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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“Umm,” you begin.

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

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

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

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

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

What is Civilization?

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

Historian Will Durant defines it as such:

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

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

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

The Beginning of Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy is Threatened

But would this nascent democracy last?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Golden Age of Greece

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

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

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

Some examples of the art and architecture include:

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

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

The Centrality of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

And as Will Durant cautions:

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

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Up first is a volume written by Elaine Cooper entitled The Power and Neglected Voice of Charlotte Mason: A Coherent, Holistic Approach to Education for Our Times. Her thesis is many ways is captured by the two adjectives in the subtitle: coherent and holistic. I could see this book being a centerpiece for introducing parents and teachers to Charlotte Mason who may have only a passing acquaintance with her life and work due to the far-reaching scope of such a succinct volume.

Cooper has been at the heart of the Charlotte Mason revival since the 1970s, working alongside Susan Schaeffer Macaulay to establish the Child Light Trust to promote Charlotte Mason education in England. In 2004, Cooper edited the book When Children Love to Learn (Crossway), bringing together leading voices in the US and England to provide practical applications for Mason’s philosophy. Cooper was also involved in the start of Heritage School in Cambridge, England, which opened its doors in 2007.

Biography

Cooper begins her work with a succinct biography of Charlotte Mason. The contours of this biographical sketch of Mason follows the work of Margaret Coombs, who published Charlotte Mason: Hidden Heritage and Educational Influence in 2015. I appreciate how Cooper retraces the hidden childhood of Mason without dwelling on her birth out of wedlock or the potential influence either parent or their families might have had on her subsequent achievements. Mason rarely mentioned her upbringing, which could be due to her embarrassment of that upbringing. But equally, she could have just as easily viewed those years as irrelevant to the person she became as an educational thinker. To that end, Cooper’s sketch devotes the bulk of the section to her experiences in teacher training schools and posts at Birkenhead, London, Worthing and Chichester.

One of the important points Cooper brings out pertains to the collapse of the positivism of late Victorians progressivism. World War 1 had swept away much of this positivism, and with it many turned to modernist views of education. Cooper writes:

“But the horrors of the First World War and the disillusionment with western civilisation sent shock waves through society. Many educators and leaders at the time felt that old ways of thinking and doing needed to be swept away, and the new be emphatically implemented for the 20^th century. Mason’s educational vision and model for a full and abundant life binding knowledge and virtue and shaping Britain as a righteous nation no longer fitted in.” (19)

From this we may derive two insights. First, this factor demonstrates how in the height of Mason’s reach within British culture—she had established the House of Education in Ambleside, she was a respected author, moved in important circles in society, and a growing number of state schools were adopting her methods—she became almost anonymous and forgotten in history. It wasn’t due to a deficiency in her educational philosophy or pedagogical methods, but rather to a radical turning away from traditional values. A turn, one might add, that demonstrably was for the worse not only in Britain but throughout the world, as a Second World War so soon after the First would confirm.

Second, Cooper hints at the fact that Mason is well grounded in the liberal arts tradition. This is something that Cooper identifies at various points in the book. Many advocates for educational renewal, particularly in the classical educational landscape, doubt Mason’s compatibility with classical education. Cooper spells out that at a fundamental level, Mason shares convictions with proponents of a renewal of the liberal arts tradition.

Philosophy of Education

Cooper next develops Mason’s philosophy of education by highlighting the core tenets of her work as well as spelling out interactions she has with numerous other philosophers of education. She grounds Mason’s philosophy within a Christian perspective, meaning that Mason’s “understanding of the world and the person” fit squarely “within a Christian metaphysical framework” (22). I think this points to an aspect of the coherent and holistic approach Mason provides in her approach to education. In a modern world driven by technology and economic outcomes, grounding education in scripture and a vital connection to God is essential.

The singular foundation to Mason’s philosophy of education, according to Cooper, is the personhood of the child. After quoting Mason, who views the child’s mind as complete—“his mind is the instrument of his education and his education does not produce his mind” (Mason, Philosophy of Education, 36)—Cooper expands upon this view of the personhood of the child:

“In her view—Mason’s understanding of identity and personhood—someone, rather than something is located in the imago dei, bearing the image of a personal, creator God. Children are separate and complete beings even in their dependency, capable of reflecting some of God’s attributes. They have language and reason and imagination. Each one exists as a real physical and metaphysical entity—an embodied self, a spiritual being with a soul and the powers necessary to appropriate knowledge, beauty and goodness.” (Cooper 24)

Grounded in the biblical concept of the image of God, the personhood of the child means that we are not educating blank slates and manipulating them to become something of significance at a later stage in their lives. They are born with capacities to learn and grow, and thus our job is to provide suitable means for them to acquire knowledge and wisdom. The respect due to the child as a learner with a powerful mind well equipped to assimilate what is to be learned is not only a foundational aspect to Mason’s work, but sets her apart from other modern educational theorists. After quoting Martin Marty, University of Chicago professor, regarding the shortcomings of modern approaches to childhood education, Cooper concludes regarding the personhood of the child that there is a “need for thoughtful and critical evaluations of popular developmental and educational theories, suggesting there is much more to understanding the child and person than hitherto assumed.” (27)

To this end, Cooper segues into a series of educational theorists with whom Mason grappled in the development of her own educational philosophy. The list of interlocutors is substantial—John Locke, Johann Friedrick Herbart, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Fröbel, Maria Montessori, Herbert Spencer, and William James—and indicates a wide range of thought and power of mind on the part of Mason. Cooper’s development of each interaction is succinct yet helps develop in compelling ways Mason’s concern with “the increasing influence of intellectual rationalism and scientific reductionism flowing out from the Enlightenment.” (27) Seeing Mason in light of this series of educational theorists makes it difficult to simply categorize her as an educational reformer in the progressive mold of Rousseau or Dewey, and yet she is not merely a traditionalist unwilling to take on board, for instance, Pestalozzi and Fröbel’s insistence on the natural capacities of the child. In fact, Mason proved herself quite capable of incorporating modern research into psychology and neurology while also breaking the mold of traditionalist conceptions of class, making a liberal arts educational available to all.

A thorough educational philosophy relies not only on a the quality of the anthropology—a high view of the child in Mason’s case—but also on a sound epistemology. For Mason, the mind does not emerge as a property due to education, the mind is what acts upon knowledge to produce the education person. There is a “spiritual nature of mind” that “requires the food of ideas for its daily bread” (45). The mind is active and seeks out knowledge, according to Mason. This differs from the empirical views of philosophers such as Locke and Herbart who view children as empty slates or sacs to be filled with knowledge. Mason abhorred predigested information and desired children to read books full of living ideas that would feed not only the minds of children, but also form their character. The goal of education, therefore, is to give every opportunity for the child to experience the wide array of insights available in a rich and generous curriculum.

To that end, the qualities of the materials Mason sought to present to children are in keeping with the best cultural artifacts produced across generations. Cooper connects this with the classical liberal arts:

“Mason ([Philosophy of Education] 1925) was passionately concerned to education all pupils broadly in the classic, liberal arts tradition—‘the joy of the Renaissance without its lawlessness’ (p. 9)—a holistic tradition which could cultivate imagination and good habits, train judgement and engender wide interests, after which anyone would be able to master the intricacies of any profession. (Cooper 50)

Methodology

Having established the main contours of Mason’s educational philosophy, Cooper then develops the key elements of Mason’s educational methods. The two keystones here are narration and habit training. What I like about Cooper’s work here is that she connects the dots, so to speak, between philosophy and method.

For instance, with regard to narration—the ability “to individually narrate back, in their own words, what they had heard” after a single reading—Cooper connects narration to the power of the mind, or the high view of the child explored in Mason’s philosophy:

“Narration was founded on her belief in the intrinsic and natural power of mind, through attentive listening, to recall knowledge gained from a single reading or seeing or doing, and the fact that such direct recollection makes so deep an impression on the mind that it remains for a long time and is never entirely lost.” (60)

Thus, narration is an active outworking of the high view of the child. Not only do we view the child as capable of assimilating knowledge, we place those capabilities in the driver’s seat of the child’s learning. Cooper shares a delightful quote from Comenius, the Czech reformer and educational philosopher, “teachers shall teach less and scholars should learn more.” (61 quoting The Great Didactic (1907), 4). In other words, the energy of learning is rightly placed within the sphere of the child, rather than energies being wasted by a teacher who overprepares and overdelivers materials that the learner can access directly through living books.

Regarding habits, Cooper again connects method to the high view of the child. Each child is naturally equipped to follow certain pathways when the parent or teacher rightly guides them along those pathways. There are physical habits (cleanliness, tidiness), moral habits (obedience, kindness), and intellectual habits (attention, accuracy), which must actually make life easier for the child. The temptation exists for parents and teachers to consider these habits as burdensome and therefore neglect to properly instill them, yet worse habits will be fixed within the child, making life ultimately harder for the child.

The rich curriculum of living books gives feet to Mason’s epistemology since the mind craves living ideas. Cooper notes how these living books are “written in literary language” or in a “narrative style.” (63) Some of the hallmarks of a Charlotte Mason education are the inclusion of nature study, picture study, composer study, and architecture, all of which Cooper situates within the methods of Mason.

Conclusion

Cooper wraps up her volume by evaluating the legacy of Mason. As someone who has been part of the Mason revival, she suggests an exciting potential outcome in the flourishing of homeschools and schools that adopt her philosophy and methods:

“It is possible that widespread interest could spearhead both a faithful and contemporary understanding of her applied Christian philosophy of education, backed up by the practical evidence of thousands of children educated in over 300 of her schools and many home schools in early 20^th-century Britain and beyond.” (69)

I for one agree that this revival of interest in Mason is having profound effects in North America. I am grateful that Elaine Cooper has put this very readable book together. For anyone wanting a clear and concise overview of Mason, this book is essential reading. If you provide leadership at a school using Charlotte Mason’s philosophy and methods, this is a great book to give to new faculty as part of their onboarding.

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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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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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If our educational renewal movement consistently graduated students well on their way to practical wisdom, that fact alone would entail a remarkable positive inheritance. I might go so far as to say that, even if our educational methods bore no better fruit in standardized test scores or excellent artistry in language, mathematics, or the fine and performing arts, still it all would have been worth it if our graduates were more prudent. Part of the reason for this is that no man is an island, and so, regardless of other attainments, the influence of these prudent citizens on the world at large is nothing short of incalculable. Prudence is the quintessential virtue of true leadership.

Much ink has been spilled on the liberal arts as the proper training for a free human being. A free society relies on men and women leaders who are able to reason persuasively with both verbal and mathematical precision, in order to lead us to human flourishing. As Aristotle asserts,

That is why we think Pericles and people of that sort to be practically wise–because they have theoretical knowledge of what is good for themselves and for human beings, and we think household-managers and politicians are like that. (Reeve, Aristotle on Practical Wisdom, 56; VI.5 translation)

In actual fact, it is not the liberal arts simply, but the liberal arts facing prudential matters that prepare a person for leadership. Study of the liberal arts can tend toward the arcane, mystic and purely academic. The best students of abstract intellectual matters are not always the best leaders. 

Aristotle’s inclusion of both household-managers and politicians justifies our exploration of prudence as a leadership trait generally. When he says that “political wisdom and practical wisdom are the same state of mind, but to be them is not the same,” (VI.8, Revised Oxford Trans.) he further clarifies that political wisdom is that type of practical wisdom concerned with the city, just as economic or household management is that practical wisdom concerned with the household. This doesn’t negate the fact that a person could have individual practical wisdom but not the leadership varieties, because of lacking particular knowledge of that sphere. But it does mean that practical wisdom expands up into all types of leadership spheres, making the essence of practical wisdom itself highly desirable. 

After all, our graduates will lead in various ways after their Christian classical education, whether it be as parents themselves, church and small group leaders, coaches, business managers and executives, and perhaps even politicians. Our world needs more prudent leaders, just as it does more prudent individuals. 

In this article we will explore practical wisdom in dialogue with Jim Collin’s idea of Level 5 leadership from his book Good to Great. Then we will note some practical implications for training prudent leaders through the school experience today.

Level 5 Leadership and Prudence

In his masterfully researched Good to Great, Jim Collins and his team of researchers set out to discover what separated enduringly great businesses (measured “objectively” by publicly available stock valuation) from comparison companies. According to his own admission Collins “gave the research team explicit instructions to downplay the role of top executives so that [they] could avoid the simplistic ‘credit the leader’ or ‘blame the leader’ thinking common today.” In spite of this, the presence of what they came to call “Level 5 Leadership” in all the Good to Great companies at the time of transition kept staring them in the face, the more so since the traits they saw were so paradoxical and unexpected. 

Collins describes the Level 5 executive as a person who “builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will” (20). He goes on to describe it this way:

Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless. To quickly grasp this concept, think of United States President Abraham Lincoln (one of the few Level 5 presidents in United States history), who never let his ego get in the way of his primary ambition for the larger cause of an enduring great nation. Yet those who mistook Mr. Lincoln’s personal modesty, shy nature, and awkward manner as signs of weakness found themselves terribly mistaken, to the scale of 250,000 and 360,000 Union lives, including Lincoln’s own. (22)

Lincoln provides an inspiring example of this “professional will” combined with “personal humility.” These leaders are not the superstar executives that led the company to a brief period of high profitability during their tenure as CEO, but then left it in the lurch at their departure. 

Collins lists a hierarchy of five levels of leadership that we can profitably set in dialogue with Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence:

• Level 1 – Highly Capable Individual: Makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good work habits.

• Level 2 – Contributing Team Member: Contributes individual capabilities to the achievement of group objectives and works effectively with others in a group setting.

• Level 3 – Competent Manager: Organizes people and resources toward the effective and efficient pursuit of predetermined objectives.

• Level 4 – Effective Leader: Catalyzes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision, stimulating higher performance standards.

• Level 5 – Level 5 Executive: Builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. (Jim Collins, Good to Great, 20) 

First, the highly capable individual has established good habits or virtues that productively make use of the talent, skills and knowledge that he has. This individual level of prudence calculates correctly that it will be beneficial to himself to work well and be known as a good worker, as that will provide him with the good things of life.

Second, the contributing team member has what Aristotle calls “consideration” or “judgment” (gnome; see Nicomachean Ethics VI.11), discerning correctly what is fair in working together with a team. This fair-mindedness relies on a perception or comprehension of each person’s rights and responsibilities. 

Third, the competent manager receives objectives or goals from and is able to use his cleverness (a morally neutral category related to practical wisdom in Aristotle; see VI.13) to organize people and resources toward meeting those goals. Moreover, this manager does so in a way that coordinates those combined efforts well and is in this sense political. We now see the forerunners of prudence approaching something like it in applied political leadership. 

Fourth, the effective leader adds still another element of practical wisdom, in that the leader first perceives and then articulates “a clear and compelling vision”–something that Aristotle would have called understanding the proper ends or goals of human flourishing and then having the art of persuasion to communicate it to others. The effective leader not only has the cleverness to chart out a path to these goals, but discerns the end from the beginning because he has high standards of excellence (virtue) within himself that enable this perception. 

Fifth, the level 5 leader adds on to these the crowning achievement of practical and political wisdom, because he has subsumed his own personal benefit within the good of the community or organization as a whole. Collins hesitates to use the term servant leadership because of how it might degenerate into mere niceness in our imaginations, but the conclusion is unavoidable:

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious–but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves. (21)

Christians should not be surprised by this finding, resonating as it does with the model of self-sacrificial leadership attested in scripture.

The sacrificial leadership described in Collins’s Good to Great also has a firmness of will, reminiscent of Charlotte Mason’s Way of the Will, which we have already had occasion to mention. The prudent leader may take time to deliberate well and correctly, but once his mind is made up about the best course of action, his will is iron. This iron will can coexist with a heart of humility partly because his knowledge is so firm and clear. He sincerely knows why, how and what is best for himself and others precisely because of his practical wisdom. 

A Pathway for Prudent Leaders

There are several practical take-aways for Christian classical schools that accept prudence as one of their aims. The first comes from the possibility of taking these 5 levels as a scope & sequence of sorts for leadership development in our schools. It might be fair to criticize the value of group work and teamwork in class projects from the vantage point of simple academic attainments. But if, as we are contending, school should act as a training ground for prudent decision-making in life, then the back-and-forth negotiations and power dynamics of persons are possible life lessons in and of themselves. Mentoring students up the levels of leadership could function as one strand in the curriculum governing this type of learning activity. 

It is worth pausing to note that it is important to differentiate this from simple rhetorical skill. Often in rhetorical training, it is the speech or paper that is graded or ranked, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the viewpoint taken. This isolation of the simple product of persuasion makes sense when we are focusing on developing the art of rhetoric only, but if we expand the vision to prudent leadership, then we can see that the speech functions holistically within a vision & strategy, a web of relationships, a set of challenges, and a perception of the resources, needs, and trade-offs of various pathways. While real-life experience leading is the most accurate training ground for this, proxies involving actual leadership of other students can help. 

It is for this reason that student leadership within a house system or student council can be a proper classical educational feature. Not because schools should function like democracies, but because of our educational goals. These leadership opportunities mimic real-world complexity than games or assignments since they involve real human beings and definite choices for their good or ill within a timeframe and constraints. Of course, if we were merely talking about strategy, it might be that our modern strategy games (whether board games, video games, or computer games) might afford the best training. Chess is a good example of this, originating as it did almost 1500 years ago in India, and its venerable history of mimicking military tactics. A little bit of such things throughout youth might be of value to future prudent leader, but because all the particulars of an actual leadership situation matter, becoming a grandmaster will be unlikely to transfer to level 5 leadership.

In fact, this case helps to illustrate one of the key differences between artistic training and an education for prudence. While artistry of any sort benefits from an abundance of focused practice within the discipline, game, or subject matter, too much specialization might actually be a hindrance to prudent leadership. As David Epstein illustrates in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, a wide array of experiences often equips us with a better intuition, vision, and creativity for making decisions in the complex situations we face. 

In this sense too, the liberal arts were made for prudence, not only because they prepare a person with practical skills to lead (writing, discussing, speaking, calculation, charting, etc.), but also because they help us encounter the world in all its variety and prevent us from focusing too narrowly on one subject or aspect of things. Prudent leaders are generalists, who have encountered the world in all its complexity: people, products, research, and relationships, to name just a few aspects. They draw from all this varied data to make complex calculations about the best course of action and they regularly lead others to human goods. 

Let’s smooth this liberal arts pathway with lessons for level 5 leadership at our schools.

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The modern world of education is characterized by the opposites of integration: isolation and reductionism. Colin Gunton, in the 1992 Bampton Lectures at Cambridge, entitled The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, uses the terms, “disengagement” and “fragmentation” to describe the predicament of modernity. The term “disengagement” he attributes to Charles Taylor, and he describes “fragmentation” by stating “that the cultural disarray that is so marked a feature of our times derives from our failure to integrate or combine the different objects of human thought and activity: in brief, science, morals and art” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; 13-14, 114-115).

The modern and post-modern cultural project has abandoned God, has denied the reality of the transcendentals (truth, goodness and beauty) and forsaken the cultural heritage of wisdom. Because of this it has majored on the centrifugal (center-fleeing) forces of the mind, that is, the tendency to divide, distinguish, dissect, and deconstruct, without strong enough centripetal (center-seeking) forces—the power to unite, integrate, enliven, and edify—in order to balance them out. Analytical thinking is not bad in itself, but synthetic thinking is more primary and necessary. The modern and post-modern project has been an attempt to deny the primacy of synthetic thinking. 

So much has been said before by many. A good example is the first chapter of Stephen Turley’s Awakening Wonder: A Classical Guide to Truth, Goodness and Beauty (Classical Academic: Camp Hill, PA, 2014; 1-8). Turley draws a strong contrast between “what we might call the moral age versus the modern age, or the sapient age versus the scientific age” (2). This is another way of explaining what I am getting at through the analogy of centrifugal and centripetal forces. Not so often recognized is the fact that the theology of wisdom in Proverbs provides the needed centripetal forces of integration.

Jews, and later Christians, developed a theology of wisdom from Proverbs in ways that made possible the classical-Christian synthesis of the patristic and medieval eras. Careful study of this theology of wisdom in Proverbs and later traditions thus provides scriptural foundation for the Christian appropriation of the classical liberal arts tradition.

The Need for Integration

Why was it right for Christians to adopt pagan learning, and to read Greek philosophy and myths? How were we able to get beyond the oft-quoted dictum of Tertullian, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” and into St. Augustine’s call to plunder the Egyptians? I believe the answer can be found in the development of a theology of wisdom. In particular, for Augustine the Jewish book Wisdom of Solomon was likely instrumental in helping him make this move in the direction of a careful appropriation of the pagan liberal arts tradition (see particularly Wisdom of Solomon 7.15-8.8). 

Tertullian’s rhetorical question comes from De praescriptione haereticorum 7:9 (“Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?”). The observation is often made that this quote, taken out of context, has been used to criticize Tertullian unfairly. However, the standard critique is justified given three factors:

1. his sweeping dismissal of Greek philosophers using 1^st Corinthians and Colossians out of context earlier in ch. 7,
2. his strong discouragement of curiosity in 7:12-13, and
3. his naïve take on the relationship of Solomon’s wisdom to that of the surrounding world in 7:10 (“Nostra institutio de porticu Solomonis est qui et ipse tradiderat Dominum in simplicitate cordis esse quaerendum.” “Our education is from Solomon’s portico, who also had passed on that the Lord must be sought in simplicity of heart.”).

In actual fact, both Paul and the Solomonic tradition drew from and engaged with sources of wisdom from outside the Hebrew tradition. Paul quotes from a Hymn to Zeus in Acts, and the Proverbs has many features and exact wordings in common with other ancient near eastern wisdom traditions. Augustine’s call to plunder the Egyptians (see Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana 2:40) calls for wise and careful integration with other sources of knowledge without compromising fundamental Christian beliefs.

The situation of the early church is analogous to our predicament today. Teachers in classical schools are not unaffected by the fragmentation of the modern and post-modern world. Whether the teacher has an education background or not, there is no escaping the various movements, philosophies and techniques of the broader world of education. Everyone in classical education is concerned about not falling into the trap of simply recapitulating the problems of modern education. What is not so clear is how to go about doing that, and the extent to which this requires a refusal to engage with the world of modern education. We have enough to worry about with keeping our own catechumens faithful, not to mention the exhausting work of recapturing something of the traditions of the ancients. What has the classical school to do with modern pedagogy?

If we add to that the confusing array of ideas about teaching propagated within classical education—a wonderful and edifying array, to be sure, but confusing nevertheless!—then we should understand that there is perhaps even greater possibility for confusion for the average classical educator in how to make sense of it all. Not every expression of classical education is alike, and how am I to sift, how am I to integrate, how am I to synthesize all these ideas into a practical vision for my day-to-day realities as a teacher, into a conviction of priorities for my vocation as a teacher? The pressure on the classical teacher to integrate various ancient philosophies, modern pedagogy, and a holistic Christian vision of education is truly enormous. Only the power of a developed theology of wisdom can energize and guide such a task.

A Theology of Divine and Human Wisdom

In Proverbs and later Jewish texts like Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon, particularly where Wisdom is personified as a figure mediating for God, we have been given some broad but nevertheless illuminating parameters for a philosophy of education or pedagogy. Moreover, the pedagogy that this theology of wisdom implies majors on the centripetal forces (integration, unification, edification), rather than the centrifugal forces (analysis, dissection, deconstruction) of the mind. 

Because of this an understanding of the theology of wisdom can help the classical education movement in three key tasks:

1. sustaining an ongoing dialogue with historical pedagogies,
2. guiding the use of the many modern technical resources and quantitative assessments of teaching and learning through qualitative values, and
3. involving a holistic and engaged account of morality and human formation. 

The theology of wisdom developed in the Jewish and Christian traditions provides such an integrating power, and it does so through what I would call a traditional and transcending pedagogy.

By “traditional” is meant both its commitment to a continuing dialogue with historical sources of wisdom and its prioritization of qualitative concerns. This should be carefully distinguished from “traditionalism,” which would hold that all significant knowledge is derived from tradition.

The term “transcending” recognizes both the transcendent quality of Wisdom itself—as in the transcendental triad (truth, goodness, and beauty)—precisely because it is God’s Wisdom, while at the same time acknowledging the inability of humans to fully capture or contain its essence. For instance, consider Job 28:12-13: “But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? Man does not know its worth. And it is not found in the land of the living” (ESV). We cannot master Wisdom, but we can participate in it.

Because of Wisdom’s immanent presence within the world and human culture, however, there is that real access to wisdom, without which we would search for it in vain: “Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding…” (Prov 3:13ff.). The human educational endeavor is thus a continuous communal process of transcending in accordance with and development of the tradition of wisdom, as a response to God’s invitation to us through the immanent presence of his transcendent Wisdom.

Applying a Theology of Wisdom to the Problem of Technicism

As a test-case of the value of developing a theology of wisdom, and an illustration of what it might look like in practice, the rest of this article will develop how a theology of wisdom can address a problem within modern education, which plagues classical schools as well: the problem of technicism.

Technicism is not simply an over-fascination with technology as a means of stimulating learning out of students, though that problem plagues modern education as well. Instead, technicism refers to a broader ideological approach to education that has become captivated by quantitative measurements and the economic evaluation of success. In technicism education has been reduced to something that can be measured in numbers alone. Teachers are made into technicians, who simply pull the levers and push the buttons assigned to them by the ruling technocrats. Technicism focuses on quantities and techniques, rather than quality and values.

It is not only classical educators that view technicism as a problem. For instance, in a leading educational journal David Carr and Don Skinner note the wide influence of technicist models on theory about learning and the professional role of the teacher, and then bemoan how “their baleful influence—on, for example, latter day talk of learning objectives, attainment targets, performance indicators and curriculum delivery—is everywhere apparent in the contemporary ‘audit culture’ of educational theory and policy….” (“The Cultural Roots of Professional Wisdom: Towards a Broader View of Teacher Expertise,” in Educational Philosophy and Theory 41:2 (2009), 144). Now let’s not get this wrong. An ‘audit culture’ is a very fine thing, if what we are concerned with is factories, markets, money and products. But it is at least a questionable theoretical assumption that schools should be modelled on this plan. Inevitably, such a pattern turns the focus away from many of the things that really matter in education, like the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. A government bureau of education can hardly be concerned with such things, when handy charts and graphs stand before them emphasizing the bottom line and the achievement gap. 

If there is a defense for a technicist model of education, it rests on the assumption that education is an applied science, like the medical practice. In this line of thinking teachers themselves need not be concerned with the theory behind the practices they employ (Who cares for all that heady stuff, anyway?), only with efficiently employing them in order to get results, measured, of course, in high test scores. After all, the average doctor only needs to be able to diagnose and treat patients, rather than understand all the detailed scientific theory that may undergird such practices. It is hard to argue against an analogy with so revered a profession as medicine, but here the analogy must fail. Who will be a better teacher? One who has been given five ways to manage behavior in the classroom and eight types of lesson plans, or one who has refined and honed teaching practices over years of seeking the truth in the tradition of educational philosophy? How can an unreflective teacher impart and embody wisdom?

The theology of wisdom in Proverbs 1-9 provides an antidote to the technicist over-fascination with techniques and quantitative assessment. The Hebrew concept of ḥokmâ or wisdom likely grew out of the idea of skillful expertise in some craft, i.e. technical skill (for instance, see Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15, NICOT; Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2004; 76-77). Yet in Proverbs we see the concept broadened and deepened into the masterful understanding for life that the English word ‘wisdom’ evokes for us today. The roles of parent and sage are fused within this holistic and value-laden passing on of the tradition. In Proverbs the prototypical son is being educated for life, the royal son is being educated to rule, and the noble’s son to carry out his official duties in the royal court. This training in technical proficiency is carried out by the father/sage in a heavily value-laden context. The student is to love wisdom and to seek it above riches; he is to reject folly in both his princely duties and his personal life. 

A theology of wisdom does not reject technē, all the techniques and quantitative measures. It simply puts them in the proper role of subservience under qualitative values and ideals for life. This will inevitably transform them, since all the techniques classical educators use must be fitted to wisdom’s ends. Nevertheless, techniques, arts, and judgments themselves remain intact under the guidance of wisdom. After all, Wisdom herself rules over all technē as a master craftsman, who was with God at the beginning as he wisely ordered all of creation (Proverbs 8:22-31). Yet this holistic vision of education requires much of the teacher.

In classical education the teacher must be a magister of the arts, a sage, a philosopher; must be a participant in the Wisdom that comes from above (cf. James 3:17). Only then can the teacher cultivate wisdom in the young and simple. Only then will the teacher wisely order techniques, practices and assessments to the right ends.  The theology of wisdom thus helps us avoid the trap of technicism through its integrative vision, in which qualitative values rule quantitative measures. Moreover, the traditional and transcending pedagogy that a theology of wisdom implies prevents us from reducing education to modern technicism, even as it provides us with a way of integrating the valuable techniques it has birthed.

In this way a modern book of teaching techniques, like Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College, can be mined for its wisdom and then integrated into a classical vision of education that has broader aims than students’ mere economic success in life. Wisdom cries aloud in the educational marketplace, “You who are simple, seek wisdom!” Her path of wise integration is hard, but all other by-ways and shortcuts represent the easy roads of Folly.

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Most educators agree that pursuing knowledge is a primary goal of education. But views diverge soon after, specifically when questions about the purpose of knowledge emerge as well as what fields of knowledge to pursue. 

As I have begun working on my first book about the craft of teaching, this question has become of unique interest to me. In particular, as I have been reading Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 3.0, I have been struck by Lemov’s contagious passion for teaching, learning, and gaining knowledge. This got me thinking, “What drives Lemov? Does the same motivation drive me as a classical educator?”

In this blog, I will present three views on the purpose of knowledge and conclude with the beginnings of a synthesis. Thomas Aquinas, the thinker I have selected to represent the medieval-classical tradition, views knowledge accessed by the liberal arts as the pathway to knowing God, humanity’s greatest happiness. Charlotte Mason emphasizes the moral and psychological impact of knowledge, specifically as it equips the mind to encounter relations between all that we can learn. And Doug Lemov, author of the Teach Like a Champion series focuses on knowledge as the pathway to raising independent students for future opportunities in college and career.

Let us now take a look at each one of these thinkers more closely. 

Thomas Aquinas: Knowledge for Happiness in God 

As a theologian, Thomas conceives of reality through a God-centered lens. Therefore, according to “the angelic doctor,” the pursuit of knowledge is nothing less than the perfection of humanity, which is happiness found in God. 

Thomas writes,

Now, the ultimate end of man, and of every intellectual substance, is called felicity or happiness, because this is what every intellectual substance desires as an ultimate end, and for its own sake alone. Therefore, the ultimate happiness and felicity of every intellectual substance is to know God.

Summa contra Gentiles, Book III, c. 25

Here we see Thomas integrating Aristotelelian metaphysics with his theology to argue that knowledge finds its ultimate purpose in and through knowing God.

How is this knowledge created and justified? From a classical perspective, the answer is the same way all things are made– the arts. Whether one is a carpenter, architect, or painter, she is using a particular art, or skill, to make a new creation. The same is the case for knowledge. Knowledge is fashioned through the arts, namely, the liberal arts.

These liberal arts offer “a particular canon of seven studies that provided the essential tools for all subsequent learning” (Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition, 2nd ed., 2019, p. 6). The Trivium arts pertain to knowledge about language and the Quadrivium arts pertain to knowledge about number. Together, these arts constitute the seeds and tools of learning.

In summary, knowledge finds its ultimate purpose in knowing God and it is created through the liberal arts, the well-worn paths of learning. By following these paths, students can independently create a vast array of knowledge. 

Practically speaking, students learn the arts of language when they are taught reading, hermeneutics, debate, persuasive speech and writing. And they learn the arts of math when they are taught counting, calculation, measuring, empirical discovery, and theoretical proof (Clark and Jain, 7). These arts are, simply put, the skills students need to make sense of the world and cultivate understanding. As the arts are mastered and knowledge is gained, wisdom is the result.

The importance of this final point cannot be missed. Clark and Jain write,

The goal of education is not simply knowledge for knowledge’s sake, however; the goal of true education is for our knowledge of God, man, and creation to come to full flower in wisdom and for this wisdom to help us better love and serve our neighbor.

Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition, 2nd ed., 2019, p. 7

While Clark and Jain do not explicitly state happiness in God to be the purpose of knowledge as we saw in Thomas, we can observe a similar vision. We pursue knowledge because we believe this knowledge will lead us to God himself, our source of happiness. The result will be the formation of a wise, servant-hearted human person.

Charlotte Mason: Knowledge for the Flourishing Life 

Next we turn to Charlotte Mason, a British educator dedicated to educational reform at the turn of the 20th century. While Mason is a devoted Christian, her emphasis regarding the purpose of knowledge is less theological and more moral-psychological. Referencing contemporary neuroscience, she argues that knowledge is food for the mind and the key to a flourishing life.

In her sixth and final volume on education, she writes,

A great future lies before the nation which shall perceive that knowledge is the sole concern of education proper, as distinguished from training, and that knowledge is the necessary daily food of the mind.

Towards a Philosophy of Education, pg. 2

Here Mason emphasizes the distinction between vocational training and a liberal (arts) education, going on to argue that the more educators focus on human formation, “the better will he fulfill his own life and serve society” (3).

While Charlotte Mason completed the volume above in 1922, she had been developing her educational philosophy for decades. In 1904, she published School Education in which she offers a curricular program for children up to age 12. In this volume, she makes the connection we have already encountered between education and wisdom, writing “…for wisdom is the science of relations, and the thing we have to do for a young human being is to put him in touch, so far as we can, with all the relations proper to him” (School Education, 75). 

Here is a helpful clue to Mason’s view of knowledge and its purpose. It is primarily a relational endeavor in which children make contact physically, affectively, and intellectually with the world around them. She writes,

When we consider that the setting up of relations, moral and intellectual, is our chief concern in life, and that the function of education is to put the child in the way of relations proper to him, and to offer the inspiring idea which commonly initiates a relation, we perceive that a little incident like the above may be of more importance than the passing of an examination.

School Education, 78

To help understand Mason’s point about relations, imagine two children. One has been educated in the way she describes. He has encountered a rich array of knowledge since a young child. He knows about birds and plants, geography and history. He navigates life with a sense of vivaciousness, intrigue, and curiosity. The world is bright, colorful, and of utter fascination to him. Each day is a fresh opportunity to learn, explore, and make new connections.

Now compare this child with one whose education or upbringing has been stultified. The birds around him are unknown to him, both intellectually and relationally. He was never trained to take notice of the plants outside his house or to observe how they bud each spring. He has not been read the great stories found history and literature. As a result, the child’s ignorance breeds only more ignorance, and, ultimately, disinterest about the world around him.

The contrast between these caricatures is startling. What is the difference? Knowledge. Knowledge fuels the mind and animates the soul. Its purpose is to inspire a student to live a flourishing life. Knowledge and knowledge alone is the intrinsic motivation that will inject a person with meaning and purpose, according to Charlotte Mason. She writes, “The matter is important, because, of all the joyous motives of school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only which determines the scale so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live” (245-246).

Doug Lemov: Knowledge for Future Opportunity 

Lastly, we look at Doug Lemov, an educational leader in the public charter school movement. His experience has been primarily focused on inner-city schools that are under-resourced and statistically less successful in terms of graduation rates and college readiness than their suburban peers.

In his introduction to Teach Like a Champion 3.0, Doug Lemov writes,

…there are teachers who everyday without much fanfare take the students who others say “can’t”–can’t read great literature, can’t do algebra or calculus, can’t and don’t want to learn—and help, inspire, motivate, and even cajole them to become scholars who do.

Teach Like a Champion 3.0, xxxvi

Here we see a small window into Lemov’s drive for knowledge. It is oriented towards helping students overcome social and individual obstacles getting in the way of their learning in order to help them become scholars with future opportunities. His book is full of techniques to enable students to do the work of learning and, thereby, become independent knowledge seekers.

In the third edition of Teach Like a Champion, Chapter 1 provides five principles, or mental models, through which the subsequent teaching techniques can be contextualized. Each of these principles, often backed by research in learning science, are geared toward helping students become independent learners and preparing them to be successful throughout school, in college, and beyond.

For example, the first principle focuses on the distinction between building long-term memory and managing working memory. He writes,

A well-developed long-term memory is the solution to the limitations of working memory. If a skill, a concept, a piece of knowledge, or a body of knowledge is encoded in long-term memory, your brain can use it without degrading other functions that also rely on working memory.

Teach Like a Champion 3.0, p. 8

Lemov’s point here is not to pooh-pooh working memory, but to help readers understand that both are essential to the learning process. By keeping working memory free, teachers equip students to more fully connect to the world around them and integrate the knowledge they are learning.

I have mentioned one principle on which Lemov’s techniques hang for increasing student knowledge. The others are equally valuable and worth exploring at a later time. For now, I simply list them for the reader’s benefit:

1. Understanding human cognitive structure means building long-term memory and managing working memory.
2. Habits accelerate learning.
3. What students attend to is what they will learn about.
4. Motivation is social.
5. Teaching well is relationship building. 

Conclusion

Each of these figures offers an important aspect of the purpose of knowledge. Knowledge enables us to know God, our greatest happiness. Knowledge propels us to thrive in the world God created. And knowledge enables us to more fully connect with the world around us, becoming more engaged scholars for whatever opportunities God puts before us.

Each of these purposes can serve as drivers to learn in their own right. To conclude, I want the emphasize a common thread I observed in all three views: the importance of fully-integrated, inter-relational knowledge development. Whether it is the classical tradition’s emphasis on holistic wisdom, Charlotte Mason’s idea of the science of relations, or Doug Lemov’s emphasis on the power of long-term memory, it is clear that a unified knowledge base is key.

At a recent staff meeting, our colleague read aloud from Ephesians 4, “…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.” At the risk of sounding heretical, perhaps in our schools, we can add one more to the liturgy: one knowledge, granted from above, worth of our pursuit, and the source of our true in happiness when it is ends in Christ.

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At the same time, we noted in the last article that our recovery movement has at times struggled to name prudence or practical wisdom specifically as a central strand of the liberal arts tradition. And because of our modern scientism this has likely resulted in a de facto neglect of prudential wisdom in the classroom. We may give lip service to wisdom and virtue as our goals, but our teachers may be only nominally inclined to turn the liberal arts we train or the classic works we study toward the ends of practical wisdom. 

Even when we teach ethics, we are often like C.S. Lewis’ moral philosophers, quick to philosophize in the abstract, and to teach Great Books in their historical and literary context, but reticent to help students apply moral reasoning to their own lives. In fact, there may be some classical educators who view such preachiness as out of place. Their view of classical education is all classical languages and literature, mathematics and science for its own sake and for the mental training they afford. Practical considerations that include the particulars of modern life and the choices that students will have to make are, in their estimation, wholly out of place. They are quick to cry pragmatism and utilitarianism, preferring instead an arcane and ivory tower classicism. I would encourage such persons to read Proverbs, Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s Republic, and then return to read the rest of this series. 

In fact, Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence proposes the ideal middle way in education between practicality and liberality, between what is useful and learning for its own sake. The joy of learning is indeed one of the values of the classical tradition, but so is practicality and a stoic awareness of the limited time we have on earth. We might think of this under the classical quest for the good life or the life well lived. Education is not all fun and games, even arcane and intellectual ones; our choices often have the weight of life and death upon them. In this light, all subjects of study have a practical dimension to them, in terms of how human beings should think about, value and use them for other ends. There is a hierarchy of goods and needs, and human beings ought to value the world in a certain way, in accordance with a true ordo amoris, to cite Augustine’s phrase for a proper ordering of loves. By adopting this perspective or attuning ourselves to this dimension of things, we will begin to see how we might instill prudence in the young. 

Deliberating about the Beneficial

Aristotle begins his more detailed discussion of the intellectual virtue of prudence or phronesis with a set of common sense considerations:

Regarding practical wisdom we shall get at the truth by considering who are the persons we credit with it. Now it is thought to be the mark of a man of practical wisdom to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect, e.g. about what sorts of thing conduce to health or to strength, but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general.

Nicomachean Ethics, VI, ch. 5 (trans. by W. D. Ross accessed at The Internet Classics Archive)

People with prudence are masters of deliberation or consultation (as some translations have it; the Greek bouleuo can mean to “take counsel, deliberate, or resolve after deliberating”). They are able to consider counsel within themselves or with the help of others (“Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.” Prov. 15:22 ESV), especially regarding what is good, beneficial or expedient for themselves. 

In case the idea of expediency or prudence itself sounds too Machiavellian, it is to what is expedient or beneficial (Greek sumphero) that Paul appeals in 1st Corinthians 6:1, instead of what is simply lawful. In this case, what is expedient or beneficial can be a guide to practical thinking with a higher moral standard than mere law. In this way, Aristotelian expediency can be baptized by applying Jesus’ Golden Rule to love others as we love ourselves. Since we naturally desire what is good and beneficial for ourselves, the spiritual virtue of love of God and neighbor can guide the intellectual virtue of prudence as we deliberate about what is good for our neighbor and ourselves in God’s good world. 

We must pause here to head off a potential misunderstanding of Aristotle’s statement above. In claiming that practical wisdom entails the ability to “deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect” like health or physical fitness, Aristotle might be heard as endorsing a philosophical quest for the good life, rather than something practical. On this view, Aristotle’s prudent person asks the big questions of life and doesn’t settle for simplistic answers or get sidetracked by subjects. After all, isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 

However, Aristotle cannot mean that a person could have practical wisdom and yet regularly and deliberately make choices that are unhealthy. Otherwise, how could it be that, as Aristotle later states, “it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral virtue” (Nicomachean Ethics Book VI, ch. 13). In their true form, moral virtue and practical wisdom are inextricably linked. So, some awareness of particular subjects, like health, that impinge on human wellbeing must be included in an education which aims to promote prudence. But it is one thing to study the art of medicine, with the goal of a profession in the medical field. It is entirely another to acquire the general understanding of particulars that will enable a person to live a healthy life, as one aspect of the good life. 

From this vantage point, we are prepared to distinguish between two ways in which an education might be practical. The more common usage today sees education as job training. And for all its abuses, there is a legitimate sense in which an education should involve apprenticeship in practical arts, trades and professions. An educated person should, in a Christian’s view at least (see e.g., 2 Thess 3:10, ESV: “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.”), be prepared to provide for himself and have something to share with others (Eph 4:28: “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.”). The second way education may be practical is in providing an understanding of right and wrong, good and evil, what is beneficial, excellent and praiseworthy in human life. Practical education not only enables a man to earn a living, but also to conduct his life.

Because of this, the art of medicine may be optional, but the study of health is not. But too often we neglect this second type of practicality in favor of the first. The same might be said of other subjects: history and politics, science and literature, technology, mathematics and economics. All these have their practical dimension, in which some understanding of them will help one to make beneficial or expedient decisions for oneself and others in the world. 

Deliberating with the Variables

Aristotle goes on to explain practical wisdom as distinct from the arts:

This is shown by the fact that we credit men with practical wisdom in some particular respect when they have calculated well with a view to some good end which is one of those that are not the object of any art. It follows that in the general sense also the man who is capable of deliberating has practical wisdom.

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 5

In essence, prudential wisdom then is about calculating, consulting or deliberating about what is best. It consists in properly weighing the options. Moral virtue itself is a habit, and therefore does not involve deliberation. But only by deliberation are moral virtues maintained as habits, and only through the right hands will a person see the right ends and value the means correctly. The arts likewise involve habits, as well as thoughtful analysis of means and ends, but only for the purpose of production, not for essential choices about how to live in the world.

The prudential perspective thus sets limits on what is valuable to know or think. It is as the Psalmist said, 

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me.

Psalm 131:1 ESV

There is a humility in the concerns of prudence to focus on earthly things and human things, rather than divine or arcane marvels. The way Aristotle distinguishes these categories involves the idea of the variable and invariable, what is changeable or unchangeable. Philosophical discussions of contingency developed from this distinction between what must necessarily and logically be true and that which could be otherwise. We might think of variable things as the facts of a case. They are matters which could be different in a different case.

This distinction between the variable and invariable aligns with Aristotle’s distinction between practical wisdom (phronesis) and scientific knowledge (episteme). He explains,

Now no one deliberates about things that are invariable, nor about things that it is impossible for him to do. Therefore, since scientific knowledge involves demonstration, but there is no demonstration of things whose first principles are variable (for all such things might actually be otherwise), and since it is impossible to deliberate about things that are of necessity, practical wisdom cannot be scientific knowledge nor art; not science because that which can be done is capable of being otherwise, not art because action and making are different kinds of thing. The remaining alternative, then, is that it is a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man. For while making has an end other than itself, action cannot; for good action itself is its end.

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 5

The goal of production is always its usefulness for something else, but a decision to act a certain way has its goal in itself: living a good life. So far so good on the distinction between artistry and prudence. We have had occasion already to define scientific knowledge (episteme) as the ability to demonstrate some truth. In Aristotle’s logical system of distinctions, the possession of scientific knowledge involves the demonstration or proof of something from first principles that could not be otherwise. Aristotle later mentions an example from mathematics: “that the triangle has or has not its angles equal to two right angles.” No one deliberates or takes counsel about that but only about affairs in which he can make a choice. The first principles that entail knowledge about triangles are fundamental and of necessity; we cannot really imagine a world in which they were otherwise. 

Our conclusion, then, is simply a restatement of Aristotle’s definition of prudence (phronesis) as a “true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to things that are good or bad for man.” The true reasoning of practical wisdom takes place in deliberation, when a person takes counsel by considering various actions. He or she must know the particulars of the situation as well as universal human values. As Aristotle’s says, 

Nor is practical wisdom concerned with universals only—it must also recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars. This is why some who do not know, and especially those who have experience, are more practical than others who know; for if a man knew that light meats are digestible and wholesome but did not know which sorts of meat are light, he would not produce health, but the man who knows that chicken is wholesome is more likely to produce health.

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 7

Aristotle comes full circle on the example of health, enabling us to confirm that there is a prudential perspective on the subject of human health. We can distinguish it even further from scientific knowledge now through this example. While a person might know through deductive reasoning from the first principles of (ancient) medicine and nutrition that light meats are digestible and wholesome, he could still be unaware of the particulars. An experienced person might not know the general categories and theory, but know the particular facts that chicken is wholesome. So, in deliberating about what to eat that might promote health, the experienced person is at an advantage over the person with theoretical knowledge.

Reclaiming the Practical Perspective for Classical Education

All that we have seen so far demonstrates the legitimacy of taking a practical perspective on various subjects in education. One of the unfortunate effects of the modern education landscape is that practicality has been subsumed under progressive education’s utilitarianism and pragmatism. In defending subjects like Latin, ancient and medieval history, and the arts, from those who swept out impractical subjects for dead people, some classical educators have strapped on the armor of “art for art’s sake” so long that have reflexively neglected the proper practicality of the classical tradition.

In this context, contemporary educators have tended to stress research findings to support making subjects relevant to the lives of their students. On the one hand, such insistence on connecting everything to students’ day-to-day lives seems extreme and anti-classical. Must I really make connections between modern day gang wars and the stories of the Greeks and Trojans? Context is everything. Such a teaching move could be either far-fetched or brilliant. Besides, the supposition that every subject of study must prove itself as relevant to the student before he or she can rightfully be expected to engage it with their full attention is manifestly pernicious. Teachers and schools end up cutting valuable subjects and justifying the practicality of STEM on the job-preparation motive alone. 

On the other hand, we now have classical reason, founded in the educational objective of developing prudence, to adopt the practical perspective, especially on the humanities, health, and economics, without neglecting the cultivation of other intellectual virtues in their place. After all, relevance is only one among several factors that “reduce stress and lead to the thinking, reflective brain response” (see Neuroteach, by Whitman and Kelleher, p. 69). It is not the case that every subject must justify itself as practical, in the sense of relevant to my personal life decisions. Yet the practicality of instructing the conscience for life must be the beating heart of the whole educational experience, not the whole of education but a living center that pumps the blood of human interest into every other part.

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