At Clapham School, where I serve as an administrator, we were able to hold a small, in-person ceremony for our graduates. As I composed my commencement address, I was struck by parallels with the class of 1919, which had graduation ceremonies cancelled or postponed in various locations due to the Spanish Influenza pandemic. In this message, I try to bring perspective to graduates this summer, that the challenges we face due to Covid-19 may go a long way toward shaping the outlook of this next generation, if one embraces the opportunity a catastrophe provides. In many ways, this speech is a sequel to my article on the Black Death in the 14th century.

Here I’ve shared my commencement address in the hope that perhaps this message will be meaningful to you as a teacher and leader in your school.

Commencement Address – Class of 2020

Good evening, class of 2020. I am so grateful that we can meet this evening with a small gathering of parents, siblings, teachers, relatives and friends. Little about the past several months has gone according to plan, so it is that much more satisfying to have planned this event, bringing a little order in the midst of chaos.

The “Greatest Generation” is a term used to describe the Americans who experienced both the Great Depression and World War 2. What characterizes these Americans is that they lived through some of the greatest hardships of the depression and exhibited the will to win on the battlefields of Africa, Europe and Asia. Of the 16 million who served in WW2, only about half a million remain today.

When we look back on the Greatest Generation, we can observe that such a generation is forged by the harshest of trials. You can’t engineer such a generation. There’s no recipe or lab manual. There were attempts to create great generations. Warren G. Harding called for a return to normalcy in 1920, a phrase that anticipated “Make America Great Again.” What is normalcy? And can normalcy be created through public policy?

The post-war 1950s represented another attempt at social fabrication of a great generation. The idea was social conformity. The picture of suburban docility was promoted on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post with weekly prints of Norman Rockwell paintings. What, though, are we striving for when we call for conformity? Can social pressure create a great generation? This is a highly relevant consideration in light of the dominant position social media has taken since the early 2000s.

My thesis, and the point that I want to make for our graduating seniors, is that great generations are forged through unexpected hardship, and cannot be made by the will of cultural engineers. And what has 2020 been, but a year of hardship after hardship. This pandemic gives me pause to ask whether we are experiencing the kinds of conditions that will contribute to the making of a new great generation. To assess this hunch of mine, I want to take us back to 1918 and 1919.

The Great War, or WW1, was drawing to a close after years of stagnation. The US was ultimately drawn into the conflict as the decisive force, bringing victory to the allied forces against the central powers. One of the unexpected consequences of American soldiers serving overseas was that they brought back the Spanish Influenza, which hit pandemic levels in the fall of 1918. Schools closed in September and October of 1918. Homecoming events, a fairly new annual celebration in the early 1900s, were cancelled that fall. We can empathize with some of the experiences from that pandemic that swept the nation. For instance, students in Los Angeles remained at home and were sent assignments by teachers through mail-in correspondence.

There were subsequent spikes of the Spanish Influenza in January of 1919 and then again in the April-May timeframe later that year. This meant that graduations were cancelled or delayed in various hotspots throughout America. The class of 2020 seems to have similarities with the class of 1919. There were no vaccines or treatments available, so the only protocols to follow were isolation, quarantine, washing hands, disinfecting surfaces, and canceling or limiting public gatherings. If nothing else, it’s good to know we are not alone. Mark Twain is reputed to have said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Well, sometimes it sure seems like it does repeat itself.

For reasons we don’t particularly know, the Spanish Influenza just went away. It took researchers until 2008 to fully understand the genetic makeup of the H1N1 virus, colloquially termed the Spanish Flu. Side note: the Spanish Flu did not originate in Spain. Spain became associated with this virus simply because they remained neutral in WW1, and were therefore able to provide unbiased reporting about this new virus during the war, a service which ultimately associated their national identity with a virus. The Spanish, by the way, referred to the virus as the French Flu.

The parallels between the Spanish Flu and the Coronavirus interest me for this simple reason. The Spanish Flu is something we can regard as the first in a series of hardships that impacted the generation who would subsequently experience both the Great Depression and WW2. Yet, few ever associate that pandemic with the ensuing events. But could it be that the Influenza pandemic served as an initial crisis in a string of events creating the greatest generation?

And so I ask you now, our graduates, a compelling question. Will our pandemic serve as an initial crisis that will forge the next greatest generation? I don’t know what the future will hold. I can’t promise you that depressions and world wars will further galvanize your generation. But perhaps if the mantle is born with only this one catastrophic event, the work of making a next great generation is accomplished here and now.

The temptation will exist to dive deeply into social distractions. We could be on the verge of the next roaring 20s. But I trust that the books that you’ve read here at Clapham, the discussions about what it takes to live life with meaning and purpose, will have prepared you to fully embrace the opportunity now made available to you in our current traumatic experiences.

Let me be clear about my charge to you. I do not spell these things out to you to place a burden of expectations on you. It matters not whether you become labelled a great generation. Instead, what does matter is to notice that your class has had a bit of rubbish luck when it comes to your graduation. And I say, good for you! That’s now part of your story. That’s something that becomes part of your perspective on life. That’s something that marks your graduation as something unique and special. And if you can own that and truly embrace it, you will find joy and blessing.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plan for wholeness and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Jeremiah 29:11

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I have to say I hesitated before using such a cliché myself in the title of this closing post in the Flow of Thought series, because I know very well how meaningless clichés can become. If everyone says they support the “love of learning,” then what does it even mean if it doesn’t change how we do school or run our classes? Now I do want to pause to indicate that, as far as I can read the education landscape, there has been a growing recognition in several quarters about the importance of inspiring a love of learning in students. More educators now than fifty years ago fear the deadening effect that incompetent and uninspiring teaching can have on students.

Previous articles in this series, The Flow of Thought:

Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers.

At general education conferences I have attended educators are discussing more and more how grades and a focus on grades as a measure of achievement can suck the joy and life out of learning. It is not so bad outside the classical education and Charlotte Mason world, in this respect, as it once was, even if many teachers’ practices have not yet caught up with their values. Or perhaps we could say that, while many educators value the lifelong love of learning as a goal, they are currently trying to get their students there through entertainment, gimmicks and classroom management manipulations, rather than through the flow of thought. But we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that their efforts are sincerely meant, even if ultimately ineffective.  

And so, I would conclude that part at least of the reason for the cliched nature of the phrase the ‘love of learning’ is a real recognition of this noble goal on the part of educators. But the other reason I feel entitled to use this cliché in my title is the force of the argument we’ve made thus far in The Flow of Thought series. Our thesis has been, following the famed positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that learning can be enjoyable. If pursued in a way such that the challenges meet our current abilities, learning in any domain of the classical liberal arts and sciences can issue in the flow of thought.

Pleasure vs. Enjoyment

As you’ll remember, flow is that timeless state of focus and concentration that people around the world describe as exhilarating, meaningful and joyful. From rock climbers to scientists, mathematicians to novelists, whether as a hobby or one’s main work, getting into flow promotes something beyond mere pleasure that our psychologist terms “enjoyment”:

“Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before…. Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment. Playing a close game of tennis that stretches one’s ability is enjoyable, as is reading a book that reveals things in a new light, as is having a conversation that leads us to express ideas we didn’t know we had…. After an enjoyable event we know that we have changed, that our self has grown: in some respect, we have become more complex as a result of it.” (46)

It’s this sense of enjoyment that resonates with the love of learning, properly understood. It’s not the titillating pleasure of some entertaining tidbit that leaves you as ignorant as you were before. It’s the transformation of the self, the enlargement of the soul, through an encounter with reality, through a grappling with the forms of existence. Incidentally, this distinction mirrors Augustine’s distinction between to enjoy and to use (Latin fruor and utor), though Augustine reserves proper enjoyment for love of God alone. There is something about enjoyment, in this sense, that is transcendent.

One of the reasons I love Dr. Jordan Peterson’s lectures and his book Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is his ability to express the deep paradox of pain and meaningful transcendence one feels in this sort of grapping with reality. The love of learning is not watching some namby pamby cartoon with its prepackaged tasty morsels of information. It’s the exhilaration felt after facing your fears and wrestling that monster in the dark, or slaying the dragon of chaos just beyond the order of your understanding. It’s struggle and suffering in the pursuit of a meaningful goal. Learning, like life, is not all roses and cupcakes, even or especially when you love it. But in spite of the pain of progressing in the flow of thought, it’s still so enjoyable that we’re even willing to do it as a hobby.

Amateurs and Dilettantes

We’ve already discussed the idea of becoming an amateur scientist or historian. Our psychologist has suggested these avenues as methods to create order in consciousness in the average adult’s leisure time. Since TV correlates with mild depression (119), we need something more challenging to grapple with to experience enjoyment. Learning in any domain presents this optimal challenge for leisure, hence the lifelong love of learning.

Csikszentmihalyi closes out his chapter on the flow of thought with reflections on how the modern world has lost this notion of the amateur because of what Josef Pieper has called a culture of “total work” (Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 25). Our psychologist discusses the words ‘amateur’ and ‘dilettante” in detail:

“There are two words whose meanings reflect our somewhat warped attitudes toward levels of commitment to physical or mental activities. These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls sort of professional standards.” (140)

This was not always so. The first is derived from the Latin verb amare, meaning “to love,” and referred to a person who engaged in an activity for the love of it, rather than professionally, for mere profit or material advantage. The second comes from the Latin delectare, “to delight,” and referred to a person who could spend his time doing whatever delighted him the most.

We too often forget this, but the sneer used to go the other way around. The upper class nobles and later on in Britain, at least, the upper middle class, looked down upon the professions and the act of receiving payment as being beneath them. This resonates with the classical contrast between the artes liberals and the artes serviles, those arts which a free man could engage in, not for profit but because he had the leisure that afforded him the opportunity to engage in the higher pursuits that would produce enjoyment (ideally, though this often devolved in the mere pursuit of pleasure), as opposed to the need to work for a living.

The irony is that we live in an era in which the noble’s leisure time is accessible to more people than ever before in the history of the world. Yet “total work” has taken over too many people’s lives, at the same time as passive entertainment predominates. In a lecture I attended last year, Andy Crouch, the author of Culture Making, expressed this cultural development as a movement from a rhythm of work and rest, to toil and boredom. And the skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety bear witness to the disorder in consciousness that results.

We have become too accomplishment focused and lost sight of the joy of experiences, according to our psychologist. And this fact is on display in the negative slippage in these words:

“The earliest meanings of these words therefore drew attention to experiences rather than accomplishments; they described the subjective rewards individuals gained from doing things, instead of focusing on how well they were achieving. Nothing illustrates as clearly our changing attitudes toward the value of experience as the fate of these two words.” (140)

Of course, we should note that there are benefits to our focus on achievement and work. The Puritan work ethic is certainly to be preferred to the privileged ennui of a class of nobles. But in a way that is precisely part of the problem I am describing. Without the love of learning we moderns are all at the same time oppressed proletariats and bored, yet privileged nobles, decrying the 1% that we are ironically a part of, if we only took a global and historical perspective.

The solution seems to be recovering the flow of thought in our leisure time as a lifelong pursuit, with the intrinsic goals of enjoyment on the one hand and personal transformation on the other.

Aside: Download the Free eBook “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom”

Wondering how to practically apply the idea of flow in your classroom? These 5 actionable steps will help you keep the insights of flow from being a pie-in-the-sky idea. Embody flow in your classroom and witness the increased joy and skill development that result!

You can download “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom” on the flow page. Share the page with a friend or colleague, so they can benefit as well.

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation

Ultimately, this distinction between the amateur and the professional resolves itself into a spectrum of motivation. At one end of the spectrum is engaging in an activity entirely for some external reward, like money or a grade. On the other side is pursuing something merely for the experience itself, like popping a candy in one’s mouth because of the tasty pleasure one will experience.

For too many people learning and school have fallen too close to the first side of that spectrum. As our psychologist describes,

“Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories. Their attention has been manipulated long enough from the outside by textbooks and teachers, and they have counted graduation as the first day of freedom.” (141)

They have “learned” for the sake of the grade and because of the need to jump through hoops in order to get on with the real business of life, which often ends up being no less extrinsic and utilitarian, as they get through another day of work, to get the money to live during the few short moments of free time before sleep and starting the rigmarole over again. Instead our psychologist would hope that the school system could be seen as the beginning, rather than the end of education:

“Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically. At that point the goal of studying is no longer to make the grade, earn a diploma, and find a good job. Rather, it is to understand what is happening around one, to develop a personally meaningful sense of what one’s experience is all about.” (141-2)

But if learning is conducted in such a way as to encourage the extrinsic rather than the intrinsic, when will that motivation counter slide on over to the other end of the spectrum? This is why Charlotte Mason call grades or marks “our old enemy” and commented in the preface to her final volume Toward a Philosophy of Education, on how “both teachers and children find an immeasurable difference between the casual interest roused by marks, pleasing oral lessons and other school devices, and the sort of steady avidity for knowledge that comes with the awakened soul” (vol. 6, p. xxvi).

In this series too, we’ve seen how joy in learning is not some mysterious, unattainable holy grail of education. Instead, training the attention and the memory, the trivium arts of language and quadrivium arts of mathematics, history, science and philosophy—all the domains of knowledge and mental skill present games and puzzles for the mind fit to occupy one in delightful contemplation for centuries. And this amateurish love of learning is marvelously democratic in nature:

“We have seen that the mind offers at least as many and as intense opportunities for action as does the body. Just as the use of the limbs and of the senses is available to everyone without regard to sex, race, education, or social class, so too the uses of memory, of language, of logic, of the rules of causation are also accessible to anyone who desires to take control of the mind.” (Csikszentmihalyi 141)

And freedom is found in this free flow of thought afforded by the classical liberal arts and sciences. Even a secular psychologist can acknowledge that “a person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free” since their “thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of television” (141). Thus joy and freedom go hand in hand and issue from the use of leisure in meaningful pursuits.

Falling in Love with Learning

But this requires what Charlotte Mason called an “awakened soul.” We must fall in love with learning. This has analogies to the experience of the newly converted Christian who reads her Bible ecstatically and shares excitedly about the gospel with her friends and acquaintances. There is all the rush, obsession and passion of a lover in the pursuit. In the same way, our psychologist quotes a passage out of Plato’s Philebus to describe the disciples of Socrates:

“The young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as if he had found a treasure of wisdom; he is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all its ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull them to pieces. He will puzzle first himself, then also others, badger whoever comes near him, young and old, sparing not even his parents, nor anyone who is willing to list….” (as qtd in Csikzentmihalyi 142)

How can we bottle this true spirit of philosophy, this genuine love of wisdom, so that we can share it with our children and students, our friends and neighbors? Nay simply to drink a draught of it ourselves and restore again the fire that has burned low? What does it take to stoke up the joy of learning in our own lives?

Susan Schaeffer Macaulay talks about how this occurred for her children after attending a “small PNEU school [the organization Charlotte Mason founded], run in a classroom built onto the back of someone’s private home, looking into an English country garden” (38). Previously, one of her children at six years old was “happy enough,” what with the “hamsters, plants, paints, and lots of little booklets” or the “special TV programs, the cute sort that are intended to grab the child’s attention.” It wasn’t all bad. As Susan Schaeffer Macaulay says, “When she came home, she sometimes talked about something that had happened. But there wasn’t much to discuss.” The story was much worse for her older sister: “She was frustrated, had a low opinion of her own achievements, and had no interest in education” (38).

But attending a school inspired by the love of learning that took seriously the challenge of the liberal arts tradition caused a transformation:

“After the first day, Kirsteen came home glowing with life and interest. ‘We had the most exciting story today, but Mrs. Norton stopped at just the wrong place. I can’t wait to hear the next part of the story!’ And what was this exciting, vitalizing story? To my astonishment it was Pilgrim’s Progress, read to them in the original.

“The quite electrifying change in those two children is really indescribable. They had so much to talk about! A wealth of literature, history, art, which was so glorious to work through. Their eyes became brighter, their minds alert. We had grand discussions, again and again. Shakespeare had become a friend whose writing was much loved. The children would argue about the actual characters; for instance, whether Hermione was right or wrong, and what the old shepherd was actually up to (they were enjoying The Winter’s Tale).” (38-39)

The challenges inherent in cultivating this revolutionary experience of falling in love with learning are worth it. And they are worth it not only because of the enjoyment we experience. They are worth it because learning, knowledge, wisdom and skill are, in their very nature, both intrinsically and extrinsically valuable. The dichotomy between joy and usefulness ultimately resolves itself into a paradox.

Our chaotic world is so complex, so unique and so endlessly varied that true knowledge, deep understanding of reality is always useful. We may not know how some particular branch of learning will benefit us or the people around us, but it will. Our spectrum between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards is really a mountain peak, with the perfect blending of the two standing at the summit. Whether we approach the mountain of learning from the easy slopes of pleasure or the rocky crags of rewards, we must ascend the hill if we are to find the delights and benefits that knowledge afford the life well lived. The sights will be glorious, the exertion of the ascent will be exhilarating and view of the terrain will most certainly help us in getting where we want to go next.

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Along the way, I was impressed by the unity of thought among the Educational Renaissance writers, as well as the presence of quite a few memorable maxims in the midst of all that dense (or playful) educational theory and practice.

A maxim is usually defined as a short pithy statement that expresses a general truth or rule of conduct. Since many of you have joined the Educational Renaissance community in late 2019, I thought a review of some of the most memorable maxims of 2019 might inspire you to read through old articles to find something of value for your educational work as you enter 2020. Now admittedly, some of these “maxims” are pithier than others, and I had a lot of high quality contenders with 29 articles to date, so it was very hard to decide on the best ones. I’ve put them in order of the sequence in which they were published.

But before our list of maxims we have a few announcements to share with the community as we close out the year.

End of 2019 Announcements

As a team we reviewed our work since August in a meeting last week and one of the things we were most proud of was keeping our commitment to produce a quality new article every week. With the demands of teaching and administration and our standards for quality, this was no easy feat, even with the three of us now laboring away together. Our goal has been to publish every Saturday morning to give you a consistent source of inspiration every weekend to prepare you for the next week of educational work. If you aren’t receiving our weekly updates, be sure to sign up for that through our pop up form.

For 2020 we’ve got a lot of exciting plots and plans for promoting a rebirth of ancient wisdom about education in the modern era. For instance, Patrick is working on a new eBook on implementing habit training in the classroom. This will be a great pairing with Jason’s very successful eBook on implementing narration. Likewise, Jason plans on turning his Flow of Thought series into an eBook and continuing to write and share more on narration through other venues, and either through revising the narration eBook or turning it into a full length treatment of the practice. Kolby’s still thinking through options for a longer work and connecting with venues. Lastly, earlier this month we had our first podcast recording session and had a blast recording together a long discussion on the idea of an educational renaissance and a short discussion of Aristotle on excellence. We don’t plan to launch the podcast for some time, but stay tuned for more announcements about that in the coming months.

Please let us know of any exciting ideas or suggestions you have for Educational Renaissance as a community member. We’d love to work toward building more of a community around our unique message of ancient wisdom for the modern era. If you haven’t followed our page on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, take a moment to do that, and share articles and resources you really like through social media; it really helps us get the word out. And now without further ado…

20 Memorable Maxims from 2019

1. Like “the air we breathe” the culture and curriculum of a school can either endorse the beauty and dignity of self-mastery, or subtly undercut it through neglect and cynicism.

-From Educating for Self-Control, Part 1: A Lost Christian Virtue

2. The classical tradition made virtue the main goal of education and let the chips fall where they may on less important matters.

-From Educating for Self-Control, Part 2: The Link Between Attention and Willpower

3. We want a sense of satisfaction and great mastery to propel students to see that hard work can be meaningful and satisfying rather than an obstacle to a trivial reward.

-From Overcoming Procrastination

4. Freedom and obedience are not dichotomous, but flow from each other.

-From Authority and Obedience in the Classroom: Reading Charlotte Mason’s Philosophy of Education

5. The customs and culture of a school or home are not a neutral factor in a child’s education, if moral excellence is our goal.

-From Excellence Comes by Habit: Aristotle on Moral Virtue

6. Knowledge of God is not just first in sequence, but first in rank of importance.

-From Easier Than You Think, Yet Harder Than You Think: Teaching the Bible to Children

7. The training of the mind through the classical liberal arts and sciences is thus the antidote to the natural disorder of the mind.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake

8. Starting a new chapter is an excellent time to take stock of your core principles.

-From New to School: 5 Principles for Starting the Year Well

9. Only after developing due reverence for a child’s existence-as-person, can we then properly ascertain methods for her education.

-From Educating Future Culture Makers

10. A strong pedagogy trains students to become independent learners as they engage in deliberate practice rather than simply fact-crammers for an upcoming test. 

-From Strategic Instruction: Optimizing Classroom Instruction for Small and Large Classes

11. Too many classroom “learning activities” focus too much on what the teacher is doing as entertainer, while students sit back passively.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 3: Narration as Flow

12. There is no standardized test for faithfulness. Faithfulness is a quality that is measured in time spent being obedient to a calling.

-From Liberating Education from the Success Syndrome

13. Of course, the highest intellectual motive is that of curiosity, which should be aroused and cultivated in any way possible.

-From Attention, Then and Now: The Science of Focus Before and After Charlotte Mason’s Time

14. But we must not forget, as Luther cautions us here, that the greatest asset of any society is not its physical infrastructures or technological developments, but the minds, hearts, and souls of its members.

-From Why Luther Believed Christians Should Study the Liberal Arts

15. Habit training as a spiritual exercise enables us to live in Christ, to have Christ as our habitude.

-From Christ Our Habitation: A Consideration of Spiritual Habit Training in Education

16. Thinking along the lines of the liberal arts is more like a mental game than a utilitarian bid for power, money or success.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 4: The Liberal Arts as Mental Games

17. When we apply ourselves to deep and meaningful work, getting in the flow and cultivating valuable skills along the way, a certain lasting joy and fulfillment is the result throughout the process.

-From In Search of Happiness, Part 1: The Road of Virtue

18. Meaningful, complex and important work requires the kind of attention that can cut through distraction.

-From Habit Formation: You, Your Plastic Mind, and Your Internet

19. The move of turning conversation into a learnable skill puts it back in the realm of education, where it ought to have stayed.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 5: The Play of Words

20. The behaviorist can with consistency treat children as mere animals to be poked and prodded with carrots and sticks, but the Christian must lead souls and inspire hearts.

-From Marketing, Manipulations, and True Classroom Leadership

Hope you enjoyed these memorable maxims! Let us know which is your favorite in the comments, and be sure to share quotes and articles with your friends and colleagues.

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Perrin’s point is that we diminish the joy students experience and the love of learning that can be derived from careful, close study of fewer subjects. He issues a compelling criticism:

Classical schools, like other modern schools, generally follow a curriculum that, according to Lewis, dabbles far too much. Our graduates really don’t “know” Latin; many of them don’t do math, or study literature, history, math, or science “incidentally.” There is usually no room for any of this incidental or accidental learning, because we fill students’ every hour with all matter of what becomes academic “stuff.” Sadly, loves are not cultivated by rapid sampling or “drive-through” courses of study—or by simply asking students to pile their plates high with great heaping helpings of the True, Good, and Beautiful. We have a phrase to the effect that one’s eyes can be too big for one’s stomach. In contemporary classical education, I fear that our eyes are too big for our students’ souls. We dish it up, eight periods a day, with eight different enthusiastic chefs serving large amounts of what we know our students will want and love. They, however, have had enough.

To gorge ourselves and our students on too much of even good, true and beautiful things can have the effect of sickening, when instead we would want them to savor such an educational meal.

Perrin’s thoughts are provocative and worthy of consideration. Thinking through what is essential for our students can be challenging, especially as the job market makes its demands on what students ought to learn before entering the workforce. But education serves an even higher value in the formation of whole persons who enjoy lives with meaning and purpose. At the heart of Perrin’s concern is that students dabble in classes superficially without cultivating a love for knowledge. It could be, though, that the issue lies not in the proliferation of subjects, but in the methodological malaise inherent in modern education. Jason and I have actually found that students respond well to a wide and varied curriculum. Charlotte Mason writes that it is “not the number of subjects but the hours of work [that] bring fatigue to the scholar” (Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 82). The mind is nourished by many and different ideas. So how do we enable our students to grow in their relationships with all the ideas out there without squelching their spirit? On the role of ideas in education, see Jason’s previous post. We’ll come back this topic to in future posts, but for now we’d love to get your thoughts.

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Dweck’s portrayal of how our beliefs influence our behavior is truly mind-altering, especially given how she bolsters it with numerous studies of children, teachers, athletes and businesses. The importance of adopting a growth mindset as a parent, teacher, coach or business leader can hardly be overstated. There’s a reason her work has made a significant splash and been called “one of the most influential books ever about motivation” (Po Bronson, author of Nurture Shock).

But perhaps it’s worth asking whether what Carol Dweck is saying here is fundamentally new. For those participating in an educational renaissance, it’s worthwhile to step back and consider the extent to which the new ideas of modern research are confirming (rather than discovering) the traditional insights of the classical tradition of educational philosophy. After all, as the writer of Ecclesiastes said, “there is nothing new under the sun” (1:9 ESV) and “of the making of many books there is no end” (12:12). In this case, I think we need look no farther than Aristotle, the great philosopher himself, for an anticipation of the growth mindset.

Near the beginning of his Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle announces a very similar research question to that posed in Dweck’s research:

“whether happiness is to be acquired by learning or by habituation or some other sort of training, or comes in virtue of some divine providence or again by chance.” (Book I, ch. 9, trans. by W. D. Ross, accessed at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html)

The word translated happiness (Greek: ‘eudaimonia’) is not the flippant feeling that we often mean today. In fact, some circles are inclined to prefer the term ‘joy’ to happiness to imply something longer lasting—a life satisfaction or fulfillment rather than momentary excitement or the absence of challenges. Of course, Dweck uses the term ‘success’ in her study, which resonates better with the modern American focus on advancement in work and career. But both terms are meant to tap into the fundamental human drive for contentment, fulfillment, human flourishing, the good life.

And the question that is posed concerns whether or not our fate is fixed. Can we learn such that we succeed and find joy, fulfillment, blessedness, through our accomplishments? Or are we stuck with what we’ve got, such that we’d better hope we were one of the lucky ones, blessed by the gods (or by the random lottery of our DNA) with intelligence, talent, or whatever that it-factor is in our particular field or endeavor? Aristotle’s answer to this question is ultimately a nuanced one: No, if someone gets to the end of their life and dies horribly without friends and alone, all their accomplishments turning back on them and coming to naught, that person cannot be said to be blessed, no matter how successful they seemed earlier in life. Some external luck must play a role, but excellence, virtue can be developed, and it is virtue which ultimately makes a life blessed.

The key to Aristotle’s growth mindset is a proper conception of virtue or excellence (Greek areté) as an activity. The truly happy person finds fulfillment in the continual pursuit of excellence. As he explains,

“For no function of man has so much permanence as virtuous activities (these are thought to be more durable even than knowledge of the sciences), and of these themselves the most valuable are more durable because those who are happy spend their life most readily and most continuously in these; for this seems to be the reason why we do not forget them. The attribute in question, then, will belong to the happy man, and he will be happy throughout his life; for always, or by preference to everything else, he will be engaged in virtuous action and contemplation, and he will bear the chances of life most nobly and altogether decorously, if he is ‘truly good’ and ‘foursquare beyond reproach’.” (Book I, ch. 10)

Virtuous activities, for Aristotle, seem to be those physical, moral and intellectual virtues discussed throughout his Ethics, often described as a mean between two extremes: for instance, courage is a mean in having the right amount of fear, not too little (rashness) or too much (cowardice). Others, however, include the excellence of art, or skill in producing some good through a true course of reasoning; practical wisdom, or the ability to weigh correctly what things are good or beneficial for oneself; knowledge, or the ability to demonstrate the truth of something; and friendship (see Nic. Ethics VI.3-7 and VIII). In other words, the pursuit of excellence in school, work, business or relationships is the most likely course of action to bring about happiness.

And as he explains, part of the reason for that is that if you are seeing every opportunity as a chance to grow and improve in virtue (i.e. a growth mindset), then no matter what life throws at you, you will find satisfaction (eudaimonia) in that pursuit. Virtuous activities are durable sources of happiness, because they don’t flit away like less noble ones: money, sex, or power. There are very few circumstances, however challenging or disastrous, that don’t allow you the opportunity to contemplate or reflect on how you could improve. Even nobly bearing up under suffering is an exercise of virtue and will therefore give a measure of its own satisfaction.

One of the weaknesses of Dweck’s book is her narrow focus on success in specific life goals and endeavors, like school, sports or work, to the exclusion of this broader conception of the ultimate goal of a life well lived. But other researchers have made a stronger case for the connection between vigorous striving after excellence and happiness more broadly understood. For instance, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted a study conducted in the 90s, in which subjects would subjectively rate their mood at random times throughout the day. Cal Newport describes in his findings in his own book Deep Work:

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile…. Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title). At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock.” (84)

The opposite is actually true; people rated their work time much higher than their leisure time, in spite of thinking that they enjoyed their leisure time more. As human beings we were made to be most joyful when striving in pursuit of excellence, when engaged in deep work, or deliberate practice. As the wise author of Ecclesiastes had said, “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil” (Eccl. 2:24). Toil is not all pain and drudgery, but can actually be enjoyed… if we believe we can grow and see each task as an opportunity to strive for excellence.

What difference should this make for the work of education? Well, educators themselves should embrace the life of growth. Excellent teachers are not born, they are made. We should strive for excellence in the craft of teaching, but also for the practical wisdom of living life well. But more than that, teachers should cast a vision for their students of pursuing excellence in each and every ability, skill or type of knowledge that the curriculum calls them to. They should explicitly teach students to believe that they can develop their abilities, and learning activities and practice sessions should be framed so as to reinforce that belief. Teachers should aim to get their students willingly and joyfully engaged in the hard work of learning through inculcating a growth mindset. John Milton, in his tractate Of Education, described it this way:

“But here the main skill and groundwork will be, to temper them such lectures and explanations upon every opportunity as may lead and draw them in willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning, and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men, and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.”

Here Milton claims that the most important and foundational task of the educator of youth is to put them into a certain mindset: that of being on fire with a zeal for learning and with a deep appreciation for excellence. Students also need hope, “high hopes” that they can make something of their lives, by living in service to their country and to God, and perhaps even becoming so excellent at what they do that their names go down in history. If this isn’t a growth mindset, I don’t know what is.

At the school where I work (Clapham School) these ideas are reflected in part of our mission, which is to “inspire students with an education… approached with diligence and joy.” This attempts to capture the powerful combination of hard work in the pursuit of excellence and the deep satisfaction that is the natural result. We call it joyful discovery for short. How will this influence your life, learning and pursuits? How will you teach, coach or parent differently because of your newfound understanding of the classical growth mindset?

For more on the growth mindset see my article on “Charlotte Mason and the Growth Mindset” here!

References:

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. Princeton, 1984. Also accessed at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html.

Carol S. Dweck. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine: New York, 2016.

Cal Newport. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central: New York/Boston, 2016.

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