassion, modern science, and human innovation. To be sure, this civilization has its flaws and dark moments, as all civilizations do, and yet we can also so say that it provided pivotal contributions for the flourishing of humanity. Future eras such as the Hellenistic period, the days of the Roman Empire, Christendom, the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment would all harken back to ancient Greece for inspiration and insight.

As classical Christian educators, the story of ancient Greece, particularly the “golden age” examined in this article, offers a glimpse into the sort of education we seek to pass on to our students today. For as G.K. Chesterton famously stated, “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

And as Will Durant cautions:

“For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.”

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As I wrap up this series of reviews, we turn to Students as Persons: Charlotte Mason on Personalism and Relational Liberal Education by Deani Van Pelt and Jen Spencer. One of the key tenets of Mason’s pedagogy is the statement that “children are persons.” This book delves deeply into this foundational philosophical concept by looking at personalist theory and differentiating personhood from individualism. This is an important book that covers a lot of ground in just over 60 pages.

Deani Van Pelt has been a leading voice in Charlotte Mason education, championing school choice in Canada and adding to our knowledge of Charlotte Mason through her research. The is the current board chair for the Charlotte Mason Institute and is Scholar-in-Residence in Charlotte Mason Studies, University of Cumbria, England. Van Pelt is not only the series editor of the 18 monographs in the Centenary Series, this book is one of two volumes she has had a hand in writing in the series. Co-author Jen Spencer has likewise been a leader within the Charlotte Mason movement, having led study groups and founding a school. Her work includes the digitization of Mason archives at the Armitt Museum in Ambleside, England as well as serving as the program director for the Alveary, a curriculum created by the Charlotte Mason Institute. Spencer was recently appointed as a Visiting Research Fellow in Charlotte Mason Studies at the University of Cumbria, Ambleside.

Situating Personhood

It can be difficult to differentiate Mason’s concept of personhood when there are many theories about childhood and learning that surround the work of Mason. A number of key figures and concepts are therefore helpfully presented at the outset of Students as Persons to establish what exactly personhood is and is not. Blank-slate theory as set forth by John Locke views the child as an empty vessel to be filled. Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed in the inherent goodness of the child, meaning that the child should be left untampered. Frederick Froebel viewed the child like a plant to be tended in a Kindergarten. John Dewey viewed education as a socializing process making them fit for democratic society. Maria Montessori considered that children are individuals “who should be left alone to explore specially created apparatus so that their creativity could flourish” (14). Beyond these individual theorists, the industrialists of North America viewed children as a work force and learning as training for a role in the industrial system. In Mason’s own Victorian context, children were viewed as “personal property, better seen than heard” (14).

Through this broad set of ideas, Mason’s statement “children are persons” takes a very different direction. Originally delivered through a series of evening “Lectures to Ladies” in Bradford, England, the ideas Mason set forth were a philosophical alternative to a host of insufficient views of the child. Even more today, this idea has found resonance:

“When education increasingly places emphasis on credentials to be attained and employment to be secured, thoughtful, searching parents, teachers and educational leaders are finding resonance with educational ideas that focus on the child’s whole wellbeing” (Students as Persons 14-15).

The wellbeing of the child is a grand vision that sets forth an educational enterprise that raises up the child “not only for a useful life but also for learning how to live this life in all its fullness” (15).

The Contours of Personhood

Van Pelt and Spencer ground Mason’s concept of personhood in her career working with children. She set forth her thoughts in the Bradford lectures “having had nearly a quarter-century to observe children and work out her thoughts about teaching and learning” (16). It is interesting to note that Mason’s career as a teacher and then as an educational philosopher occurred between that of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) and Maria Montessori (1870-1952). In the philosophies of both these figures, children were viewed as requiring special treatment through the use of carefully developed learning tools and environments. However, for Mason, she took the view that “children are not that different from adults and do not need for everything to be specially organized for them” (17). This conception of the child garners an amount of respect toward the child that finds what the authors describe as a “middle way between ‘despising’ children and worshipping them” (18). In other words, our view of children can tend towards an inaccurate view of the child when we do not grant them the respect of personhood due to them.

The British industrial revolution brought children into the workplace, which meant that society was well prepared to afford them the responsibilities of adulthood but had not really granted them their rights as children. Mason’s concept of personhood was connected to the rights of children in her third book School Education. These rights called for children to enjoy the freedoms of childhood, including the rights “to play freely, to work by their own initiative, to choose their own friends, to decide how they would spend their own money, and to form their own opinions” (18). Issuing these rights within the Victorian milieu was something of a crusade for Mason and the PNEU. However, unlike the child-centric models of education proposed by figures such as Rousseau and Montessori, Mason proposed that there is a burden of responsibility upon parents and teachers to “instruct the child’s conscience and help him to train his will and consider ideas carefully, so that he may grow to live with intention and continually work towards becoming the best version of himself as he conceived is” (19-20).

Considered in this way, the personhood of the child assumes that the child has their own will that must be given strength to choose what is good and right. There is a sense that the child will be self-directed and ought to have a diet of living ideas with which to populate a vision of what it means to live a good life.

Personhood Today

The study of personhood today interacts with insights gained from sociology, philosophy and theology. Van Pelt and Spencer bring to bear a number of recent authors to spell out how personhood has developed in our contemporary setting in ways that are consistent with Mason’s original expression of personhood.

They begin by drawing up on the work of Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, in his 2010 publication What is a Person? Amongst several points worth consideration, Smith concurs that personhood is on full display from the start of life:

“Persons do not emerge out of capacities and bodies at some chronologically delayed time, only after some crucial development has taken place. Persons exist at the start of life and are their own agents of development and emergent being across their entire life course” (Smith 457, quoted in Van Pelt and Spencer 29).

This agency on the part of the child is something worthy of respect, even though we as grown ups have a burden of responsibility to nourish and train the young person. Personhood also entails a sense of purpose “to develop and sustain our own incommunicable selves in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the nonpersonal world” (Smith 85, emphasis added by Van Pelt and Spencer 30). This is consistent with Mason’s concept of the science of relationship whereby the child develops three kinds of knowledge—knowledge of God, knowledge of man, and knowledge of the universe.

Based on this understanding of personhood, in distinction from individualism, our authors explain the implications of what this means pedagogically.

“Indeed, it is not to liberal individualism that Mason turns for her anthropology but to relational personhood. Had she rooted her anthropology in the child as individual rather than the child as person, child-centeredness could become a concept leading to license rather than to liberty of the child. It would also have brushed over the relational nature embedded in personhood and it sets one up at best as autonomous and at worst as isolated, free-floating, untethered, and alone” (32).

Thus, the child is a responsible agent learning how to relate as a person with other persons, instead of somehow trying to get off the grid, so to speak, of dependence on other individuals.

Personhood, then, is distinct from individualism, but it is also distinct from collectivism. For this distinction, our authors turn to the philosopher Juan Manuel Burgos, professor at the University of San Pablo in Madrid, in his 2018 publication An Introduction to Personalism. The person, according to Burgos, is a “subsistent and autonomous but essentially social being” (Burgos 32, quoted in Van Pelt and Spencer 34). Burgos goes on to differentiate personalism from that of collectivism and individualism:

“It was distinguished and separated from the egocentric individual by stressing the moral obligation to serve others and the community, but it did not fall into the collectivist orbit because, due to his intrinsic dignity, the person possesses an absolute and noninterchangeable value and a series of inalienable rights” (Burgos 32).

In this understanding of personalism, each person is able to experience true freedom while also maintaining a sense of connection to others that is morally responsible.

Grounding these sociological and philosophical insights is the theological concept of the divine image. Van Pelt and Spencer bring alongside the aforementioned Smith the bioethicist John Kilner, founding director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, in his 2015 publication Dignity and Destiny. Human dignity stems from God’s creation of humanity in his own image (Genesis 1:26-27). For Kilner, the imago dei, or being created in the image of God “has played a significant role historically in freeing people from the ravages of need and oppression” (Kilner 7, quoted in Van Pelt and Spencer 36). This is the central claim of the theist ground for human dignity. Kilner also notes how oppression and exploitation stem from what he “would call a non-biblical understanding of God’s image” (Van Pelt and Spencer 37).

There is a sacredness to human personhood based on the special relationship all humans have with their Creator. Instead of the autonomous individual or collective humanity, personhood implies the value and dignity of every human being while also promoting the ability people have to relate to their Creator.

Personhood and Self-education

Mason’s view of the personhood of the child is foundational to a constructivist approach to learning, according to Van Pelt and Spencer. To put it simply, constructivist theory posits that the learner actively builds knowledge through their own experience of and interaction with information. John Mays in his 2022 article “Thoughts on Teaching” pits constructivism against essentialism, which helpfully provides categories for us to consider. In essentialism, there is a body of core knowledge and skills delivered to the learner by the teacher. Mays, while spelling out the differences, finds that these philosophies of learning are a false dichotomy. One of the benefits of Van Pelt and Spencer’s book is a fuller understanding of this central debate in education. As classical education untethers itself from conventional education to promote a love of learning, there is a need to engage the learner in ways that Mason directly connects to the dignity and agency of the learner.

The constructivist ideal is best expressed by Mason in her final volume, Towards a Philosophy of Education, where she wrote, “The children, not the teachers, are the responsible persons; they do the work by self-effort” (241). So even someone committed to a teacher-centric approach should recognize that the dissemination of information only goes out into the blank void unless a responsible and motivated learner is there to capture what is sent. Van Pelt and Spencer compare Mason’s constructivism to that of other models. In particular, they review the cognitive constructivism of Jean Piaget, the social constructivism of Lev Vygotsky, and the radical constructivism of Ernst von Glasersfield. We can see, therefore, that the categories are fairly nuanced. Our authors critically examine these three models and conclude that Mason’s “aligns most comfortably among the social constructivists” (46). In this social constructivist model, children learn “by interacting with others, with our culture, and with our society” (45). Again, the personhood of the child in this sense is responsibly related to others, not as an autonomous individual nor as an indiscriminate part of a collective.

An important point made by Van Pelt and Spencer is that knowledge is made personal by each learner. When the personhood of the child is honored as something sacred, then the very form of our assessment must account for the personal. For instance, when listening to or reading through students narrations, we are looking not simply for an accurate record of what the author has said. We are also accounting for the ways in which the child has personally assimilated this knowledge.

“Factual accuracy was not the sole important thing about assessment to Mason. It was equally important to her that each child had engaged with people, places, and ideas as best they could and according to their personhood. In this way, each student’s response contained originality” (49).

Not the both-and within this statement. It is important for students to have an accurate understanding of the information that they have assimilated. But for those of us who deem it important for this education to be formative, we must also take into account how knowledge has shaped character, moral reasoning, spiritual insight, and human understanding.

In all, I found this book to be a fine representation of research into Charlotte Mason. It furthers our understanding of her philosophy by bringing to bear good exemplars of modern thinkers so that we can gain insight into how her methods have relevance and utility today. I could see many benefitting from the thoughtful and engaging prose in this volume, even though some of the ideas are challenging to grapple with. Thankfully, Van Pelt and Spencer have done most of the heavy lifting, so that we as readers can wrap our mind around so many of the key elements of Mason’s philosophy surrounding the personhood of children.

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