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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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 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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So begins the first chapter of the first volume of an eleven volume series by Will Durant entitled, “The Story of Civilization.” This series, which Will and his wife Ariel wrote over the course of four decades (1935-1975), covers the history of western civilization, from the ancient Near East to the Napoleonic conquests.

Durant begins his series by noting the preconditions and causal factors for a civilization to emerge in the first place. For example, if a region is frozen over by ice or if its soil is barren of nutrients, social order promoting cultural creation becomes very difficult. But as soon as these geological and geographical preconditions are met, the four causal factors for a civilization (economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and education) can begin to do their work. 

To illustrate the necessity of each of these factors, Durant turns first to economics. He writes, “A people may possess ordered institutions, a lofty moral code, and even a flair for the minor forms of art…and yet if it remains in the hunting stage…it will never quite pass from barbarism to civilization” (2). In this way, the economic transition to agriculture is a key form of development for a people as well as the building of towns and cities. For in cities, the wealth and brains of the region gather–to invent, to trade, to debate, and to create.

In the context of the civitas, the gathering of citizens, the other causal factors for the development of a civilization begin to gain traction. Political organization occurs through the creation of laws and formation of government. Moral traditions, rooted in values for the good of the community, develop. And the pursuit of knowledge and the arts launch a broader pursuit of truth and beauty that transcends mere survival. The harshness of life, from infant mortality to severe weather to social conflict, is offered meaning through moral narratives of purpose, hope, and redemption.

As the process of civilization unfolds, the civilization itself becomes its own form of independency, in some ways moving from effect to cause. Durant writes, “It is not the great race that makes the civilization, it is the great civilization that makes the people; circumstances geographical and economic create a culture, and the culture creates a type” (3). This type becomes the anchor of the civilization, the north star to which it it perpetually points. It is the set of ideals, the defining characteristics, of the city, the family, and the individual.

Thus we can see how civilizations begin, and can use this criteria to generally predict how they might end. The disappearance of any of the aforementioned conditions threaten to destroy them. For example: a geological catastrophe, a deadly pandemic, the failure of natural resources, mental or moral decay, the decline of social discipline, a lack of leadership, a pathological concentration of wealth, financial exhaustion, or declining fertility rates. 

Of course, the end of a civilization is not necessarily sudden or dramatic. Though Rome was sacked in 410 C.E., it was another fifty years before the empire fell. Nevertheless, the end of a civilization is in sight when its enduring values are lost. The set of ideals that define a civilization is its precious inheritance, a treasure that is to be faithfully passed on from generation to generation.

But what if this type, this set of ideals, is lost?

Five Crises Facing Western Civilization

In How to Save the West (Regnery Publishing, 2023), classicist Spencer Klavan identifies five major concerns that threaten the future of Western civilization specifically, moving this question from a theoretical exploration to an actual crisis. While he admits that it is a relatively recent practice to talk about “the West,” as a distinct historical phenomenon, historians and scholars are “…observing, in good faith, threads of continuity that stretch back through time and space” (xx). He therefore goes on to offer a working definition of “Western” as “the vast and complex inheritance of ‘Athens,’ the classical world, and ‘Jerusalem,’ the Jewish and Christian monotheists of the near east (xix).

This “inheritance,” I suggest, functions as the type, which Durant refers to as the foundation for a civilization. In the case of Western civilization, it is the set of ideals and masterpieces treasured through the generations that fit within a broader Great Conversation, full of wrong turns and dead ends, that nevertheless pursue a common vision for goodness, truth, and beauty. This conversation is not bound by race, ethnicity, or even geography. Nor is it restricted to a particular gender or social class. Rather, it is an unfolding story of humanity’s united search for meaning, composed of luminaries as diverse as Cicero and Frederick Douglass, Aeschylus and Shakespeare, Hildegard von Bingen and Abraham Lincoln.

While Klavan does frame his concerns in terms of a looming crisis at hand for the West, as a classicist, he helpfully reminds his readers that at every turn, a civilization can appears to be on the verge of collapse:

The intoxicating rise of Athens in the fifth century B.C. came to an abrupt and gory end in the Peloponnesian War. No sooner had the ancient Israelites made their way to God’s promised land than they strayed after foreign gods and suffered under foreign oppressors. The Western Roman empire crumbled into warring tribal oppressors; France’s revolution devolved from utopian optimism into terror and bloodshed; Communist uprising in Russia led to socialist dictatorship and millions of deaths” (xiv).

At the same time, here I am, in the twenty-first century, writing about Western civilization…in the West. Obviously certain events occurred which led for the transmission of the heritage to continue, for the ideas and values to be passed on. Whether it to be Jerome writing the Vulgate translation of scripture, Charlemagne sponsoring new schools, Celtic monks building libraries in medieval Europe, Johannes Gutenberg creating the moveable-type printing press, or American colonists creating a new republic, the civilization has endured.

Nevertheless, Klavan identifies five modern crises that could lead to its undoing, briefly stated as follows:

Crisis of Reality: A rejection of the eternality of objective truth and moral facts in favor of relativism, expediency, and virtual reality

Crisis of the Body: A rejection of the physical body with a turn to the inner self and posthuman technologies

Crisis of Meaning: A rejection of metanarrative, a transcendent explanation for existence that is grounded in objective truth

Crisis of Religion: A rejection of belief in God in exchange for a misplaced confidence in modern science

Crisis of the Regime: A rejection of the principles for a republic to endure, such as rule by law, popular sovereignty, and checks and balances

Solution: Educate One Child at a Time

It is beyond the scope of this article to explore each crisis in detail, much less to review the solutions Klavan suggests. A strategy for saving the West from the crises above is complex, multi-layered, and requires a deeper dive into ideas and philosophy.

At the risk of appearing simplistic, however, I want to suggest one straightforward strategy that could slow down these trends, if not reverse them: educate one child at a time according to enduring biblical values.

The 19th and early 20th century British educator Charlotte Mason famously championed the idea that children are persons. Created with immense potential as divine image-bearers, they enter the world eager to explore, create, build, think, and love. Education, then, is the process of helping children encounter the relations of the world they are born into–relations with God, others, creation, and knowledge. In this way, Mason famously called education “the science of relations.” By simply teaching children in a way that exposes them to enduring stories, poetry, nature, music, art, math, and science, we are forming them in a biblical view of reality that will enable them to respond accordingly.

After all, the underlying thread of the five crises described above is simple: a rejection of goodness, truth, and beauty. By offering an education that introduces children to these ideas, we shape their views of knowledge, reality, morality, and desire. This, in turn, will shape them into people who not only keep the economy going (one of the four factors of a civilization), but can run government, pass on moral traditions, and uphold an unrelenting pursuit of knowledge.

Mason writes,

We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room;’ should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking––the strain would be too great––but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him? (School Education, p. 170).

Notice the end goal for Mason: living a full life. Is this not the proper end of education and civilization itself?

And how do we go about this education for a full life? Mason gives us a clue:

I know you may bring a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink. What I complain of is that we do not bring our horse to the water. We give him miserable little text-books, mere compendiums of facts, which he is to learn off and say and produce at an examination; or we give him various knowledge in the form of warm diluents, prepared by his teacher with perhaps some grains of living thought to the gallon. And all the time we have books, books teeming with ideas fresh from the minds of thinkers upon every subject to which we can wish to introduce children. (School Education, p. 171)

Conclusion

G.K. Chesterton famously stated, “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.” Through this exploration of civilizations–factors for their beginning and crises that can lead to their demise–we can understand this insight with fresh perspective. Great civilizations do not occur by accident. Certain preconditions must be met, and, on top of these preconditions, specific causal factors are at play.

Civilizations continue when they take on an existence of their own, grounded in an ideal type, which functions as the north star for the ongoing formation of its inhabitants. When this type is preserved, the civilization flourishes and human flourishing is the result. But when we lose sight of this ideal, the ground becomes shaky, moral intuitions uncertain, and truth itself up for grabs.

There is, therefore, work before us now as there is in every era. For, as Will Durant puts it, “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” (4).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In a typical lesson you decide, often quickly. Then you decide, decide, and decide again. You are a batter facing a hundred pitches in a row…What do you need to decide quickly, reliably, and well, while thinking about other things under a bit of pressure in the form, of, say, twenty-nine restless students, twenty-five minutes’ worth of work left to get done, and a ticking clock to remind you that you have fifteen minutes left in the class period?” (3). 

His solution is a mental model, that is, a framework to understand complex environments. In this case, teachers can filter the plethora of time-sensitive decisions before them through a grid of principles for a successful lesson. While teaching is a craft that takes extended time to master, Lemov believes that growth in the craft can occur much more rapidly through adopting a mental model composed of core principles. 

While Doug Lemov was developing his mental model for a successful lesson, classical education expert Christopher Perrin has been refining his own set of principles for sound classroom pedagogy. His course Principles of Classical Pedagogy through ClassicalU offers ten principles, or pedagogies, of great teaching. 

In this article, I will briefly review Lemov’s and Perrin’s lists of principles before going on to suggest three points of similarity, followed by three areas of difference. In doing so, I will demonstrate the value of insights gained through cognitive psychology and learning science, while arguing for the importance of situating any great teaching practice within a broader philosophy of education that takes seriously the full-orbed reality of what it means to teach and form human beings.

The Mental Model for an Effective Lesson

Through offering a mental model, Lemov seeks to help a teacher, first, grow in understanding of how learning works and, second, perceive accurately what their students need most to thrive in their classrooms. It is one thing, Lemov thinks, to have a set of teaching principles, such as “check for understanding” or “ratio,” two common phrases in the TLaC series. It is another thing to have an additional set of learning principles that “…can help explain why certain methods work as well as how and when to use them” (5).  In this way, Lemov’s five principles that comprise his mental model seek to offer guidance for both teaching and learning simultaneously. 

Let us review them now:

Principle 1: Understanding human cognitive structure means building long-term memory and managing working memory.

Lemov’s first principle focuses on the distinction between long-term and working memory in order to implement teaching practices that build long-term memory. The general idea is that while working memory is immediately accessible, it is extremely limited in capacity. Humans can only hold so much new information in their mind’s eye. Immediately following the exposure to new information, the forgetting process begins. The way to build long-term memory and strengthen the durability of knowledge is to implement retrieval practice techniques in which students are called upon to remember, or retrieve, what they were taught in the past. 

Principle 2: Habits accelerate learning.

Similar to the first principle, this second one offers guidance on how to use one’s cognition as efficiently as possible. The reality is that each day we are bombarded with common, everyday activities that require our attention. But what if we could put the mental effort of these mental tasks on autopilot in order to focus on more important work? This is the concept, described in cognitive terms, of a habit. The more we can help students put menial scholastic work on autopilot, from reading fluency to math fact automaticity to getting out a notebook to begin writing, the more they can focus their minds and wills on understanding deeper, more complex concepts. If you haven’t already, be sure to download Patrick Egan’s free Ebook and watch the webinar on how to help students build great habits.

Principle 3: What students attend to is what they will learn about.

This may go without saying, but focused concentration is the key to efficient and effective learning. And yet, we are all aware that there is a growing deficit of ability to attend to something for an extended amount of time in our world today. This principle seeks to equip students “…to lose themselves in a task and work at it steadily for a significant period of time, which means a setting where concentration can reliably be maintained and tasks and activities where the ability to focus is carefully cultivated” (20). Jason Barney’s The Joy of Learning offers a great path forward to implement this idea, known as “flow,” in the classical classroom. His webinar on the topic is also excellent.

Principle 4: Motivation is social.

It can be tempting to focus on the learning of each individual student, but this principle reminds us that humans thrive when they work together. In this way, the learning process, including the motivation to learn, occurs at both the individual and social level. Successful lessons occur within classroom cultures in which the norms and values of the classroom encourage individual hard work and intentional team work.

Principle 5: Teaching well is relationship building. 

The final principle Lemov identifies for an effective mental model of teaching and learning focuses on the power of relationships. Specifically, he emphasizes that the teacher-student relationship is one in which the student feels safe, successful, and known. Safety includes physical safety, yes, but also the intellectual safety to take risks. Success refers to the fact that a key objective of any lesson should be to help a student learn or do something. Finally, a student feeling known fulfills a core desire wired into all human beings for them to develop a sense of belonging. 

Overall, I find Lemov’s mental model, understood through these five principles, to be a helpful framework. The task of learning and mastering 63 “techniques” for a new and developing teacher is daunting. But equipping them with five big ideas, or principles, through which to filter their classroom decision-making and priorities, can simplify the teaching craft and clarify where to focus.

Perrin’s Principles of Classical Pedagogy

Now let us turn to classical education expert Christopher Perrin’s ten principles of classical pedagogy. According to an article written this past summer, Perrin is currently working on a book with fellow classical education consultant Carrie Eben that will seek to unpack these principles in order to equip great teaching. As a side note, we interviewed Eben on our podcast, which you can listen to here.

While Perrin does not use language of a mental model, it seems that his principles function in a similar way. By call them principles, rather than practices, he is directing us to think about the broader convictions teachers can adopt to govern specific practices. In other words, these principles exist less as a checklist and more as a filter. Teachers can measure a lesson against these principles in order to gain insight about how to strengthen the teaching and learning that goes on in their classrooms.

Given that Perrin’s article linked above provides brief descriptions for each principle, I will simply refer you to that article and list them out here. They are as follows:

1. Make haste slowly: take time to master each step.
2. Do fewer things, but do them well: it is better to master a few things well than to cover cursory content.
3. Repetition is the mother of memory: revisiting and reviewing past lessons deepens both affection and understanding.
4. The one who loves can sing and remember: the importance of songs, jingles, and chants.
5. Wonder commences learning that will last.
6. Order time and space for deep thought: cultivate leisure (schole) and contemplation. 
7. Embodied rhythms, liturgies, and routines shape the soul.
8. Students learn by teaching: knowledge taught is twice-learned.
9. The best teacher is a good book: the teacher becomes the tutor and a three-way conversation begins.
10. Learn in community through conversation: this creates a friendship of the soul that gives birth to deep and mutual learning.

What a fascinating list! Immediately, we can see the contrast between Lemov and Perrin in light of the language they deploy. Lemov’s focus is primarily material, in nature: cognition, socialization, and relationships all exist within an immanent frame of being in the world. In contrast, Perrin clearly values the spiritual and transcendent dimension on the same plane as the immanent. His desire for students to grow in love, virtue, reverence, and contemplation–beyond mere cognitive achievement–stands out.

What the Principles Have in Common 

There are three key ways I see Lemov and Perrin displaying similarity in the principles they prescribe. 

First, both approaches respect deep work and the building of durable knowledge. Lemov captures this value through his distinction between working and long-term memory as well as his emphasis on habits and attention. Perrin encourages teachers to proceed slowly and deeply through a lesson in order to build a strong foundation.

Second, both approaches appreciate the power of habit and attention. Obviously, habits and attention are the explicit focus for Lemov. He underscores the value of cultivating the right processes for learning to occur. It is not merely what or how much a student learns; it is how. Similarly, Perrin encourages the mastery of each step and using strategies like liturgies and chants to strengthen the learning experience.

Third, both approaches underscore the centrality of relationship in the learning process. Lemov grounds relationships in the power of motivation and social-emotional learning. Perrin looks to classical ideas about friendship and the formation of the soul to demonstrate the centrality of community in the classroom. 

How the Principles Diverge 

Nevertheless, there are core differences in which the prescribed principles diverge.

First, it is clear that while Perrin conceives of education as the full formation of a student (mind, heart, body, and soul), Lemov prioritizes the cognitive and emotional. While I do not think it is fair to say that Lemov values product over persons, I do think his view of humanity is limited by his secular vantage point. This anthropology lacks a moral dimension as well. If students are basically a bundle of cells directed by a nervous system, then the most that teachers can do is strengthen cognition and build “productive” social environments. But if students are eternal and embodied souls made in God’s image, then we need a different list, such as Perrin’s, to shape these souls accordingly. 

Second, and related, Perrin offers a compelling vision for learning, whereas Lemov only offers pragmatic motivation. From the very beginning, Perrin is clear that the goal of all education is wisdom and virtue. He writes, “By employing the following principles, teachers will naturally cultivate virtues of love, humility, fortitude,  diligence, constancy and temperance in the lives of their students.” In contrast, Lemov’s focus continues to be college and career readiness. While his preface does indicate a vision for cultivating an equitable and just society, within the D.E.I. stream of thinking, you can tell he is wrestling with the merits of this ideology, and ultimately fails to move beyond a myopic focus on the pragmatic benefits of education.

Finally, Perrin honors the situatedness of students in time and not merely space. He does so by recognizing the value of carrying on the rich tradition of goodness, truth, and beauty from the past into the future. His emphasis on great books, contemplation, poetry, and liturgy remind us that education possesses a broader cultural and civilizational significance, and therefore, responsibility. While both Lemov and Perrin rightly emphasize the paradox that humans both exist as individuals and members in communities, Lemov fails to address that we exist in communities of both space and time. A central goal of education includes honoring one’s intellectual, cultural, and religious heritage, and passing on the torch of this heritage to future generations.

Conclusion

In sum, there are benefits to both the mental model that Lemov proposes and Perrin’s list of pedagogical principles. Where Lemov falls short is where modern education usually does: failing to grasp the full-orbed nature of a human being and the implications this places on educators. Insights from cognitive psychology and the latest learning science will continue to improve the learning that goes on in our classrooms, and classical educators do well to implement these strategies in the classroom.

But we must not lose sight of the deeper and fuller reality of what it means to be human: that our students are made in God’s image, that they are embodied souls, that there is a moral universe to navigate as well as a physical one, and ultimately, that there is a God who intentionally designed and commissioned the human race to cultivate His goodness, truth, and beauty in the world. Through the incarnation of the Son of God, we are reminded that humanity is indeed special and unique in God’s sight, that our embodiedness is indeed good, and that through Christ, our fallenness can be redeemed for His purposes, including in the classroom.

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The post The Search for Great Teaching: A Comparison of <i>Teach Like a Champion 3.0</i> and Christopher Perrin’s Pedogogical Principles appeared first on .

• The material cause is the physical “stuff” that makes up a thing’s composition. 
• The formal cause is the design, shape, or arrangement of a thing.

• The efficient cause is the agent that brings the thing into existence.
• The final cause is the purpose or end for which the thing exists.

Together these causes serve as the foundation for whatever knowledge we can know about anything that exists.

In this article, I will explore the final cause, or purpose, of teaching. It practically goes without saying that there is great confusion in the world today about what the purpose of education is, broadly speaking, and teaching in particular. What precisely is the teaching act and what is its end goal?

Let us take a modern primer on teaching as an example. Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion series of primers on teaching techniques provide excellent advice for equipping teachers to lead effective, efficient, and dynamic classrooms. From implementing tactics like “Cold Cold” to “Least Invasive Intervention,” new teachers can quickly take charge of their classrooms and provide an environment for inspiring learning to occur.

But the underlying problem with Lemov’s approach is that it fails to provide a satisfactory final cause, or purpose, of teaching. The subtitle for his books continues to point to “putting students on the path to college” as the goal. This objective, though important, is outdated, shortsighted, and paints an incomplete picture of what it means to be human. It is outdated because college is decreasingly the primary target for high school graduates. With the exponential increase in the cost to go to college and the growing attractiveness of trade schools, the traditional college route can no longer be taken for granted as sufficient motivation for PreK-12 education. Second, Lemov’s implicit purpose for teaching is shortsighted because even if college is, or should be, the sole target for high school graduates, it is only preparing them for the next four years. But what about life after that? What about the early years of one’s career? What about marriage and family? What about church membership, community involvement, and civic participation? What about navigating life’s challenges as a son or daughter, uncle or aunt, husband or wife, father or mother? With this wide range of stages and challenges for people to navigate, how can PreK-12 education only focus on college?

This leads to my final point: these techniques, though useful in some respects, paint an incomplete picture of what it means to be human. Not only do they only aim, at best, to prepare students for a four-year phase, the focus on the cognitive domain of a student’s development generates confusion about what it means to be human. To put a sharper point on it, Lemov’s work is not merely a myopic focus on the cognitive domain to the neglect of say, the moral. It is ultimately an economic, or careerist, approach to human development. In our secular world, the focus is on living one’s best life now: on experiencing as much pleasure as possible, accumulating as many possessions as one can, earning as much status as possible, and living with optimal comfort. In this sense, we could just as easily rephrase the Teach Like a Champion subtitles to “putting students on the path to an affluent and comfortable life.”

This is a sorrowful and depressing vision for the good life indeed. God created our students for so much more than to merely pursue a comfortable life. Made in the image of God, humans are created with the unique capacities to reason, to create, to cultivate beauty, and, ultimately, to steward their lives, including the people and duties they are responsible for, with excellence. If our students are to fulfill this vocation, their teachers need to grab hold of a bigger vision for the goal of what they do. They need a final cause, as Aristotle would put it, that is worth true dedication to their craft.

Let us explore, then, some alternative ways to think about the great cause of teaching.

Putting the Puzzle Together

In The Idea of a Christian School (Cascade Books, 2024), Educational leader Tom Stoner argues that education is one of the most powerful influences in our lives. A key reason, writes Stoner, is that education aids a child in her constructed understanding of the world. The formation of this understanding is like putting together a puzzle. Each piece represents a different bit of information children receive, including ideas, emotions, experiences, facts, and knowledge (2). Schooling plays a major role in the assembly of this puzzle. 

So it seems that one way dimension of the goal of teaching is to help a child develop a coherent understanding of the world, one in which all the pieces fit together. Note that even with this cognitive focus, the goal is not college; it is human development. In addition, Stoner will go on to demonstrate that behind the scenes of helping a child “put the puzzle pieces together,” lies a particular vision of the good life. The puzzle, when put together, makes a big picture. What is that picture? Drawing from the classical tradition of the ancient Greeks, Stone believes that this picture, or vision, inevitably dictates a school’s priorities, including what teacherse expected to accomplish in the classroom.

In other words, teaching possesses a cognitive aim, helping a child make sense of her world, and a moral one. The moral aim is to help students grasp a particular vision for human flourishing and desire it. In this way, the goal of teaching, we could say, is not only educational, it is formational. 

One Goal in Seven Laws

John Milton Gregory, author of The Seven Laws of Teaching, seems to agree. In the opening pages to his book, Gregory puts forward a vision of human flourishing that find its culmination in “the full grown physical, intellectual, and moral manhood, with such intelligence as is necessary to make life useful and happy, and as will fit the soul to go on learning from all the scenes of life and from all the available sources of knowledge” (11). The goal of teaching, for Gregory, is the work of transforming a child into a mature and intelligent human. 

Interestingly, however, Gregory does not stop there. In his exposition of the seven laws of teaching, Gregory offers clues for the ways the different elements of the teaching process fit together to achieve this purpose. For example, the first law focuses on knowledge and the importance of the teacher knowing that which she would teach. The second law focuses on the role of learner, a pupil who attends with interest.

If we put all of Gregory’s laws together into a singular formulation of the goal of teaching, it might go something like this: The goal of teaching is to cultivate a student’s growth in wisdom and virtue through the dynamic interrelation of teacher and student as they conjointly pursue knowledge for ever-deepening understanding.

Tried and True

So far in this article, I have examined one primer on teaching, the Teach Like a Champion series. More recently, Daniel Coupland, professor of education at Hillsdale College, published his own primer: Tried and True (Hillsdale College Press, 2022), “a teaching manual of best practices for sound pedagogy.” This book seeks to introduce the fundamentals of teaching for a new teacher through fourteen “imperative statements.”

Interestingly, Coupland himself does not articulate an overarching goal of teaching. He therefore does not align with Lemov on a college-preparation approach, but nor does he offer an alternative. No doubt, in interest of his primer remaining brief and practical akin to Strunk and White’s grammatical primer The Elements of Style, he avoids the philosophical. The result, however, is that the book comes across as overly focused on the cognitive, that is, the head knowledge without the heart (moral and spiritual formation).

To his credit, Coupland does spend a chapter on connecting one’s teaching to the broader purpose of one’s school. His first imperative statement is to “Follow the School’s Mission.” Certainly whatever the goal of teaching is, it is inextricably linked with the purpose of the school in which it occurs. Insofar as the school’s mission does articulate a purpose for what happens in the classroom, this could provide a satisfactory goal for teaching.

Another way the primer points to a broader goal of teaching is Coupland’s seventh imperative, “Plans Lessons Purposefully,” in which he advises teachers to focus on student learning. Here he distinguishes between the nebulous phrase “covering content” and actually teaching it. Coupland encourages teachers to craft objectives for each lesson regarding the knowledge, skill, or experience they are aiming for their students to obtain. This emphasis on the cognitive aspect of teaching is not dissimilar from Gregory’s. The chief difference is that while Gregory goes on to articulate a moral dimension of the goal of teaching, Coupland remains focused on the cognitive.

What Bloom Gets Wrong

Here, of course, I cannot help but think of Jason Barney’s recent work on Bloom’s taxonomy. In Rethinking the Purpose of Education (Educational Renaissance, 2023), Barney offers a critique of Bloom’s organization of the cognitive aims of education and proposes a replacement through retrieval of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. In doing so, Barney helpfully points out that the training of intellectual abilities and skills is at best an incomplete picture of what it means to educate humans.

In Chapter 4 specifically, B​​arney maps out a correspondence between Bloom’s six objective categories in the cognitive domain with Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues, including the seven liberal arts. After commenting on this correspondence and then offering a restructured approach in which Bloom’s is filtered through Aristotle’s virtues, Barney writes, “In summary, then, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues restore the intellectual virtues of the body and heart, the educational importance of beautiful craftsmanship and skill, as well as the moral wisdom of a life well lived. In addition, the virtue of philosophic wisdom clarifies a new crowning achievement of true education that Bloom’s Taxonomy does not have the resources to grasp” (72).

In this way, through returning to an Aristotelian framework, Barney proposes a profound and deeply human purpose of education, and by extension teaching, that will prepare students for a life, not mere college experience, of flourishing.

Conclusion

In this article, I have explored various ways to think about the final cause, or goal, of teaching. If we are to train teachers well in the craft of teaching, they need to understand the purpose for this craft. While teaching primers are valuable for providing techniques and practices for immediate implementation in the classroom, if they are disconnected from the final cause of teaching, the work will grow stale. In this way, we could say these primers address the material and formal cause of teaching, but do not address the efficient cause (the teacher) or the final cause (the goal). My hope is that through reading this article, you have gained an expanded vision for what this goal could be and the implications teaching possesses for helping students experience a full and flourishing life. In the end, the cause of teaching is not merely final, it is truly great.

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Imagination. The word brings so much to mind for us today. If there’s one thing that everybody can agree on for children, it’s the need to help them develop a vivid imagination through school, play, and well… everything they do. Or perhaps, ‘develop a vivid imagination’ is the wrong way of putting it.

“Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination,” said Walt Disney. “But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.”

So maybe it’s not children who need to develop an imagination, it’s us adults who need to rekindle it. 

Maybe the problem is school. Maybe we’re the ones who educate students out of imagination and creativity, as Sir Kenneth Robinson has claimed. In a TED talk from 2007, entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” he argued that we have rethink schooling entirely for our new era because of how our organized structures of school only focus on one type of “academic achievement.” This has become a popular idea and might be connected to another recent movement in education: Howard Gardner’s idea of multiple intelligences. There isn’t just IQ, but other imaginative and creative areas of intelligence that traditional schooling disregards or at least categorizes as not as valuable. In addition to verbal and mathematical intelligence (which are often prominent in standardized testing), Gardner posits that there are visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and other intelligences. The multiple intelligences theory has had its critics. One article said,

Gardner’s theory has come under criticism from both psychologists and educators. These critics argue that Gardner’s definition of intelligence is too broad and that his eight different “intelligences” simply represent talents, personality traits, and abilities. Gardner’s theory also suffers from a lack of supporting empirical research…. Despite this, the theory of multiple intelligences enjoys considerable popularity with educators. Many teachers utilize multiple intelligences in their teaching philosophies and work to integrate Gardner’s theory into the classroom. (see Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (verywellmind.com))

Some parts of this idea resonate with a postmodern retreat from any standards in education. Everyone has their own special intelligence area, no matter plummeting math and reading scores. Perhaps there’s also a fair bit of sentimentality about childhood in our talk about imagination. But on the other hand, many of these other types of intelligence that Gardner proposed are staples of the classical tradition: music, gymnastic, the prudence to engage with other people in the human world, and the rhetorical skills to persuade and communicate well interpersonally. Maybe Gardner is just repackaging lost arts of the classical tradition as a new psycho-educational theory. Of course, we’ve all probably felt in our own lives how the drudgery of school or work or daily life can seem to socialize us out of imagination and our creative intelligences. 

But it’s not just one side of the aisle that is saying we need to reinvigorate education and modern life with imagination. Anthony Esolen, a conservative Catholic professor and social commentator, wrote a witty book entitled, 10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. It’s written kind of like C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, with biting irony showing us what not to do. For Esolen the culprits of our loss of imagination actually is the result of our anti-traditionalism. It’s because we’ve lost or abandoned things that progressives would decry, like the power of memory in school, or because we are “effacing the glorious differences between the sexes.” We’ve lost traditional childhood games, and won’t let kids pick their own teams anymore. We overly separate children from the adult world, and we deny the existence of transcendent and permanent things, we also keep children indoors too much because we’re afraid of them getting dirty or hurting themselves. (I rely partly on Justin Taylor’s review on the Gospel Coalition for this assessment.)

To his list from over a decade ago we could add a host of growing modern phenomena:

• Overstimulation through media
• Over scheduling in “activities” and lack of free play
• Loss of fairy tales and quality imaginative literature in school
• Focus on career prep, practicality, STEM, standardized testing and grades

So perhaps we can land on a thesis with surprising contemporary agreement: we need more imagination in childhood and in school. But our agreement may be only surface deep, as the devil really is in the details.

What is imagination anyway? How do we cultivate it? What might Christianity and the classical tradition have to say about the matter? I hope to open the discussion for us of some of these very big and daunting questions. First, we’ll discuss what imagination is and how we use our imaginations all the time in all sorts of ways. Second, we’ll consider how we can cultivate the imagination in our classes and subjects, before concluding that a well-developed Christian imagination should be an important goal of our schools. 

What Is Imagination?

First, let’s try to answer the question “What is Imagination?” It’s one of those terms we’re happy to use all the time, but I’m not sure anyone really knows what we’re talking about. Is it just another word for creativity? Or is it a faculty of the human mind? Is imagination just something we use at Disneyland, or when reading fantastical literature, or is it more far reaching than that? Well, I think the latter in both cases. The imagination is an ability of ours as human beings that deeply informs who we are, how we think, and how we live and relate to others, even if we don’t consider ourselves a very imaginative person. 

When I am trying to define important ideas like this, I often go to Aristotle, that great philosopher, at least as a starting point. Avid readers of Educational Renaissance will no doubt be laughing here, because have been writing on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues for a few years already. But you will remember that, no, imagination is not one of the intellectual virtues, and I’m not about to make it one. I don’t even think the imagination is mentioned in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics… but I was reading Aristotle’s De Anima (“On the Soul”) this summer for a series on The Soul of Education and having unthinkingly assigned myself the absurd task of imagining up a talk on imagination some months ago for the ACCS Endorsed Teacher Training Workshop at Coram Deo Academy (where I serve as Principal), I happily happened upon a passage where Aristotle does in fact define imagination. And I think his definition actually helps us as educators to understand what we’re really after for our students.

The word ‘imagination’ in English pretty clearly features the word ‘image’ in it. And Aristotle roughly defines it as the faculty of bringing images before the mind. In Greek the word is phantasia which comes from a word for light and vision, having a similar idea. It’s the ability to bring pictures before your mind that you are not currently seeing or experiencing; in fact, for Aristotle, it could be more than just pictures, it could include other senses like smells or sounds. It is not sense or memory, because if imagination were just limited to what we were experiencing or had experienced, it would be very limited. The very power of imagination is that we can blend and expand on those things we have seen or experienced from our memories, creating something new. It is a synthetic faculty, bringing together disparate things to make of them something that did not exist before. In that sense, imagination is not like the intellectual virtues which for Aristotle are always true, it’s not knowledge or understanding, because those can’t be false but imagination can be. We can have “vain imaginations” as scripture says, but we can also have the glorious imaginings of faith, where we walk precisely not by our sight.

I hope you can see that on this definition, imagination actually looms larger in education than Disney could have imagined. Imagination is connected to memory, creative production and thought. It is like a master faculty of the human mind that underlies all sorts of more developed intellectual abilities. On this definition, then, I would assert that Disney’s claim that children are born with a vivid imagination is plainly false. Children are certainly born with an imaginative ability that they will naturally use as human beings, but it’s only the trained and developed imagination of the great painter or artist, engineer or writer, that is vivid and alive to its full potential. 

It certainly is possible that children would begin to disuse their imaginative and creative abilities in some areas through traditional schooling, but it is likewise true that they are learning to imagine in ways that they never could have on their own, if it weren’t for us. J.R.R. Tolkien did not lose his imagination by learning Latin and Greek and old English and history. It was the store of memories that he gained through his studies that allowed him to build a compelling imaginative world that arguably exceeded the depth and breadth of any imaginative writer before him. 

I use the example of Tolkien because I think it illustrates the point well. But I think there is a real danger in limiting our view of imagination to fantastical literature only. Imaginations of all different sorts underlie all of the subjects that we teach and in fact our very lives. I mentioned before the possibility of good or bad imaginations. Scripture would teach us to consider that some human imaginings are fleshly, worldly and stereotyped, while others might be spiritually led and philosophically grounded. Aristotle himself asserts that “imagination may be false.” 

This brings us to the first and perhaps the most important point for us to remember as classical Christian educators about the imagination. The imaginings of the heart may be deceitful, they may lead us astray. This is so important to know as we are shepherding our students morally and spiritually. But it is also key academically. The problem in science or math or history class may be that the students imaged into their own mind an inaccurate representation of the truth that we are trying to teach them. We must work with them to correct the picture that they think they know and help them imagine appropriately. Often, this entails going back to the source images, storyline, details. We have to get them to talk out and explain the picture they have in their minds, so that we can surgically assist them in altering it. This process can be difficult; it’s more difficult if we aren’t even aware of how things went wrong. This is also why getting the initial exposure of the vision of some truth right is so important: it’s easier to teach something the right way first, than to struggle with trying to reteach again and again and again.

But before we go too far into applications of this understanding of the imagination, we need to pause and detail just how broad this faculty of imagining really is. A few weeks ago my dad was visiting us from California. And I asked him what he thought about the imagination. My dad is a Christian therapist or counselor, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he immediately brought up the role of the imagination in mental health and addiction. He talked about how in dealing with challenging and painful circumstances, healthy individuals are able to, in some sense, escape or find positive refuge in imagining a calm and peaceful environment of some kind. He teaches his clients to do this. It made me think of a poem by William Wordsworth that I memorized in high school and taught in some of my first years of teaching:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Did you catch that last stanza? Seeing this pleasant nature scene provided Wordsworth with a type of wealth, that he could then recollect, imagine again to himself afresh when in “vacant or in pensive mood.” He had gained the ability to cheer his heart against the trials of life. This is part of what our children miss, when they don’t have time in nature.

So, there is this positive role that imagination plays for aesthetics, for quality of life, and even for developing good taste for the higher pleasures. This is part of what a rich classical education is meant to give our students. But negatively, my dad also discussed the role of the imagination in addiction, how addicts will imagine to themselves beforehand the satisfaction of their desire. This shows us that the imagination is a moral and spiritual faculty, that requires self-control and training to focus on, to think on, as Paul says, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise” (Phil 4:8). The content of our and our students’ imaginings matters and it’s not something we should leave up to chance. Charlotte Mason, the British Christian educator of the late 19th century, also discusses the positive moral value of giving students a vital relationship with every area of knowledge. Without this, human beings are more easily a prey to the lower and immoral pleasures on offer in our world.

In addition, imagination plays a role in living a prudent and virtuous life through our ability to imagine possible futures. Through imagination we can anticipate the negative consequences of our actions. While we can’t know the future, we can envision potential futures playing themselves out based on how we act and how we would imagine others to act in response. We can also imagine where we want to go in our lives, in our organizations, and we can develop an ideal vision of the future that can serve as our NorthStar while working out the day-to-day realities that befall us. This is how imagination plays in to the intellectual and moral virtue of prudence, both for individuals and for groups of people. We can only act prudently for our own good when we can imagine what will be good for us.

For this to happen our memories need to be stocked with real-world experiences and surrogate experiences through literature and history. This is why the saying, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it,” has such cache. But reading itself requires imagination for true understanding. We must actively picture to ourselves what we are reading about. Reading is not a passive experience. And in fact, one of the great strengths of reading over more entertainment-focused media, like the screen, is that the mind must do more work to imagine to itself a vision of the content read. Don’t get me wrong! Children can’t picture to themselves what they’ve never seen. But passive entertainment does not stoke a child’s imagination. Reading aloud is a lost art, and we should help students develop their imagination through lots and lots of practice.

How can we cultivate imagination in our classes and subjects?

Well, we can begin by ruling out some things. We don’t cultivate this active faculty of the imagination through iPads, screens, videos, and edutainment. These are crutches for the imagination. It’s not that children should never experience the delights of video; images delight the mind and can help to stock the memory, but if all their imaginative work is done for students, this will not give them the practice of drawing from their own stock of memory to creatively render ideas to themselves through their imagination. Everything in its place. Our world has no lack of exposure to images by way of screen. So instead, we want to provide for them the vibrant life-giving materials of a Christian and true imagination, and engage the memory, then prompt creative production with true, good and beautiful models. The key here is that students do not have everything handed to them on a silver platter, but just enough to get their minds going. We don’t want to overstimulate. 

So what should we do? Well, parents should provide their children with hours of uninterrupted imaginative play. This provides children with the possibility of imaginative flow. We all know how detailed imagination and creativity take time and thought. If every minute of every day is schedule for children, there is no margin, no open space for this. While much of this applies to parenting and not teaching, schools too should beware of the modern temptation to fill every minute and pack every afternoon and evening with sports and extracurriculars. We have a tendency as a culture to believe that more is always better. Chris Perrin of Classical Academic Press has been keen to remind us that the origin of the word ‘school’ is the Greek word ‘schole’ which meant leisure. Often we are going at anything but a leisurely pace at school, and this has negative ramifications for children’s imagination. 

At the same time, this fact about imagination helps be on our guard against some modern ideology around attention span. When pundits claim that a child of a particular age only has a 10 minute or 15 minute attention span, we should be incredibly skeptical. That same child could be glued to the TV for hours on end, exercising perfect attention. Or that child could spend hours at the craft table with crayons and scissors and nothing but his vivid imagination. And yes, the child might struggle to attend to a new and abstract concept in math for which he has not been given any concrete or pictorial representations. Attention span for children is not a fixed entity. It is possible that if your students are struggling to attend that you have not set up the knowledge in such a way as to engage their imagination. 

How else can we cultivate the imagination? Well, I mentioned reading aloud, and so I would be remiss as the author of A Classical Guide to Narration not to call for the narration of classical literature after one reading aloud. If you didn’t know, narration is a practice where students are asked to tell back in detail after a single reading of some rich text. Instead of summarizing or analyzing, the student who narrates has to imaginatively relive the text as he tells it all back point by point. It’s this imaginative recreation of a story or description or explanation that seals this new knowledge in long term memory and engages the imaginative powers of the student. It will over time help students develop a rich verbal and linguistic imagination. 

In order to help students do this well as part of our lessons we should be sure to prepare them for the rich text that will be the main feature of each new lesson. For example, we can set up the reading by providing them with the right images of real plants, animals, buildings, geography, or items, that are featured in the text. We want them to understand it, and so we should provide them with the vivid images that will make sense of the story or scientific explanation. They will naturally then use those images as they narrate the text in front of the class or to a partner later on. 

Another important way to develop the imagination of our students is through Artwork Study, or Picture Study, Charlotte Mason called it. The idea is to place before students the pictures, paintings and artwork of our greatest artists from down through the ages. Give them a couple of minutes to take it all in quietly. Turn the reproduction over. Then have students recount as many details as they can before discussing it. This does not require special training in art or art history to do. We can stock the memory and learn the language of our great visual artists and in this way develop the visual imagination of our students. I could go on to talk of nature study and natural history outdoors. Learning to name the plants and animals in our own area is a wonderful way to start, as is basic sketching of our findings in a nature journal during our excursions.

Of course, we don’t want to leave out geometry and spatial reasoning, as if there were not an imagination proper to mathematics. This calls for a slow, deliberate movement from concrete to pictorial to abstract. In other words, whatever curriculum we use we should be sure as teachers to provide the imagination with the raw materials it needs in the proper order or sequence. Artistry in any area requires a detailed vision of what could be. We want to help students gain the developed imagination of design thinking and engineering. This may in fact be why we value manipulatives and scientific experiments, because they help lead to a mathematical and scientific imagination.

A Christian Classical Imagination

All this seems to follow from the fact that the imaginative faculty is responsible for bringing new images to our minds from the storehouse of our memory. Integration and synthesis are the acts of the creative imagination. This imagination is a far-reaching master faculty of the mind, and we would do well to recognize how crucial it is to cultivate it in school.

So I conclude that a Christian imagination and a well-informed classical imagination, trained in the liberal arts and sciences, fed on the Great Books and Great Conversation, full of true, good and noble ideas, is a if not the major outcome that we are seeking in our sort of education. We want our students to be imaginative in this sense.

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis wrote something striking about what it means to be original that has stayed with me. He said,

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

I think that what Lewis said of originality applies to how we think about cultivating the imagination in school. Imaginative expressions should aim at truth-telling. The best developed imagination, originality itself, actually comes from submission to the truths of the Great Tradition, of Christianity first and foremost, but also the best that has been thought, said, written, painted, composed, experimented before us. 

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To prepare for a launch year, there are a number of elements for school founders to discuss, care for, and organize into a cohesive plan. These elements, many of which are minute, taken individually may at times feel trivial, disconnected, and unimportant. The truth is, however, these factors and logistics combine to form not simply a plan, but a culture. If school cultures are made up of the habits and routines that together form a school’s identity, then these elements are nothing less than the invisible glue that holds the broader school culture together.

In this article, I am going to suggest five elements new schools want to get right regarding specifically their faculty culture on Day 1. While there are just about a million things founding school leaders could prioritize when building their team of faculty, these five elements will strategically position the school to cultivate a great faculty culture throughout its first year of operation.

1. General Expectations

This is the least inspiring of the elements, so I will address it first. The truth is that any functional work environment requires clarity and accountability regarding the basic expectations all employees will be held to fulfill. What is the dress code? What time should faculty arrive each morning? How long should they remain on campus after school is dismissed? What is proper email protocol for style, formatting, and response time?

These questions may feel mundane, but the truth is that ambiguity in these areas over time chips away at a cohesive culture. As Patrick Lencioni points out in Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a lack of clarity leads to a lack of commitment. While it is important to balance procedural clarity on the one hand with professional independence on the other, upfront communication regarding the general expectations that matter will prevent unnecessary confusion and a lack of commitment in the long-term.

2. Relationships

How are the various constituents of the school going to interact with one another? How will they speak about one another? Schools exist as a unique social conglomeration of children and adults, parents and teachers, with varying levels of authority. It is important for the school to provide clarity for faculty on Day 1 regarding how students will be permitted to speak to their teachers, how teachers will interact with parents, and how teachers will speak about parents.

The two leading values for a healthy relational culture are kindness and respect. Kindness is the disposition of goodwill we all desire to be exhibited toward us, and therefore should exhibit toward others. Kindness begins in the heart and is manifested through action: the words we say, the gestures we use, and the responses we have, especially in pressure-filled moments.

Respect is the due regard we owe one another. In a school setting, there are two general types of respect. The first type is the respect we owe all people based on their personhood and worth as divine image-bearers. In this sense, all members of the school, including children, should be recognized and treated as persons. The second type is the respect we owe various constituents of our community based on their role and position in authority. You can lay the groundwork for a strong faculty culture by taking time up front to talk about the ways different groups within the school will interact and providing specific examples for how kindness and respect should be modeled.

3. Parent Partnership

Parent partnership may sound like a carry-over from “relationships,” but the emphasis is different. Cultivating a faculty culture of parent partnership means forming teachers who understand that parents should be viewed as assets, not obstacles, in the educational journey. The reality is that teachers learn so much about a student in a single year, but this knowledge pales when compared to what the parents know about the child from years in the home. School leaders can promote a faculty culture of parent partnership by instilling good practices for keeping parents informed and inviting them to provide insight into a child’s needs and growth areas.

It is worth mentioning as well that a faculty culture of parent partnership will greatly assist with yearly retention. Parents will choose to re-enroll their children if and when they believe and trust that the school is delivering on its commitments. The primary vantage point parents possess for making this determination is through the relationship they have developed with their child’s teacher. This is all the more reason to prioritize parent partnership for teachers on Day 1.

4. Planning Ahead

This may sound obvious, but again, I return to the importance of details and building institutional habits. In the first year, it is important for schools to establish what kind of school it is going to be, particularly in the classroom. Will it be a school that flies by the seat of its pants, plagued by a lack of preparation, unpredictable decisions, and the tyranny of the urgent? Or it will take time to slow down and prepare, investing the extra time on the front end to sow seeds of preparation and calm?

School leaders, especially in the first year, will not have time to review with teachers every planning detail. My suggestion, therefore, is that they prioritize holding teachers accountable to writing and submitting good lesson plans. A good lesson plan provides the avenue for a teacher to think through the plan for the day, from time-bound procedures to teaching objectives to classroom assignments. Planning in advance will reduce the burden on a teacher’s working memory and allow her to be more present with her students. If a school can establish a faculty culture of planning ahead, particularly through good lesson planning, it will save itself from a plethora of issues down the road.

5. Text-Centered Learning

For a school just opening its doors, it needs to decide what will be the core values of the classroom. What matters most in the daily instruction of students? While there are lots of possibilities to choose from, I suggest that for classical schools specifically, it is important to instill a faculty culture of text-centered learning. Here I mean a form of learning in which the text, not the teacher and not the student, serves as the primary GPS for what will be taught and learned. This is not to suggest that the text is or should be infallible. Nor is it to imply that the teacher’s or student’s opinions do not matter. Rather it is to clarify that amidst all the opinions and ideas swirling around in a particular lesson, we are going to let the text, assuming it is well-chosen, be our chief object of inquiry. This is the surest way to implement the core elements of a liberal arts education.

One practical way to promote a text-centered culture is through narration. Narration, which we have written about extensively at Educational Renaissance, is a teaching method that exposes students to rich content and then gives them the opportunity to share in detail what they recall about the content. This practice instills in teachers and students alike an acute alertness to understanding the text before moving on to exercises in analysis and critique.

Conclusion

If school founders can instill these five elements in their faculty culture, they will be well on their way to not only a great inaugural year, but to a successful first chapter in the school’s short history. Amidst all there is to do and plan, the key is to prioritize what matters most and remain committed to these values. May the Lord lead and guide you as you seek to do the Lord’s work for the sake of your community and the next generation!

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This series may not be able to answer all the controversies and complex intricacies of this age old set of questions, but at least if we follow out these different strands, we might be able to be more aware of our preconceived notions and how they are affecting our view of the children in front of us day after day. Even as Christians we can tend to hold contradictory notions at one and the same time and this befuddles our practices and responses to everyday occurrences. Once we follow the ghost of the soul out into the courtyard of ideas, we’ll find both valuable insights into who we are and how we should be educated, but also incorrect notions that should be discarded and reburied as liable to lead us astray. In this way we can end the haunting of our educational practices by false views and unhelpful practices.

We can profitably begin with Plato’s account of the soul as immortal and containing three parts which must be properly harmonized with one another through education. Before Plato significant thinking about the nature of the soul had already begun among earlier Greek philosophers, but no one thinker arguably has had a greater influence on Western conceptions of the soul than him. 

The Immortality of the Soul

In Homeric times the word for soul, psyche in Greek, had more of a straightforward referent, something akin to ‘life’ on the one hand, and ‘shade’ or ‘ghost’ on the other: 

The soul is, on the one hand, something that a human being risks in battle and loses in death. On the other hand, it is what at the time of death departs from the person’s limbs and travels to the underworld, where it has a more or less pitiful afterlife as a shade or image of the deceased person.

See Ancient Theories of Soul (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Summer 2009 Edition)

This set of meanings is roughly comparable to the common use of ‘nephesh’ in the Hebrew Old Testament, which may have originally meant ‘neck’ or ‘throat’. Your soul in this ancient Greek or Hebrew context is what makes you alive, and perhaps, ironically, the part of you that lingers on in Hades or Sheol after you have died. 

Plato develops especially on this second meaning in the Phaedo to express his view that the human soul is immortal. For Plato this immortal soul is embodied throughout a human life and can be affected negatively by the choices and lifestyle lived in the body. Purifying the soul from bodily entanglements is part and parcel of the true practice of philosophy, which involves a type of dying that leads to genuinely blessed life. 

This Platonic view of the soul will influence Stoicism, as well as later Gnosticism. Moreover, it seems almost impossible not to conclude that Jesus and the apostles are not, in some ways, both countering and affirming it, as earlier Jews had before them. For instance, Jesus says, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28 ESV). This seems to agree with the idea that the soul outlives physical death, adding further the Christian view of final judgment and everlasting “destruction” in hell. 

At the same time, we do not have any Christian affirmation of the idea that the soul pre-exists bodily life in normal humans. Therefore, Plato’s supposition that all learning is in fact remembering finds no support in Christian theology. It also brings with it its own set of problems, like the possible infinite regression of souls passing into and out of bodies. Plato’s socratic method of educating by ‘drawing out’ the knowledge already nascent inside the soul must find some other justification than this theory of the soul for classical Christian educators. 

But we have had no trouble doing so, since asking the student questions to prod thought is attested elsewhere, not least with Jesus himself. In addition, the value of socratic or maieutic instruction is found in training a student in the art of dialectical reasoning and, at the same time, forcing a student to analyze their own partially formed or borrowed answers to life’s fundamental questions for logical consistency. This process can help bring about a metanoia, a repentance or change of mind, where a student adopts a more consistent understanding of the world. We can safely do away with pre-existence while holding onto the human soul’s continued existence after death based on the biblical support.

The Tripartite Soul: Rational, Emotional, and Appetitive

In Plato’s Republic his tripartite theory of the soul finds its most stunning and educationally suggestive descriptions. The overarching concern of the dialogue is the attempt by Socrates to explain what justice is and why it is worthwhile in and of itself, regardless of society’s rewards. The tale of the ring of Gyges told in book 2 helps to bring the issue to a head by positing a scenario in which a man with a ring of invisibility could practice all manner of injustice without any fear of punishment. It is a case of absolute power corrupting absolutely and challenging the hearer on whether he wouldn’t do the same thing, if given the opportunity. 

Socrates’ extended answer to the question of whether justice truly leads to happiness or blessedness hinges on the order or disorder of the several parts of the soul. He maintains that the tyrant with absolute power is actually the most miserable and unhappy type of person. In order to explain why he writs large the nature of the soul, by expanding into an inquiry into the just city-state, which ends up having the same harmonious parts as the individual human soul.  “Corresponding to the three types in the city, the soul also is tripartite,” says Socrates (Perseus Digital Library, Book 9, 580d). “Each of us also in whom the several parts within him perform each their own task—he will be a just man and one who minds his own affair” (441d-e).

The three parts are the rational, high-spirited, or we might say emotional, and the appetitive. The symbolic images he assigns to these are a man (rational), a lion (spirited), and a monkey or monster (appetitive). “Does it not belong to the rational part to rule, being wise and exercising forethought in behalf of the entire soul, and to the principle of high spirit to be subject to this and its ally?” (441e) asks Socrates. These two parts, then, allied together, can effectively “preside over the appetitive part which is the mass of the soul in each of us and the most insatiate by nature of wealth” (442a). In Plato all the non-ideal forms of government, as well as the non-ideal forms of individual character, are explained through various types of disordering of these fundamental parts of the soul or city. 

We can pause at this point to note that Plato’s tripartite soul draws from our common sense self-awareness as human beings. Each of us has felt within 1) the massive force of appetitive desires, 2) the high emotional spirits of a desire for honor and the motivation to act, 3) the ability to think rationally about things, whether our own affairs or abstract sciences. Naming these various parts of the human inner life does not exactly put us in heavily speculative or theoretical territory, unlike the soul’s pre-existence. Whether we think of Freud’s superego, ego and id, or the biblical language of mind, heart and flesh or passions, we find ourselves assuming something very like the threefold division of Plato. In other words, Plato’s tripartite soul is fundamental and necessary, virtually uncontestable (unless we get down very deep in the weeds of exact distinctions), and therefore incredibly important and valuable.

Plato has posed the question of human justice or righteousness as a matter of a rightly ordered soul in harmony with itself. In doing so he framed the work of education and personal growth as aiming principally at what came to be called the cardinal virtues: practical wisdom or prudence, courage, temperance and justice. Practical wisdom arises when the rational part of the soul rules and is obeyed in a person’s choices. Courage involves the high-spirited part’s emotional regulation according to right reason, even in the face of fears. Temperance, or self-control, comes about when the mass of desires and appetites submit to the rational and spirited part, with the outcome of these three being a person who acts justly toward himself and others. 

How does this educational goal come about? we might ask. What pedagogy or means can be turned to this end or purpose of education? Plato’s answer is that it is “the blending of music and gymnastics that will render them concordant, intensifying and fostering the one with fair words and teachings and relaxing and soothing and making gentle the other by harmony and rhythm” (441e-442a). A literary, poetic, and musical education filled with examples of real goodness, truth and beauty (we must engage in some censoring of the poets, Plato asserts) will tune the heart to right reason. Physical training to endure pains and sufferings, improve fitness and build up well-trained reflexes of nerve and sinew, rather than pampering the flesh, will set the appetitive part in submission. (For more on gymnastic and musical education, see Clark and Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition.)

Based on his symbolic and tripartite image of the soul, the task of education becomes very clear, aiming both at justice and ultimate happiness or human flourishing as two sides of the same coin:

And on the other hand he who says that justice is the more profitable affirms that all our actions and words should tend to give the man within us complete domination over the entire man and make him take charge of the many-headed beast—like a farmer who cherishes and trains the cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild—and he will make an ally of the lion’s nature, and caring for all the beasts alike will first make them friendly to one another and to himself, and so foster their growth. (589a-b)

This type of self-culture implies the help of a certain type of parental discipline and educational regimen that might be otherwise unwelcome. The conclusion is that each soul has a “many-headed beast” within it that must be taken charge of, checked, and dominated. The heart and sense of honor and motivation must be made an ally to the reason, “cultivated plants” like good habits and right emotional responses must be “cherished” but wild growths must be pruned, weeds dug up by the roots. 

Moreover, the three parts of the soul have each, according to Plato, a different set of natural desires. The rational part is a lover of learning and a lover of wisdom, the natural philosopher in us. The spirited part is a lover of honor; we might call this our social-emotional nature, easily swayed by the wrong influences, but a powerhouse of energy and drive. The appetitive part is a lover of gain, money or profit, chiefly concerned with how to satisfy its own desires. According to this insight, then, the major concern of education is not simply how to train the skills of one individual part of the soul, i.e. honing the faculties of the rational part. For, if the appetitive part or spirited part are ruling the man, then the powers of the rational part of the soul can themselves be used in service of the man’s avarice and unchecked ambition. Instead, the challenge of education and self-culture is how to properly order the development and growth of the three parts of the soul in harmonious and proper relationships with one another. Each part must do its own proper task, claims Plato. 

To the extent that Plato is right about this, modern education is found to be wanting because of its abandonment of traditional values and morality. Without an agreed upon principle for the ordering of the soul’s affections, as C.S. Lewis explained in The Abolition of Man, education will tend to be disforming, making bloated heads and shriveled chests, or we might say, unrighteous men, enslaved to their own prejudices and appetites. This much we have said before on Educational Renaissance, but perhaps now we can see more clearly how it is this tripartite view of the soul that hovers over this educational problem. As we continue our series on The Soul of Education we will see how this fundamental insight from Plato finds expression or contradiction in various ways.

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