Here we observe the seedlings of the classical Christian renewal movement: the distinction between training students how to think versus what to think. Sayers’ diagnosis is that schools in her day had prioritized learning subjects over skills. Her solution: train students to be independent learners through a return to the classical liberal arts, especially the language arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.

In this article, I want to suggest that Sayers’ prescription for liberal arts education, and more broadly, the classical notion of self-education, is precisely what society is in need of today. Many modern schools have shifted their focus to spoon-feeding students information, teaching to the test, and creating “safe spaces” for students to be protected from opposing ideas. A return to the liberal arts–training students to get into the driver’s seat of their learning–will prepare them to meet today’s challenges with resilience and approach questions with both confidence and charity.

Persons as Self-Educating

Charlotte Mason, a British educator living at the turn of the 20th century, became a major proponent of this notion of self-education. As Karen Glass has helpfully unpacked in her book In Vital Harmony, Mason’s philosophy can be summarized in two key ideas: 1) Children are born persons and 2) Education is the science of relations.

When Mason says children are born persons, she means that they are born with the capacities to grow in knowledge, skill, strength, and character from the very beginning. We should not wait until a person reaches adulthood to begin taking her thoughts seriously. Rather, from a young age, we can begin to help children build a flourishing life. They are not robots to be programmed, sponges to be soaked, blank slates to be written on, or cattle to be herded through the education industry. Children are capable and, therefore, responsible. Our job as parents and teachers is to help children steward their moral choices, helping them gain mastery over their wills, form productive habits, and pursue knowledge from a place of intrinsic motivation, not behaviorist manipulation. As Mason put it, “a child is not built up from without, but from within” (Towards a Philosophy of Education, 25).

The second idea integral to Charlotte Mason’s philosophy is that education is the science of relations. Learning is about seeing how all the different bodies of knowledge in God’s creation connect and then going on to form a personal relationship with this knowledge. For Mason, there is no such thing as emotionless, rote learning or information processing. If a child is really learning, then he is connecting with knowledge at the heart level. In addition, these relations are to be discovered, not created, by the child. We are born into a world designed by God with order and connection. Lifelong learning is about discovering more and more about how these relationships work and forming a synthetic integrated conception of the world.

For these philosophical reasons, Charlotte Mason was insistent that children must do the work of education for themselves. We cannot force-feed knowledge for true learning to occur. She writes, “One thing at any rate we know with certainty, that no teaching, no information becomes knowledge to any of us until the individual mind has acted upon it, translated it, transformed, absorbed it, to reappear, like our bodily food, in forms of vitality. Therefore, teaching, talk and tale, however lucid or fascinating, effect nothing until self-activity be set up; that is, self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child’s nature” (Towards a Philosophy of Education, 240). This emphasis on the active role students play in their education is key to preparing students to become strong, independent learners.

Tools, not Jigs 

So we want to set up children to be able to educate themselves, but how do we do this? Returning to Dorothy Sayers, the British medieval scholar uses the analogy of tools to help us understand what the classical liberal arts are all about.

In short, the liberal arts empower students to take on any intellectual challenge they face. She writes,

For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command.

This tools metaphor can helpful to hone in on, specifically Sayers’ distinction between a tool and a jig. A tool, such as a hammer, can be used for a variety of projects while a jig has one specific task. For example, I once purchased a very particular cabinet jig to drill new holes in my kitchen cabinets in a uniform manner. Given its specialized use, I have not had need of it sense. Meanwhile, tools like my hammer and drill, with their wide utility across a variety of projects, I use frequently.

Sayers underscores the point:

We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or looks to the end of the work.

To equip students for self-education is to give them tools, not jigs, the liberal arts, not disparate bodies of knowledge, “…for the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

Self-Education in a Coddling Culture 

With this idea of self-education in mind, I want to close with a brief connection to an epidemic in American culture today: the rise of fragile students who are easily perturbed, anxious, and intimidated. Jonathan Haidt, a sociologist at New York University whom I have written on before here, has identified specific falsehoods we have taught children that have contributed to the problem.

In order to raise up resilient students, we can employ the notion of self-education in the following ways:

1. Permit students to experience real moments of struggle. Don’t solve the problem right away, but rather give space for students to wrestle through the challenge.
2. Train students to think logically, using evidence and reasons to support their beliefs. To be sure, emotions are a gift from God to be celebrated and enjoyed. But when one’s feelings become the driver in argumentation and analysis, students struggle to approach challenges with fortitude.
3. Lead by example in seeking to understand the viewpoints of those with whom you disagree. Someone who holds an opposing view should not to be cast as the sworn enemy. Just because you hold a different view from someone else does not mean they are the sworn enemy. We need to be okay living in the tension of disagreement.

If teachers can implement these three ideas in their classrooms, they will help prepare their students for long-term success. In contrast, when students are shielded from struggle, trained to trust their feelings, and embrace the “us vs. them” mentality on complex issues, they will find it hard to adapt and persevere. Haidt writes, “When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay ‘emotionally safe’ while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient” (The Coddling of the American Mind, 30).

May we as educators raise up a generation of resilient students who seek the truth with independence and resolve, preparing them to be lifelong learners who can tackle life’s problems and educate themselves with joyful fortitude.

The post The Classical Notion of Self-Education for Today appeared first on .

Previous article in the series, Human Development:

Part 1: What Do You Have in Mind?

Dorothy Sayers and the Lost Classical Tradition

Although not properly a member of the Inklings – the informal literary society gathered around Tolkien and Lewis – Dorothy Sayers was an esteemed member of the British literati in her day and frequently shared her works with Lewis and Tolkien. Best known for her detective novels, Sayers was likewise a first-rate essayist, critic and scholar. She was among the group of women upon whom degrees were first granted at Oxford in 1920. Her writings rarely directly address education, although learned figures like Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane opine from time to time on the subject. It was in 1947 that Sayers addressed an audience in Oxford on the subject of education, a presentation later published under the title “The Lost Tools of Learning.” It wasn’t until the 1990s that her educational vision took hold, and then not in her native England, but in America of all places.

At the heart of her address is a maneuver to map the medieval trivium upon three stages of development. The trivium denotes three of the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic and rhetoric), or what we might call the language arts. Our educational renewal movement has devoted much attention to figuring out what these three arts are and how to teach them effectively. Sayers refers to three stages of development, designating them as the Poll-parrot stage (the youngest learners), the Pert stage (middle grades), and the Poetic stage (after puberty sets in). This designation directly led to classical schools adopting titles such as Grammar school (usually Kindergarten through grade five or six), Logic school (grades five or six through eight) and Rhetoric school (high school), for better or worse. This pairing of the liberal arts trivium and stages of development became so powerful within the classical education movement that it is common to find school websites that describe the trivium as the learning stages of children.

A Critique of Sayers’ Stages

In his 2019 article “Dorothy Sayers Was Wrong: The Trivium and Child Development” on the Circe Institute blog, Shawn Barnett challenges Sayers’ correlation of the trivium and stages of child development. He rightly identifies how Sayers was responding to the state of educational reform that overly focused on teaching facts in more specialized subject areas. Elsewhere I have referred to and critiqued the factory model of education (particularly as developed in Seth Godin’s book Linchpin), and inasmuch as this was what Sayers was responding to, we have found her to be helpful in our day to formulate a renewal of education along classical lines. I share Barnett’s concern that we not be so overly reactionary to the state of conventional education that we warp our understanding of what classical education is.

Despite Sayers’ clarion call to rediscover the lost tools of learning – that is the classical liberal arts – Barnett takes to task her developmental stages understanding of the trivium as anachronistic. Barnett writes, “medieval educational theorists never conceived of the trivium in terms of developmental stages that roughly correspond to a student’s age.” He correctly assesses the ahistorical nature of her essay in that childhood stages of development were never in view during the Middle Ages. He further rightly points out that most of the trivium was taught to university students, not to children. I leave aside Barnett’s discussion of Medieval curriculum as I am certain he is correct that we must take special care to select the best texts for our curricular content. I don’t know that Sayers would disagree with this point. My sense is that Sayers was less interested in spelling out specifically what children should read at what age, but instead giving general guidance that the liberal arts trivium is the answer to the problem of an overly specialized model of education that emerged after WWII with undue focus on technicism and scientism. Medieval education never thought of education in developmental terms, and Barnett demonstrates that Sayers’ is completely anachronistic on this point.

Yet where I think Barnett’s critique misses the mark is that the punchline of Sayers’ joke is exactly that it is anachronistic. We can hear even in her naming of the stages of childhood (Poll-parot, Pert, Poet) an element of humor or levity. Her appeal to the old guard Oxonians in her audience is that the antiquated trivium can be dusted off to meet the needs of modern education. She is not calling us to return to the Middle Ages. When we truly understand the Western cultural heritage as something like open source software, there are ways we can update something like the trivium today. Keep in mind that the Medieval version of the trivium as it existed in the universities was an updated version harking back to the classical era. In fact when we attempt to identify exactly what we are talking about when we look for a classical analogue, we are really looking at a centuries old tradition that grew, developed and changed in a dynamic relationship with the prevailing culture of the eras in which it existed.

What Sayers provides through her anachronistic paring of the trivium and child development theory is an attempt to link the deep magic of the classical liberal arts tradition with the cutting edge of modern research. One can clearly see the influence of Piaget in Sayer’s thinking. Piaget’s breakthrough work on child cognitive development was first published in French in 1936 and then translated into English in 1952. Because his work corresponded roughly to Rousseau’s four stages of child development in Emile (1762), Piaget’s ideas spread fairly rapidly. Yet Sayers never refers to Piaget, nor Rousseau for that matter. Her three-part schema seems not to be based on Piaget’s four-part schema, but this may be more down to her desire to fit the schema to the trivium than a lack of awareness of the Rousseau/Piaget four-part schema.

Piaget’s work on childhood cognitive development was the cutting edge science of Sayers’ day. So one major take away from her essay has to do with the nature of her argument. For the classical liberal arts to inform and influence education today, it must be conversant with modern research. In hindsight, we can see how there is a tension between the classical tradition and advances in research. Yet, that tension enables us to explore the ways we can gain insights into the craft of teaching. To that end, let’s examine further Piaget’s theory of childhood cognitive development and the ways it influences neurobiology and cognitive science today.

Piaget and His Stages of Development

The basic theory of cognitive development moves through four stages. The first stage is the sensorimotor stage from birth to two. The infant uses basic reflexes to interact with the world, establishing sets of habits in reaction to various stimuli or bodily functions. Some of the cognitive traits initiated in the first stage are understanding object permanence and gaining a sense of curiosity surrounding novelties. The second stage is called the preoperational stage, beginning when the child learns basic speech patterns. Children begin to play and pretend during this stage. They also ask lots of questions, sponging up knowledge through those close to them. The third stage begins around the age of seven. The concrete operational stage finds children developing the skill of logic, particularly inductive reasoning. The fourth stage, called the formal operational stage, begins around the age of eleven. Children in this stage are able to think abstractly, solving multifactorial problems and monitor their own learning.

So far we can see how Piaget’s four-stage theory corresponds somewhat to the kind of schema Sayers proposed as the trivium stages. However, we can add a few layers of complexity to what Piaget understood about these stages. To begin with, children progress through these stages at different rates. It is not as though every child upon turning seven automatically enters the concrete operational stage. What Piaget was really after in his research was not entirely about the four stages, but the mechanisms that enabled a child to develop cognitively. He saw that a child responded to new challenges by updating old schemas to assimilate new knowledge. However, there comes a point where a child makes a shift to respond to complexities of newly assimilated knowledge and updates her entire schema. For instance, an infant is able to assimilate a massive amount of information just through physically manipulating objects. But there comes a point when the child alters her schema because physical manipulation is insufficient to assimilate certain kinds of new knowledge. Language is required because of the insufficiency of motor operation, and the child updates her schema, moving into the preoperational stage. This does not mean that the sensorimotor method of learning goes away. Instead, the newly accommodated way of learning expands the aperture of knowledge receptors.

It should also be pointed out that abstract thought is not absent in children before turning seven. It is not uncommon for Piaget’s stages to be described as a concrete stage followed by an abstract stage. In Piaget’s use of the word “operate” or “operational” he is conveying that a child is capable of systematizing thought in the best mode possible for that stage. So the infant is systematizing thought about the physical world by putting objects in her mouth and banging them on the tile floor. When we think about the realm of the abstract, it is clear that children are able to have abstract thoughts, it is just that the ability to systematize abstract concepts has not yet become the dominant schema for their thinking.

There are some key concepts Piaget developed as hallmarks of cognitive development. We begin with decentering. A child is decentering when she is able to pay attention to multiple attributes of the same object. Children younger than three or four can become fixated on only one attribute of an object. Once children are able to decenter, they can hold in their mind multiple aspects of something. This cognitive skill is essential to reading. When we read, we see the letter symbols grouped together. By decentering we can simultaneously see that these symbols form words and phrases that carry meaning. Next is conservation. The concept of conservation involves the ability to recognize a quantity remains the same even when transformed in different situations. For instance, the amount of orange juice remains the same when poured from a tall, skinny glass into a short, wide glass. Children gain the ability of conservation usually by age seven. Finally, reversibility is the concept that an object can be restored to its original condition after being transformed. For instance, if you take a cookie out of the cookie jar (subtraction), you can restore the original state by returning a cookie to the cookie jar.  A child that has the ability of reversibility can understand series of events and how to move forward or backward through that series. Like conservation, this ability emerges around the age of seven.

Gleaning from Piaget’s work, we can draw a few postulates about child cognitive development. First, Piaget provides a way for us to think about the mind of the child from the perspective of the child, meaning we are not evaluating a child’s cognitive abilities as lesser or slower than adult cognitive ability. In fact, there are cognitive process that are rather faster and more adept than adult cognitive ability. Take language as a case in point. Children acquire their native language more rapidly and with greater fluency than most adults acquire a second language. So, the cognitive ability of the child is not a diminution of grown-up cognitive ability, it is actually a cognitive ability unto itself.

Second, Piaget gives us certain hallmarks that are present at different stages. We can observe a toddler banging pots together with an understanding that the child is actually thinking at a deep level about his little universe. Students in, say, Middle School are not only learning about different subjects, they are also gaining mastery of executive function. Can they follow sets of instructions to solve equations, write a paper, and turn in work on time fully completed?

Third, Piaget’s layout of the developmental stages shows educators that learning is dependent on and constrained by developmental processes. At a certain level, this is intuitive. John Milton Gregory in his Seven Laws of Teaching establishes the principle that the unknown should be built upon the known. This idea is consistent with the notion that new learning should be built upon the structures of the child’s operational abilities.

Piaget’s theories have undergone transformations since he first proposed his stages. Among the greatest criticisms of his theory is that the basic theory is at best a heuristic guide to general development, but when applied as a structural whole, it misses the nuances of development. Today developmental theory views cognitive development as a modular system, with different parts of the mind operate independently. So an advance in reading skill based on cognitive development does not mean that the same child will experience an equivalent advance in number sense. However, in general terms, there are elements of neuroscience that bear out the basic heuristic of his theory. For instance, our understanding of how the brain develops during the first year of life shows how at a neurological level there are parts of the brain that get connected together, substantially leading to new cognitive capabilities. In infants, the number and quality of neurons linking the prefrontal cortex is limited so that those early years are marked by unhindered curiosity and exploration. When the neurological links are strengthened through the process of myelination, the prefrontal cortex can take on a stronger role in formal thinking which has the effect of inhibiting or restraining curiosity and exploration. Biological factors such as this go some way toward explaining some of the passage through Piaget’s stages.

The dictum that “neurons that fire together wire together” provide insight into cognitive development and also indicate potential pedagogical strategies. What we’ve learned through neuroscience is that the brain grows new neurons, prunes old neurons and myelinates neurons that are repeatedly used. Myelination is the process of wrapping neurons in a fatty substance that helps it fire faster due to increased conductivity. This is the basic theory of neuroplasticity. The brain you have now is not the brain you had yesterday, nor the brain you will have tomorrow. That is IF you develop new habits or make changes in your behaviors. Essentially, your brain wants to conserve effort and will prune neurons it no longer needs and protect the ones it consistently uses. Yet, the environment bombards the brain with new information that forces the brain to constantly evaluate what needs to be kept, discarded and protected. This goes some way towards explaining the physical processes behind cognitive growth even into adulthood.

Reappropriating Dorothy Sayers

Having taken a bit of a deep dive into Piaget, it is worth returning to the basic contours of her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” If we take the thrust of her argument seriously then we must heed the call to recover that which was lost and use it effectively today. She uses the analogy of “tools” to describe the liberal arts. Our educational renewal movement has done a decent job dusting off the old books and implementing them so that students are once again reading the great books, learning the Western cultural heritage, translating Latin and Greek, examining logic and gaining rhetorical skill. Genuine practice of the liberal arts is raising up a generation of students truly empowered to lead our churches and societies. For this I am grateful to Dorothy Sayers for planting the seed in her essay that would blossom into classical Christian education today.

As I have wrestled with her essay over the years I have seen the inadequacy of the three-stage developmental schema she mapped out for the trivium. For one, the trivium really should not be thought of as stages of development. It was a few years ago now that Jason Barney proposed a twofold understanding of the liberal arts. He wrote:

“This leads me to propose a twofold understanding of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Each is both an art and a science, both a complex skill of communication and a traditional body of knowledge about that area.”

The liberal arts are neither developmental stages nor are they mere subjects. The reduction of the liberal arts to subjects is likewise problematic.

“If you look at many of our textbooks in grammar, logic or rhetoric, you have to admit that the method of the textbook seems to assume that the goal is primarily to teach our students knowledge about these ‘subjects,’ as if that were enough.”

The danger of this approach is that students acquire the “right” answers as they gain mastery of the subject materials, but have they become well practiced in the art of grammar, logic and rhetoric? This is the genius of Jason’s proposal, that the subject matter informs masterful practice of the art and masterful practice more deeply ingrains the subject matter. The liberal arts conceived of by Sayers as tools means we must have a good knowledge of what the tools of learning are, but we must also be able to use the tools of learning effectively.

This is where my reflection on childhood cognitive development comes into play. As we teachers reflect on the craft of teaching, it is essential to understand the science of how the minds of children are developing. Sayers in a rudimentary way points the way forward for how we can implement the liberal arts for today. It is not that the liberal arts get locked into particular stages of development. Instead, we must gain a sensitivity to how the learning and practicing of the liberal arts matches the emerging cognitive abilities of the children in our classrooms.

Here in the second part of this series we have covered a lot of theoretical ground. So in the last part of this series the goal is to give due consideration to implementation. There are ways in which we can use the science of today to inform best practices as we recover the lost tools of learning.

Previous article in the series, Human Development:

Part 1: What Do You Have in Mind?

The post Human Development, Part 2: All the World’s a Stage appeared first on .

What did Sayers share that day that elicited such a response decades later? 

In her own British way, the writer and poet articulated a forceful critique of modern education and then provided a compelling solution. At the 30,000 foot level, her critique was that modern educational methods were failing to equip students to learn for themselves. Her solution? Recover the lost tools of learning, also known as the liberal arts, in order to equip students to do the work of learning and be prepared for the complexities of life ahead.

In this article, I aim to demonstrate congruity between the classical principle of self-education and Doug Lemov’s concept of “Ratio” in Teach Like a Champion 2.0. This is a continuation of my ongoing series on “Teach Like a Champion in Classical Perspective.” Lemov is a leader in the charter school movement who is passionate about distilling the best techniques for the craft of teaching. Using data from state achievement tests as a starting point, Lemov and his team observed hundreds of top teachers across the nation to identify proven techniques for student success. Today I will specifically examine how Lemov’s concept of “Ratio” works well to support what Sayers believed to be the purpose of formal education: to train students to learn for themselves.

A Problem to be Solved

First, let’s get clear on the problem of modern education, as Sayers sees it. She opens her essay by criticizing modern educational methods for failing to prepare students to navigate the complexities of the modern world. In an age of mass-marketing and propaganda, schools were doing little to equip students to discern right from wrong in difficult situations where the truth is not immediately evident.

Sayers writes:

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

It is incredible how firmly this punch, which was thrown over seventy years ago, lands today. The fact that Sayers wrote the preceding paragraph before the rise of the internet, social media, and the recent phenomenon of “fake news,” is fascinating. If the “press” and the “radio” were propagating mistruths and fallacious thinking back in the 1940’s, how much worse is the problem today? Who is preparing students to navigate such deceptive terrain? According to our lecturer, not schools.

And yet, Sayers isn’t quite finished; she continues her attack on modern education with a barrage of questions:

Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across grown-up men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that is sound, scholarly and properly documented, and one that is to any trained eye, very conspicuously none of these things? Or who cannot handle a library catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curious inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular question which interests them?

Here Sayers identifies an even deeper problem ingrained within modern educational methods. According to Sayers, not only were schools in her day releasing students into the world ripe for the picking by propagandists and media producers, they were failing to prepare students to learn for themselves. Schools, instead of preparing a generation of students capable of thinking independently and equipped with the wisdom to navigate complex situations, were graduating men and women who remain dependent upon the thinking of others. Sayers concludes:

They [teachers] are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

What Sayers is referring to here is the classical principle of self-education. This is the idea that, as the saying goes, it is better to teach a man to fish rather than to merely give him one. Students need to learn how to learn if they are going to navigate this world wisely and virtuously.

Elevating the Ratio

Keeping what Sayers has said about the need for students to learn for themselves, let’s now examine what Doug Lemov writes about “Ratio.” For Lemov, the whole point of ratio is to get students to do as much of the cognitive work as possible. The more work students are required to do, the greater the ratio, and the more effective the teaching. Of course, Lemov isn’t interested in students engaging in any sort of learning activity, but the kind of work that is truly cognitively demanding. He frames three different approaches for making this happen: questioning, writing, and discussing. 

First, though, he clarifies that student participation itself is not equivalent to ratio. It is possible to have a high rate of class participation and yet low ratio with regards to rigorous cognitive work. Likewise, it is possible to have high “Think Ratio”–work that is truly rigorous–but low class participation. As the graph indicates below, the key is to seek both. Lemov writes, “When you seek ratio, you ultimately seek to be high on both axes” (240). 

Teachers, then, should always be engaged in self-diagnosing ratio in their classrooms, asking the questions “How rigorous is the work?” and “How many are participating?”. 

The Content Prerequisite 

Next, Lemov turns to what he calls “The Content Prerequisite” in order to reach the highest levels of ratio. This is the idea that in order for students to engage in rigorous thinking, they need actual mental content, or knowledge, to think about. Lemov acknowledges that in the current educational landscape, the memorization of “mere” factual knowledge is not highly regarded. But he goes on to argue that exercises where students try to “think deeply” without knowing much turns out to be vacuous. “Facts and rigor,” Lemov insists, “are not opposites as some educators continue to suggest, but synergistic partners” (19).

Interestingly, Lemov is not alone on this view. The importance of knowledge acquisition in the learning process is confirmed by the research in Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. In this book, the authors argue that retrieval practice–recalling facts or concepts or events from memory–is crucial for gauging effective learning. In an early chapter of the book, entitled “Learning is Misunderstood,” they point out that creative thinking, a popular phrase in today’s educational world, and increasing knowledge, go hand in hand. Using a building metaphor, the authors write:

Memorizing facts is like stocking a construction site with the supplies to put up the house. Building the house not only requires knowledge of countless different fittings and materials but conceptual knowledge, too…Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it (18).

In other words, one can’t effectively engage in problem solving, creative thinking, or rigorous analysis without knowing from memory the facts relevant to the topic. It is all too common today to brush off teaching factual knowledge with the quip “I’ll just Google it,” or “That’s what Wikipedia is for.” While it is true that we live in an age in which more information is at our grasp than ever before, it still falls to each individual human learner to sort the information into comprehensible categories. And ironically, to sort information, you need to know information.

(Side note: If you are looking for a great strategy to increase the amount of memory recall in your classroom we recommend checking out Jason’s eBook on the practice of narration.)

The Importance of Knowledge

In her own way, Sayers confirms the importance of the knowledge prerequisite in her lecture. She creatively ascribes the Trivium, the three classical language arts, to three coinciding stages of childhood development. Admitting herself that her views on child psychology are neither “orthodox or enlightened” she defines the work of the grammar (elementary school) stage as memorizing, reciting, chanting, and observing. In short, it is about collecting mental material, or knowledge, that the mind will go to work on in later developmental stages. Sayers writes:

What that material actually is, is only of secondary importance; but it is as well that anything and everything which can usefully be committed to memory should be memorized at this period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not…At this stage, it does not matter nearly so much that these things should be fully understood as that they should be known and remembered. Remember, it is material that we are collecting.

While most classical educators today will disagree with Sayers’ explanation of the Trivium, from a historical standpoint, and critique her understanding of childhood development, let’s not miss her key insight here. It is the same idea that Doug Lemov and the authors of Make it Stick are touching on: knowledge matters. A rigorous education, one in which students are doing the cognitive lifting in a manner that prepares them to learn for themselves, requires the acquisition of knowledge. Where precisely this fits within the liberal arts paradigm is debatable, but the necessity of knowledge, or the content prerequisite, as Lemov calls it, is not.

Building Ratio in the Classroom

Now that we have discussed these preliminary matters, let’s turn to Lemov’s three ways for building ratio and empowering students to do the work of learning: questioning, writing and discussing.

First, teachers build ratio through questioning. When students are asked good questions and expected to give thoughtful answers, they are doing the bulk of the cognitive lifting. They are being asked to explain the concept or make a connection between two ideas. Rather than the teacher lecturing from “on high,” students are engaged in the demanding task of working out knowledge for themselves. Some of the most useful techniques I have found for increasing ratio through questioning are as follows:

• Wait Time: Allow students time to think before answering. If they aren’t productive with that time, narrate them toward being more productive.
• Cold Call: Call on students regardless of whether they’ve raised their hands.
• Break it Down: When a student makes an error, provide just enough help to allow her to solve as much of the original problem as she can.

A second way to build ratio is through writing. As Jordan Peterson shared in a classroom lecture, the best way to teach students to be critical thinkers is to teach them to write. Both the amount and quality of writing students do on a regular basis are key determinants for their ability to think and learn for themselves. Perhaps one of the greatest advantages of writing assignments is that 100% of students are doing the cognitive work, as opposed to one or two when a question is answered orally by one or two students. I have to say, as someone who has been teaching writing for several years now, I actually get a small adrenaline rush when I’ve crafted a well-worded writing prompt and watch every single one of my students go off to the races in fulfilling it. Some key techniques that I’ve found helpful for building ratio through writing include:

• Everybody Writes: Prepare your students to engage rigorously by giving them the chance to reflect in writing before you ask them to discuss.
• Art of the Sentence: Ask students to synthesize a complex idea in a single, well-crafted sentence. The discipline of having to make one sentence do all the work pushes students to use new syntactical forms.
• Build Stamina: Gradually increase writing time to develop in your students the habit of writing productively, and the ability to do it for sustained periods of time.

Building Ratio Through Discussion

A final way Lemov offers teachers to increase ratio in their classrooms is through discussion. He saves this way for last because in some sense it is the most predictable. When students are sitting in a circle and engaged in discussion, there is an (almost) inevitably high degree of ratio going on. In most classical schools, discussion is constantly used pedagogically as a tool for training in the liberal art of dialectic. So the benefits of discussion are well-known and celebrated.

Nevertheless, teachers would do well to remember that not all discussions are created equal. Students simply sitting in a group and restating their opinions at each other, as Lemov notes, does not qualify as a discussion (314). These are merely disconnected verbal interactions. Instead Lemov defines a discussion as “a mutual endeavor by a group of people to develop, refine, or contextualize an idea or set of ideas” (315).

I agree with Lemov’s definition here with one philosophical caveat. It should be clarified that the ideas Lemov is speaking of are not to be understood as mere personal accounts of what people think about the world, whether or not these ideas actually correspond to reality. Rather, a worthy discussion should lead to the discern of objective truth, of the way the world actually is. Thus discussion always has a morally formative and humanizing goal: to expose students to the truth, that they might abide in it, and go on to express it prophetically to others.

Some helpful techniques for building ratio through discussion are as follows:

• Habits of Discussion: Make your discussions more productive and enjoyable by normalizing a set of ground rules or “habits” that allow discussion to be more efficiently cohesive and connected.
• Batch Process: Give more ownership and autonomy to students–particularly when your goal is discussion–by allowing for student discussion without teacher mediation, for short periods of time or for longer, more formal sequences.

Conclusion

In this article, I’ve attempted to demonstrate agreement between the classical principle of self-education and Doug Lemov’s idea of building ratio. When students are expected to do the cognitive lifting in the classroom, they are being prepared to learn for themselves, not just at school, but throughout all of life. Certainly Lemov’s techniques are insufficient for achieving the broader vision of human flourishing from a classical perspective, which entails growth in wisdom and virtue, but nevertheless, his insights for ways teachers can empower their students to learn for themselves are noteworthy. I heartily commend them to you in your broader aim to recover the lost tools of learning in the education of your students. As Sayers implies at the end of her lecture, it would seem that nothing less than the future of western civilization depends on it.

Other articles in this series:

Work, Toil, and the Quest for Academic Rigor

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 3: Check for Understanding

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 2: Teacher-Driven Professional Development

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 1: An Introduction

The post Building Ratio: Training Students to Think and Learn for Themselves appeared first on .

The basic problem Wilson is trying to solve is a crisis in national public education. He reflects on the state of the public schools in the 1980s as producing students who lack rudimentary skills in reading, writing and arithmetic. Even more concerning is the detrimental effect this has on American society through cultural illiteracy. The expectation that a democracy is founded upon an educated citizenry has been eroded through misguided reform movements. Wilson proposes an alternative form of education founded on a biblical worldview and utilizing the ancient liberal arts model.

Having identified the problem of public schools as not providing the intellectual and moral foundation to enable a civil society to succeed, he identifies numerous attempts to reform public schools that availed little positive results, especially for the Christian. The public schools are a wasteland for the Christian. “So in this battle for the public schools, it is folly for the Christians to continue to lose and inconsistent for them to win” (39). What would it look like to gain a win in the public schools, when it is committed to a worldview of secular humanism? But is it more likely that our children will be turned out doubting their faith, intellectually malnourished, and fairly well indoctrinated in an anti-Christian worldview. Sure, a parent can devote extensive resources to countering what the public school has to offer. But what, then, is the value of an education that must be questioned, qualified and contested at every turn?

Wilson hints at a further problem in the reactionary approach taken by Christian schools in the latter half of the 20^th century. The solution to the educational crisis was not to build a Christian alternative to the secular public product on offer. The liability was essentially to Christen secular humanism. A more thorough reconsideration of an authentically Christian form of education needed to occur, which Wilson enters into in the heart of this work.

The first main section of Wilson’s book is to lay out a case for a distinctively Christian education. The biblical framework he provides rests on several biblical passages, including Deut. 6:4-9, Eph. 6:1-4 and Matt. 22:37. Taken together these passages speak to an education that is thoroughly imbued with scripture. Students should not simply have a Bible lesson once a day, or once a week. The entirety of the child’s instruction should be informed by a biblical worldview.  Wilson also frames Christian education in such a way as to caution us against thinking that education cannot save man. He delves into the theological paradigm of Adam, created in the image of God yet fallen. Our students come to us as offspring of Adam. It would be foolish and sacrilege to think that our cleverly devised curriculum could save. Only the grace of God saves through the accomplished work of Christ. Wilson states that “educational reformation must begin with the Biblical view of man” (74). This is why the Christian parent will struggle with the public schools. This is why the Christian parent must be discerning about even the Christian schools.

“So it is not enough to have a Christian curriculum, and Christian teachers. It is not enough for the school to meet in a church. The Biblical educator must not only have a Christian understanding of the material, he must have a Biblical understanding of the student. If he does not, then the result will be a hybrid Christian methodology employed to achieve a humanistic goal.” (76).

The Christian parent must be discerning, then, about the nature of the Christian education they are looking for. The Christian school must be diligent about its methodology. We cannot assume all students will have been recipients of God’s grace, thus our teaching is “preparation for those who have not received the grace of God, and godly instruction for those who have” (76).

The second major section of Wilson’s book lays out a model of classical education based significantly on Dorothy Sayers 1947 article “The Lost Tools of Learning” echoed in the title of this book. (You can see my own take on Sayers and the recovery of educational values from the past). The salient features of Wilsonian classicism are the selection of great books from the Western canon (83-85), engaging students in the “great conversation.” Latin language studies are essential for laying a foundation for understanding the English language, foreign languages, the scientific method and a host of other benefits (87-88). Wilson then explores the trivium both in the mode expressed by Sayers as corresponding to the stages of childhood development (91-97), but also as structures for how different subjects are taught (100).

Wilson points to his aims to promote a love of learning and a strict standard of discipline. These aims, however, receive very little treatment (a paragraph each on pp. 100-101). The method proposed for promoting a love of learning is to employ teachers who are enthusiastic about their subjects. The low student-teacher ratios maximize the teacher’s influence so that students catch the enthusiasm themselves. Regarding loving discipline, Wilson emphasizes order, a lack of disruption and submission on the part of the student. Corporal punishment is used according the guidelines of his school’s discipline policy. I think that many readers will have wanted more educational theory here, rather than an exposition of Wilson’s Logos school handbook.

An unexpected turn was Wilson concluding his section on classical schooling with a review of his school’s growth and academic performance. He is able to point to impressive numbers, as his school grew rapidly and students at the Logos school achieved exceptional scores on standardized tests. True, standardized tests can be a solid measure of academic goals. However, the book’s claims to a Christian educational ideal surely requires some different modes of measurement. Has there been a measurable impact on the stated cultural crisis that frames the book? Are graduates retaining their faith at a greater rate than their public and private school peers? Are graduates contributing to church and society in ways Wilson has expected as a result of this educational paradigm?

Wilson concludes this section with several explorations of the challenges of modernity. He covers works by Neil Postman, Allan Bloom and others to question the use of video in education and the quality of music children are exposed to. He notes the challenge of Christian anti-intellectualism. He also considers the question of whether parents should choose homeschooling or a classical Christian school. Wilson concludes by reviewing the crisis of modern education and reiterating his proposal of classical Christian education as the means to train up children in a biblical worldview.

In the nearly twenty years since its publication, the classical Christian movement has grown significantly as a movement in the United States, indebted in no small part to Wilson’s efforts. The movement has developed in theoretical sophistication, with many schools no longer adhering to Sayers’s stages-of-development conception of the trivium. More schools are now exploring STEM subjects as an integrated quadrivium of sorts. The question as to whether the trivium ought to be taught as distinct subject has shaped several schools, with Jason offering a critique of this view in consideration of the meaning of the concept of “arts” as “the ability to make something.” The liberal arts are not merely bodies of knowledge but a set of “highly complex skills that students needed to be trained in over a course of years.” Alongside the ACCS, other organizations have been founded such as Circe Institute and Society for Classical Learning that broadened the theoretical and practical discussions within classical Christian education.

Looking back on what amounts to a foundational volume for the classical Christian movement, I was surprised to find that the book was far more practical than philosophical. I appreciate the emphasis on biblical worldview applied to education, but one comes away wanting a more robust exploration of what this looks like within the liberal arts tradition and as an educational method. I think in The Liberal Arts Tradition by Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain (previously reviewed by Jason) one will find a more deliberate exploration of educational philosophy along these lines. Wilson rigidly positions the movement against progressivist educational reform. It is not that I don’t agree with his critique of modern education, but I wonder if there are insights that can be gained by studying developments in educational methodology stemming from such areas as neurology, cognition or psychology. All in all, I think Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning is a necessary read for those within classical education, but many will sense that the movement has developed in ways that make it less directly applicable today.

The post Review of Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Douglas Wilson appeared first on .

Rediscovering a World of Ideas

Prior to the age of exploration, exploding into life after Columbus’s westward journey across the Atlantic in 1492, a different exploration of an unknown world occurred after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. For well over a millennium, the Byzantine empire was the eastern stronghold of Christendom, paralleling the Roman church in the west. The Ottomans with superior military technology breached the walls of the famous imperial capital, simultaneously ending the Medieval assumption that Christendom was unassailable. Byzantine scholars seeking to protect the vast stores of manuscripts housed in Constantinople emigrated to Northern Italy, bringing with them Greek texts long forgotten in the west. These texts fueled an already burgeoning intellectual environment in such cities as Venice, Florence and Milan.

A new form of humanism was gaining traction in the north of Italy, reacting to the calamities of the late Middle Ages. The black plague decimated perhaps a third of Europe’s population, exacerbated by poverty and famine. The fracturing of Roman Catholic hegemony through internal warfare, such as the war of the Roses in England or the hundred years war between England and France, brought an end to an economically, politically and religiously unified Europe. Yet a number of institutions carried over from the heights of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, chief among them the universities. Italian universities such as Bologna, Padua, Rome and Turin shared a history with the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Paris. The scholasticism that flourished in the medieval universities instigated a tireless search for classic texts, as scholars sought to reconcile theology and philosophy through dialectical reasoning. Humanism, the study of classical antiquity, offered a new vision by looking to the past. The texts brought to Northern Italy after the fall of Constantinople added fuel, in the form of Greek classical texts, to the fire of the emerging humanism. Works by Aristotle and Plato, long forgotten in the west, arrived in Venice and Florence in the hands of Byzantine scholars. Soon a concerted effort to translate Greek texts into Latin became a project of primary importance. The old universities were a happy home in which the Renaissance humanists could partake in this new project.

Renewing Educational Goals

Renaissance education inherited a ready-made structure developed in the middle ages. The humanist ideal of rebirthing civilization by drawing upon classical antiquity was happily situated within this educational structure. Today, the classical Christian school movement has likewise drawn upon the very same structure. The liberal arts were comprised of the trivium and quadrivium. Let’s see how the trivium met the goals of Renaissance educational goals.

Grammar was the initial art of the trivium. Not only were the parts of speech learned, but students would also theorize about the nature of language and how thoughts were shaped through the use of words. The study of Latin and Greek were essential to the Renaissance enterprise, especially since both ancient languages were not spoken in the West. Young scholars would learn these languages in order to interact directly with the rediscovered manuscripts from the East, written predominantly in Greek. Or students would acquire Latin, the language of scholarly pursuit, so that they could read the newly available translations of Aristotle and Plato.

Students learned how to reason carefully by acquiring skills in logic. The dialectical method drew opposing viewpoints together in order to establish the truth of statements. Aristotle reigned supreme, his theory of syllogism providing powerful tools to thinkers of all eras by carefully defining premises and conclusions by way of deduction. Several of Aristotle’s works were already known during the Middle Ages, but texts from Constantinople were quickly translated into Latin and formed the new logic (logica nova). Professors quickly added numerous commentaries on these Aristotelian texts, which often extended the dialectical method into the realms of philosophy, theology and ethics.

The most revolutionary of the arts in the Renaissance was rhetoric. The scholastic theology of the Middle Ages was mired in dialectic thought that was beholden to rigid dogmas. Even more important than the new logic were the rhetorical texts discovered in the early renaissance: Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Quintilian’s Institutio, Cicero’s De Oratore, and Brutus’s Orator. The study of rhetoric not only entailed acquiring skill in expression, but also the study of examples of rhetorical skill, what we might call profane literature. Quintilian in particular focused attention on the rhetorical ideal of the good man speaking well. Notions of the good man coincided with the emerging humanism of the time. In the face of the fall of society, rhetoric provided a set of concepts to call individuals to noble civic duty.

If western society was going to survive the fall of the Christendom of the middle ages, a renewal of educational goals was necessary. This renewal set in motion a reconsideration of human beings as self-directed individuals capable of setting the course of society through their own moral agency. In some ways this was a challenge to the church and to God, yet in other ways it refined conceptions of church, God and theology. Martin Luther, for instance, concluded that Aristotle was the foundation upon which the authoritarian doctrine of the Roman church was based. Only through removing Aristotelian concepts of the soul and ethics does one properly encounter the soul and ethics of scripture. However, in challenging these conceptions, Luther challenged the authority of the church, leading to a break with the Roman church and a broader reformation of Christianity throughout Europe. Francis Bacon would likewise challenge Aristotelian notions of deductive reasoning based on syllogisms, formulating a new scientific method around induction. Beginning with facts observed through sense perception, the scientist derives general truths through the observation of nature. Revolutions in society impacted not only theology and science, but economics, politics among other areas of knowledge. A renewal of education breathed new life into a stultified western society.

An Educational Renaissance Today

Society is due for a rebirth today, and perhaps is observing the sparks of one in an educational renaissance that parallels that of Italy and broader Europe in the 15th century. In her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Dorothy Sayers proposes a return to an old form of education as a mean of accomplishing renewal today. She writes:

“If we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.”

This statement lays out three important ideas. First, the success of a free, democratic society depends upon the quality of education its people receive. Publishing her article in 1947, Sayers would have been all too aware of the dangers of the far-right authoritarianism of Nazi Germany as well as the emerging threat of authoritarian communism in the Soviet Union at the outset of the Cold War. However, the most significant threat to democracy was not fascism or Marxism in foreign lands, but the loss of the liberal arts tradition within our own lands. This leads to Sayers’ second point, that the “wheel of progress” had made certain unfulfilled promises. Progressivist educational theory almost completely took over schools in earnest during the late 1800s, although Sayers is correct that progressive educational thought had been around since Locke and Rousseau. The cultural and moral relativism of the progressive program eroded a sense of truth residing outside the individual. Instead, the internal motivations of the child took on central importance, guided by insights in the fields of psychology and sociology. Education took on more utilitarian aims, forsaking the long-held notion that education imparts the norms and ideals of society. Finally, Sayers’ points to the educational model of the Middle Ages, the liberal arts tradition that was part and parcel of Western civilization, which we have seen was foundational to the educational goals of the Renaissance, during which a renewal of society took place.

The claim has been made that Western civilization has fallen. Rod Dreher for instance traces a centuries-long decline of Western society through key revolutions. In his book The Benedict Option, he considers how we are seeing a cultural decline today that parallels the decline of Roman culture in the 6th century. Dreher looks to the past in how Benedict formed intentional communities to preserve the heart of Christian culture and to weather the fall of Western society. Similarly, we can look to the past to identify educational theories, methods and practices that will enable us to rebuild and renew Western civilization. Yet for several decades now there has been a growing sense that educational reform is needed and in some sectors already occurring. Add this to the growing literature on neuroscience and educational psychology. We find ourselves at the very same intersection Renaissance intellectuals found themselves: the recovery of that which was long-forgotten in a context of burgeoning intellectual pursuit. We are ready for an educational renaissance.

The post Renaissance Education: Looking to the Past to Chart a Course for Education Today appeared first on .