One of my favorite podcasters, Brian Johnson who put out a great series of YouTube videos called Philosophers Notes, had this tagline on his podcasts: “Isn’t it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live?” This idea always resonated with me, not because we need an extra class on living, but because the idea of how to live should be resonating throughout all of our classes. Educators have often missed the fact that math, science and history are to be learned in order to know how to live. If math, science and history don’t seem like subjects where you would learn how to live, then you’re probably like me, having been raised in a system of education more focused on functional outcomes (getting into the best colleges or getting into the best careers) than on living meaningful and purposeful lives. 

You might be skeptical, and rightfully so. The dominant mode of education, the one we see in mass media, is all about the systematic approach — a conveyor belt of educational product. But consider my geometry class. The major goal of the class is to see our world differently, especially those parts of our world that appear most obvious. Why ought we to do proofs? Why transform polygons? Why inscribe triangles within circles? To help us to grapple with the world around us in fascinating new ways. We live in a three-dimensional world that is often depicted in two dimensions. Let’s get to the bottom of that. And in so doing gain insight into what it means to live in this space. Now you kinda want to take geometry again, don’t you?

In this article I want to go beyond just academic subjects and consider the entire enterprise of education as it pertains to life. There are many dimensions to this, so I don’t expect I will fully extract every morsel in this essay, but hopefully it will provide you with some suggestive avenues to stimulate your own thinking about life. Additionally, I would like to relate these thoughts to our current response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

(One more thing, before diving in. A justification of a seemingly inadequate title. You might think that I’m missing an indefinite article, since you know my heartfelt devotion to Charlotte Mason. Yes, she states, “Education is a life,” and by that she means that the child’s mind is fed on living ideas. I’m extrapolating that idea to demonstrate that there is another level of understanding Mason’s claim. Furthermore, you will notice the preposition “on” instead of “of.” Many teachers are asked to express their philosophy of education, in which they will describe their teaching techniques and practices, sometimes elaborating on their view of the child as a whole person. What I am doing here is not really a philosophy of education in that sense. I am instead thinking about education as a whole and its place in life. Maybe the preposition “on” will rattle a few feathers. Thus ends the deconstruction of an inadequate title.)

Two Forces: Achievement or Inspiration

To begin with, I think it is important to make a distinction between two competing forces in education. These aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do exist in tension with one another. The first force is what we might call achievement. Students, parents and teachers want what’s best for their child, and this often gets translated into measurable categories. The grade in a class is a measure of the student’s achievement. The class rank, SAT score, National Merit selection index number and a plethora of other measurements let everyone know how this particular student stacks up against all others. It’s actually really valuable to incorporate measurement in education, but it’s really difficult to measure what really matters.

I’ve written elsewhere that most of our educational measurements select only a few areas of learning and growth, solely because they are easy to measure. Unfortunately, much of what we measure has little value in predicting future success. Our tools simply cannot measure determination, the ability to hold pleasant conversation, kindness toward others, piety, resilience, or delayed gratification. So we need this first force — achievement — but it is a force fraught with fallacies.

The second force I will call inspiration. My hunch is that most teachers go into education because they want to inspire students to love subjects they themselves love. Most teachers look back at their own education and can point to a few teachers that inspired them. They want to make a difference in the lives of their own students. Unfortunately, there are far too few teachers who retain this high level of inspiration for the entirety of their career. Teaching is a demanding job, calling for long hours preparing lessons, learning technology, sitting in staff meetings, and grading homework. Teachers who truly want to inspire students find the nature of their work rather intense, because it means you need to bring massive energy to every lesson, you have to work with struggling students, you need to motivate fringe students, you need to coach and counsel both students and parents, and sometimes you need to flex your schedule to reach those students who need extra help. The first force – achievement – can also steal from the second force. The most inspirational teacher can get caught up in tracking the measurements, not only as a way of looking at her students’ success but also to measure her own success. Don’t get me wrong, we shouldn’t be graduating a group of fantastically inspired students who are complete and utter failures. We need achievement. But we also need inspiration. Both forces are necessary. If I’m honest with myself, though, I greatly lean toward the force of inspiration, sometimes wishing the other force could go away. 

These thoughts on two forces have lived with me for quite some time. So when I came across this quote by Charlotte Mason, I felt it was time to really wrestle with it philosophically for a while.

“It seems to me that education, which appeals to the desire for wealth (marks, prizes, scholarships, or the like), or to the desire of excelling (as in the taking of places, etc.), or to any other of the natural desires, except that for knowledge, destroys the balance of character; and, what is even more fatal, destroys by inanition that desire for and delight in knowledge which is meant for our joy and enrichment through the whole of life.”

Charlotte Mason, School Education, pg. 226

The strength of Mason’s feelings is matched by the power of her vocabulary. The character of learners is “destroyed” when education becomes focused on the desire for wealth or success. The only sure educational desire is for knowledge. She calls it fatal to base education on anything else. The word “inanition” means that a thing is emptied of all of its nourishing content. Take your bleached grains, your generic white bread, with its crusts cut off, and try living off just that. That’s the picture Mason paints for education when the focus is shifted away from the life-giving enrichment of knowledge. I would guess that Mason sides more with the force of inspiration than the force of achievement, too.

Mason, however, was very much aware of the force of achievement, and most definitely saw that a good education entailed success at such things as examinations (Vol. 3, pg. 301). So we can’t minimize the role achievement plays in education. There remain standards that must be met in order to be considered a well-educated person. But Mason also recognizes that our standards ought to be measured against what truly matters in life.

“But the one achievement possible and necessary for every man is character; and character is as finely wrought metal beaten into shape and beauty by the repeated and accustomed action of will. We who teach should make it clear to ourselves that our aim in education is less conduct than character; conduct may be arrived at, as we have seen, by indirect routes, but it is of value to the world only as it has its source in character.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 129

Achievement, then, is not only necessary, it is of fundamental importance. It is actually the goal toward which inspiration aims. The two forces that tug at each other actually cohere elegantly when put together properly. If our aim is on top marks, a 4.0 GPA, college entrance, merit-based scholarships, and the like, our aim isn’t truly aligned. What Mason is articulating is that true achievement is a life so well lived that the world is made a better place. This life of great value is achieved through character. Here is achievement that is truly inspirational.

The Classroom is a Microcosm of Life 

The vision of a life well lived is our ultimate goal of achievement. But that vision seems so far off that it feels impractical on a daily basis. Time presses upon us each day holding in our faces the immediacy of the lesson at hand, the upcoming assessment, or the report card soon to be released. Achievement snaps into focus, pushing inspiration out of the picture.

We need to start viewing the classroom differently. The classroom is the place where life occurs. The temptation is to think about life as truly occurring outside the classroom. Students feel this way, since home is where they most often eat, rest and play. Their youth group, sports team or the Starbucks where they hang out with their friends feels more like the locus where life occurs than the classroom does. School is where they have to go to do the work that’s required of them. How often do we get sucked into that way of thinking as well? But life occurs in the classroom all the same, even if students don’t place the greatest importance on that aspect of their life. To be clear, I don’t think one can say one sphere of life is more or less important than others. Our existence as living beings transcends time and space, and we are unified beings no matter what space we inhabit. To view ourselves as more alive in one place than in others begins to disintegrate the coherence of our being. In light of this, we must strive to breathe genuine life into the atmosphere of our classrooms, lest we cause real harm to ourselves and others.

So what does it mean when I say life occurs in our classrooms? For one, it means that our students are whole persons. We are not just interacting with our students’ minds. Students are also emotional, social and spiritual creatures, just like we are. All dimensions of their personhood come into the classroom. All dimensions of their personhood are being trained and cultivated. This means that teaching that doesn’t connect to their multi-dimensionality will actually not get assimilated because it isn’t fundamentally important to their existence as living beings.

But wait, you might say, aren’t there things you just have to learn, even if there isn’t an emotional, social or spiritual connection? Let’s consider a recent geometry lesson. We are just starting to learn trigonometric functions. This is hard stuff when it’s brand new. I could see the look of frustration on their faces. Lurking in the background is a feeling that if this doesn’t relate to real life in some way, what’s the use of putting in the effort to figure out when, how and why to use inverse sine? In this very moment, though, real life is happening before our very eyes.

What I did was take a step back from the lesson about the law of sines, to help them grapple with their encounter with things that are difficult to learn. “You are feeling the fog right now, aren’t you?” I helped them to see that some things we learn aren’t fully clear at the outset. This might have been true when they first learned long division in early grammar school. This might have been true when they learned factoring in algebra 1. I was connecting them to their emotional state. “Hey, we’re all experiencing this together.” It is very common for us to feel that we are the only one who doesn’t get it. But when there’s a recognition that we are doing something together, a deep bond is formed. The “ah-ha” moments become a group celebration. Learning is a social and relational thing. I was connecting them to their social state. “This seems pretty out there, doesn’t it?” The deeper you go in mathematics, the more abstract and esoteric things become. In this moment, I was showing them that they were exploring something almost mystical. I could relate this to something as practical as navigating an airplane. But the practical application will actually compound their frustration in the moment. Instead, I helped them to see how their imaginations were gaining new tools. I was connecting them to their spiritual state. Real life was occurring in a specific learning environment. The temptation was to think in terms of achievement. “We’re not getting it. Our grades will suffer. I won’t go to the best school. I won’t get a good job. I’ll likely be homeless for the rest of my life!” Instead, we thought in terms of life and saw geometry as a field of endeavor in which we can gain an understanding of meaning and purpose. (I might add that these students have done well using trigonometric functions. As an experienced teacher I knew the fog would dissipate through more practice.)

What does this mean for you as a teacher? We must become observers of life. We only get a relatively small amount of time with the students God gives into our care. By being watchful for real life occurring in our midst, we position ourselves to seize every moment we can. The little arguments that erupt between students, the games that are played on the blacktop, the struggles to learn new concepts, the disorganized backpack. All things are avenues into genuine life connections.

Application of Education is Life to COVID-19

If we agree that education is about life, then this COVID-19 epidemic presents a huge teaching and learning opportunity. We are confronted with the frailty of our humanity. A few weeks ago I compared our present epidemic with the black plague in the mid-1300s. A confrontation with death and our own mortality is not a topic we should shy away from. We ourselves as teachers might be wrestling with new emotions and concerns about safety. We must also assume our students are wrestling with the reality and implications of COVID-19. Their world just got turned upside down.

Because one of the forces of education is inspiration, I think now is the time to inspire our students with a deep and profound vision of what life really means. There are some students who miss their interactions with friends through daily contact. Students presently feel a deep sense of loneliness and isolation. Many students miss the life-structuring order of our daily schedules. We can share with them how all of these feelings point to their yearning for meaning and purpose in their lives. Our texts and discussions can take on new importance if we are forthright in our response to the impact of COVID-19 on them and us right now. You may have a chance to model for them how your faith is upholding you in this moment, or what practices you’ve incorporated during this time of social distancing.

As an example, I teach a health class for sophomores and juniors. We spent time this week talking about meditation and mindfulness as a Christian practice. When I planned this unit, coronavirus was not in my thinking. Now that we’ve gotten to this unit, I opened up about how just a few minutes of quiet meditation in the morning helps me to calmly approach my day. I contrasted this to mornings when I opened up a news feed and saw how many new cases and deaths there were. They were able to see how I was responding to COVID-19, and then I asked them to share their own responses to the epidemic. We explored how stress can impact our health and well-being.

Clearly there are boundaries that we need. I am always careful not to make a class about me, my feelings or my viewpoint on current matters. I am also careful not to traumatize my students by forcing them to talk about raw feelings or controversial matters. Yet we should be open to teachable moments when we can provide insight through our transparency. We should equally be open to discussing matters that are hyper-present in their minds. How odd it would be for a teacher not to mention COVID-19 or social distancing.

Application of Education is Life to Online Learning

Speaking of social distancing, online learning has meant that we are all accumulating new technological skills. You are using student management software in new ways, or you are becoming masters of Zoom or Skype, or you are learning how to use Google Classrooms or MS Teams. Your students are also accumulating new technological skills. If you’re like me, they are learning these skills quicker than you. You might be asking them questions about how to upload assignments or share your screen. With this in mind, don’t be afraid of being a learner. Show them that you are learning how to do some new things. Ask them questions. There’s something empowering when a student is able to teach a teacher. If we are promoting life-long learning, then there are moments when we need to let our guard down so that our students can see that we ourselves are life-long learners.

My other piece of advice as we dive deeply into technological solutions to educating amidst social distancing is to make sure the techniques and technology of education don’t drown out our experience of life. I have told my students how much I miss them at the end of our Zoom sessions. There’s something about being able to see them eye-to-eye in the hallways. I can casually ask them how they’re doing, and they can see the care in my eyes. The technology enables us to connect, but our pixelated, two-dimensional connection is no replacement for embodied presence with one another.

Teach Like Life Depends on It

Someday — hopefully sooner rather than later — we will return to classrooms. We will return having learned some lessons about the nature of education. My hope is that one of the enduring lessons is that education is about life. My hunch is that the reason you come to our humble website is that you get this concept, and that you are striving to provide an education that nourishes the lives of your students. Let me encourage you that I think it will be teachers and schools that feed their students’ souls who have the best hope of surviving this epidemic and even thriving during and after this epidemic. Why do I think this? It is because when people confront forces like our frailty and mortality, we begin to ask questions of meaning and purpose. Parents and students will be looking for this kind of education, one that engages the mind and the soul. Now more than ever is the time to teach like our lives depend on it.

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All classrooms and every subject should be a breeding ground for deliberate practice. Hear me correctly, though. Not all students (and maybe none of our students) in a given subject will go on to become experts in the field. However, they can acquire the core skills of deliberate practice in every subject, so that whatever path they choose, they can apply these skills in the pursuit of excellence. By incorporating these skills in my history class, for instance, I may expect to see my students apply deliberate practice as musicians, journalists, or mathematicians.

There are four essential components to deliberate practice. All of them are necessary if one is to see gains in a discipline.

#1: Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

The first component of deliberate practice is repeated rehearsal of a skill. Finding the right frequency is key here. Too much practice on a given skill can be just as detrimental as not practicing enough. It would be counterproductive to spend hours a day practicing scales on the piano, perhaps causing injury to the hands and wrists. How many scales ought to be done? Just enough to see improvement in a focused area, like the fluidity of finger movement.

The best way to get the frequency right is to set up a regular appointment to work on a given skill. Our class schedules often provide daily or weekly opportunities to drill down into a set of skills. Helping our students manage their out-of-school course work, though, may help them find optimal results. Same place, same time, same subject.

We need to be careful with this first component. It is all too easy to set up high frequency and think we are accomplishing something, when in fact all we are doing is a long series of empty work. Thus, the second through fourth components must be present within the rehearsal times we set up.

#2: Break It Down

Any skill can be divided into many smaller skills. Even the simple act of running can be broken down into components such as foot strike, kick, forward lean, hip rotation, head position, and arm swing to name a few. In my hermeneutics class, I break down for my students various constituent parts of the act of reading.

The second component of deliberate practice is breaking down concepts and skills into smaller pieces. Those smaller pieces can then be isolated and practiced with focused attention, energy and motivation.

Imagine being told to improve your writing. One could write more, lots more. But without first breaking down the task of writing into smaller parts, writing will be a frustrating endeavor with little improvement occurring. Instead, bad habits are likely to be reinforced. Being guided, however, toward making more concrete choices for your nouns, or using stronger active verbs, or expanding your vocabulary, or varying your sentence length gives the author specific, actionable items to work on each time writing is practiced. More can be accomplished through focused attention on a small part of the whole, than by trying to lift the whole by brute force.

Practically speaking, this means that in our regularly scheduled practice session, a choice needs to be made as to what specific sub-skill will be practiced. As teachers, we can provide for our students a specific area to work on for a given problem set or reading exercise. There are some master skills specific to each subject that have outsized impact on that area of knowledge. For instance, all of us have heard the math teacher encourage her students to show their steps for each problem. That’s because this is a master skill. Finding the few skills that enable a student to see massive improvement in a subject is a sure way to cultivate interest and participation within a class.

#3: Best Effort

In order to get the most out of practice, one must actively engage the will. When you picture an elite athlete working on drills, their level of intensity is what sets them apart from the weekend warrior joining a pickup game of soccer or basketball. Arnold Schwartzenegger once described his process for building muscle. He would intensely focus on a specific muscle before and during a lift. There was a mind-body connection made that enabled him to see significant gains as a bodybuilder. To see gains as a scholar, musician or athlete, this kind of intense connection needs to be cultivated.

This is the hardest, but most necessary component of deliberate practice. Will power, or motivation, can be weak in our students. Many authors have made the analogy between will power and muscle. Our wills can be trained, so that we develop stronger motivation. But we can also use up our strength as the day goes on. We can help our students to increase their will power, but we also need to be realistic about how long we can expect them to apply themselves with intensity. My suggestion is that episodes of deliberate practice occur in the classroom. As the adult in the room, we teachers (hopefully) have greater will power and can set the tone for the level of intensity we expect from our students. We become the coach motivating them through their mathematics drills, their writing exercises, their scales and arpeggios. The goal is for them to acquire the ability to reach this level of intensity on their own, but that might take time to internalize. But if they see results in the application of will power leading to gains in the subject area, the intrinsic reward will start to drive them.

#4: Aim High

The fourth component of deliberate practice is about setting our aim at improvement. The goal is not about completing assignments or covering all the material in a class, although completion and knowledge are important in their own right. The goal really boils down to human growth. Are we improving ourselves in some area? And even more importantly, are we identifying areas where improvement can occur?

Cultivating a growth mindset in the classroom can be difficult, especially where there is undue focus on grades, or where the class is perceived as a hoop to jump through prerequisite to some other course, job or qualification. The biggest hurdle that stands in the way of a growth mindset is fear of failure. The discomfort students feel when they fail could derive from a sense of shame, pressure they’ve put on themselves or others, or an overly competitive group dynamic. However, failure is necessary in order for growth to occur. Put another way, if our students are constantly succeeding, they are probably not encountering sufficient challenge to enact growth. Returning briefly to our example of bodybuilding, the bodybuilder will repeat a lift to the point of failure — meaning they can’t make another lift — which stimulates muscle growth. We can approximate this failure-growth connection by using feedback loops in our classrooms.

A feedback loop is a means of verbalizing and demonstrating a concept or skills that is either incorrect, not fully formed or could be taken to the next level. For example, showing students capitalization errors in their writing and bringing their focused attention to improving this area is a feedback loop. We can now connect them to regular practice on a discrete skill that requires their best effort. Students can be coached to find their own failures. Errors can also be anticipated before they occur. “Now class, where are we likely to make mistakes in this problem?”

Setting measurable goals is part of aiming high. We may have a long view toward perfect execution, but there may need to be incremental growth along the way. Setting these as measurable increments helps students track their own growth as well as celebrate their victories along the way (increasing motivation). If we are to learn all 100 vocabulary words by the end of the semester, maybe we set an increment of 10 per week. Runners training for their first marathon set incremental goals for the weeks of training, five miles this weekend, eight miles next weekend, get into double digits, build up to 20 miles, until one is ready to go 26.2 miles.

Now, we need to keep in mind that expert performance in the field of our subject area may not be possible for all of our students, let alone any of our students. So calibrating what it means for our students to aim high takes a deep understanding of the students in our classes. Helping them set goals is part of them internalizing how to enact deliberate practice. Remember, we are helping them acquire a transferable skill set. Our subject area is not really about our subject at all. It’s really an opportunity to practice deliberate practice. Of course, I’m overstating the case. Obviously there are standards related to history, mathematics, science, languages that need to be met. But we don’t want to be so short sighted as to think that growth in our area of knowledge is the only goal we’re aiming for.

Putting It All Together

I remember learning how to do effective practice when I was a music major. It began with committing myself to daily practice (repeat, repeat, repeat). Whenever I would mess up a measure, I would stop, and spend several moments just working the fingering of the sequence of notes (break it down). This passage was circled and repeated at intervals over the coming days. I would make sure I stopped the automatic mode of just making it through a piece, so that I would put my whole mind and effort into these challenging passages (best effort). Each time I improved a measure, my overall performance increased. I saw results in moving up in the section (aim high). My ambitions never really took me beyond college orchestra as a performer. But I learned a transferable skill that helped me excel in other areas, such a languages, biblical studies, history, and writing.

Learning to think well is just like learning music or basketball. Charlotte Mason writes about how deliberate practice enables children to develop habits of thinking:

How the children’s various lessons should be handled so as to induce habits of thinking, we shall consider later; but this for the present: thinking, like writing or skating, comes by practice. The child who has never thought, never does think, and probably never will think; for are there not people enough who go through the world without any deliberate exercise of their own wits? The child must think, get at the reason why of things for himself, every day of his life, and more each day than the day before.

Charlotte Mason, Home Education, pg. 153-154

Differentiation and Deliberate Practice

One of the challenges we face as educators is assisting students who lag behind the group or outpace the group. We usually place the laggers into extra tutoring and give the really smart kids extra work or try to accelerate their progress in that area. There’s good reason to consider these strategies. But one often unexplored strategy is to look at deliberate practice as a means to develop skills that will enable them to reflect on their own practice habits. Stragglers often lack the practice skills that will help them achieve forward movement in their studies. Instead of breaking down their workload, they become overwhelmed by the sense that they are behind their peers. Small victories can begin to build the momentum to see themselves catch up to the pack. The frontrunners can be tempted to skim the surface of their work, delighting in the thrill of gaining early access to new knowledge. Finding alternative goals to ripping through advanced levels of content, articulating goals such as perfect execution, or understanding concepts at a deeper level may help them to learn better practice habits. I’ve seen several intuitive learners come crashing down when they hit their first challenge, largely because they haven’t internalized the habits of deliberate practice.

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