Author: Kolby Atchison
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6 Tips for Teaching Classically
This past fall, I announced the launch of my free eBook “The Craft of Teaching: ‘Teach Like a Champion’ for Classical Educators.” I am now excited to share that this summer I will be presenting a workshop on the same topic at the Society for Classical Learning‘s Annual Conference (you can access the full schedule…
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Rest for the Weary: On Cultivating the Intellectual Life
As the pace of our modern world grows busier and busier, spurred on by the services of smartphones and laptops, people need somewhere to turn for relief. Our glowing rectangles promise us conveniences such as efficiency and a life of ease, but for what purpose? More efficiency, more ease. It’s a never-ending cycle. Technology frees…
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Life in Plato’s Republic, Part 2: Building the Just City
“Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important place of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give it.” Plato, Republic, Book II Welcome back to my…
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Life in Plato’s Republic, Part 1: Is Justice Worth it?
“Whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, we are all more or less Platonists. Even if we reject Plato’s conclusions, our views are shaped by the way in which he stated his problems.”1 In today’s article, I begin a new series on Plato’s Republic. I’ve been wanting to start this…
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Christian Education and the Calling of the Church
Every Christian family has to make the difficult decision at some point where to send their children for school. With the widespread availability of public education over the last hundred years, the conventional option for some time now has been public schooling. Here the cost for admission is free and the overall education they receive…
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Educating for Resilience in a Coddling Culture
In The Coddling of the American Mind (Random House, 2018), authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt make a forceful critique of the way Americans today go about raising and educating their children. Their point isn’t complicated: parents and teachers, in general, overprotect children from the challenges and rigor of everyday life. As a result of…
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Educating for a Christian Worldview in a Secular Age
In our secular age, there exists a plurality of options for how to think about complex questions. Take the question of what it means to be human, for example. For the biologist, to be human is to possess the DNA of the species Homo sapien. In contrast, for the eastern mystic, to be human is…
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Three Premises for Teaching Theology
In March 1984, British missiologist Lesslie Newbigin delivered the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary on the topic of the gospel and western culture. In these lectures, which were later compiled into a book entitled Foolishness to the Greeks (Eerdmans: 1986), Lewbigin considers what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel…
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Educating for Humility: Promoting a Classroom Culture of Excellence in Service to Others
Of the many ills that plague modern society, perhaps one of the most insidious is the wedge we have driven between character and excellence, or ethics and achievement. Contemporary examples abound of “successful” men and women who have earned impressive accolades despite deep recesses in character, and occasionally, because of those recesses. As a result,…
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Building Ratio: Training Students to Think and Learn for Themselves
In 1947, medievalist Dorothy Sayers took the podium at Oxford University and delivered a lecture that would launch a referendum on modern methods of education. It took time, to be sure, but from our current vantage point in 2020, there is no doubt that her words left a sizeable imprint on the current educational landscape.…