A couple of months ago, we received inquiries about the possibility of offering online what I had advertised for our in-person tutorial program. After much consideration, my husband, Patrick—the Upper Years and Adolescence teacher for our tutorial—has decided to offer both a history and a literature class online to students in 8th grade and up. We could not be more excited for this opportunity, and if this is something that might serve your family well, you can read more information below.

“To awaken wonder was the major work of the muses and of the Integrated Humanities Program” (James Taylor, Poetic Knowledge). Now it will be the major work of the Adolescent Integrated Humanities Program hosted in The Toolshed. Inspired by James Taylor’s work on the poetic mode of learning, students will walk a thoughtfully curated road of historical sources, poetry, and literature, not as subjects of analysis, but as a vicarious experience of theology, philosophy, and history in the poetic mode of learning. Led by Patrick Faus, an autodidact, lover of the Great Tradition, and teacher with over twelve years of experience teaching adolescents students pastorally, students will inhabit a receptive posture as they encounter excellent works of art and historical record on the level of imagination, and in this way they will come to more deeply know and love their cultural inheritance.

There will be two class offerings:

The Age of Gods and Heroes (Ancient History) - M/W/F from 9:00 am - 10:30 am (Pacific). Cost: $150/month for 9 months ($1350/yr).

The Well Read Life: Entering into the Thousand Good Books (Literature) - M/W/F from 11:00 am - 12:30 pm (Pacific). Cost: $150/month for 9 months ($1350/yr).

Classes will run from September 9th through May 28th with breaks for Christmas and Easter Break. They will be hosted in The Toolshed with each class being held in a unique space with a forum for discussion as well as a class space where lessons will take place live, with the recordings automatically posted for those who need to catch-up later.

To learn more about these classes, you can check out this doc.

To sign up for the classes, fill out this intake form (no payment is taken at sign-up).

Patrick was also honored to recently be apart of a conversation about home education and boys. You may want to give it a listen:

What’s Happening in The Toolshed?

The Toolshed is a growing community of homeschooling moms (and a few dads!) discussing how to create poetic family culture’s and implement The Children’s Tradition curriculum.

• The Mother’s Tradition Book Club on September 1st @ 5 pm (Pacific) - come ready to discuss David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

• Poetic Habits of the Household course: What are the structures that make a poetic atmosphere possible for a family? In what order do we begin to address areas of struggle in the home? This course is a map to follow for moving from a standard American life towards a more traditionally poetic lifestyle. In it we will explore how the posture of our hearts, followed by the habits of our household, make way for a mode of education that is inspired by love. Lessons now available:

  • Lesson 1: Reflective Preparation

  • Lesson 2: A Mother’s Rule of Life: The Soul

  • Lesson 3: A Mother’s Rule of Life: The Body, Parts 1 & 2

  • Lesson 4: A Mother’s Rule of Life: The Mind

  • Lesson 5: Habits of a Poetic Household: Ordering the Environment

  • Lesson 6: Habits of a Poetic Household: Ordering Your Time

  • Final lessons over the next two weeks:

    • Lesson 7: Habits of a Poetic Household: Centering the Table

    • Lesson 8: Habits of a Poetic Household: Ordering the People

• The Great Conversation: An Integrated Humanities Course: Follow the chart plotted by the IHP at your own pace, and then join the conversation in our Great Conversation space.

• The Great Conversation: An Integrated Humanities Cohorts will open sign ups for The Iliad 8/24 through 9/4. The cohorts will kick-off the week of 9/14.

• September 14th - GC: IHP Iliad Cohorts Meeting (day/time will depend on cohort) | Discuss: Book I-III

• October 2nd - John Senior and the Restoration of Realism by Father Bethel LECTURE: Foreword, Introduction, and Chapter 1

  October 9th - Restoration of Realism BOOK CLUB Live Circle Call

• October 16th - GC: IHP Iliad Cohorts Meeting (day/time will depend on cohort) | Discuss: Book IV-XV

The old ways of teaching were beautifully simple. Modern education is often complicated by the fragmentation that came from every subject being broken into learning objectives, and every learning objective into micro-goals. But the more I learn about ancient and medieval education, the more I am inspired by the refreshing simplicity of an integrated-approach to lessons that was handed down for thousands of years.

Today we are releasing a series of copybooks that embody the simple, poetic heart of those Grammar School lessons from years gone by. Each copybook integrates singing or chanting, reading, recitation, and cursive handwriting. They are muse-ical in every classical sense of the word: inspired by the muses of story, poetry, and song. Children begin with gentle copywork in the Nursery Years (1st - 2nd grade), and then progress to incorporate spelling practice in the School Years (3rd on up). The Nursery Years copybooks teach children to delight in the beauty of words without analysis. The School Years copybooks goes further up and further in to that delight through lessons that are structured as an invitation of prayer. We often say that wonder should lead to worship, and in these materials that idea becomes a concrete reality!

I invite you to click the links below to view the sample lessons. I hope these copybooks will breathe life and peace into your homeschool while also giving you confidence in the depth and richness of the formation your child will receive through them.

Mother Goose’s Melodies: A Sing-and-Read Copybook (Primary-Ruled) - $46

Aesop in Verse: A Recite-and-Read Copybook (Primary-Ruled) - $46

Incline My Heart: Copywork and Dictations from the Psalms

• Vol 1: Psalms 1-5, King James Version (Wide-Ruled) - $46

• Vol 1: Psalms 1-5, King James Version (College-Ruled) - $41

• Vol 1: Psalms 1-5, The Abbey Edition (Wide-Ruled) - $46

• Vol 1: Psalms 1-5, The Abbey Edition (College-Ruled) - $41

• Vol 1: Psalms 1-5, The Orthodox Psalter (Wide-Ruled) - $46

• Vol 1: Psalms 1-5, The Orthodox Psalter (College-Ruled) - $41

Use the code INDEPENDENCE10 FOR 10% everything in the TCT Shop now through July 17th!

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The Children’s Tradition: The Philosophy of an Embodied Education in Wonder is now available on Amazon! I am sharing the Letter to the Reader from the book below to give you the full scoop on how this little book came to be. By publishing the contents of TCT’s philosophy my hope and prayer is that the gift of the poetic mode of learning (what the ancients called Gymnastic and Musical education) will spread far beyond the small, but precious, corners of the world it presently inhabits.

As a small P.S. If you have already read Part 1 of TCT in the original curriculum, would you mind going onto Amazon and leaving a review? I would so appreciate it if you did! My heart will be forever grateful to those of you who help share about this little passion project of mine.

From the earliest days of educating my children, I aspired to transmit the riches of a classical education in a way that would nurture humility rather than pride, but early on I had no idea whether this was actually possible. I am a second-generation homeschool mother, and while I am incredibly grateful for the education I received, I was also sobered by my experiences in various homeschool cultures of the 1990s. Because of observations I had made along the way, my nagging fear was that if I pursued academic depth and richness, my children’s egos would inevitably be inflated by their awareness of the “special” education they were receiving, leaving them with big heads and small hearts. Nevertheless, as my own homeschool journey began, I continued to pick up one book on educational philosophy after another, beginning with those popular in the classical education world and then incorporating more and more of Charlotte Mason as I learned about her method. My increasing hope was that a wide and generous curriculum, rightly approached, would not nurture ego in my children, and yet I was still grasping to understand what that “right” approach was.

Then, in the autumn of 2023, I opened the first page of Poetic Knowledge by James S. Taylor, and my life was forever changed. My weighty questions about the nature of education and the means of enculturing humility found their answer in the poetic mode of learning. I proceeded to devour everything I could find on the subject—books, lectures, articles, and more. Naturally, as a homeschooling mother of five (at the time), I was particularly eager to find a curriculum that embodied the heart of poetic learning as a profound, sacramental participation in Reality in every area of study, yet my search turned up empty. There were plenty of homeschool curricula that I could certainly have adapted to fit the poetic mode of learning (as I increasingly was doing at the time), but I did not find anything that intentionally implemented the philosophy of the poetic mode in every lesson.

This was how a beta version of The Children’s Tradition, a classical and Charlotte Mason-inspired curriculum, was born and released in the summer of 2024. After a year of additional resources sent my way by enthusiastic fans of John Senior (my people!) and significant clarification of both the philosophy and lesson plans, the finished edition of TCT was released in the spring of 2025, three weeks before our sixth baby was born into the world.

From its first conception, The Children’s Tradition has always been primarily about a particular philosophy of education based upon a golden thread of pedagogy handed down to us from antiquity—not merely as it existed in Greece or Rome, but as it was received, baptized, and brought to maturity in medieval Christendom. It was during that time that Christians drew upon the truth, goodness, and beauty the ancients had perceived and saw them more fully in the light of Christ, the center of Reality. Make no mistake: while I cite brilliant modern educational philosophers such as James S. Taylor, John Senior, and Charlotte Mason, the ideas I focus on in this volume are the ones that were being recovered from the Great Tradition and never of their own invention. In every case, I am not seeking to merely appeal to Authority but rather to the golden thread of Truth itself as it has been preserved and passed on from one generation to another.

While TCT includes knowledge streams and lesson plans, the heart of the curriculum has always been in the introduction, where I explain the theological and philosophical underpinnings of the curriculum. More than once, I told friends that I wished I could lock up the second two-thirds of the curriculum (where all the practical details are fleshed out) until the reader had finished the first part. Alas, digital PDFs do not come with keys. But it turns out locks and keys were largely unnecessary because the parents and educators who were drawn to the poetic life were eager to take in these ideas and incarnate them in their own homes.

Before long, the requests started coming in: the philosophy of TCT needed to be in a form that was shareable beyond those who were using the curriculum. The hearts of TCT families were being moved—not just for their own children, but for their families and friends to know the gift of poetic education for themselves. This was the very desire that had moved me to publish TCT in the first place, so I naturally wanted to answer their call. This little book you now hold in your hands is the direct result of TCT families who loved you enough not to keep the richness of the poetic life to themselves. It is a lightly edited version of the philosophy contained in TCT, and I hope it will spur you on toward a more poetic way of life and educational culture, wherever you find yourself.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Amanda Faus

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I also invite you to listen to our most recent conversations with the incomparable (Adam Taylor) and the insightful (Philosopher Dog). Maybe every podcast hosts feels this way, but I truly am blown away by the wisdom of the guests we bring on our channel. These two did not know about each other’s conversations, but there are meaningful golden threads between the two that make them a profound pairing.

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“To awaken wonder was the major work of the muses and of the Integrated Humanities Program,” (Poetic Knowledge, p. 145). And now it will be the major work of the IHP for Mom course and cohorts in The Toolshed that is launching next month. Led by Professors John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Franklin Nelick, the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas in the 1970’s studied some of the Great Books of the western canon, but it was no hoity-toity Great Books Program. As James Taylor recounts, some viewed the IHP as, “‘romantic’, undisciplined, and not really serious. But the professors of the IHP were unmoved by this criticism, other than to, with mirth and goodwill, agree with them!” (Poetic Knowledge, p. 146). I suspect if high-brow intellectuals inspected the reading lives of Mother Academics, they might give a similar criticism. As my friend, , beautifully captured in a recent video, the intellectual life of mothers is not one that takes place in undistracted solitude. We read our books with babies in arm, we share the pages of our nature journals with toddlers, and usually the people we are narrating to are under 5 feet tall. But here we are, to laughingly agree with the theoretical high-brows at the slight absurdity of it all, and to plod on anyway!

Because we mothers are in the work of raising little humans, and we are doing so amidst an effort to recover our own humanity in a utilitarian, sensationalized world, we need the poetic mode just as much as our children. It is in this participational way of being in the world that humanizes us, drawing us into the ordinary experiences of human life, and from that experience invokes reflections and conversation. And when we are oriented this way, we encounter the Great Books, not as subjects of analysis, but as a vicarious experience of the greatest stories, of history, and of philosophy.

Course
In this program, for just the cost of being in The Toolshed ($12/month or $100 year), you gain access to a independent course outlining how to work your way through the IHP’s original syllabus, expanded and clarified by what James Taylor outlined in Poetic Knowledge, and at a pace that makes sense for moms. The time commitment will be 5 hours a week or less, with natural buffers and breaks for seasons like advent.

Cohorts
In addition to the course, we will also have IHP (For Moms) cohorts of women who are going through the course together. In the interest of keeping groups to a reasonable size (12 women or less), they will be organized by time zone and availability. Each cohort will have a monthly Live Room in The Toolshed where you will be able to give encouraging accountability, share what you are learning, and to hear from others. Most of all, we will get to take our studies out of the abstractions of our minds and allow our thoughts to be sharpened and developed in conversations with others who are doing the same readings and pursuing the same poetic experiences that we are.

The Toolshed Community
Finally, because the course is apart of the The Toolshed offerings, you will also gain access to a thriving community of homeschool parents pursuing the poetic life in their homes where what we are learning touches every area of our lives. In a world of modern educators aimed at analysis, dissections, and the bare facts of a thing, what Lewis compares to looking at the beam, TCT families are striving for a participational, sensory-rich knowledge where we look along the beam with our students.

Join The Toolshed and sign up for the IHP (For Moms) Cohorts! Registration will run from now through June 1st.

The Toolshed

The Course

The Books
As you can see in the original IHP syllabus photos above, the list of books that we will be working our way through is long. I have adjusted the order we are reading them to match the accompanying lectures by John Senior and Dennis Quinn referenced below. We will read Aesop throughout the time we are covering the ancient Greeks rather than dedicating a whole cohort block to them. I will also include additional optional readings that pertain to our poetry memorization (see below). But for our first year, the core texts will be:

Aesop, Fables
Homer, The Odyssey
Homer, The Iliad
Herodotus, The Persian Wars
Aescylus, Oresteia

The Lectures
With much gratitude to Fr. Scott Randall Paine, we can listen to recordings of John Senior and Dennis Quinn discussing some of the Great Books in the same way they did when teaching at the IHP. For any book read that we have corresponding lectures, we will conclude our readings with Contemplatio weeks of listening to the lectures on the books we just read and writing some reflections on what we received from our readings and their lectures.

Memorizing Poetry
Central to the IHP was the cultivation of students memories, and that included memorizing lengthy poetry passages. You can see the full list of poems above. While the poetic ideal is to one student transmitting the poem orally to another student, someone has to begin by learning it from the pages of a book, so that is what we will do. In our first year, we will learn the following:

Shakespeare, “The Quality of Mercy is not strained” Act IV, Sc. 1 (Merchant of Venice)
Ben Jonson, “To Celia”
“Western Wind, when wilt thou blow”
Robert Burns, “My love is like a red, red rose”
“Gaudeamus Igitur”
Sir Walter Scott, “Breathes there a man with soul so dead”
Tennyson, “Break, Break, Break”
Meredith, “Lucifer in Starlight”
Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us”
A. E. Houseman, “When I was one and twenty”
Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

Calligraphy, Stargazing, and More
In the IHP, students learned calligraphy as a means of developing their attention and perception of beauty. They also did naked-eye stargazing and learned about the myths behind the constellations. In this spirit, each month we will encourage you to notebook these things:

• Write your poetry memorization by hand each week, either in calligraphy, if you are interested in learning it, or in cursive, if that is a more approachable option.

• Naked-eye stargaze at least once a month. Select a constellation to learn the myth behind its name, and then retell it in a written narration.

• Nature journal once a month, choosing an object to study, draw, and write notes on in your notebook.

• You might also add in handwriting a folk song you are learning with your family, reflections from your reading, or encyclopedic-style articles.1 Maybe you draw a plan of your garden beds, or sketch an artist study you do with your children. Any experiences that ground you in the riches of Reality are encouraged to be included in your Mother Acadamia notebook.2

FAQ’S

How long will it take to complete the full IHP syllabus?
By my estimation, at a pace of 2.5-3 hours of reading per week, including breaks for a few choice seasons like advent, it will take approximately 4 years to work our way through the whole IHP syllabus. We are working at the pace of moms, not full-time college students. But don’t worry! This is not a 4 year commitment if you don’t want it to be.

How often do cohorts open and close?
Cohorts will open for one month before we begin each book, and we ask that participants commit for the duration of the time required for that book. At the conclusion of a book, if you need to take a break, that is totally allowable, and you can hop back in for a future book as you are able. The first cohort commitment is 12 weeks for Homer’s Odyssey. This will be followed by another 12 weeks for Homer’s Iliad, and then 17 weeks for The Persian Wars by Herodotus, and so on and so forth.

Is this just a book club?
As you can see in the information shared about the course, this is not intended as merely a book club, but a path to follow in deepening your experience of the Great Tradition as a living reality. We read, we ponder, we write, we gaze, we draw, we listen, we converse. As we often say in the classical education world, we are not brains on sticks, and this course is specifically designed so that you will not forget that.

Join The Toolshed and sign up for the IHP (For Moms) Cohorts! Registration will run from now through June 1st.

The Toolshed

Gracious and Holy Father, give us the wisdom to discover You, the intelligence to understand You, the diligence to seek after You, the patience to wait for You, eyes to behold You, a heart to meditate upon You, and a life to proclaim You, through the power of the Spirit of Jesus, our Lord. Amen.

This is why we are gathered together on this day. My heart echoes these words as a prayer, not only for myself, but for every student standing in a circle around us. Through the power of the Spirit of Jesus, our Lord. Amen. Each class is dismissed, led away by their respective teachers. As I enter the dining table that serves as the Lower School Years (3rd/4th grade) classroom, I look through the window where I can see Mrs. G gathering her Nursery students onto a blanket in the front yard where they will begin with a reading from Stories from Shakespeare by E. Nesbit, followed by Swedish Drill. My students sit down to the table where we begin with the reading and recitation of poetry. You could hear a pin drip as I read Stevenson aloud. A pin drop, that is, until something makes us all burst into a giggle. My analytical brain is always in awe of the way the children delight in hearing poetry read aloud.

We then pull out our poem of the term: “Sleeping Beauty” by Walter de la Mare. We read the whole thing together. They then recite the first two verses without looking. Onto verse three for this week, we casually discuss what it means to flit and have filmy wings. A student shows us how to flit with her arms. I can see it in the children’s eyes— how they are stretching their minds to grasp at words that rightly express what they imagine.

Next, we pick up our Roger L’estrange’s translation of Aesop: Fables. The children get excited because today we get to read two fables that together communicate a single moral. We all share a sheepish chuckle at “The Apples and the Dung Heap”, and we certainly can’t help but find more humor in the thought of fruit holding a conversation, as happens in “The Apple, the Peach, and the Blackberry.” “We always think the highest of ourselves!” a boy narrates the moral with the shake of his head. What goes without saying, but can be felt palpably in the room, is how wrong it is to do so. Pride is icky, and we feel it in our bones. Bleh.

After a moment’s pause, I direct our attention to the next lesson. “Everyone pull out your composition notebook. It is time for our dictation lesson of Matthew 5:20. You have three minutes to look at the verse and review any words you may have trouble spelling. Remember, if you are still working on spelling, that will be your goal for this lesson. If you are proficient in the spelling, your goal is to capitalize and punctuate properly. Lastly, if you can spell, capitalize, and punctuate the whole verse properly, you should write it in cursive. I will go around the room and write down your goal.” I move from child to child, letting them set a goal for their dictation lesson, but also pushing them to challenge themselves if they set the bar to low. They rarely do though. They know that Kalos is a place where they come to pursue excellence. I have students who will write the verse with near-perfect spelling and punctuation in cursive, with plenty of leftover time to select an extra piece of copywork from our poetry or fables. I also have some students who are still in the copywork phase and are not quite ready for a true dictation lesson. All are welcome at the table, but each student is called up to do his personal best, whatever that may be.

With this wide range of students in one class, I have often taken inspiration from Chapter 2 of Little Men by Louisa May Alcott, where readers are introduced to the boys in Professor Bhaer’s school at Plumfield. Each falls within a wide range of personalities and abilities. There is the naturally refined Demi (the beloved oldest March sister, Meg’s, son), restless Emil (who takes inspiration from Pirates), Dick Brown (with a crooked back), and Billy Ward (who was made intellectually disabled by a fever), among others– each with unique virtues and vices, intellectual strengths and weaknesses, and yet there is room for them all.

After dictation we move into the living room for Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. We are reading The Comedy of Errors, but before we begin I ask what we read last week. A zealous girl excitedly recounts: “The wife thinks that the one guy is her husband, but he isn’t because he’s a twin, but the twin doesn’t know his twin is there in the city, and so everyone is mixed up and it’s crazy!” They are deeply invested in the story, even as one of the boys may occasionally remark as we pause for more narrations that we are 23 minutes from lunch. 17 minutes from lunch. 4 minutes from lunch. They are human children, after all. Before we know it, the story concludes, and after giving their final group narration, they are excused for a lunch recess.

With picnics laid out on the grass, the children, at least the ones who have enough patience to eat their lunch before beginning to play, gather upon them. Of course, there is more than one boy who scarfs down a pb&j as he walks directly to the basketball court. For thirty minutes they frolic and run, playing games like sharks n’ minnows or jump over the log. At 12:40 we ring the cowbell again, and it’s back inside for Tales of Troy and Greece. Today we are beginning “The Golden Fleece.” Voices ring out,

"I know this one!”
“Oh yah, it’s a good one!”
“I don’t think I’ve read it.”
“Quicksilver is in it!”

I love when we get to reread a familiar story, even as we introduce it to the children who have not gotten to hear it before. I remind them all the time, “This is such a good story. You’re definitely going to want to read it again.” I never want them to think that the riches we are offering them at Kalos is something they will “graduate” from. Whether it is a song, a scripture, or a story, it is all worth returning to at 9 or 39. I often think of how in Experiment of Criticism C. S. Lewis said that literary people, “will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.” And we are in the work of raising literary people in these parts.

Next on the agenda is Latin with Mrs. H. Thank God for older homeschool moms who are willing to use their gifts to serve the children of the generation behind their own! I sit on the couch in the back of the living room, observing the children from behind and making any notes about today’s lessons that I want to jot down in my notebook. They sing out Dona Nobis Pacem and Aranea Parva Ascendit Fistulum. Mrs. H acts out a little Latin drama with a stuffed animal kitten and mouse, and the children chime in with parts of the dialogue. She concludes by reading them a Latin picture book, and we are collectively immersed into the language for a final few minutes. “I love Latin!” my children frequently declare. What’s not to love?

After Latin the Nursery kids join us in the living room for artist study. I read to them about the life of Goya, such a wild character to contrast with the reverent Velasquez we studied last term. After we finish reading and discussing his life, the students return to their class tables where tea and a snack is waiting for them. Each week, one or two moms graciously volunteers to come and provide this moment of sophistication. They sip tea and munch on a muffin while they take a couple minutes to just take the painting in with their eyes. Naturally they may fall into chit chat, but I remind them that this is the special time of the day where we try to give our whole attention to the beauty in our gaze. How challenging it is for us modern people to sit and stare at an unmoving picture for 60 seconds. We conclude this lesson with them sketching a rough outline of the painting in their notebooks. In a few weeks, in our term exam, I will ask them to sketch it from memory. This, more than almost anything else, is the kind of strengthening our attention and memories need in this time of fragmentation and distraction.

We head outside for our final lesson of the day, geography. We are reading Charlotte Mason’s Elementary Geography, and today is about highlands and lowlands. The children lie on their bellies, notebook sprawled open in front of them, as they draw the different land formations from the lesson. Our lessons are a synthesis of embodied, observable realities and imaginative exercises. They write and they draw. We review some of the concepts we have encountered in previous lessons, discussing the mountains to our east and west, the way the marine layer will soon be drifting over the western mountains from the ocean, and seeing how quickly they can identify north, south, east, and west. On that note, we conclude our day. The students gather up their pencils and notebooks into their backpacks as we all exclaim to one another, “Where did the day go? How does time fly so quickly every week?” This is the joy of participating in true leisure, or “something like perfection”1— you wish it could never end.

If you are interested in giving your children a poetic education, or in implementing poetic lessons in your co-op or tutorial program, head on over to thechildrenstradition.com to learn more!

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Hello everyone! Please allow me to interrupt my article series in order to release the blurbs for the Poetic Life conference lectures. I know there are a number of fabulous conferences going on this time of year, so it is truly an honor for those of you who are taking the time to come to The Children’s Tradition’s humble corner of the internet. I hope you feel as eager and inspired as I do reading about the topics we are going to cover.

What are the perks of attending Live? We will have a number of fabulous giveaways, and then our Saturday Q/A will be based upon questions submitted Live throughout the conference!

And if you are wanting to join us, but haven’t grabbed a ticket yet, just click the button below:

Get your ticket!

Thursday, April 23
4:00 PM (PT)

Speaker: Patrick Faus
Bio: Patrick Faus is married to Amanda and is the father of their six children. With over a decade of experience in youth ministry, combined with a few years working in enrollment at a classical Christian college, he has seen firsthand the struggles facing young people today and the deep need for intentional, faithful parenting. He joined The Children’s Tradition team full-time in 2025, and is grateful for the opportunity to help ordinary fathers and mothers learn how to pursue a poetic life and renew the culture of their homes.

Talk: A Classical Conversion
Blurb: In A Classical Conversion, Patrick will share his unexpected journey— from a self-described “bad student” formed by pop culture in the halls of public school to a deep lover of the classical tradition and an involved homeschool father. He will share some of the key books that awakened his soul and how they moved him further and further into the Great Tradition. Philosophically reflective, Patrick will explore how beauty and truth can break through modern appetites and invite us to rediscover the enduring feast that has stood the test of time. You will be inspired and leave with practical ideas for how to lay a compelling feast of Good Books in a life-giving atmosphere.

Thursday, April 23
5:00 PM (PT)

Speaker: Kelsie Hartley
Bio: Kelsie Hartley is the wife of Aaron Hartley, a homeschooling mother of 6 wild children, the host of the Reading Revisited podcast, and a Birth Doula. She hails from the land of Public School, Bible College, and TV and is working hard to find her home in the land of Books, Classical Education, and Catholicism. In her free time you can find her curled up on the couch with a cup of coffee and a novel. But, most of the time she is trying to find the perfect checklist or schedule that will make homeschooling a breeze!

Talk: How I “Failed” My Way into The Children’s Tradition
Blurb: Kelsie has homeschooled and she has “failed” at homeschooling. Most homeschool moms (and teachers too) feel like Anne Shirley from time to time after some experience actually teaching, “I’ve come so far short in many things. I haven’t done what I meant to do when I began to teach…I haven’t lived up to my ideals,” and “So far is the gulf between theory and practice.” But, maybe we haven’t failed as much as we think. Maybe the things that we consider failures weren’t the most important anyway. Maybe we need to revisit our educational philosophy and see what we are actually trying to do. What are our ends? And are our means serving those ends? Or have we somewhere along the way gotten things a bit mixed up?

Friday, April 24
4:00 PM (PT)
Speaker: Benjamin Lyda
Bio: Benjamin Lyda has over 20 years of experience in public, private, charter, and homeschool settings as a teacher, administrator, and consultant. He holds a Master of Humanities and Master of Theological Studies. He is the author of Scriptorium Writing, a 3rd-8th grade curriculum and the founder of Living Classical, an educational consulting organization.

Through curriculum, speaking, training, and other resources, he seeks to provide teachers with a vision and method for education that is distinctly Christian resulting in formation of the student's heart toward loving the Good, True, and Beautiful, to the end that, when they see it, those students reach out their hands in welcome of the epiphany of God's glory. He is married to his high school sweetheart and together they are bringing up six children whose names all begin with the letter E.

Talk: Poetic Education for the Heart
Blurb: In a fragmented and distracted age, the clutter of commercial demands for our attention, the breathless busyness by which we live, and time’s endless ticking make being present for our families seemingly impossible. To manage the mayhem has become a full time job, leaving little time left to teach our children. In addition, executive function, once called good old fashioned self-control and attention, is slipping away.

Taking tips from how play has changed over the generations and how suburban children in London resemble refugee children in Jakarta, a simply policy of “less” can make all the difference in the rhythms of our homes and the temples of our hearts.

Friday, April 24
5:00 PM (PT)

Speaker: Aaron Hartley
Bio: Aaron grew up near Raleigh, NC where his parents gave him and his brothers the gift of a classical education. He attended the Moody Bible Institute to study Biblical Studies and Theology. Since then, he has taught high school literature, theology, and humane letters are multiple different schools. Currently, he teaches at Thales Academy in Apex, NC. He and his wife, Kelsie, have been married for 12 years and have 6 children who are all homeschooled. When not teaching, Aaron is in the woods hunting and fishing. Aaron is also a graduate student at the Sheridan Center for Classical Studies at Benedictine College earning an M.A. in Classical Education Leadership.

Talk: Lights on the Dashboard: Indicators of a Healthy Classroom Culture
Blurb: What are the key performance indicators for healthy culture in a classroom? Whether that classroom be in your living room or in a traditional school setting, how do you know that what you’re doing is working? Josef Pieper describes that the foundation for building vibrant culture lies in building a life of leisure and orienting our teaching around contemplation. But what is meant by leisure? How does that actually impact our classroom culture? And how can we tell if our classrooms and homes are truly built upon leisure?

Saturday, April 25
9:00 AM (PT)

Speaker: Adam Taylor
Bio: Mr. Taylor recognized his calling to education from an early age; his parents James and Linda were both teachers, musicians and poets who instilled in their children the love of the True, Good and Beautiful. However, his path to realizing that calling took a bit longer than most. After graduating from St. Mary’s Academy (NE Kansas), Mr. Taylor briefly attended Kansas State University, before enlisting in the United States Marine Corps in December 1992. For 20 years, he served in a variety of leadership roles and worldwide locations, retiring in May of 2013. Since then, he’s worked for Cloudera, Inc., most recently in the role of VP, Professional Services. He has a lifelong love of history, literature, the outdoors, and sport, and is passionate about building, developing and leading great teams. Mr. Taylor and his wife Annie and two children currently reside in Fort Scott, KS; his son Ian is a member of our founding class of 2021.

Talk: Wounded by Beauty
Blurb: “Then he saith to Thomas: Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands; and bring hither thy hand, and put it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27)

The opening line of St. Benedict’s Rule is a loving command of a father to his children; an echo of Jesus’ first call to the apostles, “Come and see”. “Obsculta, o fili, præcepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui”. (Listen, my son, to the precepts of your master, and incline the ear of your heart). Like the Benedictine order itself, this exhortation reaches across the centuries; its roots finding purchase in every age.

What then is the ‘ear of the heart’? Why was it so necessary for Benedict’s rule and Christian culture? How does it find connection with education? And, most importantly to this conference, how has our ‘machine’ age’ hindered the ability to hear with our hearts and why must we be willing to be ‘wounded by beauty’ in order to be healed?

Saturday, April 25
10:00 AM (PT)

Speaker: Amanda Faus
Bio: Amanda Faus is the happy wife of Patrick Faus and delighted mother to their six children. Greatly blessed, yet also sobered, by her own homeschool experience in the 1990s and early 2000s, she is passionate about helping parents and teachers think principally. She desires all educators to understand the ideas behind what they are teaching so that they can more clearly do so with the proper ends in mind. Most of all, she is committed to being a part of a classical renewal that honors Christ as the Logos at the heart of Reality and propagates a sacramental experience of the world. In 2024 she released The Children’s Tradition, a classical curriculum that revives the ancient and medieval poetic mode of learning for children in the Nursery through 7th grade.

Talk: Oh Gladsome Light: Lessons as Liturgy
Blurb: There is much debate today about what constitutes a “classical education,” which is why we have begun to use and commend the phrase “medieval model school,” coined by Adam Taylor. In it, we are beckoned to return imaginatively to a time when the best thoughts from the Greeks and Romans were taken into the Church and baptized into a sacramental, Christ-centered perception of Reality.

The ancient world, long shadowed in the darkness of Plato’s cave, was led out by our beloved Savior, who drew us into the Light of Himself as “the true Light which gives light to every man” (John 1:9). Hundreds of years later, medieval Christendom was a testimony to the powerful work of redemption happening in the world, where Christian communities approached life as liturgia—an act of worship—ordered by ora et labora, work and prayer.

In the Machine Age, the Light of Christ that shines throughout creation is often obscured by the haze of sensationalism and the narrowing lens of empiricism. As we seek to recover our vision for education as a life, we will look at the practices of medieval Christendom—particularly the centrality of the Psalter in daily life and education—to recover an integrated understanding of knowledge and lessons that will illuminate our hearts and reshape the rhythm of our days.

Saturday, April 25
12:00 PM (PT)
Speakers: Everyone
Talk: Speaker Panel: Q/A
Blurb: Join us Live as the speakers from the conference answer the questions you submitted over the course of their talks!

Grab a cup of coffee, folks. This is a long one.

For something to be classical, it has to be old. This is the bare-minimum assertion of the classical education renewal: we are claiming to be harkening back and recovering time-tested pedagogies that were handed down through the ages, first by the Greeks and Romans and later by the Church. At the very least, families who are buying classical Christian curricula and attending classical conferences are trusting leaders in the movement that this is the case. Because of the great responsibility this trust bestows upon us, I believe one of the most relevant questions we should be asking and answering for those we are leading is this: Has this idea or method been meaningfully handed down through history? And because I believe it lies at the heart of a number of the modern classical education movement’s errors, I will add: For what age was this idea or method implemented? These may seem simplistic, and yet I have listened to countless conversations in the classical world that fail to address either of these topics. Someone might talk about education being the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, but then they will submit modern methods to achieve that classical end without disclosing its source. People will say that a classical education is “a liberal arts education”, but they appear to have never paused long enough to consider what age students were taught the liberal arts and what that means for us today. This problem is epitomized in the application of Dorothy Sayer’s trivium-based essay that is widespread in the classical movement, and that is where I will turn our attention to for today.

In the 1980’s, a group of educators who were inspired by Dorothy Sayer’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” joined the classical movement. In it, Sayers developed her personal theory of education that involved three stages of learning that correspond to the first three liberal arts known as the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. This pedagogy is often referred to as “Ages and Stages.” Sayers’ theory stated that elementary schoolers are “poll-parrots” who thrive on the rote memorization of things like facts, timelines, poems, and songs. Logic is meant to correspond to the middle school years when students are thought to be in a “pert stage” and naturally geared towards argumentation. Finally, the rhetoric stage, otherwise referred to as the poetic (not directly in the sense that I usually use the word poetic in these parts). This is when students are supposed to be interested in integrating their knowledge to formulate unique ideas and express them beautifully. It is commendable that classical educators at that time were thinking about how education is shaped by the natural development of children. Any observer of humanity will notice that there is a progression to the way human beings grow and learn. Unfortunately, however, the trivium-based approach was derived from unorthodox ideas in Dorothy Sayers’s essay The Lost Tools of Learning that, it turns out, weren’t rooted in any kind of meaningful historic pedagogy at all.

Before I go there, let me begin by saying there is much to admire about Dorothy Sayers. She was a logical woman of high intelligence and deep thought. Her mystery novels are excellent, and her experiences and reflections as a woman are full of insight. I do understand why The Lost Tools of Learning resonated with so many, especially people who were seeking to recover their own education at the same time they were forming ideas about how to educate their children. In it she expressed concern for students who were being taught in ways that would leave them stunted and unable to keep growing and learning into adulthood. She lamented the disintegration of knowledge into airtight subjects. She venerated Latin studies and said that students who learned Latin need not be subject to scientific grammar lessons in English. These are sentiments that all faithful classical educators would heartily affirm. Unfortunately, these are not necessarily the ideas of hers that have received the most air time in the modern classical renewal. Rather, three aspects have: a historically unprecedented application of the trivium to stages of learning, the notion that rote-facts memorized by children are pegs upon which ideas will come to hang later, and her conviction that,

An Old Idea (the Liberal Arts) Applied to a New Sphere (Childhood)
We are going to talk about each of these three points, but I want to begin with quoting Sayers’ own words where she tells us that her ideas are the application of a very old idea (the liberal arts) to a new sphere (childhood). She wrote,

She was well-aware that the liberal arts were historically college and university level studies. Nonetheless, when reflecting upon her own childhood, she believed she saw a correlation between her intellectual growth and the trivium, conceptualizing each of those three arts as a stage of child development. By her own admission, her theory was not connected to historic pedagogy.

She continued to elaborate on how she developed her theory of childhood education from the medieval liberal arts noting,

I return to the question I posed at the beginning of this essay: at what age was each art taught? Here Sayers suggests that this is irrelevant. She assumed that she could downwardly structure the liberal arts and push them down into primary and secondary education despite this being unprecedented in education historically. Does it not strike you as odd that Sayers would propose a new theory of education, based merely on the personal anecdote of her own childhood, in lieu of looking to the ancient and medieval wisdom about how to best prepare for the Liberal Arts? As the bona fide masters of the Liberal Arts, why would we think we need something other than the methods of preparation they handed down to us? This is the proverbial pitfall of assuming that the ends justify the means. Her confidence derived from the conviction that she was properly identifying the end of education, and that end could be achieved through the mechanisms she outlined.

How to Think, Not What to Think
When Sayers wrote, “What the Men of the Middle Ages supposed to be the object of the educative process” she eventually explained that she believed that that object, the sole true end of education, was, “to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.” (Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning) Because of this, she emphasized that the act of memorization was more relevant than the content.

While she was correct that children are gifted at memorization, she over-applied her theory when she assumed that it meant the form and content being memorized was inconsequential. From these sentiments came the popularization of the idea that classical education’s goal is to teach children how to think, not what to think. But no ancient or medieval scholar would have seen this as the “sole end” of education.

Plato said in The Republic that,

Hugh of St. Victor, a true medieval, summarized that,

The true end of education is to impart as much Beauty—indeed, as much of Christ—as our students are able to receive, that they may be conformed to His likeness as partakers of the divine nature. This work necessarily involves teaching students what to think, for truth, goodness, and beauty are objective realities, and it is our task to sow them into their souls. I have observed that far too often students who were taught “how to think, not what to think” become relativists who turn around and use the tools they have been handed in classical schools and programs to debunk the Christian faith. This is a problem that classical educators must contend with, prayerfully examining what could be the cause of so much deconstruction coming out of our own homes and schools.

Reality is the soil in which the liberal arts are cultivated and grow, and that comes through years of a grammar education that is not a stage of learning or merely the systemized study of language rules, but teaches students to be at home in language. For this to occur, it was historically understood that one needed to have wide exposure to sophisticated language through Scripture, poetry, and stories with a memory chalked full of knowledge about people, places, and the symbols that fill the world. This kind of grammar education cast a wide net and,

Timeless compilations like Aesop’s Fables and the Gesta Romanorum are notable examples of texts that fill students’ imaginations with a wide range of images while also awakening them to the fact that we live in a world that requires interpretation. The wisdom of texts like these is that we get to receive the stories, along with the interpretations, from the Tradition, and they are best received by immersion rather than in carefully curated selections that suit modern sensibilities. This relational approach to knowledge is in direct competition with the methodized approach to knowledge in the Sayer’s model today, and it deserves to be defended from within the long historical tradition that has preserved it for us.

The beauty of being at this point in the classical recovery in America is that we get to learn from some of the first couple of generations mistakes. Forty years into the classical renewal, this principle of teaching students “how to think, not what to think” has been tested and found wanting. After working as a teacher at classical schools for twenty years, Joshua Gibbs did an episode on his podcast In the Trenches titled “What if There is No Rhetoric Stage?” and gave this sobering reflection:

Not only was this idea of “how to think, not what to think” ahistorical, it didn’t even work. What, you may ask, had caused these headmasters to be so cynical? How did they know that it hadn’t worked? A close observation of high school and college students, even classical ones, will tell you that they are more like parrots and sponges than the developed, poetic thinkers Sayers was aiming for. Before you think that I am being unkind or demeaning to adolescent students, please know I do not mean this as a criticism. I have nothing but the highest esteem for adolescent students and think there is beauty and wisdom in how they are made. But while there are always exceptions, 9/10 are not made the way Sayers suggested, and teachers who expect adolescent students to manifest unique, creative, or original thoughts will be disappointed.

Not only has the promised outcome proven to be ineffective, but additionally classical teachers are waking up to the fact that the method itself, particularly the theory that facts are pegs for ideas to hang upon and that the memorization of facts is the primary goal of the grammar years, was also not true. Classical school teacher and eventual home educator shared her first-hand experience of spending years implementing Sayers’s poll-parrot theory of the grammar stage with her fourth grade classes, only to find out when she moved on to teach eleventh grade that it did not produce the fruit she had been promised.

Rachel’s observation here is representative of numerous testimonies I have heard over the years. That is not to say that there is never any benefit in learning something like a history timeline. But the pertinent question remains when it is best to introduce such a thing, and I am convinced it is not in elementary school. But in all of this, the dual issues of believing education’s goal is merely teaching students how to think, as well as the flawed premise of the fact-pegs theory, ultimately compound over a deeper issue. In the Lost Tools essay, Dorothy Sayers described the way her theory worked upon certain tendencies of youth that directly related to the care of their souls, though she did not frame the issues as such.

Raising Superior, Argumentative Types
Embedded in her “never too early” approach to the liberal arts is Sayers’s over-concern for the child as an intellectual mind rather than their whole person as a spiritual being. In her essay, she admits that the memorization of facts in the poll-parrot stage has the tendency to give students, “a pleasant sensation of superiority” (Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning). In response to parents of middle school logic students who might object to their children learning to argue and debate lest they become intolerable, she retorts, “Children of that age are intolerable anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalized to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands.” In both cases her observations about some of the natural dispositions of children at these ages might be correct, but it is concerning that she argued pragmatically that we wield a child’s disposition towards certain vices as a useful means to our educational ends. I can sympathize with someone who may be reading this and thinking that I am making a mountain out of a molehill, but John Senior and Charlotte Mason would convince us that this mentality is in fact the Achilles heel of the classical education movement that has been bringing so many of our students spiritually down.

There are significant differences between Charlotte Mason and Dorothy Sayers worth noting at this point. Sayers was a mother to one child, Arthur Fleming, but she did not raise him due to his being born out of wedlock. I can only imagine how painful that experience was for her as a mother. Sayers lived a busy life as an academic, a writer, and a marketer, all spheres that are far removed from the life of children. While I am sure she was well-intended, her theories about children lack the substance of experience or the carefulness of those who understand the raising of children to be soul-care. Most of all, and to be fair, she never could have dreamed that a speech she gave could be ran with to such degrees. Conversely, Charlotte Mason, who never had any children of her own, nevertheless was very attuned to the needs of children because caring for them was the work of her life. Where Sayers saw childish flaws as means to her ends, Mason warned teachers and parents against using a child’s flaw against them to manipulatively, “play in unlawful way upon motives” (Charlotte Mason, Philosophy of Education).

Let’s Not be an Enemy of Children
Similarly, John Senior saw the care for children’s souls as the paramount issue of education, though his background and life varied greatly from Charlotte Mason’s. A husband and father, he was a Great Books professor at the University of Kansas. He and two other professors, Dennis Quinn and Franklin Nelick, embarked on what they called, with tongue in cheek, “an experiment in tradition” by creating a college within the college named The Pearson’s Integrated Humanities Program. It was John Senior’s experience as a college professor that informed his strong warnings against moving liberal studies down into childhood education. He was all too aware of the ill effect it would have on their souls.

While Sayers did not think it was important to note the age at which the liberal arts were traditionally taught, it was John Senior’s observation that this mistake was precisely the cause of so many of modern classical movement’s problems. They mistakenly were not giving children the proper education suited to their age, in books or experiences, while simultaneously pushing subjects and content down into lower grades that were properly suited to college. This, he would explain throughout his writings, was the source of the pride and ego that was far too often characteristic of classical graduates.

In addition, Senior and the other professors of the IHP observed that the general population of students coming to them at the college level were not prepared for a genuine encounter with the Great Books. In the introduction of John Senior and the Restoration of Realism by Father Bethel it describes the students that they were working with:

The heart of the IHP was to implement the “poetic mode” of teaching in order to help the students awaken from their intellectual (and by default, spiritual) slumber. We will go more deeply into the poetic mode in a future article of this series, but suffice it to say for now that central to the poetic mode is humility, the receptive-mode of learning. If a student lacks this, he is unable to be properly educated at all. One of John Senior’s emphasis was that the only soil in which knowledge could grow was, as we say in our TCT’s general catechism, “A humble heart that is willing to receive, and a disposition to love God in and through His world.”

This was the primary reason he strongly warned against moving liberal studies down into childhood education: he knew as an experienced Great Books teacher of the ill effect it would have on students’ souls to skip the poetic mode of learning in favor of analytically driven, scientific approaches to knowledge that are so popular in modernity. One of the great tendencies of a developed civilization, even historically, is that elementary curriculums become swollen as more and more knowledge is pushed down into those years to compensate for the immense amount of knowledge students become expected to encounter in the upper years and college or university.

H. I. Marrou explains in Education in Antiquity,

Marrou points out how this cycle is observable throughout history. Elementary, or what was called grammar school, education would reach a bursting point as too much was placed on students too early, and then a renewal had to take place where they are brought “back to the basics.” It seems clear to me that we are very much experiencing a similar moment now as so many subjects and learning goals in the state standards have been pushed earlier and earlier, only to keep producing worse and worse results.

Who among us hasn’t seen an online graphic illustrating the great difference between the expectations for first graders in the 1950’s versus today? Seventy years ago, first graders were expected to learn the basics of writing their letters. Today, California’s state standards have students of the same age writing paragraphs. And of course state standards do not only dictate public education but public charters schools where thousands of homeschool students are enrolled. Ironically, but not surprisingly in light of Marrou’s research, by and large students are doing significantly worse in compositional writing today then they were in the 50’s. Earlier intervention did not led to greater literacy or composition skills.

This is not merely an issue in broader education or for those who teach to state-approved standards– the other side of the same coin came to fruition in the classical education movement of the 80’s. They bloated the elementary curriculum (and the middle and high school curriculums for that matter) with the liberal arts in an effort to promote classical schools as the fast track to good colleges. In homeschools, many first generation homeschool moms, with a whole lot to prove, labored to match their energy. On the one hand, it was indeed impressive to see how much they could memorize or the wide range of knowledge they had in their toolbelt. But spiritually, the results were often darkened by pride and ego. This is why John Senior spoke so strongly and declared that to push college level studies down into the prerequisite years of K-12 education was to be an enemy of children.

I know such a phrase sounds somewhat dramatic (and it goes without saying that people who do this certainly aren’t intending to harm children), but Senior’s conviction flowed from his attunement to education as ultimately the nurturing and raising of embodied souls, made for communion with God. In his book Restoration of Christian Culture what stands out is how his vision of Christian men and women, Christian families, and Christian culture is dominated by a synthesis of the physical and spiritual. There was no separating the intellectual life of students, and the pedagogy of teachers, from a full consideration of how this formation would affect their spiritual growth.

When I hear of elementary students who are receiving interventions in 2nd or 3rd grade because they are failing to meet state standards, I feel as strongly as Senior that we are doing great harm to children, communicating to them that they are broken and bad at school when in fact they often are just typical children who are weighed down by their bloated education. On the other hand, in memorization-heavy, poll parrot grammar approaches, pushing rote memory and the college-level liberal arts down into elementary and adolescent education proves spiritually reckless as. This robs students of a love of knowledge because the knowledge they are being given is dry and dull. A relationship of mastery whereby one “dominates” what needs to be learned can never cultivate love. Sadly, students taught this way are in danger of thinking education is drudgery, merely something to get through, before graduating elementary school.

The IHP’s professors’ passion about the poetic mode sprung from both a concern for the proper academic preparation necessary to learn the liberal arts in adulthood as well as their wise insight into how improper preparation is, worst of all, harmful to the souls of the students. This is not to say that the liberal arts have no relevance at all to childhood education, but rather we must keep in mind the natural progression of certain modes of learning to particular ages, and allow that to shape our curriculum.

It is only when we understand the dominant modes in which students are suited to learn that we will be able to teach them in a way that effectively cultivates their intellect and nourishes their souls. For this reason, we will discuss the centrality of Gymnastic and Musical education, i.e. the poetic mode, for the School Years in a future article in this series. With all this criticism, one naturally wonders what the solution might be, or how we might heal from these misapplied methods of the past thirty years.

Juxtaposed to the ahistorical trivium-based ages and stages, we have John Senior’s emphasis on the historically precedented Ages of Man. He wrote,

The trivium-based Ages and Stages approach of the classical movement is ahistorical, does not track with the reality of children, and is spiritually harmful. But every turn-about in the classical movement (of which we moderns likely need many of) begins with looking back. For thousands of years—from Socrates to William Shakespeare and beyond—there has been a persistent idea that a man’s life can be divided into seven stages. The cover art of The Children’s Tradition, in fact, is drawn from Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life series, which portrays four principal stages: Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age. Though philosophers have varied in their exact divisions, the underlying principle of the Seven Ages of Man has remained remarkably consistent. Senior outlines them as follows: Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence, Youth, Adulthood, and Old Age. In my next article, we will turn to look at those Ages that pertain to education—the Nursery, the School Years, and Adolescence—considering them as distinct seasons of life within this broader paradigm. We are told that God, “knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). Understanding the Ages of Man helps us to recognize the humble capacities of human people as they grow. When we know the reality of our children’s frame, we can nurture them in that ancient tradition that aims to transmit humanitas. These Ages reflect a historically literate understanding of human development, one that was central to classical and medieval thought, and this is one more "experiment in tradition” that I would advocate we aim to centralize in the next generation of Christian classical education.

The Poetic Life conference is April 23rd - 25th!

Get your ticket!

In the Age of the Machine, many are feeling a gentle, but pressing, call to return to a humane way of educating their children. Amid a culture that has been spiritually starved by artificiality and sensationalism, there is a growing hunger to recover ancient memories, to live in touch with Reality, and to experience genuine communion with God, our fellow man, and nature.

But where do we begin?

This question stands at the heart of the second annual conference hosted by The Children’s Tradition.

Together, we will look to the classical tradition, not merely as it existed in Greece or Rome, but as it was received, baptized, and brought to maturity in medieval Christendom. There, the Church drew upon the truth, goodness, and beauty the ancients had perceived and saw them more fully in the light of Christ, who is the center of Reality. Join speakers Patrick Faus, Amanda Faus, Aaron Hartley, Kelsie Hartley, Benjamin Lyda, and Adam Taylor (Ars Imitans here on Substack) for lectures rich in ancient insights and practical guidance for cultivating a Christ-centered education that is ordered towards the kind of wonder that begets wisdom.

So far in this series we have covered: why “Find what works for you” is terrible homeschool advice, framed this series around the ideas of the social imaginary and the need to restore our cultural soil, and looked at the first two pillars of The Children’s Tradition: God exists and God reveals.

Which leads us to today, where we will look at the next two pillars, in bold:

God exists, God reveals, God saves; therefore, the curriculum is a course to be run that will lead us from wonder to worship.

Pillar #3: God saves; therefore, His incarnation is the means by which we participate in His life. That participation is the end of all human existence.

In the Hexaëmeron of St. Basil that I referenced yesterday, our father in the faith noted that behind the ten powerful words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” it was revealed to us that not only did God make the invisible, intellectual, and spiritual world (the heavens), but that He also made the visible world, that is, the world of the senses (the earth). From the beginning of creation, spiritual and physical reality have been fundamentally integrated as a majestic whole that expresses the substance of Reality. Just as if you poured two different liquids into a single glass you could not unmix them, you cannot separate the spiritual from the material in conceptualizing life in this world. This is the nature of Reality: spiritual and physical nature are bound up in each other, and to separate them (if you could do such a thing) would do violence to the truth. Any education that attempts to does this—either dis-integrating the mind from the body or the body from the mind—harms the souls of the children being taught.

Now the pinnacle and fullness of all Reality was expressed in the incarnation of our Lord. God took on flesh for our salvation, forever sealing the glorious union of spirit and matter and re-affirming that both are good— good enough, in fact, for God Himself.

Who can conceive the inconceivable, that God, who is spirit, took on flesh? In my church we sing the 1,500-year-old hymn “O Only-Begotten Son” each week in our liturgy where we extol this exact mystery:

I am always struck by the strange paradox of the last line. My soul is left in awe when I consider what God did in love for mankind. St. Gregory of Nazianzus (born 329 A.D.) wrote that Christ had to take on human nature and a body so that He could heal mankind from the poison of Death. This was the only path for our salvation.

Christ assumed our nature so that we could be united to Him. Though mankind was once cut off from life through slavery to Death, in the incarnation we were set free and reunited to the life of God so that we might share in His resurrection. As educators, we must never lose sight of the fact that the fullness of what it means to be human is seen in the person and work of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. John Senior beautifully summarized this in Restoration of Christian Culture:

The incarnation is a potent reminder that our faith is not merely doctrines to intellectually affirm, but participation in Life itself. “His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” (2 Peter 1:3-4) As the source of our Life, Christ is also the never-ending end of our existence. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all Reality. And because of this, our time on this earth is a pilgrimage towards deeper communion and participation in the Life of God. Everything we do is either drawing us more deeply into that life or hindering us through the parasitic passions of sin and worldliness.

You will recall Ephesians 6:4, which tells us that we are to educate our children, to lead them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Participating in the life of God is the fullness of what we are leading them to. We want to raise our children in a home culture where Christ is known and experienced when we gather to pray, eat, work, relax, study, or play. Every aspect of human life can be redemptivly drawn into the life of Christ, and the education of our children is the means by which we take them by the hand and welcome them in. Which leads us to the final point that Senior exhorts us.

Pillar #4: Supposing God exists, reveals, and saves, the curriculum becomes a definite course of work that leads to worship.

As Senior wrote,

This is the claim I am making in The Children’s Tradition. Our children’s lives are too precious to be resigned to the experiment of modernity. Our philosophy of education must begin, explicitly and unapologetically, with God Himself. By looking to the ancient paths of how Christians have been educating their children over the past 2,000 years, we are granted an inspiring vision for what education could be– one that leads our students from wonder to worship. I am not suggesting that the classical tradition is monolithic. Tradition is a living inheritance, not a method. It is a tapestry that has been woven with many threads (and has seen many threads removed in the process). Yet by coming to know, experience, and imitate the portions of this wise tradition available to us, we are granted the possibility of participating in a time-tested, human-forming art of educating children. We are not merely pursuing an education with a uniquely “Christian view” of the world– we are learning to see.

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The Poetic Life conference is April 23rd - 25th!

Get your ticket!

In the Age of the Machine, many are feeling a gentle, but pressing, call to return to a humane way of educating their children. Amid a culture that has been spiritually starved by artificiality and sensationalism, there is a growing hunger to recover ancient memories, to live in touch with Reality, and to experience genuine communion with God, our fellow man, and nature.

But where do we begin?

This question stands at the heart of the second annual conference hosted by The Children’s Tradition.

Together, we will look to the classical tradition, not merely as it existed in Greece or Rome, but as it was received, baptized, and brought to maturity in medieval Christendom. There, the Church drew upon the truth, goodness, and beauty the ancients had perceived and saw them more fully in the light of Christ, who is the center of Reality. Join speakers Patrick Faus, Amanda Faus, Aaron Hartley, Kelsie Hartley, Benjamin Lyda, and Adam Taylor (Ars Imitans here on Substack) for lectures rich in ancient insights and practical guidance for cultivating a Christ-centered education that is ordered towards the kind of wonder that begets wisdom.

Charlotte Mason wrote in School Education, “All education is divine.” As I discussed in my last article, every culture has an imaginative vision of life that will shape every aspect of what they do, and this applies no less to education. We are living in the time when we must regularly examine the unexamined, not waiting for another generation to pass before we discern the metaphysical fault lines of our beliefs. Today we are going to look at the metaphysical anchors that sustain a faithful classical Christian education: God exists, God reveals, God saves, and the curriculum is a course to be run that will lead us from wonder to worship. Everything we believe a human being to be necessarily flows downstream of God, in whose image we are made. These four points are the credenda, the theological foundations that will give us our praxis—that is, a clear set of things to do.

Pillar #1: God exists; therefore, there is a necessary order in nature and in all sciences and arts that study and imitate nature.

The beginning of our understanding of education is summarized in the beautiful first line of Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” St. Basil the Great (born A.D. 330), in a series of nine homilies (sermons) that he gave on the beginning of Genesis, described different theories of creation and how the world came into existence. As he summarized, the Greek philosophers had various myths and theoretical formulations about the beginning of the world, but as soon as one came along with an interesting idea, another man would come after to prove why the former was wrong and lay out how his new theory was more correct. St. Basil concluded:

“It is because they knew not how to say, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ Deceived by their inherent atheism, it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that all was given up to chance.” (Homily I on the Hexaëmeron)

He wrote this nearly 1,700 years ago, and yet, in a very real sense, we are up against a similar atheistic atmosphere—the philosophical naturalism that is the air we are all breathing. Philosophical naturalism is the belief that the world can be known and understood from a purely natural, as opposed to supernatural, perspective. This is not science itself, but the prevailing philosophical assumption behind modern science (and, downstream of that, the modern default of education). In this framework, God is simply irrelevant. His role as Creator and Ruler over creation is ignored, either through explicit denial, or by being treated as irrelevant to what needs to be known and taught. The majority of curricula available on the market today either assume this foundation or at the very least surrender enough truth to participate in a government-sanctioned educational system that requires approved materials to affirm the myth of neutrality.

This will never do for a Christian education. We cannot take it for granted that we serve the God who is, in whom all existence is hidden. As God said to Moses in Exodus 3:14, “I AM WHO I AM.” He is eternally existent and uncreated.All things serve as beacons of light by which we perceive the Light of God. And Psalm 19:1 extols, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork.” We know God more deeply through creation, and in our enjoyment of creation we glorify God. St. Basil continued in his homily:

“Of what use, then, are geometry, the calculations of arithmetic, the study of solids, and far-famed astronomy—this laborious vanity—if those who pursue them imagine that this visible world is co-eternal with the Creator of all things, with God Himself? … they have become ‘vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.’”

Upon what basis do we assume orders of knowledge, objective answers in science, or laws in art? These assumptions all flow from a presupposition that God exists and ordered the world. To even propose the possibility is antithetical to historic Christianity. For hundreds of years, it was understood that you could not separate any knowledge from the knowledge of God. Rather, the assumption of classical and medieval Christianity was our second theological point:

Pillar #2: God reveals; therefore, there is a necessary content to knowledge.

As John Senior explained, “The ultimate formality of whatever subject [is] studied is the mind of God as it is revealed in created things—physical, mathematical, and ethical—and as it is imitated in things productive, so that God Himself is always our only subject, which is not to deny the real distinction of the parts” (The Restoration of Christian Culture, 118).

Education is ultimately a study of the mind of God as it is revealed in creation. Physical objects, the laws of arithmetic, and moral topics are all the revelation of God’s mind to us. Christ is the Divine Logos, capital L. He is the Power and Wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24), and everything in creation contains a little l-logos that is derived from Him. I love the way Andrew Kern describes this in his book Unless the Lord Builds the House: Christ is the King of Glory who has put little glories in everything. I used to think that God made things and then used them to explain Himself to us. When I read Isaiah 26:4, “The Lord God is an everlasting rock,” I thought God was just dumbing things down for us simple humans to understand. Through the classical tradition, I have come to realize it is the exact opposite. God exists, and Reality exists in who He is, and He has made the world as a cosmic echo, a reflective image, of His mind. “Rockness,” as in “The Lord is an everlasting rock,” preceded the creation of a single stone upon this earth.

Truth is not subjective, whether we are talking about physical realities or spiritual ones. You will hear me talk about capital-R Reality often, and that is fundamentally connected to this principle. God exists, and He reveals Himself throughout creation, and that is how we can know that there is capital-R Reality, capital-T Truth, capital-G Goodness, and capital-B Beauty. “Truth, goodness, and beauty”—the placeholder phrase we frequently allude to in the classical tradition—is a summary of transcendence. All of these objectively exist, and they exist in God. And, of course, as we talk about the revelation of God, the pinnacle of that revelation was in the Incarnation, when Christ took on flesh. The ultimate echo of the Logos in creation is mankind, who is made in His divine image—which is what we will look at tomorrow.

The Poetic Life conference is April 23rd - 25th!

Get your ticket!

In the Age of the Machine, many are feeling a gentle, but pressing, call to return to a humane way of educating their children. Amid a culture that has been spiritually starved by artificiality and sensationalism, there is a growing hunger to recover ancient memories, to live in touch with Reality, and to experience genuine communion with God, our fellow man, and nature.

But where do we begin?

This question stands at the heart of the second annual conference hosted by The Children’s Tradition.

Together, we will look to the classical tradition, not merely as it existed in Greece or Rome, but as it was received, baptized, and brought to maturity in medieval Christendom. There, the Church drew upon the truth, goodness, and beauty the ancients had perceived and saw them more fully in the light of Christ, who is the center of Reality. Join speakers Patrick Faus, Amanda Faus, Aaron Hartley, Kelsie Hartley, Benjamin Lyda, and Adam Taylor (Ars Imitans here on Substack) for lectures rich in ancient insights and practical guidance for cultivating a Christ-centered education that is ordered towards the kind of wonder that begets wisdom.

Gentleman, what are you?
I am a king, for I rule myself.

Ladies, what are you?
I am a queen, for I rule myself.

What does it mean to rule yourself?
I am free to do good. I am not a slave to my desires.

What is slavery to Death?
The vices are pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, sloth.

What does it mean to be human?
The virtues are faith, hope, love, wisdom, justice, courage, temperance.

The rest of the questions and answers are specifically shaped by the philosophy of The Children’s Tradition. There is a common Latin expression, “Repetitio mater memoriae,” that is,“Repetition is the mother of memory.” We have students repeat these phrases and verses each week to orient them towards the Good. It is beautiful to see how quickly they have absorbed the ideas contained in this catechism, and the way those ideas form an anchor for discussions throughout our school days.

What is the Christian Faith?
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.

What is the credenda of your education?
God exists, God reveals, God saves. The curriculum is a course to be run that will lead me from wonder to worship.

Students, what are you?
I am an embodied soul, made in God’s image. I am endowed with reason and suited to communion with God, man, and creation.

Gentleman, what are you?
I am a king, for I rule myself.

Ladies, what are you?
I am a queen, for I rule myself.

What does it mean to rule yourself?
I am free to do good. I am not a slave to my desires.

What is slavery to Death?
The vices are pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, sloth.

What does it mean to be human?
The virtues are faith, hope, love, wisdom, justice, courage, temperance.

How do we become fully human?
Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:1-2)

Why do you come to school?
To give my body, heart, and mind, with full attention, to know truth, perceive goodness, and be moved by beauty.

What is the soil in which knowledge grows?
A humble heart that is willing to receive, and a disposition to love God in and through His world.

What is wisdom?
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the supreme wisdom is the knowledge of God. The rest of wisdom is to know my own ignorance, and to be an eager student of God’s Word and God’s world.

How shall you then live?
“The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.
The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble.
My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings.
Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart.
For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh.
Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.
Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee.
Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.
Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established.
Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil.” (Proverbs 4:16-27)

A Prayer of St. Augustine
“Eternal God, who are the light of the minds that know you, the joy of the hearts that love you, and the strength of the wills that serve you; grant us to know you, that we may truly love you, and so to love that we may fully serve you, whom to serve is perfect freedom, in Jesus Christ, our Lord.”

We all live with ideas in the air—the prerequisite beliefs upon which our day-to-day conversations and decisions rest—and it is these ideas that, when embodied, are the life or death of any education. Carl Trueman calls this the “social imaginary”:

“The social imaginary is the way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it—though that is emphatically not to make the social imaginary simply into a set of identifiable ideas. It is the totality of the way we look at our world, to make sense of it and to make sense of our behavior within it.” (Carl Trueman, Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)

For modern Americans, the social imaginary of the public sphere tends toward philosophical materialism. We associate the pursuit of truth with certitude, the scientific method, and observable material realities. We assume approaches to knowledge that begin with the assumption that God does not exist. That is not to say that everyone talking on X or at the local elementary school actually denies the existence of God, but there has been an unspoken agreement for some time that He is not necessarily relevant to any meaningful pursuit of knowledge. By conceding to keep God out of the public sphere, we as a culture (often including Christians) have given our imagination over to godless materialism, which has led to subjective relativism in the spiritual and moral spheres. And as I explained last week, the world of home education has not gone unscathed by these secular ideologies.

In The Death of Christian Culture, John Senior built out the idea of a culture’s presupposed beliefs as “cultural soil.” Healthy soil, by necessity, has room for oxygenation to occur and is abundant in living organisms like bacteria, fungi, and worms, as well as decomposing organic matter known as humus. In this analogy, good cultural soil is rich in thoughts and experiences that will nourish whatever living ideas are planted into the souls of those who live in it. Bad cultural soil will make it excruciatingly difficult for good ideas to put down roots in the minds and hearts of its people. We can all recall the Lord’s parable of the soil, where He tells us that the seeds that fell upon the good soil “are those who, having heard the word with a noble and good heart, keep it and bear fruit with patience” (Luke 8:15b). A verse like this must leave us wondering: how can a receptive disposition, goodness, and nobility of spirit be nurtured in a heart so that it is hospitable to seeds of Truth?

We want the social imaginary of our homes and schools to be rooted in what is true, good, and beautiful, but for that to be the case, we have to look at the foundations of a faithfully Christian education. Before we can have a praxis—that is, a clear set of things to do—we have to begin with our credenda, or the dogmatic teachings that govern us. This is not because didactic teaching is the beginning of imagination formation (the formation of your child’s imagination begins before they understand speech), but because the imagination formation you are giving your child is already assuming certain teachings.

Put another way, every pedagogy (teaching practices) assumes an anthropology (a view of man) and a theology (a view of God). Apart from great intentionality, being formed as we are by secular schooling, media, and political discourse, we will find ourselves instinctively drawing our ideas from the surrounding culture—a culture that unconsciously teaches us to see the world as nothing more than what can be seen and measured—if we do not think through these things. We examine what often goes unexamined in educational philosophy so that we can harmonize our homes and schools to Reality as it really is. As a Christian, I am convinced that there are at least four essential theological nutrients necessary in cultivating a spiritually, intellectually, and physically life-giving culture in our homes. They are outlined by John Senior in Restoration of Christian Culture as follows:

1. God exists, therefore there is a necessary order in nature and in all sciences and arts that study and imitate nature.

2. God reveals, therefore there is a necessary content to knowledge.

3. God saves, therefore his incarnation is the means by which we participate in His life. That participation is the end of all human existence.

4. Supposing God exists, reveals, and saves, the curriculum becomes a definite course of work that leads to worship.

As our tutorial students recite each week as part of the general catechism of their education:

What is the Credenda of our Education? God exists, God reveals, God saves; therefore, the curriculum is a course to be run that will lead us from wonder to worship.

Make sure to subscribe, and tomorrow we will look at each of those four points and how they give life to the soil of our children’s hearts.

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The Poetic Life conference is taking place April 23rd - 25th!

Get your ticket!

In the Age of the Machine, many are feeling a gentle, but pressing, call to return to a humane way of educating their children. Amid a culture that has been spiritually starved by artificiality and sensationalism, there is a growing hunger to recover ancient memories, to live in touch with Reality, and to experience genuine communion with God, our fellow man, and nature.

But where do we begin?

This question stands at the heart of the second annual conference hosted by The Children’s Tradition.

Together, we will look to the classical tradition, not merely as it existed in Greece or Rome, but as it was received, baptized, and brought to maturity in medieval Christendom. There, the Church drew upon the truth, goodness, and beauty the ancients had perceived and saw them more fully in the light of Christ, who is the center of Reality.Join speakers Patrick Faus, Amanda Faus, Aaron Hartley, Kelsie Hartley, Benjamin Lyda, and Adam Taylor (Ars Imitans here on Substack) for lectures rich in ancient insights and practical guidance for cultivating a Christ-centered education that is ordered towards the kind of wonder that begets wisdom.

I have been in the homeschool world for thirty years of my life, i.e. ever since kindergarten when I sat for photos in my Tweety-Bird jumper. I grew up attending annual homeschool conferences, was taught from mainstream curriculums, participated in co-ops every single year, attended charter school classes, did a dual enrollment program at the local junior college, and then spent two years as a private tutor and “mommy’s helper” to homeschool moms where I would go into their homes to clean and teach their children. Two years ago I wrote and released The Children’s Tradition, a classical Charlotte Mason homeschool curriculum, but the first time I ever wrote a lesson plan was when I was 16 and helping a mom with her 9 and 7 year old. A happily stereotypical oldest daughter of a large family, I had taught multiple years of kindergarten through second grade materials to my younger siblings before I was 19. What can I say? My parents both have functioned in teaching roles throughout my life in various contexts, and the apple did not fall far from the tree. Teaching and writing and lesson planning seems to have been in my bones from the beginning, but in a very particular way because I grew up in the context of the homeschool world of the 90’s and early 2,000’s.

I share all this to provide some context that the world of the homeschool mom has been most of my world for almost my entire life. The children I grew up with, the mothers I observed, the stories I believed were each birthed in that sphere. Today, as a mother of six children and homeschool mom myself, this continues to be the world I inhabit. The majority of my friends and the children I spend time with and teach: homeschooled. To quote St. Paul out of context, “What do I have to do with judging outsiders?” I am a homeschool insider. There are plenty of people doing an excellent job exposing the problems with the public school system, but as the saying goes: not my circus, not my monkeys. My writing is a commentary and reflection upon the larger homeschool movement first and foremost before it is a commentary on anything else.

You see, something that has concerned me for a long time is that, when it comes to the homeschool movement at large, the messaging is rampantly relativistic. “Find what works for you!” we are told. If you listen to mainstream conferences you will hear inspirational talks that encourage you, “You’re doing a great job! You are enough!” and then tell you to do things like discover your child’s learning style or evaluate your educational philosophy on the basis of your personality. And this is all rather appealing to us modern people because we live in the era of what Carl Truemen coined “the expressive individual.” In his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self he explained how the western world has moved through three different views of identity over the last 2,000 years.

Ancients: Political Man, whose sense of self and duty was understood primarily in relation to his city-state.

Medieval: Religious Man, whose sense of self and duty was shaped by his relationship to God and the Church.

Modern: the Expressive Individual, whose sense of self and duty is oriented towards himself, what he perceives to be his personality, needs, and desires.

In this era of Expressive Individualism, the modern homeschool movement is no different from the mainstream culture in its tendency to frame homeschooling as the Ultimate Personal Choice. The trouble is, this actually is putting an impossible burden on mothers to invent an education for their children out of the mixed bag of their individual students, personality, and family dynamics. It’s not surprising that mothers will cling to labels for clarity: I am an eclectic Charlotte Mason traditional homeschooler who uses some classical curricula and has dabbled in Waldorf but we are a STEM family so we prioritize hands-on experiments… and we could just keep going. It is not that the personalities and interests of a mother and her children are irrelevant when it comes to their home education, but they are way downstream from what is most important. When we get lost in the subjective aspects of homeschools, we are in danger of failing to recognize what really matters.

As I mentioned, one of the primary mantras of the homeschool world is “Find what works for you.” That idea was seemingly canonized last year in the title of a bestselling book Homeschooling: You’re Doing it Right Just By Doing It. I don’t doubt that the book is full of wonderful advice, but the whisper in the back of many a second generation homeschoolers’ heads when we hear something like that is, not always. Because the awkward truth of being a second generation homeschooler is that you know it doesn’t always end well. Homeschool moms who signed up for Pride and Prejudice book clubs and tea parties can end up with a punk rocker who fails to launch into independent adult life. More homeschool mothers than we would dare to count have experienced the devastating pain of watching their child deconstruct the Christian faith that it was their greatest desire to transmit. Now before I sound all doom and gloom, it is worth stating that I personally know many wonderful homeschool graduates leading beautiful, Christ-honoring lives. But the point stands: homeschooling, it turns out, is not an inherent good that is a sufficient choice in itself. It requires great wisdom and prudence to tend to the soil of a homeschool with the eyes on the fruit you hope to bear a decade from now. As Josef Pieper wrote in An Anthology,

“To do what in reality is right and good presupposes some knowledge about reality; if you do not know how it is with things and how they stand, you are in concreto (in concrete reality, practically speaking) unable to choose what is ethically good. The mere ‘good intention’… does not suffice at all.” (Josef Pieper, An Anthology)

You see, the problem with doing what works for you is that you won’t actually know what worked until it’s too late, and mere good intentions will not tie your efforts up neatly with a bow in the end. Ok, sure, you can tell if the cursive program is “working.” But I am talking about the Important Stuff. Like did your approach to discipleship “work?” Did your imagination formation “work”? The fact is, as far as I can tell, every homeschool parent these days is being asked to make choices on trust: trust in institutions, in influencer recommendations, in the latest fads of “modern research.” But rather unsatisfyingly to me, in all these options your children are the experiment, and you are left to hold on to your seat and find out the results fifteen years from now.

For this reason, when I became a mother and began to prepare for homeschooling, I had some angst. I wanted to educate my children with excellence, and most of all I wanted to share with them my love of Christ. I was quickly drawn in by the beautiful description of classical education that I heard in a lecture by Dr. Christopher Perrin, but my own experience with classical students left me with some doubts. There are horrifying statistics floating around about the number of students who walk away from the Christian faith in college. As someone who did youth ministry for over a decade, I didn’t need statistics because I had seen it with my own eyes. There is a spiritual crisis of students whose faith is quickly undermined in adulthood, and that includes those from a wide range of homeschool and Christian educational backgrounds, even the classical movement of the 2000’s that I had my eye on.

So what am I proposing we do? How do we evaluate the best educational path for our children? At a minimum, I hope it is clear that decisions around education are not merely a matter of personal preference but rather are the domain of prudence, what many philosophers have called the mother of all virtues. To quote Josef Pieper again, “Prudence is the art of making the right decision based on the corresponding reality.” If we are to make wise decisions for our homeschools, we need to be clear on what Reality is so that we can live in harmony with it. We need to look to first principles, to the foundation we are building our homes and homeschool upon.

As R. C. Sproul wrote in The Consequence of Ideas: “Philosophy forces us to think foundationally. By foundational, I mean first principles, or basic truths. Most ideas that shape our lives are accepted, at least initially, somewhat uncritically.” For thousands of years, philosophy has been the context in which questions have been explored like: what are human beings? What makes them what they are? What are they for? What is their purpose? For the Christian, philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom is inextricably connected to theology. The medieval church even coined the expression, “Philosophy is the handmaiden of theology.” Some of philosophy’s biggest questions have been simply and explicitly answered in the Bible. Other philosophical questions can take more effort and study to ascertain, but will still be built upon a biblical foundation and reasoned out from there as we see in the rich tradition of the Church’s fathers.

Understanding what philosophy is, broadly speaking, we can look to a more specific field of study and think about what it means to have a philosophy of education. This is particularly relevant to us as Christians since one of Paul’s specific commands to parents includes the instruction, “And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but educate them up in the training and admonition of the Lord,” (Ephesians 6:4, Latin italicized). The Latin word educate corresponds to what is commonly translated as “bring them up”, and it is our children’s upward process of growth that is ours to nurture in school.

For the next few weeks I am going to be releasing a series of articles where I work through the basic theological and philosophical foundations of a classical Christian education. These will be based on the first TCT conference I gave last year, which is also available to watch for free on Youtube. I hope that by focusing on the principal things, the most important truths and ideas that a faithful Christian education is built upon, we will be granted a life-giving vision of a trustworthy path to walk in our homeschools. Rather than experimenting with our children’s lives we can look to the wisdom of the Great Tradition that has trickled down to us through 2,000 years of Christian history.

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The Poetic Life conference is taking place April 23rd - 25th!

In the Age of the Machine, many are feeling a gentle, but pressing, call to return to a humane way of educating their children. Amid a culture that has been spiritually starved by artificiality and sensationalism, there is a growing hunger to recover ancient memories, to live in touch with Reality, and to experience genuine communion with God, our fellow man, and nature.

But where do we begin?

This question stands at the heart of the second annual conference hosted by The Children’s Tradition.

Together, we will look to the classical tradition, not merely as it existed in Greece or Rome, but as it was received, baptized, and brought to maturity in medieval Christendom. There, the Church drew upon the truth, goodness, and beauty the ancients had perceived and saw them more fully in the light of Christ, who is the center of Reality.Join speakers Patrick Faus, Amanda Faus, , , , and Adam Taylor ( here on Substack) for lectures rich in ancient insights and practical guidance for cultivating a Christ-centered education that is ordered towards the kind of wonder that begets wisdom.

Get your ticket!

“Poetic knowledge is a kind of natural, everyman’s metaphysics of common experience. It is a way of restoring the definition of reality to mean knowledge of the seen and unseen.” ~ James Taylor, Poetic Knowledge

It is early in the morning, and I am typing over the body of my two year old who blearily stumbled down the stairs into my lap, and promptly fell back asleep. The sound of her breath, the sensation of her chest rising and falling upon mine, and the sweetness of her existence fills my soul. Oh, how I love her. She is at rest in her mother’s arms, and it makes everything right in her world. This is the poetry of being a woman. We take our minds, our hearts, and our bodies and through them people are formed to think and feel a certain way about the world. Many of us can trace our sense of safety and security (or lack thereof) back to the arms that cared for us in our earliest days. And it doesn’t stop as we grow older. A woman has the capacity to provide a life-giving presence to everyone she knows- her husband, family, and friends- for their whole lives. I am convinced this is uniquely connected to what has been called the poetic mode of knowing. Most of us have never heard the term “poetic mode of knowledge”, and yet this is an essential way women communicate their values to their family and friends. Or at least that was the thought that hit me when I began reading James Taylor’s invaluable work titled Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education. He was writing about education but my mind immediately saw the relationship between what he was describing and a giant missing piece of the modern woman’s life.

When Taylor wrote Poetic Knowledge he lamented bygone times in western culture when people crafted even the most utilitarian of tools as “expressions of celebration of the higher things yearned for within the human being.”1 The kind of culture that could make even a wooden ladle lovely in contrast to the harsh utility of a Teflon spatula. Longing stirred in my heart when he listed off all the simple, beautiful things that “naturally emerged from a culture that, in spite of its relative hardships, found itself whole, integrated, and spiritually free enough to celebrate the ordinary as wonderful.”2 Forget about kitchenware for a moment. Is that sentence not a worthy end for all of life? Might we as women aspire to craft homes that nurtures souls to be whole, integrated, and spiritually free enough to celebrate the ordinary as wonderful?

In his introduction, Taylor goes on to describe some of the ways modern man’s soul has revolted against the industrialization and technologization of the world in the form of hippie culture and environmentalism. For all the problems tied up in these cultural phenomenons, they nonetheless indicated something about the human longing for a natural, harmonious way of living. You can still find a similar thread running through American culture today. In the Age of the Machine, many a crunchy mama has issued her not-so-subtle rebellion against industrialization with a linen dress and 1,000 hours outside. However grateful we might be for dishwashers and washing machines, there can be a nagging feeling that something, we know not what, has been lost to us.

This “problem that has no name” has been being discussed for at least 70 years as women have been increasingly disordered and depressed. I happen to think Betty Friedan’s take on the situation was very flawed, but she wasn’t wrong that something was going on with women, and it wasn’t good. Much of the work that historically consumed the American woman’s time had been reduced or rendered unnecessary. This century has been a time pregnant with opportunity, but many women have perished for lack of knowledge. Restless and lacking a vision for how to live into their design as Life-givers and Lovers, women were urged on to time-consuming participation in the industrial complex. The Machine chewed them up and spit them out, and the quintessential modern woman is presently the one crying on Instagram. To be fair, this is not a far cry from the Victorian woman on her fainting couch, so it is not a completely new drill. This social, emotional, and psychological issue has been in the works for at least a few hundred years. Most of all, it is greatly troubling to me that even Christian women have not been immune to the devastating effects modernity is having on the soul of humanity. If we who have Christ do not have a vision for the good life given to us through Him, what hope is there for the rest of the world?

I am one of many people who are convinced that western humanity has been taking some major wrong turns for a few hundred years (at the very least), and the fastest way forward is to look back. In this season of my life I am particularly interested in looking back as a means to recovering the poetic mode of knowledge because I am convinced it is an essential piece needed to restore modern man’s soul. In his introduction, James Taylor describes his goal, “To not only explain poetic knowledge but to promote its restoration as the appropriate means of reawakening the intuitive nature of human beings who are able to know reality in a profound and intimate way that is prior to and, in a certain sense, superior to scientific knowledge.”3

I want to be a part of the poetic mode’s restoration on the feminine front. Women are on the front lines of nurturing the sensory emotional experiences of their people. This is not to say that the poetic mode is somehow less relevant to men. The ways in which men can live in the poetic mode is varied and great, and they represent 50% of the people for which women ought to be working to create poetic atmospheres for. But I am pondering the way there is a uniquely participational, intuitive dimension of women’s work that is distinct from men, going back to the God-given differences in our masculine and feminine natures. For example, how many of us mothers lament the “loss of our brain cells” during pregnancy and babies (logical thought), but have never stopped to value the increase in our intuitive awareness (the poetic mode)? Maybe these seasons are not our bodies breaking down so much as our souls waking up. Or at least they could be, if we had the wisdom to press into the mysterious, feminine path God has us on.

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The Children’s Tradition 2nd Annual Conference, The Poetic Life: Tending to the Heart of Classically Christian Homes and Schools is happening April 23rd - 25th. To find out more and purchase tickets, head to The Children's Tradition website. Use the code EARLYBIRD15 for 15% off your ticket before April 1st!

Interested in learning more about the poetic mode? I have taught over fifteen lectures on James Taylor’s book Poetic Knowledge in The Toolshed, an online gathering place for mother teachers (and a few fathers too!) who are interested in cultivating the poetic mode of learning in their homeschools and educational programs. There is also a Poetic Immersion course where you get to experience for yourself what lessons in the poetic mode are like.

In this episode we talk about the liberal arts - what they are, and why those of us with school age children aren't quite there yet.

Books

• The Liberal Arts Tradition by Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain

• Parents and Children by Charlotte Mason

• Ourselves by Charlotte Mason

• The Great Tradition by Richard Gamble

Quotes

• “The Florentine mind of the Middle Ages… believed, not only that the seven Liberal Arts were fully under the direct outpouring of the Holy Ghost, but that every fruitful idea, every original conception, whether in Euclid, or grammar, or music, was a direct inspiration from the Holy Spirit, without any thought at all as to whether the person so inspired named himself by the name of God, or recognised whence his inspiration came.” (Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children)

• “One of the ancient patterns of education was that imitation precedes art. An art could only be attained from an extensive foundation in action and imitations forming cultivated habits… an art could only be attained when imitation was joined with reason.” (Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition)

• “There was a special teacher for each of the three stages- primary, secondary and higher- of literary education: after the primary-school teacher- ‘grammatist’- came the ‘grammarian’- who in his turn was succeeded by the ‘rhetor.’’ (H. I. Marrou, Education in Antiquity)

• “Intellect is formed in schools only in a preliminary way and indirectly. Rational animals abstract universals from particulars at all ages, but boys can’t handle strings of them without the concrete things in hands. Argument for them is common sense: what goes up must come down. What lives dies. The liberal arts and sciences overload their brains, short-circuit knowledge of particulars and turn out smart brats who argue about everything in a vacuum. If you say let x be a horse, the budding sophist thinks x is a horse. The ‘Great Book’ teachers of the last generation admitted children to college at twelve who became ‘quiz kids’ on radio and television shows, ending up not only fools but misfits and suicides. Childhood has rights and needs. Forcing college courses down to schools is presumptive arrogance, an enemy of children and of science itself.” (John Senior, Idea of a School)

• “(Aquinas) stands at the beginning of the medieval tradition that taught the liberal arts as preparatory for the studies of philosophy and theology. Thomas Aquinas describes them as the tools by which knowledge is fashioned.” (Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition)

• “What is the soil in which knowledge grows? A humble heart that is willing to receive, and a disposition to love God in and through His world.” (Kalos Classical’s Catechism)

• “What is wisdom? The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the supreme wisdom is the knowledge of God. The rest of wisdom is to know my own ignorance, and to be an eager student of God’s Word and God’s world.” (Kalos Classical’s Catechism)

• “Students, what are you? I am an embodied soul, made in God’s image. I am endowed with reason and suited to communion with God, man, and creation.” (Kalos Classical’s Catechism)

• “There was a special teacher for each of the three stages- primary, secondary and higher- of literary education: after the primary-school teacher- ‘grammatist’- came the ‘grammarian’- who in his turn was succeeded by the ‘rhetor.’’ (H. I. Marrou, Education in Antiquity)

• “Trying to abstract the skill of each liberal art from its accompanying content and form is to deface it. We believe each art is an irreducible well-worn path (vium) that will allow students not only to acquire the skill and content, but to be initiated into the Western tradition. Because the liberal arts require an imitative foundation, they can only come after the establishment of piety and the musical and gymnastic training.” (Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition)

• “You see why ‘liberal studies’ are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman. But there is only one really liberal study,—that which gives a man his liberty. It is the study of wisdom, and that is lofty, brave, and great-souled. All other studies are puny and puerile.” (Seneca, “On Liberal and Vocational Studies”)

Resources

• The Circe Institute’s Definition of Terms

• In The Trenches podcast

In this episode, we continue to look at what a Musical Education looks like and how the poetic mode of learning is how we enflesh this education in wonder.

Books

• Poetic Knowledge by James Taylor

• Restoration of Christian Culture by John Senior

• Iris in Exile by Dennis Quinn

Quotes

• “I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”
  (C. S. Lewis, “Meditations in a Toolshed”)

• “Without direct experience of reality and the love of it, you put (students) into a Great Books course (and) you turn out smart, disputatious types with little real content to their agile arguments.” (John Senior, Restoration of Christian Culture)

• “‘Wonder is that passion that arises from consciousness of ignorance.’ This consciousness leads to the seeking of knowledge of things in their causes.” (Dennis Quinn, Iris in Exile)

• “Richard of St. Victor, a spiritual master of the middle ages, says in a cryptic Latin phrase, Ubi amor ibi oculus–’wherever love is, there the eye is also,’ which means that the lover is the only one who really sees the truth about the person or the thing he loves.” (John Senior, Restoration of Christian Culture)

• “Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)

Resources

• Essay: “Meditations in a Toolshed”

• Article: The Children’s Tradition Does Not Teach Subjects

• Senior and Quinn Talk: Good Books for Children ten video series on Youtube

• The Children’s Tradition (Beta) Curriculum

• TCT’s Private Social Network: The Toolshed

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Welcome to Episode 8 of Wonder Tales where we are joined for the first time by a special guest! The delightful Emelie Thomas of the Sacramental Stories Substack reads our fairy tale for us, and then we have a wonderful conversation about how the prince was converted by the conquering power of Love. As we journey with him through the story, our souls are inspired to, “Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you.” (Matt 6:33)

Books

Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang

Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich

Quotes

“Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in'; aim at earth and you will get neither.” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

“Also in this revelation He showed a little thing,
The size of a hazel nut
In the palm of my hand,
And it was as round as a ball.
I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought:
‘What can this be?’
And it was generally answered thus: ‘It is all that is made.’
I marveled how it could continue,
Because it seemed to me it could suddenly have sunk into nothingness because of its littleness.
And I was answered in my understanding:
‘It continueth and always shall, because God loveth it;
And in this way everything hath its being by the love of God.’
In this little thing I saw three characteristics:
The first is that God made it,
The second is that God loves it,
The third, that God keeps it.” (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love)

“It is necessary for us to have awareness
of the littleness of created things
and to set at naught everything that is created,
in order to love and have God who is uncreated.
For this is the reason why we are not fully at ease in heart and soul:
because here we seek rest in these things that are so little,
In which there is no rest,
and we recognize not our God who is all powerful, all wise, all good, for He is the true rest.
God wishes to be known, 
and He delights that we remain in Him,
because all that is less than He is not enough for us.
And this is the reason why no soul is at rest
until it is emptied of everything that is created.
When the soul is willingly emptied for love
in order to have Him who is all,
then it is able to receive spiritual rest.” (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love)

Welcome to Episode 7 of Wonder Tales where we look at the strangest story I’ve told so far. It is the tale of a woman’s daughter, a Rabbit who steals her away, and the effort she makes to return home to her mother’s arms. This story is full of strangeness, but it also contains deep truths that are ours for the searching out!

Minutes

00:00 - 2:30 A reading of “The Rabbit’s Bride” from Household Stories from the Brother’s Grimm

2:30 - 12:00 Interpretation of the Symbols and Themes

Books

The Holy Bible, KJV

In this episode we look at Musical Education, where wonder tunes students souls to perceive truth, sense goodness, and move towards beauty.

Books

• Plato’s Republic

• The Liberal Arts Tradition by Kevin Clarke and Ravi Jain

• Awakening Wonder by Stephen Turley

• Metaphysics by Aristotle

• School Education by Charlotte Mason

Quotes

• “Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated, ungraceful… He who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art or nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.” (Plato, The Republic)

• “Making men with chests, to use Lewis’s metaphor, is the primary business of education in the earliest years.” (Kevin Clarke and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition)

• “Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria reshaped the Pythagorean concept of the music of the spheres by presenting Christ as ‘the minstrel who imparts harmony to the universe and makes music to God.’ The symphony of the cosmos is in fact Christ, the Logos, in whom all things hold together.”(Stephen Turley, Awakening Wonder)

• “In The Laws, Plato’s spokesman says, ‘Shall we begin then, with the acknowledgement that education is first given through Apollo and the Muses?’ The Muses are the deities of poetry, music, dance, history, and astronomy. They introduce the young to reality through delight. It is a total education including the heart, the memory and passions and imagination as well as the body and intelligence. The nursery rhyme and fairy tale first present the phenomena of nature to the child. ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ is a Musical (with a capital ‘M’) introduction to astronomy that includes some primary observations of the heavenly phenomena and stirs the appropriate human emotion wonder. Now it is precisely this emotion that provides the motivating energy of education.” (Dennis Quinn, “Education by the Muses”)

• “Philosophy begins with wonder.” (Aristotle, Metaphysics)

• “We hold that all education is divine, that every good gift of knowledge and insight comes from above, that the Lord the Holy Spirit is the supreme educator of mankind, and that the culmination of all education (which may, at the same time, be reached by a little child) is that personal knowledge of and intimacy with God in which our being finds its fullest perfection.” (Charlotte Mason, School Education)

• “The songs we sing, the stories we read, and the art we make and admire form our souls. They go directly to the heart and fasten mightily upon them, making one the friend of reason. Musical education is soul-craft: carried out properly it tunes the soul, and makes one receptive to truth and goodness.” (Kevin Clarke and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition)

• “Imagine the possibility of thinking of these areas of the curriculum as musical education rather than the ‘grammar of…’ History would not be so many facts to memorize, however creatively we do it, but an opportunity to use stories from the past to build up a child’s moral imagination- a possibility that instantly unlocks the significance of ancient historians. Literature as musical education would resist the modern encroachment of critical reading in order to awaken the same imagination. Science as musical education has perhaps the greatest potential of all especially in our context. Imagine if the foundations for all future science were a wonder and awe of God’s creation and sympathetic love of the created world. What might later scientific inquiry look like?”  (Kevin Clarke and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition)

“The Music of the Spheres” 
by Charles Nevers Holmes  

How angelic is the music
From an organ's mighty throat,
Or a song by human voices,
Or a harp’s harmonic note;
How melodious the music
In the wide world out of door.
Of a skylark or a brooklet, 
Or the surf upon the shore.

And philosophers once told us,
In an epoch long gone by, 
Of sublime celestial music
From the spheres within the sky;
Though our firmament is silent
Over land and over sea,
Suns and worlds unite together
In symphonic harmony.

Were our ears attuned to hear it.
Ah! What music would arise 
From the stars amid Orion 
To the universal skies!
Underneath God's spangled heavens,
Which have neither depth nor years.
We might hearken, soul enchanted,
To the chorus of the spheres.

Resources

• The Children’s Tradition

• “Education by the Muses” by Dennis Quinn 

• The 9 Muses of Greek Mythology

• Ask Andrew podcast

Welcome to Episode 6 of Wonder Tales where we look at this gut-wrenchingly beautiful story that teaches us about the redemptive arc of suffering and the power of Beauty to see us through it. Most people have never heard the original, complete “Ugly Duckling” fairy tale since every picture book version adapts and abridge it, leaving essential details and themes out. This is an episode you don’t want to miss, and you just might want to keep a tissue nearby!

Minutes

00:00 - 18:20 A reading of “The Ugly Duckling” from Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

18:20 - 38:45

Interpretation of the Symbols and Themes

Books

The Holy Bible, KJV

Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

Tending the Heart of the Virtue by Vigen Guroian

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

Welcome to Episode 5 of Wonder Tales where we hear about a chosen princess who fell under a curse of death but was ultimately rescued in the fullness of time by her Prince whose presence turned the thorns of her bondage into a garden of redemption as he rescued her from the dark enchantment that had overtaken her world. 

Minutes

00:00 - 6:55 A reading of “Briar Rose” from Grimm's Household Tales, Vol. 1: With the Author's Notes

6:55 - 22:31 Interpretation of the Symbols and Themes

Books

The Holy Bible, KJV

Grimm's Household Tales, Vol. 1: With the Author's Notes, Introduction by Andrew Lang

Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile

The Complete Fairy Tales by Charles Perrault