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

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

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

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

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

The Material and Corporeal Soul

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

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

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

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

The Soul as Biological Mechanism

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

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

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

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

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

Mortality and the Pragmatic Pursuit of Tranquility

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Value of Physical and Mental Tranquility for Study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Epicurean Legacy and the Materialist Ghost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pedagogy and Warning: Lessons for the Classical Christian Educator

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

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

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

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

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

________________

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

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

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

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“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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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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This is why it has been so crucial for classical Christian educators to return to foundational questions. The average parent or teacher in our movement may tire of such stargazing, but it is necessary. The means that we use to educate young human beings must be consistent with the end or purpose of education. 

But the purpose of education itself and the means we use to educate must also be consistent with our answer to the even larger question of what a human being is. Most of our practical disagreements in how to educate children have these fundamental worldview questions hovering in the background, like a ghost that will continually haunt us if we do not acknowledge its presence. 

To picture worldview commitments as star-gazing or a set of higher level propositions, at the top of a chain of deductions written out on a whiteboard somewhere, tricks us into thinking that we can assume them and get on with application. But this is untrue. The soul of education must enliven our work with children and be embodied in our curriculum, pedagogy and classroom leadership moment by moment, otherwise we will repeat the errors of competing worldviews and beliefs, half-truths and downright falsehoods.

The soul of education is therefore found in our view of the soul. Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education is a notable example of this recognition. She grounded her educational ideas on the fundamental claim that children were persons. “I believe that the first article of a valid educational creed–’Children are born persons’–is of a revolutionary character; for what is a revolution but a complete reversal of attitude?” (The Parents’ Review 22; June 1911, 419-437). Our attitude toward children will inevitably shape our work as educators in ways that are beyond our immediate awareness. Classical Christian educators advocate a similar reversal of attitude or revolution in education.

We may not think of the word ‘person’ as carrying the same theological or philosophical weight as the word ‘soul’. But Charlotte Mason draws our attention to our modern assumptions about the nature of human beings through this word. Today even as classical Christian educators, we are stymied by a mishmash of terms for the nature of human beings: from traditional and religious terms like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, to the language of modern psychology and neuroscience. How do we make sense of it all? And how are these terms and our half-formed understanding of them implicitly shaping our attitude toward the children we educate? 

I have heard one of the leaders in our movement meaningfully claim that in education we are “nourishing souls,” rather than any number of alternatives. At the time there was a collective sigh in the room as we felt at a visceral level the weight of this re-imagination of education. But why? What does the word ‘soul’ even mean? And how can it be more than the ghost of our traditional imagination in a world where human beings are conceived in terms of their amygdala, frontal lobes, and dopaminergic system?

As Christians committed to the language of scripture regarding our flesh, soul, mind and spirit, how can we sift through the varying conceptions of the human person for the fundamental insights that can create a Christian revolution of attitude and methods in our educational endeavors? 

In this series of short articles on the soul of education, I propose to evaluate ancient and modern theories of the soul, from Plato and Aristotle to modern psychology and neuroscience, in order to glean important and revolutionary insights for our day-to-day educational practices. The ghost of these various conceptions of the soul are haunting our schools and classrooms. Like the Stoic Athenodorus we have to keep our heads about us, follow the ghost out into the courtyard of ideas, and learn its story by digging in the spot where it left, if we would no longer be haunted (see Pliny the Younger’s Letter to Sura). In our next article we will begin this process with Plato’s tripartite soul and its implications for education. 

I hope you enjoy this series of short articles as I take a break from my series of articles on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. The Soul of Education is tangentially related to that extended exploration and will provide me with some needed time to wrap up book editing and writing projects, as well as research for the next series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of intuition or understanding (nous). Share a comment or thought on how you think any of the competing theories of the soul might be affecting our attitude and methods in education!

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One consequence of these trends is the exclusion of literature and humanities from the broader conversation about education, its goals, methods, and ideals. Charlotte Mason, for one, found novels, fictional literature, and poetry to be a potent source for her educational philosophy. While certainly we can understand the reticence to feature too prominently the imaginative portrayal of a person’s education or development in exact recommendations for how to teach, literature and the humanities have as their subject matter what it means to be human. Therefore, they concern the education of human beings in all their complexity, glory, and fallenness. 

Poets, novelists, and fictional writers might not be good guides as to the length of school days and the exact details of curricula and lessons. But they have a farsighted imaginative perception that has the power to shake up, challenge and inform our philosophy and practices. Because of the very unreality and singular nature of their imaginative portrayals, they are able to shock us out of our complacency and restore our ideals and vision for the educational art.

In this article, we will be transported to the 19th century post-Napoleonic era in France to witness the education of Edmond Dantès, a poor first mate of a merchant’s vessel in the south of France. In the classic adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, young Dantès, who is on the brink of perfect happiness, about to marry his love Mercédès, is fatefully betrayed by two seeming friends, and sentenced to imprisonment without trial (Barnes & Noble, 2011 edition).

While in the dungeons of the Château d’If, an island fortress off the coast of Marseilles, Edmond Dantès receives a first-class education from one of his fellow prisoners, a learned Italian man called Abbé Faria. He also will learn from Abbé Faria of a tremendous fortune hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo. After Abbé Faria’s death, fourteen years in prison, eight of which he spent learning from the Italian, he will escape to become the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo. His education has transformed him and enabled him to seek out the hidden crimes of his persecutors, who have only grown in power and riches since his own demise. 

In this article I will avoid any spoilers about the end of the book, which I myself am still reading–I also have not watched any movie version–and instead will confine myself to an analysis of the education of the future Count of Monte Cristo.

The Teacher-Student Relationship

When Edmond Dantès is found by his future teacher, he has all but given up hope in despair. Without seeing another soul than his jailer for six years, he has committed to starving himself to death, when he begins to hear a sound of file and digging. He breaks his resolution to try to discover what this is and Abbé Faria reveals himself in answer to Dantès’ prayer:

“Oh, my God! my God!” murmured he, “I have so earnestly prayed to You that I hoped my prayers had been heard. After having deprived me of my liberty, after having deprived me of death, after having recalled me to existence, my God! have pity on me, and do not let me die in despair.” (111)

Their relationship comes about as a result of God’s mercy, providentially arranging for Dantès to be lifted out of his despair in a dark and unjust world. Dantès’s relationship with his teacher has a unique beauty about it because he has been starved of human-to-human interaction; he is open to friendly and familial love in a way that few students are. As he says to Faria at their first meeting, “If you are young, I will be your comrade; if you are old, I will be your son” (113). 

The Abbé Faria quickly develops a paternal affection for Dantès. Like an expert psychologist and counselor, and with the piercing perception of a Sherlock Holmes, Faria helps Dantès discover from only his memories who it was that thus betrayed him and sentenced him to his unjust and torturous imprisonment. But their relationship has a moral and spiritual mentorship at its heart rather than a professional detachment:

Faria bent on him his penetrating eyes: “I regret now,” said he, “having helped you in your late inquiries, or having given you the information I did.”

“Why so?” inquired Dantès.

“Because it has instilled a new passion in your heart–that of vengeance.” (136)

As their relationship develops Dantès’s promise, “I shall love you as I loved my father” (113), holds true, and after 8 years Faria will adopt Dantès (“whom Faria really loved as a son,” 154) by granting him the secret of his treasure.

Unlike the situation of many modern classrooms the teacher-student relationship of Faria and Dantès is of long duration, spans multiple subjects of study (as we’ll see), and is more akin to personal mentoring and tutoring, with a familial father-son air. The mutual interest, joy in companionship and holistic integration challenges our factory model assumptions. Why is it that we have abandoned the tutorial or the multi-year influence of a teacher on a student’s life and development? Perhaps it is because we have also abandoned a traditional vision of the ideal teacher.

A Portrait of the Ideal Teacher

We are introduced to the learned Abbé Faria as an intellectual, certainly, but also as a paragon of moral insight: “The meagerness of his face, deeply furrowed by care, and the bold outline of his strongly marked features, announced a man more accustomed to exercise his moral faculties than his physical strength” (115). When he learns from Dantès of the removal of Napoleon from power and the restoration of the monarchy in France, he exclaims in a sort of biblical doxology:

“The brother of Louis XVI!–How inscrutable are the ways of Providence!–for what great and mysterious purpose has it pleased heaven to abase the man once so elevated, and raise up the individual so beaten down and depressed?”

And then later, 

“Ah! my friend!” said the abbé, turning toward Dantès, and surveying him with the kindling gaze of a prophet, “these are the changes and vicissitudes that give liberty to a nation.” (118)

Faria’s prophetic gaze is not only political, but has a spiritual or theological source. His later refusal to consider killing a guard during an attempted escape confirms him as a man of conviction and scrupulous character, whatever else he may be (121-122). 

Because of his moral fiber and his endless invention and great learning, he has not succumbed to despair, like Dantès, even though he has been imprisoned much longer (117), but has secretly made himself tools (115) from the odds and ends in his prison, pens and cloth to write his magnum opus, A Treatise on the Practicability of Forming Italy into One General Monarchy (123), and of course he has carried out a multi-year project of digging in an attempt to secure his escape. In addition to all this, he has used his free time in his cell as an opportunity to improve himself, continuing his own personal education. How is such a feat possible? Faria explains to Dantès:

“I had nearly 5,000 volumes in my library at Rome; but after reading them over many times I found out that with 150 well-chosen books a man possesses a complete analysis of all human knowledge, or at least all that is either useful or desirable to be acquainted with. I devoted three years of my life to reading and studying these 150 volumes, till I knew them nearly by heart; so that since I have been in prison a very slight effort of memory has enabled me to recall their contents as readily as though their pages were open before me. I could recite you the whole of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandès, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli and Bossuet. Observe, I merely quote the most important names and writers.” (123)

In addition to this detailed knowledge of Great Books, through which Faria possesses “a complete analysis of all human knowledge,” Faria also knows five modern languages, as well as Latin and ancient Greek, through which he teaches himself modern Greek. If this description might have seemed to classify Faria as merely another arcane, ivory-tower intellectual, we should note the applied practicality of his slimming of the 5,000 volumes down to a select 150 and his further comment that he names the “most important names and writers.” This is a teacher who can discriminate between various authors and is able to distill for his eager pupil the essence and summation of “useful and desirable” knowledge. He knows how to do this for another because he has first done it for himself. 

It is worth noting again that Faria is not driven to despair by his imprisonment because his vast reading has provided for him an endless source of employment and joy in his own ongoing learning. The flow of thought overrides his unfortunate circumstances. He has spent his time, among other things, making a vocabulary of the words he knew in modern Greek and turning them back and forth in his minds in order to develop facility with the 1,000 he knew in order to be able to express perfectly anything he wanted (123).

But Faria is not a humanist and linguist alone. He also is an eminent source of useful information and scientific knowledge, as well as the inventiveness and crafty resourcefulness already displayed in his tools and excavations:

“The elder prisoner was one of those persons whose conversation, like that of all who have experienced many trials, contained many useful and important hints as well as sound information; but it was never egotistical, for the unfortunate man never alluded to his own sorrows. Dantès listened with admiring attention to all he said; some of his remarks corresponded with what he already knew, or applied to the sort of knowledge his nautical life had enabled him to acquire. A part of the good abbé’s words, however, were wholly incomprehensible to him; but, like those aurora borealis which serve to light navigators in northern latitudes, they sufficed to open fresh views to the inquiring mind of the listener, and to give a glimpse of new horizons, enabling him justly to estimate the delight an intellectual mind would have in following the high and towering spirit of one so richly gifted as Faria in all the giddiest heights or lowest depths of science.” (136)

Such an ideal teacher surely surpasses what any of us who are employed in the profession might hope to attain; nevertheless, he represents an expansive vision of the intellectual life that we cannot do without. Faria’s title, Abbé, names him a member of the clergy, whether cleric or Abbot, and recalls the term for “father” used of abbots and priests. He is a spiritual and theologically grounded intellectual, who has also attained to the breadth of humane learning and obtained a practical and deep scientific understanding. He is a polymath or renaissance man. He is therefore able to situate the various branches of human learning in relation to one another.

How far a cry is this ideal from the high school teacher or college professor, plyer of trade knowledge and skill development in but one area, yet without a comprehensive philosophical understanding of the whole!

The Ideal Student and Course of Study

We have already seen Edmond Dantès’s readiness to learn and relational receptiveness above. In many other ways he represents the ideal student for so grand a teacher. He has the proper sense of wonder and curiosity, as well as the right early experiences to be an attentive learner:

“Though [he was] unable to comprehend the full meaning of his companion’s allusions, each word that fell from his lips seemed fraught with the wonders of science, as admirably deserving of being brought to light as were the glittering treasures he could just recollect having visited during his earliest youth in a voyage he made to Guzerat and Golconda.” (125)

The process of learning or education is here compared to uncovering the glittering treasures of the east (two territories in India known for grand buildings and diamonds). Because of this proper disposition toward the value of learning, Dantès became so “absorbed in the acquisition of knowledge, [that] days, even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive course” (137). He enters the time-warp characteristic of the flow of thought already possessed by his teacher. But of course, they first determine the appropriate course of study before embarking on a journey limited only by the qualifications of the student.

“And that very evening the prisoners sketched a plan of education, to be entered upon the following day. Dantès possessed a prodigious memory, combined with an astonishing quickness and readiness of conception; the mathematical turn of his mind rendered him apt at all kinds of calculation, while his naturally poetical feelings threw a light and pleasing veil over the dry reality of arithmetical computation or the rigid severity of lines. He already knew Italian, and had also picked up a little of the Romaic dialect, during his different voyages to the East; and by the aid of these two languages he easily comprehended the construction of all the others, so that at the end of six months he began to speak Spanish, English, and German.” (137)

Not all students will have Dantès’s natural qualifications of memory, calculation and poesy. But these are nevertheless the key ingredients in a rapid and effective course of study. It would be incorrect to say that Abbé Faria taught him everything; in fact, he makes an interesting set of distinctions between principles and application, the sciences and philosophy. “Human knowledge,” he says, “is confined within very narrow limits; and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do myself” (136). He then sets a term of two years as all that would be required to compass the principles, but not the application of this knowledge, noting that “to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other” (136). 

Faria here alludes to the Aristotelian distinction between true scientific knowledge, which involves the ability to demonstrate, and the mere memory or understanding of a thing. He also describes philosophy as “reducible to no rules by which it can be learned”; it is rather “the amalgamation of all the sciences, the golden cloud which bears the soul to heaven” (137). For such a prodigious intellect, Faria has a proper humility about what the teacher can convey to the student and what the student’s own learning and continuing education after schooling must do to complete the enduring love of wisdom (“philosophy”) that “bears the soul to heaven.” 

For the Count of Monte Cristo in the making, this scientific course of study is enough, and presumably his own efforts at blessing his friends, enacting vengeance on his enemies, and making a new life for himself when all is done, will be necessary to complete his journey. But one further thing is needed to prepare him for that task: the Abbé Faria’s finishing school:

“The abbé was a man of the world, and had, moreover, mixed in the first society of the day; his appearance was impressed with that air of melancholy dignity which Dantès, thanks to the imitative powers bestowed on him by nature, easily acquired, as well as that outward polish and politeness he had before been wanting in, and which is seldom possessed except by those who have been placed in constant intercourse with persons of high birth and breeding.” (139)

We often overlook the powerful effect of the teacher’s mode of being, “polish and politeness,” upon the students, or the natural effect of “constant intercourse” or social interaction with a certain type or class of people. We might describe some of these habits and customs as the result of enculturation, without which a student would be unprepared for certain callings in life. Dantès, for instance, could not have become the Count of Monte Cristo without this “air of melancholy dignity.”

Conclusion

Let us close by summarizing in the form of several propositions what we have discovered in our fictional excursion into the singular education of the Count of Monte Cristo. 

The bond between teacher and student should be more than professional, but friendly and even familial, on the order of adoption or apprenticeship. This reality makes our modern era’s rapid change of teachers and professionalized teaching staff conducted at economic scale a liability, rather than a benefit. Tutoring and tutorials, as well as smaller schools with teachers teaching the same groups of students across multiple years in multiple sub-disciplines, become desirable from the perspective of teacher-mentorship. 

The ideal mentor-teacher, especially at the secondary or collegiate level, is a man or woman of moral and spiritual standing, not just an intellect or a capable deliverer of content through an engaging PowerPoint lecture. The ongoing education of the teacher and his active engagement in interdisciplinary inquiry are not extras to be dispensed with at will but necessarily influence the ideal student who is to become like his teacher. We must avoid hiring teachers as subject-experts or mere practitioners, rather than as spiritual, moral, and intellectual guides with a commitment to lifelong learning.

In early youth the cultivation of a student’s interest, wonder and curiosity, as well as habits of attention and strength of memory are crucial to his later development. Students should learn languages and have vivid experiences that will serve as the hinges on which the doors of later learning will swing open easily. In secondary education, 150 Great Books well studied will be a better summation of human knowledge than 5,000 books indiscriminately encountered. In addition, the understanding of principles in the sciences must be supplemented by application and demonstration, in order to bubble up to that highest of attainments, the true philosophy or love of wisdom. 

Life itself will be the test of a student’s education, and especially those decisions and choices of prudential wisdom upon which a life is made new or wrecked upon the shoals of an unjust world. (P.S. I can’t wait to read what happens next in The Count of Monte Cristo.)

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For example, a teacher responsible for teaching The Great Gatsby must consider how the book will be taught, what she will focus on, and how she intends for students to develop and grow through the study. Each day, she walks into a room full of students in need of direction for approaching the text. This requires leadership.

In modern educational circles, we often speak, not of leadership, but of “classroom management.” Unfortunately, this phrase is embedded with faulty assumptions about who students are, what the purpose of learning is, and how we are to manage them toward some desirable end. As a result, classroom management techniques are problematic in two key ways.

First, classroom management techniques are often behavioristic. In other words, they seek to address the behavior of students through systems of external rewards and consequences, rather than aiming to form the whole person of the child, especially the heart. Strategies are deployed to artificially motivate behaviors of respect, obedience, service, and even kindness in a way disconnected from the child’s internal moral development. Is this child growing in a love and understanding of the idea of respect for authority? How is the child becoming more servant-hearted in her disposition? These questions are not usually asked in typical classroom management conversations.

Second, classroom management techniques are often task-oriented rather than people-oriented. This makes sense since the phrase emerged during the post-industrial revolution in which the effective and efficient completion of tasks was prized above all else. Now, at its best, modern business management theory is people-oriented, but most managers too easily slip into the mindset of “How do I get this employee to perform this task?” rather than “How do I lead this employee on a path toward growth and increasing expertise?” The latter focuses on the development of the talent and skill of people, not simply whether they are hitting the deadlines. 

To equip teachers to grow as true leaders of their students, in this article I will recommend three recently published leadership books that contain relevant ideas for classroom leadership. These resources will help teachers see their true leadership role and therefore embrace the responsibility for them to invest deeply in the lives of their students. While teachers will need to push through some of the business-focused examples of these resources, the underlying ideas are both relevant and applicable for classroom leadership today.

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman 

The first book I want to recommend is Multipliers (HarperCollins, 2017) by researcher Liz Wiseman. In this book, Wiseman sets out to show how leaders can make people under their supervision smarter, rather than targeting mere compliance. Early on, she differentiates between two managers, the Genius Maker and the Genius (9). The genius maker grows people’s intelligence by “extracting the smarts and maximum effort from each member on the team.” This type of leader talks only about 10% of the time, thereby making space for others to grow through active participation in coming up with solutions to a problem. 

In contrast, the genius is self-oriented. He is smart and successful, and everyone in the room knows who has the best ideas. He may facilitate “conversations” but soon these turn into opportunities for him to share his correct views with others. After all, he is the genius. Why not just listen to him? The result is that people do not have the permission to think for themselves or the legitimate responsibility to make decisions. It all goes back to what the genius thinks is right. 

For Wiseman, the genius maker is a multiplier of of intelligence while the genius is actually a diminisher. At heart, multipliers “invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius–innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence” (10). The upshot is that these leaders not only access people’s current capability, they stretch it. People actually report getting smarter under the supervision of multipliers. The fundamental assumption of a multiplier is “People are smart and will figure this out” whereas the assumption of the diminisher is “They will never figure this out without me” (20). 

Teachers can become multipliers of intelligence in their classrooms by resisting the urge to be the residential genius. Although they are older, smarter, and more experienced, these assets can be leveraged to empower their students toward growing their own abilities, rather than making it all about the teacher.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers:

• Do you empower students in your classroom to make major contributions to class culture, discussions, learning, and skill demonstration? 
• Is there room in your classroom for students to make mistakes as you stretch them to attempt difficult assignments?
• Do you ask your students to explain complex concepts to their peers rather than yourself?
• Does your approach to grading grow student intellectual confidence or does it foster dependence on your own intelligence?

Boundaries for Leaders by Dr. Henry Cloud

Boundaries for Leaders (HarperCollins, 2013) is written by clinical psychologist Dr. Henry Cloud, an author recognized for his work on cultivating healthy relationships. In Chapter 1, he writes, “This book is about what leaders need to do in order for people to accomplish a vision” (2). The key word here for Cloud is people. He will go on to argue that people perform their best work in healthy work cultures that take into consideration the psychological well-being of both employer and employee. By setting good boundaries in place and leading in a way that people’s brains can follow, Cloud contends, good results will come. 

Cloud writes that boundaries are made up of two things: what you create and what you allow (15). A boundary is a property line, marking out who is responsible and for what. When someone is given real ownership of something, anything that happens under their supervision only happens because they created it or allowed it. 

In top-performing classrooms, teachers teach in a way that makes it possible for their students’ brains to function as they were designed (25). This happens through setting good boundaries. Cloud writes, “Show me a person, team, or a company that gets results, and I will show you the leadership boundaries that make it possible” (26).

As a psychologist, the author is aware of how the human brain works and what leaders can do to maximize brain health and productivity. In turn, teachers can use these insights as they seek to pass on knowledge, skills, and virtues to their students.

For example, it is helpful for a teacher to understand that the brain relies on three essential properties to achieve a particular task, be it the following of a classroom procedure or the completion of an assignment:

1. Attention: the ability to focus on relevant stimuli, and block out what is not relevant (“Do this”)
2. Inhibition: the ability to “not do” certain actions that could be distracting, irrelevant, or eve destructive (“Don’t do this”)
3. Working Memory: the ability to retain and access relevant information for reasoning, decision-making, and taking future actions (“Remember and build on this relevant information”)

As teachers design their lessons and think through what they want their students to accomplish for the day, it is beneficial to think through these three neurological elements for the completion of a task. When we ignore one or more of these elements, we risk short-circuiting our students optimal use of the way God designed their brains.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers:

• What student behaviors in your classroom have you created or allowed?
• How do your lessons promote student attention on what is most important for the curricular objective?
• What procedures and expectations have you established and maintained to ensure that what is not important or destructive is not allowed in?
• How are you building your students’ working memory of key information to help them complete assignments with greater success? 

The Motive by Patrick Lencioni 

The Motive (Wiley, 2020), written especially for CEOs, explores the underlying motivation of a good leader. Author Patrick Lencioni, well-known for his book Five Dysfunctions of a Team, illustrates through a leadership parable that one’s motivation for leading will dictate what one prioritizes and how he or she spends her time.

In the parable, two types of leadership motivation are at play (135). Reward-centered leadership rests on the fundamental assumption that the leader, having been selected for the role, has arrived and therefore possesses the freedom to design her job around what she most enjoys. It is the belief that the leader’s work should be pleasant and enjoyable because the leadership position is the reward. She therefore has the freedom to avoid mundane, unpleasant, or uncomfortable work if she so pleases, which she does.

In contrast, responsibility-centered leadership assumes that leadership is all about responsibility and service. It is the belief that being a leader is responsible; therefore, the experience of leading should be difficult and challenging (though certainly not without elements of gratification). 

To be clear, Lencioni writes that no leader perfectly embodies one form of motivation or the other. But one of these motives will be predominant and leaders need to be self-aware of what drives them. Reward-centered leaders often resist and avoid doing the difficult things that only they can do for the team they are leading. As a result, the whole organization suffers.

When it comes to leading a classroom, there are all sorts of things that a teacher would prefer not to do: address difficult student behavior, call a parent with bad news to share, have “family talks” with the whole class about negative classroom culture issues, or give a low grade on an assignment. But to be the best leaders they can, teachers need to lean into these responsibilities and thereby discharge their role teacher well.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers

• What is your motivation for becoming a teacher?
• What are the 3-5 things you can do for your class that no one else can do? 
• How are you caring for your class culture, especially rooting out dysfunctional behavior and forming healthy interpersonal dynamics?
• What kind of feedback do you give your students on their behavior and work? 
• When was the last time you had a difficult conversation with a student in which you addressed unhealthy behavior?
• When was the last time you complained about a student’s or parent’s behavior? What steps do you need to take to address it?
• How often are you reminding your students of the big picture of their education, your particular curriculum, and the core values of your classroom?

Conclusion

Teachers are the leaders of their classrooms, responsible for casting vision for their students, supporting them in their work, and cultivating healthy classroom cultures. Rather than deploying classroom management techniques which can be overly behavioristic and task-oriented, teachers should embrace their role as leaders and focus on developing their people. By helping teachers become better leaders, we will see dynamic classrooms, better learning results, and, most importantly, thriving students.

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What is this purpose? Education is about coming alongside students made in God’s image and helping them achieve their God-given potential. It begins with the question, “Who is this person that sits before me?” and goes on to probe both the limits and possibilities of her growth. Consequently, education is a branch of applied ethics, grounded in a particular conception of human flourishing, both individually and corporately. Like Kant’s categorical imperatives, we must ask ourselves, “If I were to educate every human person in this way, what sort of world would result?” 

Through asking questions like this, we can arrive at a way of educating that is counter-cultural, inspirational, and robustly biblical. This approach will take seriously the image-bearing status of our students and invite them into the good life as defined within a broader biblical framework of human flourishing. As a result, it will prepare the next generation of people like William Wilberforce and Mother Teresa, men and women equipped to lead and ready to serve no matter the cost.

Of course, this sort of quality education comes with a budget. To give students the attention and support they need calls for a sufficient number of well-trained and godly faculty. It is also dependent upon a well-developed curriculum, a safe and reliable facility, and supplies. This all costs money.

Like most non-profits, Christian, classical schools rely on the generosity of donors who believe in the mission to deliver the outcomes of the education. The process of partnering with donors to fund the mission, known as fundraising, can be a touchy subject, both for the giver and receiver. In this blog article, I will explore the relationship between education and fundraising, showing how the vision for education we seek to promote here at Educational Renaissance offers some help guidance for how we can provide for it financially. 

Science of Relations, Including Money

Earlier this week, I met with my colleague about an Upper School course we are designing on applied theology. We brainstormed objectives for the course like implementing spiritual disciplines, growing in awareness of personal vocation, mapping out convictions that align with faith and virtue, and developing a biblical worldview on key ethical questions. While we were in the flow of our brainstorm, my colleague wisely suggested that we include a unit on the theology of money. I responded immediately that I thought this was a great idea. We do not often reflect theologically on money–what is and how it can be used to bring glory to God. And yet these are precisely the sort of questions one could explore in an “Applied Theology” course. Press pause on the hypostatic union for a moment; what should we do about bitcoin? 

In A Spirituality of Fundraising (Upper Room Books, 2010), Henry Nouwen observes that money is a central reality in our lives, beginning when we are children (28). It is likely that our view of money is influenced by family upbringing more than anything else. Each of us grow up and develop a particular relationship with money just as we do with other facets of the created order.

This relational existence is precisely what prompted Charlotte Mason to ultimately define education as “the science of relations.” She writes,

A child should be brought up to have relations of force with earth and water, should run and ride, swim and skate, lift and carry; should know texture, and work in material; should know by name, and where and how they live at any rate, the things of the earth about him, its birds and beasts and creeping things, its herbs and trees; should be in touch with the literature, art and thought of the past and the present. I do not mean that he should know all these things; but he should feel, when he reads of it in the newspapers, the thrill which stirred the Cretan peasants when the frescoes in the palace of King Minos were disclosed to the labour of their spades. He should feel the thrill, not from mere contiguity, but because he has with the past the relationship of living pulsing thought; and, if blood be thicker than water, thought is more quickening than blood. He must have a living relationship with the present, its historic movement, its science, literature, art, social needs and aspirations. In fact, he must have a wide outlook, intimate relations all round; and force, virtue, must pass out of him, whether of hand, will, or sympathy, wherever he touches.

School Education, p. 162, bold emphasis mine

I quote this passage in full because it captures so well the relational existence that we are all born into. True knowledge of the world, including money, expands beyond the domain of information. While we can speak abstractly about income and expenses, P&L statements, and cash budgets, these numbers impact us personally when they are ours to manage. Consequently, depending on our upbringing and training, we can view finances as a terrifying enigma, a necessary evil, or a God-given aspect of responsible living. When viewed as the latter, we can approach finances and fundraising just as we do the throne of grace: with confidence in the faithfulness of our gracious and generous God.

Relocating our Source of Security

Effective fundraising begins with a proper view and relationship to money. It also requires a new way of relating to material resources. For most people, money is a chief form of security. This is in large part why fundraising is such a touchy subject. To admit the need for money leaves one feeling exposed. To ask for it even more so.

But it does not have to be. Nouwen writes, “The pressure in our culture to secure our own future and to control our lives as much as possible does not find support in the Bible. Jesus knows our need for security…What is our security base? God or Mammon?” (32). In this chapter, Nouwen clarifies that money holds an important place, but never as the foundation. As believers, we must put our trust in God and constantly through prayer recalibrate our dependence on Him alone.

Can we trust God? Yes, we can! His transcendence and sovereignty know no depths. As the prophet Isaiah writes,

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance? Who can fathom the Spirit of the Lord, or instruct the Lord as his counselor? Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten him, and who taught him the right way? Who was it that taught him knowledge, or showed him the path of understanding?

Isaiah 40:12 NIV

Here the prophet underscores the unquantifiable distance between the knowledge and power of God and ourselves. This is an important truth to keep in my mind as we approach fundraising. Our security base cannot be our ability to forecast expenses, increase enrollment, or attract new donors. The only true base of security for believers is God alone.

Viewing Donors as Whole Persons

As Christian, classical educators, we talk often about the fact that we are educating whole persons. Here we are getting at the idea that humans are more than their grade point average, trophy case, or SAT score. They have minds, but they are not merely minds. They have bodies, but they are not merely bodies. They will likely one day join the work force and earn a salary, but this is not their sole purpose of existence. Therefore, we provide students with a liberal (generous), well-rounded education that will prepare them to thrive intellectually, physically, spiritually, and yes, economically.

Likewise, we should approach people with means to support the school as more than the biggest gift they can give. Donors are whole persons with families, interests, challenges, and aspirations. They have spiritual needs just like you and me, and need biblical encouragement. When we begin to view donors as whole persons, we grow more generous ourselves as we look for opportunities to bless and serve them.

It can be tempting to approach donors with a feeling of desperation and even helplessness. We feel the pressure of school expenses adding up and, as a result, fundraising can start to feel like begging. But, again, Nouwen is helpful here. He argues that fundraising is the opposite of begging; it is the invitation to join a compelling mission. He writes,

We are declaring, ‘We have a vision that is amazing and exciting. We are inviting you to invest yourself through the resources God has given you–your energy, your prayers, and your money–in this work to which God has called us to do.’

A Spirituality of Fundraising, p. 17

Seen in this way, fundraising is a form of ministry, not begging, in which we play the role of gift-giver even as we ask for monetary gifts to support the mission of educating the next generation.

Conclusion: The Role of Teachers

If you are a teacher reading this article, and you are still reading, well done! I am grateful for your attention. Many teachers are uncomfortable with the idea of fundraising and did not become a teacher to ask people for money. That is fine. But my hope in writing this article is that it will help you remember and appreciate the financial side of your school. I actually believe you will become a stronger faculty member and broader contributor to your school’s culture if you can appreciate this important dimension of your school’s sustainability.

In Journey to Excellence (ACSI, 2017), Ron Klein writes, “While the active fundraising effort of others is important for progress, the faculty’s subtle, indirect culture of gratefulness and appreciation for donors is no less crucial” (98). Teachers, understand that your school is a non-profit and relies on donors. It is very likely that your salary is dependent to some extent on the generosity of donors and therefore the efforts of those charged to raise funds. When appropriate, offer your gratitude to these partners in your school’s mission and prayerfully consider inviting potential new partners to learn more about your school.

Fundraising does not have to be a necessary evil. When we trust the Lord as our ultimate security and believe that our school’s vision is a cause worth getting behind, inviting others to partner together can bring an unexpected amount of joy.

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Moreover, some Christians fear, utilizing brain science to boost cognitive performance through strengthening the brain sounds like a mad scientist’s version of humanistic self-help. In our secular age, God-talk has been pushed to the margins and human innovation has taken center stage. The good news, we are told, is that with the right life plan in place, we can grow strong enough to turn our lives around on our own.

How, as Christians, can we maintain our convictions about the reality of a spiritual realm and our desperate need for God’s grace while simultaneously availing ourselves to the best of current neuroscience? What insights might scientifically-observable processes like neurogenesis and neuroplasticity yield in our calling to conform ourselves to the image of Christ?

In this blog, I will draw connections between recent findings in neuroscience with the aims of a liberal arts education. Along the way, I will consider the relationship between the body and soul, including the brain and the mind, within the context of growing spiritually and morally. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate that a working knowledge in how to care for one’s brain is one way we can steward our human bodies well and to lead lives of virtue and wisdom in service to Jesus Christ.

Growing New Brain Cells Through a Love for Learning

One of the most stunning insights from current neuroscience is that we can grow new brain cells. As humans age, we lose brain cells over time, which is partially what leads to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Aging, of course, is unpreventable and irreversible, but the research is clear that caring for our brains can slow the aging process. By adjusting the way we eat, sleep, and exercise, we can create new brain cells that actually grow one’s brain and increase one’s cognitive capacity.

In Biohack Your Brain (HarperCollins, 2020), Dr. Kristen Willeumier (PhD, UCLA) offers practical tips for increasing neurogenesis, that is, growing new brain cells. Some of these tips include eating blueberries, learning new words, and writing with your nondominant hand (22). Interestingly, Dr. Willeumier writes, cultivating curiosity is another way for spurring neurogenesis. When humans learn for the sake of pure joy and a love for knowledge, new brain cells are created and neural connections are strengthened (184).

One of the key aims of a liberal arts education, of course, is precisely this: to cultivate a love for learning. As Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain have demonstrated in The Liberal Arts Tradition, a fantastic summary of Christian, classical education, tuning the heart is a critical stage that precedes training in the liberal arts. This stage they call “musical education” and it serves as the soil for knowledge of God, humanity, and creation to later flower (7).

It is thus important to point out that the goal of cultivating a love for learning in the earliest years of education has both affective and neurological benefits. As we put specimens of goodness, truth, and beauty before our students for them to love and pursue, their hearts (metaphorically-speaking) and brains grow.

Cultivating Intelligence and Intellectual Virtue Through the Trivium

Not only can we grow new brain cells with certain practices, but there is growing research that we can actually increase intelligence. Dr. Willeumier writes, “In terms of intelligence, research shows we can change our brain to boost intellect in a number of ways. Primary among them, perhaps unsurprisingly, is by learning new information and skills, which helps to strengthen neuronal communication and rewires parts of the brain responsible for cognitive thinking” (42). Additionally, research shows we can increase intelligence by how we eat, sleep, exercise, and handle stress.

There are many ways to think about intelligence, but we all have three main types. First, we have what is called crystallized intelligence: the knowledge, facts, and skills we have accumulated over time. Second, we have fluid Intelligence: the ability to problem solve. Finally, we have emotional intelligence: the ability to interact and connect socially with others.

Interestingly, it turns out that reading long-form narratives is the best way to boost all three.¹ Reading for extended amounts of time, at least thirty minutes, improves overall neuronal connectivity and the integrity of white matter in the brain (188). Along with reading, several other modes of language acquisition strengthen cognitive capacity. Learning new vocabulary, studying a new language, and writing all contribute to strengthening memory, growing new brain cells, and staving off neurodegenerative diseases.

In the liberal arts tradition, the language arts are known as the Trivium. These are tools for fashioning, or producing, knowledge, as opposed to subject areas, or sciences, to be studied in theory only. In other words, they are the skills for learning and using language. However, the purpose of the Trivium is not merely to increase one’s intelligence. It is growing in wisdom and intellectual virtue, ultimately to service God and neighbor (47).

As Christian, classical educators, we want to promote the pursuit of objective truth, beliefs that correspond to reality. It is encouraging, and not surprising, to see that language acquisition has been shown neurologically to increase one’s intelligence. But let us not lose sight of the fact that intelligence is not the end goal for Christians. We are to use our minds to honor and serve the Lord, especially the way we use language. While all humans will use language whether they receive a classical education or not, the Trivium prepares students to use language wisely and in service to others.

The Brain and Gymnastic Education

For time immemorial, philosophers have argued about the relationship between the mind and body. How do these two parts of a person relate? Are they ultimately one thing or two? More recently, this debate has taken a scientific edge. Are mental states reducible to firing neurons?

In an article for Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought, “Neuroplasticity and Spiritual Formation”, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist at UCLA, offers an interesting take on the relationship between the mind and the brain. The brain, he believes, serves as the passive recipient of experience, taking in the sensory data of the natural world. The mind, on the other hand, serves the active role of making decisions and choices about how to focus one’s attention.

Applying this approach to a current issue, Dr. Schwartz writes, “Many people are concerned about the effects of the internet on our distractibility. If ever there was an era in which the brain could be readily recognized as constantly putting out a call, ours is it. Because of this, more than ever, we now have to bring in the mind to decide what to listen to. A lot of what the brain is putting out calls about is not particularly good to listen to—certainly not to focus on.”

In this quotation, Dr. Schwartz suggests that while the brain serves as the central station for receiving sensory data, the mind’s job is to determine which data to focus on. In this way, Dr. Schwartz seems to conceive of the mind as the seat of the will, conscience, and affections. However, what Dr. Schwartz does not emphasize, at least in this article, is that the brain, neurologically-speaking, is very much active in these moments as well.

What I want to suggest is that perhaps we should think of training the brain as a form of gymnastic education, the broader training of the body. Clark and Jain write, “Education is not merely an intellectual affair, no matter how intellect-centered it must be, because human beings are not merely minds. As creatures made in God’s image, we are composite beings–unions of soul and body. A full curriculum must cultivate the good of the whole person, soul, and body” (29).

If Clark and Jain are right about the importance of promoting a fully-orbed Christian anthropology, and I believe they are, then it seems that caring for and training the brain is to be included. Fortunately, given the close connection between the mind and the brain, our lessons already lend themselves to this sort of training. As I have already shown above, training in the language arts grows new brain cells and strengthens neural networks. But it is worth stating and remembering that God has given us brains, which are physical organs, and we should care for them as we do other parts of our physical bodies.

Physicality and Christian Formation

There is one final point I would like to make about the relationship between the brain and liberal arts education. It is the idea that Christian formation, which is ultimately a spiritual process, often occurs through physical means.

In “The Physical Nature of Christian Life: Formation and Flourishing”, Dr. Brad Strawn and Dr. Warren Brown, psychology professors from Fuller Theological Seminary, write, “Humans cannot be reduced to disembodied souls or immaterial minds. We are embodied and embedded creatures. Our physicality matters, including our brains. Humans are formed and transformed through embodied and embedded experiences. Personhood is not the immaterial reality, but an embodied one.”

There is much to unpack in this quotation, and I do not agree with all of their philosophical conclusions, but I do think they point out something important. Sometimes when thinking about how to help students grow spiritually, we think of their relationship with God in individualistic and gnostic terms. In other words, we summarize Christian formation as a private encounter between God and their individual souls. But what these psychologists helpfully remind us is that often our relationships with God grow in communal settings. Whether it be the weekly church gathering, summer Bible camp, or small group Bible studies, we grow as Christians through embodied and communally-embedded moments.

Thinking about how adults grow in these settings as much as children, the psychologists write, “Many of the same formative social processes are at work in adults as in children: imitation, attachments, and life-forming narratives. What is at stake in ongoing adult development is the degree to which wisdom and virtue come to characterize persons.”

As we seek to cultivate wisdom and virtue in our students, as well as ourselves, we should remember that this endeavor, though moral and spiritual in nature, has a connection to our physicality. We should think through how we can harness physical experience to form our students in wisdom and virtue.

Conclusion

There is a lot more that could be said here. As we educate the hearts, minds, and souls of our students, how should we understand what is happening to the brain? In this blog, I have reflected on the relationship between neuroscience and the liberal arts. As educators, I believe we can use the insights of modern brain science to not only take better care of our physical bodies. We can use these insights to strengthen the liberal arts education we offer our students to help them grow in wisdom and virtue, and ultimately, in service to Jesus Christ.

Endnotes

1. Kidd DC, Castano E. Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind in Science (6156): 377-380)

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In this article, I will share about some key elements in the early life of John Adams, demonstrating the role education played in his development. Living in 18th century New England, Adams’ world is quite different than our own, and yet, there are some striking points of connection. Through highlighting some of these points, my hope is that readers will come away inspired about the craft of teaching, especially teaching the classics, and eager to pick up a biography of their own.

Biographies and Education

First, a word on biographies and how they intersect with my work as an educator. As I have been reading about the life of John Adams, it has become obvious to me just how helpful biographies are for those seeking to teach. Here are two reasons. 

First, since education can be understood as “the science of relations,” a phrase used by Charlotte Mason, a comprehensive education must include the study of past figures and events, that is, history. The story of one particular past figure offers a unique entry point into the subject of history as it presents to the reader one coherent narrative, a life, over a duration of time. Biographies demonstrate both how individuals are affected by broader historical and cultural forces, and conversely, how individuals affect these forces themselves.

Second, biographies help us as educators contextualize our current educational landscape. Any biography you pick up will contain some traces of education. The individual may be educated at home, school, or through a tutor. In some cases, she may not be formally educated at all, but instead finds ways to teach herself or learn through practical experiences. The point is that education is at play in the life of every figure, past or present, and educators can gain theoretical insights about all sorts of forms of education without ever stepping into the classroom itself.

The Early Education of John Adams

John Adams (1735-1826) grew up outside of Boston in Braintree, Massachusetts, in a relatively modest setting. His father worked as a farmer and served as a deacon in the local Congregrationalist Church. His mother came from a prominent family in the medical community.

His father identified Adams’ intellectual aptitude from a young age and ensured he would receive a formal education. He was taught to read at home or from the neighborhood “dame” with heavy reliance on The New England Primer. Unfortunately, Adams lost interest in school during this time due to a poor relationship with the teacher. He had no desire to read or study, instead turning his sights on becoming a farmer.

However, after talking with his father, it became clear that the teacher, not the school work or learning itself, was the problem. As a result, his father enrolled Adams in a private school down the road, where a new schoolmaster named Joseph Marsh helped spark a renaissance in his love for learning. Adams became a voracious reader and soon enough a small textbook edition of Cicero’s Orations become one of his earliest and proudest possessions. 

Love for the Classics, Especially Cicero

At age 15, Adams was pronounced ready for college and enrolled at Harvard, the only choice at the time. He became an attorney, not a classicist, but this did not stop him from integrating classical literature into his reading diet. In fact, after his stint as a school teacher, it was his reading of Cicero that prompted him to move from his hometown of Braintree to advance his career in Boston, seeking to “win renown.” He often read Cicero’s Orations during his free time, finding significant inspiration through the rhetorical excellence of the speeches.

As a brief aside, in a special introduction to a modern republication of Orations, translator Charles Yonge writes,

“Eloquence, the quintessence of oratory, has ever been a safe criterion of the intellectual and moral level of a people, its decay an indication of torpor and of decay of the ideal” (iii).

It is no accident that John Adams, a future leader in colonial efforts for independence, was exposed to a literary diet rich in eloquence early on. Eloquence can be defined as fluency in speech and writing, and Adams would later prove to be a master in this art.

Starting Off as a Teacher

After his Harvard years, Adams took a post as a schoolmaster to earn the funds necessary to apprentice under an attorney. It was a one-room schoolhouse in the center of town. Although Adam was untrained as a teacher, he suddenly found himself responsible for the intellectual development of, approximately, a dozen boys and girls. 

While Adams did not enjoy his time as a teacher, he did learn some lessons about education, one being that children respond better to encouragement than punishment. At the same time, Adams learned that teachers ought to be cautious in how much praise they give, or it will become too familiar and lose its influence (38).

Unfortunately, Adams turned out to not be a very strong teacher. He was more often found writing and reading at his desk at the front of the school-house, rather than instructing his students. He read Milton, Virgil, Voltaire, and various works of history. Through his study, Adams became more and more interested in politics, history, and the ways humans come together to make an orderly society. He did not, however, become a better teacher.

The Boston Massacre Trial

On March 5, 1770, a deadly riot broke out between British patrolmen and a Boston mob, which became known as the Boston Massacre. It is difficult to know precisely how the riot began, including who started the conflict, but the trail of blood tells no lies: British soldiers killed five colonists. As one can imagine, with dissatisfaction toward British rule already growing among the colonies following the Stamp Act, this incident threw fuel on the fire. Captain Thomas Preston and seven other soldiers were imprisoned and awaited trial with the anticipated outcome being the death penalty.

The question then became: who would legally defend the soldiers in court? In a time of such division between Bostonians and the British, who would want to? Adams was no advocate for British rule, but he was a strong proponent for justice. He believed in the right for each individual to receive a fair trial. Using his training as an attorney, Adams followed his conscience and offered himself to serve as the defendant lawyer. He diligently and compellingly made the case for the innocence of the soldiers, or at least, the lack of clear evidence for the contrary. The outcome: six of the soldiers were acquitted and the remaining two received punishments other than the death penalty.

This anecdote highlights the character of John Adams. His decision to defend the British soldiers was not a popular one among his fellow Bostonians. If he had any future plans for political office at the time, it is not evident based on this sort of action. And yet, through this instance we can see the moral fiber of Adams. His backbone. His convictions. Here Adams reflects on this memory:

“If, by supporting the rights of mankind, and of invincible truth, I shall contribute to save from the agonies of death one unfortunate victim of tyranny, or of ignorance, equally fatal, his blessings and years of transport will be sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of all mankind.” (67).

Adams valued what is true and just over popular opinion, and yet his stellar performance and resolute character would eventually earn him a reputation as a strong and capable leader.

Abigail Adams and the Classics

There is one final element I would like to share about John Adams and the role learning played in his early life. When the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to debate possible responses to British tyranny, Adams was a prominent figure in the cause for independence. More and more, Adams championed the cause for liberty and his arousing speeches influenced many colonial delegates to join his side. In February 1776, it became clear to Adams that independence was the only guarantee for American liberty. And yet, while colonists had discussed this option privately, no public discussion had occurred up to this point. Adams began to wrestle about when and how to make the radical motion for a colonial revolution.

During this time of wrestling, Adams’ wife Abigail offered him encouragement from a renowned Shakespearean passage:

There is a tide in the affairs of men, 

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in the shallows and in miseries…

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene III

Abigail’s encouragement to her husband is clear: the time is now to declare independence from Britain. As Brutus and Cassius deliberated their own path in the drama of Julius Caesar, so Adams must now take a step forward into his eventual fate. Abigail drew on her own reading of the classics to support her husband in this courageous move.

Conclusion

As I have sought to demonstrate in this article, there is much educators can gain by picking up and reading biographies. Not only do biographies expand our grasp of history. They contain keen insights into historical practices of education and offer glimpses of wisdom for how great men and women lived in previous times. In the early life of John Adams, one can see how crucial of a role education and learning played in his life. If it were not for his supportive father, inspiring teacher, and reading diet of the classics, it is not obvious that the Founding Father we know today would have founded more than a quaint legal practice in Braintree, Massachusetts.

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“Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important place of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give it.”

Welcome back to my series on Plato’s Republic! As I shared in my first article, I’m producing this series for two reasons. First, I want to make Plato more accessible to everyone. Part of preserving the western intellectual tradition, or at least, not losing it, entails cracking open the books of old to rediscover what ideas they contain. Second, and most relevant for educators, Plato’s Republic contains ideas that have immense implications for education today. By going back in time to consider these ideas, educators can gain fresh insight into the nature and purpose of education, paving the way for an educational renaissance that fuses together the best of ancient wisdom and modern research. 

In Book I of the Republic, Socrates and his friends are left at a stalemate. They have attempted to defend the value of justice only to encounter a state of aporia, that is, uncertainty or doubt, instead. This conclusion to Book I is intentional on Plato’s part. He wants his readers to actively engage with his writings, thereby experiencing the joys and frustrations of intellectual inquiry for themselves. For Plato, encountering aporia is a crucial step in the learning process. Only by truly realizing one’s lack of understanding will one truly desire to grow in knowledge of the matter.

In today’s blog, I will take a closer look at Book II of the Republic. In this section, Socrates and his friends make progress in their inquiry regarding the nature of justice. First, they revisit whether justice is more desirable than injustice in the first place. Then Socrates puts forward his account of a just city to illustrate at a macro-level the origins of justice. Finally, Socrates and his friends discuss how the guardians, the warrior-leaders of the city, ought to be educated. Let’s take each of these in stride.

To be Just, or Unjust, That is the Question

In Book I, Socrates and Thrasymachus, the infamous Sophist, engaged in a heated debate over the definition of justice, specifically whether the just life is worth pursuing after all. Thrasymachus made a compelling case that life is merely a struggle for power and that it is clear to any rational person that injustice leads to greater success in the long run. Socrates refused to accept this position, insisting that justice cannot be reduced to power. He defined justice as the virtue of the soul and argued that without justice, the soul is left miserable, purposeless, and without direction.

As we turn to Book II, we see that Glaucon and Adeimantus find Socrates’ viewpoint attractive, but would like him to elaborate. After all, Thrasymachus has a point that injustice appears to triumph over justice more often than not. If Socrates is going to convince them, much less anyone else, he will need to go into further detail on what precisely is so desirable about justice.

To get the conversation going, Glaucon suggests that all human goods can be classified into three general categories of desire (357c). The question becomes: Where does justice belong?

The three categories are as follows:

1. Things that are desirable in and of themselves, things like enjoyment
2. Things that are desirable intrinsically and extrinsically, that is, they are desirable in and of themselves, but also bring beneficial consequences. Things like: knowledge, health, sight
3. Things that are only desirable for their consequences, such as physical exercise, medical treatment, and financially profitable activities

Socrates’ inclination is to place justice in the second category, the one reserved for things that are desirable in themselves as well as the consequences they bring (358a). Glaucon responds that this may be correct, but it is not the opinion of the majority. Most people tend to view justice in the third category, as a form of drudgery that nonetheless leads to fortuitous results.

To illustrate this point, let us say that I aspire to be a world-class table tennis player. I may be tempted at times to find ways to compete unjustly in order to expedite my international advancement. After all, if I lose an important match, say an important qualifying round, it could set back my career goal for decades. On the other hand, if it is publicly revealed that I have used an illegal paddle or weighted the ball illicitly, then my career may be permanently over. The upshot is that behaving justly in this situation is a form of drudgery (it may take years for me to receive international recognition for my skill), but it will likely serve me better in the long-run (no skeletons in the closet).

Notice that my chief motivation for behaving justly in the example above is not justice in and of itself. It is what justice brings me. This is a problem, thinks Glaucon, and he tells his own story to demonstrate why (359d).

The Myth of the Ring of Gyges

There once was a shepherd named Gyges, narrates Glaucon, tending his flock in a nearby field. Suddenly an earthquake strikes, causing Gyges to fall into a recess in the earth. Down in the recess, he chances upon a magic ring that allows him to turn invisible. As the story goes, it doesn’t take long for Gyges to realize the fresh opportunities that now await him. He uses the power of the ring for personal advancement. He seduces the queen, conquers the king, and declares himself the new ruler of the kingdom.

Now, to be clear, Gyges’ behavior here is horrid. We would like to think that the just person would act differently. Not so fast, says Glaucon. Suppose there are two rings of the type discovered by Gyges, one worn by a just man and the other by the unjust man. Glaucon argues that both men would behave exactly the same way. Why? If justice is only valuable for the benefits it offers, then it makes no difference whether one is just or unjust so long as one is not found out.

Glaucon uses this story to illustrate the problem associated with placing justice in the third category or even the second category for that matter. The appearance of being just is often more desirable than actually being just. As long as justice is desired for its benefits, one is inclined to put on the façade of behaving justly while secretly behaving otherwise.

Justice as Intrinsically Desirable

Adeimantus, the brother of Glaucon, underscores this point, demonstrating how justice is deployed for expedient ends in both Greek literature and everyday life (362e). He references the likes of Hesiod and Homer to demonstrate that Greek myths teach that justice ought to be pursued for the rich well of blessings it brings. Additionally, he acknowledges, 

“No doubt, fathers say to their sons and exhort them, as do all those who have care of anyone, that one must be just. However, they don’t praise justice by itself but the good reputations that come from it; they exhort their charges to be just so that, as a result of the opinion, ruling offices and marriages will come to the one who seems to be just…” (363a)

If Glaucon and Adeimantus’ concerns are accurate, then people are often just merely out of coercion. That is, they fear the social consequences of acting otherwise. This is a problem. As long as justice is desired for its benefits, the temptation to put on the facade of justice without actually being just will be a temptation. Thus, in order to give a rigorous defense for the value of justice, Socrates and his friends concur that justice must be defended as a good that is desirable in and of itself.

Otherwise, as Plato scholar Julia Annas puts it,

“Why be just, if you can get away with merely seeming to be just while in fact reaping the rewards of injustice?” (68). 

An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, Oxford University Press, 1981

As you can see, a difficult task has been set for Socrates. In his account of justice, he must demonstrate that it is desirable to be just even if one has the absolute guarantee that one’s injustice will not be found out. In other words, he must show that it is desirable to be just even if one suffers for it (69). Additionally, he must prove that “…it is undesirable to be unjust even with all the rewards that conventionally attach to the appearance of justice” (69). It is not worth being unjust even if one chances upon Gyges’ ring.

Building the Just City

Now that the group has agreed upon its terms for determining justice’s worth, Socrates prepares to offer his account of justice, beginning with its origins. To do so, he leads his friends to engage in a thought experiment regarding the origins of justice, not in an individual, but in a city (368e). If they can discover the origins of justice in a city, thinks Socrates, they will be able to apply this understanding to the origins of justice in the soul.

Socrates begins with the premise that cities are founded based on the realization that humans are not self-sufficient. They need the help of one another for the provision of basic necessities: food, shelter, clothing, etc. Socrates suggests that in order for a city to be self-sufficient, a minimum of four individuals is needed to take up the following productive roles: farming, housebuilding, weaving, and shoemaking (369d). er

In order to be most efficient, the principle of specialization is employed. Each individual will specialize in her own craft, rather than seeking to master all of them. This will lead to greater production in both quantity and quality over time. Soon enough, however, it becomes clear that in order for these four individuals to truly do their jobs well, they will need additional supplies, the goods produced by carpenters, smiths, craftsmen, shepherds, and even merchants (371a). Thus, the city slowly expands.

So far, no reference to justice has been made. Socrates is still establishing his framework for the city. Due to its meager provisions, Glaucon critiques it as “a city for pigs,” and Socrates concedes the point that as currently described, the city is unrealistic. So they begin to introduce certain luxurious elements into the healthy city, making it a feverish, or unhealthy, one (372e).

The problem is that with luxury comes excess of desire. Socrates describes it well:

“Then the city must be made bigger again. This healthy one isn’t adequate any more, but must already be gorged with a bulky mass of things, which are not in cities because of necessity–all the hunters and imitators, many concerned with figures and colors, many with music; and poets and their helpers, rhapsodes, actors, choral dancers, contractors, and craftsmen of all sorts of equipment, for feminine adornment as well as other things…” (373b). 

To Conquer and Defend

Up until this point, the simplicity and idyllic nature of the city is largely attractive. Wouldn’t it be lovely if such a city existed? If only! While Socrates isn’t a Christian, he has keen insight into the nature of human beings. He understands how luxury invites desire and that desire has no limits.

The result is that our beloved city, now injected with the thrills of luxury, must conquer neighboring lands in order to maintain its lifestyle. This ability to conquer, and defend, requires a standing army of specially trained warriors, following the principle of specialization, in the art of warfare (375b). 

These warriors, whom Socrates calls guardians, will not only need specialized training in how to use their weapons masterfully. Given their crucial role as defenders of the city, the guardians will need extended leisure time to remain dedicated to their civic duty. Moreover, they will need to be trained to be both gentle and great-spirited in order to be kind to their own and vigilant in warfare with their enemies.

A Guardian Education

Just as a guard dog is trained to differentiate between friend and foe, so the guardians will need to be educated if they are to protect the city from invaders. This education will consist of training both the body (gymnastic) and soul (music and poetry). The knowledge they gain will equip them to not only physically defend the city, but discern what is good for it. Therefore, thinks Socrates, it is crucial for the guardians to be trained as philosophers, that is, lovers of wisdom. Socrates summarizes,

“Then the man who’s going to be a fine and good guardian of the city for us will be in his nature be philosophic, spirited, swift, and strong” (376c). 

Additionally, the musical, or soul-craft, education of the guardians must begin from a young age. Socrates puts the point firmly:

“Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important place of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give it.” 377b

Tuning the Soul

Given the high stakes of the musical, or soul-craft, education of the guardians, Socrates insists that the stories and poetry presented to the student guardians must be scrutinized. This instruction, after all, is shaping their souls to know and love what is good. Only the most fine and beautiful stories will be permitted (377b). 

Major works like Homer and Hesiod must be censured heavily. Stories that give false images or representations of what gods and heroes are like will be thrown out. These stories endorse terrible behavior, such as irreverent actions toward parents or being easily provoked to anger. (378b). They include episodes in which children rebel against their parents and parents abuse their children. Given that the young cannot distinguish between what is commendable and what is not, these stories must not be told.

Instead, all literature–epics, lyrics, tragedies, stories–must represent the gods as good. Bad things don’t come from good gods, Socrates insists. Only good comes from the gods. He concludes, “These stories are not pious, not advantageous to us, and not consistent with one another” (380c).

Moreover, stories in which the gods change forms must be censured. Change implies imperfection at best and corruptibility at worst. Student guardians must be taught that the gods are good, immutable, and truthful. But this is exactly the opposite depiction of the gods in the major legends. 

“A god, then, is simple and true in word and deed. He doesn’t change himself or deceive others by images, words, or signs, whether in visions or in dreams” (382e). 

The goal for the musical education of the guardians is to be as god-like and god-fearing as possible (383c). They are, after all, the defenders of the city. They are civic trustees, tasked with the responsibility to perpetuated the city’s flourishing and vitality. in this way, the future of the city is bound up in the education of the guardian class.

Application for Educators

Thus concludes Book II of Plato’s Republic. Justice has been categorized as a good that must be proven to be desirable in and of itself. Socrates has begun constructing his hypothetical city to identify the origins of justice and injustice. And a description of the education of the guardian class, the city’s noble defenders, is underway.

While this article must come to a close, let me leave educators with two practical takeaways.

First, I encourage readers who are interested in learning more about Plato’s idea of musical (soul-craft) education to check out Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition. In this book, they provide a helpful summary on how teachers can engage in the important work of shaping the moral and religious imaginations of their students through the power of story. You can read a great review of the book written by Jason Barney here.

Second, as I was reading Plato’s section on what stories and poetry to put before students, I could not help but think of Charlotte Mason. In her writings, she is clear that children are to read and narrate only the best books, books that contain living ideas. I look forward to writing more about this in the future.

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