A new generation of parents has arrived, people who love their children more visibly, more anxiously, and more attentively than perhaps any generation before them. They read the books, they watch for the warning signs, and they would lay down almost anything for the good of the child in front of them. Yet many of these same parents struggle to tell the difference between play and scholé, or between protecting a child from cruelty and protecting a child from difficulty. These are not the same acts of love. One forms a soul while the other, however tenderly intended, can quietly deform it.

The Confusion of Our Age

Scholé, the Greek word behind our English word school, originally meant leisure. But this wasn’t the leisure of idle hands. It meant unhurried, purposeful engagement with something worth doing for its own sake, like a walk taken to think or a poem read aloud because it is beautiful. Play, when we understand it correctly, belongs to this category. It is ordered, it is free, and it is good. What many well-meaning parents offer their children today is ease, the removal of anything that costs effort or produces discomfort. Ease is not scholé; ease asks nothing of the soul and therefore forms nothing in it. A childhood spent avoiding every hard thing does not produce a restful, well-ordered person. Instead, it produces someone who has never practiced enduring what is difficult and who will meet the first real hardship of adult life with no muscle built for it at all.

Sacred Toil, Not Cruelty

Scripture does not treat labor and difficulty as accidents to be engineered away. After the fall, God tells Adam of the inherent necessity of laboring to survive (Genesis 3:19). While this is spoken as a consequence, the church has long recognized that the toil itself, once submitted to God, becomes a place of formation rather than punishment. Paul names longsuffering directly as a fruit, listing it among the fruit of the spirit (Galatians 5:22), alongside love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance. Work that costs something is not evidence that God has abandoned the task; it is often the very shape the task takes. Aristotle advanced the notion in the Nicomachean Ethics, that virtue of character, does not arise in us by nature. It comes by habituation, by doing the hard, repeated thing until it becomes who we are. The order in which a young person is trained in this practice is of great importance, fundamentally shaping their entire character. He offers no shortcut around this because virtue is inseparable from the repeated cost of acquiring it.

Also, we learn from C.S. Lewis what happens when a generation is spared this cost entirely. An education that trains the intellect while never asking the affections to be stretched, disciplined, or tested produces individuals who lack the moral core and spirited conviction required to manifest true excellence and initiative. As Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” If children are never required to struggle with a difficult text or memorize complex material, they will reach adulthood wanting to be successful, but they will lack the discipline needed to maintain that virtue.

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Homework as a Case Study

Homework has become, in many households, the flashpoint where this confusion plays out nightly. Parents reasonably ask why a young child should carry the school day home at all. The answer is not that homework must be long, daunting, or punitive, and it is not meant to introduce anything new the child has not already been taught. Homework exists to reinforce a concept the classroom has already covered, and in doing so it quietly serves a second purpose, giving a parent a nightly window into whether a child is actually grasping that concept at the pace it is being taught, or only appearing to.

This is exactly where the confusion this essay is naming tends to surface. When a parent sits down beside a child who cannot finish the assignment, the temptation runs in two directions, and both miss the mark. One is to direct the frustration outward, at the teacher, as though a hard assignment were evidence of a school making life needlessly difficult for the child. The other is to direct it inward, at the child, as though struggle were proof of laziness or of a child merely playing at school rather than learning. Neither response serves anyone. The parent’s actual task in that moment is neither to blame nor to rescue, but to sit inside the difficulty alongside the child and encourage the very perseverance and endurance this essay has been describing all along, to help a child suffer well rather than to remove the suffering or condemn the one enduring it.

If a child has genuinely tried, and tried again, and still cannot grasp the concept, the partnership between home and school has a proper next step, and it is neither silence nor blame. A short note to the teacher, telling the teacher plainly that the child struggled despite real effort, is not an admission of failure on anyone’s part. It is the co-laboring this essay keeps returning to, working as it should. In almost every case, a teacher who receives such a note will reteach the concept because the goal on both sides of that partnership was never to punish the struggle but to notice it and respond to it together.

An evening of academic struggle does not always originate from a genuine cognitive barrier, and the discerning parent must recognize that differing roots require distinct responses. When the obstacle is simple defiance, the remedy is not further instruction but a boundary maintained with quiet resolve; the task remains to be completed, as scheduled, without the erosion of lectures or bargaining, for here the formation is of the will rather than the intellect. Apathy, by contrast, necessitates a concise reminder of the labor’s inherent value, paired with an immovable standard, as the child who has withdrawn their care must find that the duty persists even when their enthusiasm does not. However, genuine exhaustion invites tender accommodation rather than rigid firmness; a curtailed session or an earlier rest acknowledges that physical fatigue is a biological reality rather than a defect of character. The wisdom required of the parent is not the application of a singular rule, but the subtle judgment to distinguish these conditions, for to treat rebellion with softness, or weariness with severity, misdirects the soul’s training at every turn.

Charlotte Mason put the underlying principle as plainly as it can be put: “the formation of habits is education, and education is the formation of habits.” A short, consistent homework habit, returned to each evening regardless of mood or convenience, does something a longer but sporadic assignment never could. It teaches a child that difficulty does not excuse itself because the school day has ended, and it teaches a parent to sit beside that difficulty rather than rescue the child from it or resent the one who assigned it. This, far more than the content of any single worksheet, is homework’s real purpose. It is training in showing up for the hard thing, and in showing up for each other, in the smallest possible dose, every single day.

Beyond Homework: The Whole Curriculum as a Training Ground

Homework is only the most visible instance of a much larger pattern, which is the entire architecture of a classical education. A child who reads a genuinely difficult text, rather than one pre-chewed for easy comprehension, is practicing forbearance. A child asked to retell what she has read in her own words, rather than simply recognize the right answer among four choices, is also practicing forbearance. Whether a child is annotating a dense page, reciting fifty lines of poetry from memory (as in Paul Revere’s Ride), declining a Latin noun through five cases for the tenth time, or working through a math algorithm that refuses to resolve on the first attempt, they are doing the same work. None of it is cruelty, rather, it is sacred toil because a soul does not learn to bear weight by never being asked to carry any.

Dorothy Sayers championed deliberate difficulty in memory work, yet she never advocated for drudgery as an end in itself. We memorize seemingly dry details, like historical dates, because the mental peg must be firmly set before any weight of significance can hang from it; as she noted, the goal is “to teach men how to learn for themselves.” Modern classical education softens the austerity of such memorization by anchoring it in song, chant, and motion. When a psalm is sung, a Latin declension clapped to rhythm, or a math fact paired with physical movement, the effort of memorization remains, but it is transformed. The work is still work, yet it shifts from drudgery into something bordering on delight, a labor so genuinely engaging that children often return to it by choice.

The minimal presence of screens in these classrooms follows a similar logic of replacement rather than subtraction. While technology is not inherently evil, its design prioritizes instant gratification, subtly conditioning children to seek escape the moment a task becomes arduous. Choosing a chant over a screen is not a preference for silence over joy; it is the reclamation of an older, communal delight. It is a joy built by navigating difficulty together rather than avoiding it in isolation, and it is this very practice of embodied, joyful endurance that cultivates the conditions where true forbearance takes root.

The Ordered Love Behind the Rigor

Augustine wrote that a brief but true definition of virtue is the proper prioritization of what we value, which means loving each thing in its proper measure and place. He summarized this pursuit by writing, “Virtue is nothing else than perfect love of God.” A parent’s love for a child’s present comfort is not a false love. But when that love is placed above the child’s long-term formation, it has slipped out of its proper order. Rightly ordered love does not spare a child every cost. It counts the cost and pays it anyway because it loves the child’s future more than it fears the child’s present frustration.

Apostle Paul told the Corinthian church to do all things decently and in order (1 Corinthians 14:40), and the same charge applies to the raising of a child. Structure, moral uprightness, and the daily discipline of hard books and harder recitations are not obstacles to a flourishing childhood. They are its scaffolding, and the promise held out to the child who learns to bear this weight is not just survival. In Colossians 1:11, Paul prays that believers would be ‘strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness.’ This is an endurance that does not merely grit its teeth, but learns, over years of small faithful toil, to hold joy and hardship in the same hand.

This is the mercy hidden inside classical education’s rigor. We are not asking children to suffer because we are indifferent to their comfort, and we are not claiming that suffering is somehow good in itself. Scripture never asks us to worship hardship for its own sake. It asks us to notice what hardship produces when it is met rightly. Paul tells the Romans that tribulation worketh patience, and patience, experience, and experience, hope (Romans 5:3-4), a chain of fruit that begins in discomfort and ends in something sturdy enough to hold a whole life together. This is what we are actually asking of our children when we ask them to suffer well, in small, supervised, faithful doses. Not suffering as an end, but suffering as a seed, borne now, in the safety of a classroom and a parent’s watchful presence, so that it yields a harvest of endurance, humility, and hope no shortcut could ever produce. This is why we teach children to suffer well, so that when the larger, less supervised sufferings of adult life arrive, as they always do, our children will meet them already practiced, already strengthened, and already equipped to turn hardship into the very fruit that sets a life up for lasting success.

References

• The Holy Bible, King James Version. Genesis 3:19.

• The Holy Bible, King James Version. 1 Corinthians 14:40.

• The Holy Bible, King James Version. Colossians 1:11.

• The Holy Bible, King James Version. Romans 5:3-4.

• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics.

• Augustine. City of God.

• Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man.

• Mason, Charlotte. Home Education.

• Sayers, Dorothy. The Lost Tools of Learning.

“What in the world does classical Christian education have to do with Africa? What Africans really need is training in farming. All I see on the news are famines across Africa. They need to learn to feed themselves. In other words, why doesn’t someone teach them how to fish instead of just giving them fish?”

While talking with friends at a wedding recently, someone asked me about the Rafiki Foundation’s work in ten African countries. I explained that we were teaching the Bible and offering classical Christian education, and that is when I got the farming question.

It is not a bad question. In fact, it is one that has been debated for years, not just in Africa, but since the time of the ancient philosophers. Just give people, especially materially poor people, the basics. Give them skills, technical training, or the trades so they can earn a living. Isn’t that what education is for?

In Africa, the Rafiki Foundation is providing classical Christian education in ten countries, and it is working. We think all humanity deserves something more than an education that simply prepares them for a test or job.

We believe Classical Christian Education (CCE) is the best education for any human being, across any culture, because it aims to cultivate wisdom and virtue. This aim of education does more than equip one to make a living, it enables one to have a satisfying and purposeful life. Classical Christian Education does more than help you learn one thing; it equips you to learn to do anything.

What Africa needs now is more than just training in farming or coding, that is the kind of education it has received since the early twentieth century. An education in the Christian liberal arts, however, has not been tried on a grand scale in Africa. This is what the Rafiki Foundation is doing.

Why does this work for Africa?

CCE works in Africa because for over 2,000 years it was the education of the church. From Augustine to Aquinas, from Calvin to Luther, and even into the nineteenth century, CCE formed the minds and hearts of Christians. Africa has over 600 million professing Christians. Why not give them the established education of the church, connecting them to and unifying them through the historic Christian faith and traditions? This is not to make African Christians European in their expressions of worship or customs, but to ground them in theology and history, allowing for cultural variety while remaining true to the basic doctrines of the faith.

Secondly, Classical Christian education works in Africa because it is a far better fit for African culture than the progressive education model that has been the standard of education since the early twentieth century. CCE resonates more with African culture and its traditional forms of education in three areas: community, authority, and history.

In many African communities, the child is not in charge—the elders are. Certainly, the child is valued and schooled in the culture and traditions of the community, but they do not determine culture and traditions; it is the elders who preserve and pass on culture, traditions, and history. That, too, is the mindset of classical Christian education: the privileging of community over rampant individualism. In many African countries and among the thousands of ethnic groups, there is a strong sense of community. Classical Christian education certainly develops the individual’s gifts and character, but it also fosters a strong sense of community while engaging in the great conversation through the great works of the centuries—works infused with the true, the good, and the beautiful, and which create a meaningful, shared history.

Finally, CCE is for Africa because it is the education of free men. With the desire among many Africans for true democratic governance, the best way to preserve and strengthen democracy is to embrace the education that gave rise to democracies in the first place. The liberal arts are designed to equip and free people to think for themselves and participate in democratic societies. We need thinking men and women of wisdom and virtue to preserve and protect a democracy.

So how is it working in Africa?

Classical Christian education is the best choice for Africa because it teaches people not only how to fish, but how to do more with the fish caught.

The Rafiki Foundation operates model classical Christian schools in ten African countries. Established in 1985 to bring Bible study and help people raise their standard of living, Rafiki has concentrated its work in these ten countries. Within each of these ten countries sits a 50-acre bustling campus comprised of a fully established children’s home, a PreK–12 classical Christian school, and in seven of our ten campuses is a teacher’s college. With these resources and institutions, Rafiki is not only helping 5,000 African students and staff cultivate wisdom and virtue but is also poised to equip a thousand African church schools to do the same.

Rafiki has developed an international-level classical Christian curriculum and three-year teacher’s college courses for the purpose of providing this education not only within the ten countries Rafiki Villages exist, but also for the thousands of church schools across Africa. The material has been field-tested for over 20 years with African PreK-12 grade students and African teachers and, by initial local measures, it is providing an excellent education for young people in the Christian liberal arts. Graduates have performed well on national exams and qualified for tertiary education at rates well above the national averages. In many of these countries, the national pass rate on exams is around 50 percent, whereas Rafiki students have a 95 percent pass rate.

While it is too early to have statistically measurable evidence of long-term outcomes, there are very promising results. Hundreds of Rafiki high school graduates have gone to university, and now dozens are graduating from university and entering a variety of professions and vocations. Most have a sound faith in Jesus Christ, as evidenced by their lifestyle and participation in local churches; Rafiki college students often host Bible studies in their university dormitories. University graduates are entering influential fields—we have young women who are now engineers, young men who are lawyers, and a half-dozen students entering the medical field to become doctors or nurses.

Our school days resemble those of classical Christian schools in the United States in many respects. One U.S.-based classical Christian education leader visited Rafiki schools in Africa and afterwards reflected saying he would gladly put his child in one of our schools. Here is an example of a day in a Rafiki classical Christian school:

“You would see children in grade one learning phonics, grade three being introduced to writing and rhetoric, grade eight making pyramids in history class and later in the day studying formal logic, grade ten learning about famous scientists during biology class, grade eleven reading Much Ado About Nothing, and grade twelve finishing their two-year course in rhetoric.”

Three other distinctives of Rafiki’s CCE model in Africa should also be recognized. First, not only are African students experiencing this feast of an education, but they are also being exposed to the common arts by which they can support themselves. In addition, a thorough study of the Bible takes precedent, and all students study the Bible as the first class of the day. Lastly, we ensure Rafiki students receive formal instruction in a local African language, study African history, art, and literature, and retain the true, the good, and the beautiful of their cultural traditions.

Yes, by God’s grace, this education can prepare men and women to be farmers and financiers, carpenters and corporate leaders, businessmen and businesswomen, and Bible teachers. The vision is altering the African continent—a multitude of godly contributors who continue to develop the true, good, and beautiful in ways unique to their cultures and lead future generations to do the same. This is what Africa needs.

Submitted by:

Karen J. Elliott, Executive Director, Rafiki Foundation, Inc.

You can also find out more at the Rafiki Foundation website:

Home - Rafiki

And podcast: Episode 29: Cultivating Classi… - The Rafiki Foundation - Apple Podcasts

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Sometimes the history of a word sheds light on its meaning, and sometimes it doesn’t—but it can still be entertaining.

The Latin word scio means “I know,” and its noun form is scientia (”knowledge” or “something known”). From scientia we derive our word science. Our word conscience literally means “with knowledge.”

The Latin word nescio is a combination of ne (”not”) and scio (”I know”), so it literally means “I do not know” or “I am ignorant.” I find it amusing that our word nice is ultimately derived from nescio. How can that be?

Today we might admire a new computer purchased by a friend and simply say, “Nice!” We mean that the computer is attractive, well made, or of good quality. But the Latin root pointed instead toward ignorance. How, then, did our word nice come to suggest approval?

Well, in some uses it still carries a hint of its older meaning.

Imagine a five-year-old boy enthusiastically explaining that he is going to work on his scooter until it flies. Then he will fly to Grandpa’s house, bring Grandpa back on the flying scooter, and together they will slay the two dragons living in the backyard with his saber sword...

“That’s nice, Johnny,” we say.

Or after another wonderfully imaginative story:

“Isn’t that nice, Susan?”

Sometimes calling an eleven-year-old “a nice girl” is not entirely a compliment.

The history of other words can be even more illuminating—sometimes even profound. Consider two ancient words for man.

The Greek word is anthrōpos. We recognize it in anthropology, and even in the name of the AI company Anthropic. Can artificial intelligence mimic the truly human? Apparently Anthropic thinks so. You may also recognize anthrōpos in misanthrope, someone who hates people, and philanthropist, someone who loves people enough to be generous with his money.

Traditionally, anthrōpos has been understood to mean “the one who turns upward” or “the turned-up one.” The explanation is that ana means “up” or “upward,” while tropos means “turned” (think of our word trope). Whether or not this is the word’s precise historical origin, it beautifully captures an enduring truth. To the Greek mind, the human being is the creature who turns his face toward the heavens, wondering about his origin, contemplating the stars, and asking questions about ultimate cause, purpose, and meaning.

By contrast—and as a complement—the Latin word for man is homo, which is closely related to humus, meaning “earth” or “soil.” The human is made from the humus and walks upon it.

The Greeks remind us that we are meant to wonder at the heavens. The Romans remind us that we are also meant to cultivate and walk the earth. We are simultaneously like the angels, gazing upward, and like the animals, treading the ground. We possess a capacity for the transcendent even as we remain rooted in the earth.

This harmonizes with what Scripture teaches about human nature. We naturally worship and seek God. We naturally make our homes upon the earth and love the places in which we live. Yet we are also possessed by a longing for something more—something beyond this world and beyond this life.

Any good education will take these twin realities into account so that our study of history, literature, and even science becomes genuinely anthropological and deeply humane.

That would be...nice.

In Pixar’s futuristic film, Wall-E, humans have survived on spaceships where all their needs are supplied. They are entertained and fed, but have no work to complete, no mental or physical challenges to overcome. Their bodies have become so flabby that they have lost their ability to walk and are instead carted around on luxury hovering chairs. As the film progresses, it comes to light that an hostile artificial intelligence has devised the distraction of humanity in order to further its own evil purposes. Eventually, the humans arrive at a crisis of decision: Either remain immobile and fat, being entertained until they die in space, or once again become adventurous and independent, working with their own hands to live again on earth.

Wall-E was released in 2008, but it speaks directly to our current AI-problems. Generative AI has developed so much that many people think that the difficult task of writing can now be taken care of by machines. We can be freed from the hard work of thinking and sharing our ideas with others. We can live our lives entertained.

Therefore, we also stand at a crossroads.

Mentally, at least, we could become like the spaceship-bound humans, content to let the machines run our lives and do our thinking for us. Of course, we run the risk that our minds would resemble the physical bodies of humanity in Wall-E—flabby and not good for much!

Or we could follow the wisdom of the past, becoming writers who can organize our thoughts, evaluate ideas, make arguments, and tell a good story.

Classical schools have already decided for the latter path. They insist that we develop our minds to become independent thinkers. They believe that writing—along with speaking, reading, and mathematics—are the activities that develop the mind most reliably and most profoundly.

Writing is at least three things: 1) thinking, 2) therapy, and 3) thwarting manipulation. These three things benefit our children and cause them to grow into flourishing human beings.

1) Writing is thinking! It crystalizes our thinking. In other words, the written word is to our thinking like nice clothing is to our physical appearance: it brings out the best in us. If writing is thinking, then when we put our thoughts down on paper, guided by our teachers, we gradually gain a powerful mind.

2) Writing is also therapy. The word therapy comes from a Greek word that means healing.

Psychological research has shown that writing benefits our past, our present, and our future. It benefits our past because it helps us make sense of our difficulties. Those who have gone through a traumatic experience, for instance, heal faster if they write out what they went through. Our present benefits from writing include sorting out our jumbled up thoughts and emotions. Future benefits can derive from, for instance, goal setting in writing. Those who set goals in writing do better than those who merely have goals in their minds.

Classical education never needed modern psychological findings, though, to know that an emphasis on writing would produce good thinkers. If we produce good thinkers, we produce competent, influential, and alive human beings.

3) Writing thwarts manipulation.

Becoming strong in mind through writing keeps us free because we are less able to be manipulated by others. When we learn how to use persuasive ways of writing, we can recognize it when others use the same techniques on us.

Writing helps us get our own ideas just right. In the process of writing, we become aware of how it sounds and feels when we communicate sloppily. Therefore, it also helps us detect when the thoughts of others are sloppy. But if we don’t know how to write effectively, we are much more easily taken in.

Those who learn to write excellently will inevitably lead those who do not.

Let’s leave AI to specific applications that can save time. We can’t let AI run our kids’ minds, or else we’ll be dooming them to intellectual unfitness. They could become as inept in mind as the humans in Wall-E were physically.

Alternatively, we could give them a classical education. Classical schools will offer our kids vigorous exercise in writing. As a result, our children’s minds will resemble the bodies of professional athletes, ready to engage the intellectual battles of their time as well as the everyday challenges of friendship, family life, and fluid markets.

Because classical schools embrace the time intensive task of regular writing instruction, students who receive this gift will grow and be free rather than flabby. They will be enabled to bring order and beauty into the world.

By Joelle Hodge, MAT

My husband and I were married in the summer of 1997. I was 21; Brian was 22. Like most young couples, we had plenty to learn—not just about each other, but about how to disagree.

And we disagreed.

If I’m honest, Brian probably “won” more arguments in those early years. Not because he was right (I’m still comfortable saying I was right a good 90% of the time), but because he had something I didn’t: composure.

I, on the other hand, had… Italian intensity.

When something upset me, I shifted gears quickly (faster speech, louder volume, sharper tone, lots of hand gesturing). You’ve seen it before. With that shift came more emotion and less reason. And Brian learned something important: if he simply waited me out, I would eventually calm down, and then apologize.

It was a terrible pattern.

Not only did I feel like I was right, but I was also the one apologizing at the end of every disagreement. I was undermining my own case. He didn’t have to out-argue me; he just had to outlast me.

That dynamic continued until something changed. Not in Brian, but in me.

In 2001, a few colleagues and I started Classical Academic Press. One of our first projects was to create a new logic curriculum. Alongside my co-author, Aaron Larsen, I began working on what would become The Art of Argument, a book on informal fallacies.

If you ever ask my husband what he remembers about that season of my life, he’ll tell you: “That’s when everything changed.”

He’s right. What changed wasn’t just that I learned logic. I had studied logic before, in college. But it had stayed theoretical; something to understand, not something to use.

This time was different. In the process of writing a curriculum designed for real application, I had to internalize the material. I had to learn not just what the fallacies were, but how they showed up in everyday life; how people evade, distort, exaggerate, and misrepresent arguments. Including me. I began to see my own habits more clearly. And I began to change them.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that logic forces us to confront: most of us are not nearly as good at reasoning as we think we are.

Aristotelian logic makes this plain. There are 256 possible ways to structure a categorical syllogism. (A syllogism is just a simple three-part argument with two premises and a conclusion.) Out of those 256 combinations, only 19 are valid.

That means if you’re just “winging it,” you have about a 7% chance of constructing a sound argument.

Seven percent.

And yet most of us walk into conversations (especially disagreements) assuming our reasoning is solid.

It isn’t. Not consistently. Not without training.

That was certainly true for me.

In my early years of marriage, I wasn’t losing arguments because I was wrong. I was losing them because I lacked the tools to reason well and to express that reasoning clearly. Without those tools, I defaulted to emotion. And emotion, even when justified, is a poor strategy for persuasion.

Learning logic gave me something I didn’t have before: a vocabulary and a framework.

It taught me how to identify weak arguments; both my own and others’. It trained me to slow down, to listen carefully, to distinguish between what feels persuasive and what actually is persuasive. It gave me the ability to make my case without relying on volume, intensity, or frustration.

In other words, it made disagreement more productive, and far less destructive.

This is why the study of logic matters. Not because it makes students better test-takers or sharper debaters (though it does both), but because it forms people who can engage in meaningful, rational, and respectful communication.

Every relationship depends on that.

Without logic, disagreements tend to devolve into one of two things: emotional escalation or quiet avoidance. Neither leads to clarity. Neither leads to growth. And neither strengthens a relationship.

But when both parties are equipped (even just a little bit) with the habits of sound reasoning, something different becomes possible. Disagreement becomes an opportunity to pursue truth together, rather than a contest of endurance or emotion.

This is especially important for parents to consider.

Our children are growing up in a world where emotional reaction is often modeled more prominently than careful reasoning. They are absorbing patterns of communication from social media, news outlets, and peer interactions that frequently reward speed, intensity, and certainty over patience, clarity, and truth.

If we want something different for our children, we have to give them something different.

A course in logic is not an academic luxury. It is a practical necessity for anyone who values clear thinking and healthy relationships. And it’s not just for students. Parents benefit just as much (perhaps more) from learning these habits.

It is never too late to begin.

As I was drafting this article, Brian walked into the room and asked what I was working on. I told him I was writing about how learning logic changed our marriage.

He laughed. Then he said, with a hint of nostalgia, “I remember when I used to win all the arguments.”

Those days are gone. And our marriage is better for it.

Joelle (Jolie) Hodge is President of Classical Academic Press and co-author of two logic textbooks, The Art of Argument and The Discovery of Deduction. She also serves on the CLT Academic Advisory Board and teaches Applied Ethics as an adjunct professor in Messiah University’s Honors College, where she explores the nature of the good life with her students.

Jolie holds a Bachelor of Arts from Messiah College and a Master of Arts in Teaching in Classical Education from the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. She has spent more than twenty years working in the renewal of classical education through publishing, teaching, and leadership. Prior to finding her professional home in classical education in 1999, she began her career as a staffer to US Senator Arlen Specter.

She and her husband, Brian, have one daughter, Anna. As a family, they enjoy making art, water sports, and keeping up with their lively Golden Retrievers.

By Andrew Selby, PhD

On Becoming a Deep Person

Have you ever been at a work meeting or a family gathering when a crisis arose? Or maybe a gathering where people were processing a difficult and unexpected situation? What about at the office a day after a scandal has broken? When chaos breaks out, we want someone to walk confidently and unsurprised into the room and offer advice calmly on a way forward.

In my life, that person was my dad. Whenever I was faced with some kind of trouble and uncertainty, I knew that when I turned to him, he would have meaningful, reliable advice. There wasn’t much in life that surprised him. Whether I asked him about parenting, finances, or personal conflict, he was ready to share words of wisdom that illuminated the situation.

In short, the kind of people we look for in times of distress and anxiety—people like my dad—are deep people.

What do I mean by a deep person? Deep people combine knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. They have knowledge, which means that they are acquainted with learning in a number of areas. You could ask a deep person, “What are you reading right now?” and it would be sure to start an interesting conversation. Deep people also possess understanding; they know the principles of things. They have thoughtful responses to questions like “Who is God?”, “What are human beings?”, and “What does the good life look like?” Because they are rooted in principles, they aren’t easily pushed around by others. They know who they are and what they think. They perceive people’s motivations, so behavior that appears erratic to us mere mortals appears as part of a pattern to them. Finally, deep people have wisdom, which is defined as the effective application of understanding to everyday life. They have practiced living out their understanding. They do the right thing on a regular basis and thus have self-control and patience, and know that good things require hard work and delayed gratification.

Possessing these strong attributes, deep people are sought out. They are the rare persons who instill confidence in everyone else. When they walk into a room full of tumultuous thoughts and emotions, everyone utters a sigh of relief and says, “Oh, I’m so glad _______ is here. Now we’ll know what to do.”

We want our kids to grow up to be deep people, don’t we? I would love for my own sons and daughter to be pillars like this in their homes, churches, and communities. I would feel so proud if others sought them out for advice. I want them to become anchors for their communities when the sea of tough times rages around them.

And that’s why I’m glad my own children are at a classical Christian school. The education offered there forms deep people. Hardly any schools have the goal: “produce deep people.” But I’m so pleased that our school does pursue such a goal.

How does a school go about forming deep people?

First, students have to have great teachers who are deep themselves. The old saying is true: you can’t give what you don’t have. The process of creating depth of character starts with a faculty who spends time trying to grasp the principles of things. I learn from the other teachers at my school all the time in our trainings and discussion groups—the ones that happen formally through professional development, but even more in our reading groups that happen just for fun. My colleagues are always learning.

Next, we don’t just rely on ourselves to help our students see the profound truths about who God is, who human beings are, and what it takes to live a good life. We trust the Great Books to do that. These are books that have survived over time because wise readers found them sources of insight and inspiration from generation to generation. Above all, we rely on the Holy Scriptures. We dedicate time to careful study of the Scriptures in Bible classes, but the Bible—or at least Biblical wisdom—pops up in every class. By helping our students think the thoughts of Moses or David or the Apostle Paul or our Lord Jesus, we give them a great opportunity to become deep. Our reading of the other classics that have formed Western civilization has a similar shaping effect.

It’s hard to overemphasize how important reading is. That’s why classical schools are almost exclusively low-tech on purpose. When I consider why my dad so often had wisdom to dispense, I know it was because he was a reading man. He dedicated years of his life to studying the Bible in seminary and on a daily basis. He also read widely in literature, philosophy, and history, and he even studied core texts in mathematics and science. A person well-read in the Great Books will gain lifetimes of wisdom as they meditate on the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Milton, and C.S. Lewis.

Finally, in addition to the great authors that students learn from and the great teachers who guide them, they also spend time in discussion with one another, helping each other come to truth in community. While they may not have much wisdom to glean from each other yet, they are building the skills of listening to each other and processing ideas together that will make them wiser as they go through life.

In short, classical Christian schools cultivate deep people. They produce leaders who are rock-solid in a crisis. Through study of the Great Books with great teachers and in community, our students are ready to become the kind of people that others will look to for guidance and answers in an unstable and confusing world.

By Jessica Hooten Wilson, PhD

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We have a problem with reading in the 21^st century.

When we discuss reading as a society, we are not merely talking about a pastime disappearing such as kids no longer collecting baseball cards or playing marbles, we are talking about the loss of access to the treasures of wisdom from our shared tradition. We are—without fully understanding the ins and outs of the reality—lamenting the loss of reading as a loss of virtue in our culture.

Reading affects every part of our society.

If you have government leaders who do not read, what does that mean for how they live their life? Or, what does a culture look like when its artists, entertainers, and producers are not readers? They spin like tops in the current moment, unable to draw from the past and speak into the future. Without what Flannery O’Connor would call prophetic imagination, these artists of the moment cannot make anything worth lasting.

For our purposes, as Christians dedicated to education, what does it mean for schools and churches when a society does not read?

Schooling becomes impossible without reading. A truism in grammar education is that in K-2 grades, children learn how to read, whereas 3^rd grade on is reading to learn. Too many high schools now push students through the system without ever asking them to read books in their entirety. One college president recently dismissed books as passé because Google has access to all the information that you need. These students arrive at college eager to download information into their heads and spew AI-produced material into professors’ inboxes as though that suffices for education.

In churches, once upon a time, we could have said “Christians are readers. [And] We are ‘people of the book,’” but today such a “vision of what it means to follow Christ…falls short,” writes Brad East, arguing that reading has no hold on churchgoers anymore in a postliterate culture.[1] Pastors use AI for sermons. Congregations not only do not read history or philosophy or fiction, but Christians do not read the Bible itself.

We do not look to reading to save us, but can we all acknowledge that a world without reading has become grimmer? That perhaps, just like a world without prayer, a world without faithful Christians fasting and feasting, or a world without art or generosity or music, that a world without reading is a darker one.

Reading as spiritual practice

Instead of pushing reading into the slot of harmless or fun or escapist or whatever, see reading as it is—a spiritual practice. For reading to be a spiritual practice, the activity must be formative. We should be reshaped by grace into Christ-likeness more. How might reading do this?

In reading Scripture, the spiritual practice becomes obvious. When Christians imagine reading nonbiblical literature, the query about spiritual practice becomes more hazy.

First, attention as self-emptying.

Simone Weil, in her reflections on the right use of learning with its end in the love of God, advocates a posture of kenosis or self-emptying before the text before you. When one abandons him/herself of all preconceptions, false ambition, or vain uses of the text before the object, then true attention to it becomes possible.

When we approach books (or math, in Weil’s case) with an objective to use what is before us, then we have lost all possibility of a spiritual practice. It sounds very mystical, but we are describing a mystery that is true. The whole Christian life should be an imitation of Christ, and this process of letting go of one’s agenda before a book and receiving what the book has to give may be a starting place.

This practice of attention aids us in reading in such a way that we will read God, our neighbor, and the world around us better. We will see and imagine better. Our attention has been transformed from consumption or self-seeking to ego-less and altruistic. If we read regularly with this posture, reading itself becomes a spiritual practice.

Second: In addition to attention, reading may be a spiritual practice because it forms in the reader humility, generosity, patience, perseverance, and so many other virtues. To listen to an author rather than yourself for so many pages increases your humility. It decenters the self. To sit before a poem and have no idea what it means increases your humility. To wonder at the beauty of a sentence. To pity a villain because he or she resembles you more than you cared to admit extends generosity to a fictional character that might become practice for you granting that same open-ended care to the person next door.

Third: Reading a book is meeting a person. CS Lewis said that in “Reading great literature I become a thousand persons and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, yet it still I who see.” Our eyes are not enough by which to see the world because we are so limited. Reading gives us the opportunity to walk a while in someone else’s shoes—whether fictional, historical, or even the point of view of a self-help author. We practice loving the book the way we would love our neighbor—tiny exercises in admitting our misunderstanding, our subjective views, our blindness and accepting others’ provision. When we end a book still disagreeing, we can practice that dialogue of civility and courageous stance for truth.

Conclusion

I could go on and on about the benefits of reading—in fact, I have. I’ve written a couple of books on it. I’m an evangelist for reading because I believe that books are a valuable resource for discipleship and forming us into God’s image. I believe that biblical literacy matters for the health of the church and each Christian’s soul. I love to go running and watch Netflix as much as the next American, but when I talk about reading, I am not simply promoting my favorite hobby. And I am not talking about an elitist activity meant for the few. Weil insisted that “Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. The need some light from eternity.”

There is a reason that all dystopias depict a world where books are banned or burned and the people in these apocalyptic universes are enslaved not by chains but by not having access to reading. For the God who created light with a word, for an incarnate Lord who called himself the word and revealed himself in a collection of pages of those words, the enemy is the liar who convinces you to do anything else but attend to words. Reading may not save our souls, but thank God that it was the Word who did. Perhaps we should respond by turning the page.

[1] https://www.bradeast.org/blog/my-latest-biblical-literacy-in-a-postliterate-age-for-ct

Dr. David Diener

What does it mean to say that classical education considers human beings to be philosophical? What does it means to say that human beings are, by nature, philosophers? “Philosophy” can sound like a difficult subject only accessible to a select few who are highly educated. In reality, however, the tradition of classical education recognizes that all people—whether young or old, highly educated or relatively un-educated—are by nature philosophical. In the following I will explain what it means to say that classical education cultivates humans as philosophical beings by first explaining what philosophy is and then exploring two key aspects of doing philosophy: beginning in wonder and pursuing wisdom.

To begin, what is philosophy? If we go back in history, we find that throughout the tradition of classical education “philosophy” has been understood in much broader terms than it often is understood today. Cassiodorus writes in the sixth century, for example, that, “Philosophy is the demonstrable (insofar as it is humanly possible) knowledge of divine and human matters.” The medieval thinker Hugh of St. Victor similarly refers to philosophy as “the discipline which investigates comprehensively the ideas of all things, human and divine,” and in the nineteenth century John Henry Newman defines philosophy as “a comprehensive view of truth in all its branches.” What we see in all of these thinkers is an understanding of philosophy that is incredibly broad. Philosophy includes all branches of truth—all ideas having to do with divine or human matters. Thus all human beings, insofar as we pursue truth about any of these ideas, are philosophers.

What does it mean, though, for a human being to engage in philosophy? What are the specific characteristics or activities of human beings that make us philosophical? Historically speaking, there are two key aspects of philosophy that answer these questions: Where you start from (wonder) and where you are going (wisdom). In other words, philosophy begins with wonder and has wisdom as its goal.

From the ancient Greeks onward it has been understood that the beginning of philosophy is wonder. Aristotle writes, for example, that, “It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.” Centuries later Thomas Aquinas similarly claims that, “Those who first philosophized and who now philosophize did so from wonder.” So, what does it mean to wonder at something? Wonder involves recognizing that we do not fully know something yet simultaneously desiring to understand it. Think about, for example, a small child who marvels at a helium balloon that floats upward instead of falling toward the earth like all other objects. Or think about an adult who marvels at the millions of stars that can be seen on a clear night. In both cases, the person sees something that is beyond his understanding and yet longs to know more about it. Thus as Dennis Quinn explains, “In true wonder it is ignorance itself that we wish to escape.”

Another way of saying this is that wonder involves a recognition of the mysterious nature of reality. In wonder we recognize that the world is bigger than something that we can fully grasp, and nevertheless we desire to know more about it. In order to see that human beings are naturally philosophical, i.e. full of wonder, we need look no further than small children. Children, oftentimes more easily than adults, realize that the world is full of mystery. Children see things all around them that they don’t understand, but they also have an innate desire to learn. This is why children constantly ask “Why?” This wonder is not something that children have to be taught to do. Rather it is naturally part of who they are. As Ross Inman explains, “Human beings have a unique appetite for wonder; we are wonder-hungry, we might say. . . . A desire to philosophize is as natural to us as our desire to eat, drink, and live in community.” To say that human beings are philosophical, then, is to say that we naturally respond to reality with wonder.

In addition to beginning with wonder, a second key aspect of philosophy is that it is directed toward the goal of wisdom. Simply put, the pursuit of wisdom is the ultimate goal of all true philosophy. The word “philosophy” literally means “love of wisdom,” and a philosopher is thus someone whose goal is the attainment of wisdom. Note that to say human beings are philosophers does not mean that we already possess great wisdom. Rather it simply means that as we learn (grounded in wonder) we love and pursue wisdom even though we haven’t fully attained it.

In the tradition of classical education there are two kinds of wisdom: theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom. Theoretical wisdom (sophia) is intellectual knowledge of the highest things, whereas practical wisdom (phronesis) is the ability to apply general principles to specific cases. For example, I might know in a theoretical sense that the greatest commandments are to love God and to love my neighbor. I will need practical wisdom, or prudence, however, to figure out what exactly it means to love my neighbor in a particular situation. J. I. Packer thus defines wisdom as “the power to see, and the inclination to choose, the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.” In other words, wisdom involves both an intellectual and a moral component—both knowing about the world and then acting in accordance with that knowledge.

When we put together these various aspects of philosophy, we see that classical education is intrinsically philosophical and seeks to cultivate humans as philosophical beings. Classical education begins with students’ sense of wonder and seeks to teach them about the nature of reality through all the branches of learning. As students explore the mysteries of the natural and moral order—as they learn about the natural world, themselves as human beings, and God—they come to better understand the nature of reality and their place in it. Far from being a merely intellectual exercise, however, classical education is concerned not merely with what students know but with how they live. Classical education seeks to cultivate students who have not only theoretical wisdom but also practical wisdom, and who live virtuous lives as they respond to the natural and moral order by acting prudently. One might say, in other words, that classical education is concerned with helping students to become philosophers.

by Dr. Kevin Clark

Benjamin Franklin wrote famously that only two things are certain: death and taxes. True enough, but he of all people should have added a third: public speaking. Whether welcoming guests around our table, toasting the happy couple, expressing sympathy or gratitude, or offering a few words of extemporaneous prayer, it is certain that we will find ourselves in front of others and in need of the right words. When the time comes, however, will we find them?

Is there any better feeling than finding the right words? To say precisely what we intend to say, and to be understood precisely as we intended? Is there anything worse than when the right words don’t come? or when the words come but they come out all wrong? No wonder that public speaking is one of our greatest fears.

Rhetoric is the art of finding, formulating, and expressing the right words for a particular audience and given occasion. It is an essential human area of study, not simply a pursuit for specialists. This is why it is an essential part of the core classical curriculum. It is what the tradition would call a liberal art. An art is a productive skill acquired through imitative practice. The word liberal comes from a Latin word meaning free. A liberal art is a skill that sets us free to flourish as human beings—that is, to use our natural abilities with purpose, skill, and intention.

The Greek philosopher Plato defined rhetoric as the art of leading peoples’ souls with our words. While rhetoric may be the art, the office of using words to lead souls comes naturally. It is what it means to be human. Our words convey meaning. They inspire action. They create new possibilities, new realities. Think of the creative power of the words “I do.” Words also close doors, betray trust, and break faith. Alas, loose lips sink ships. What an extraordinary power. We study rhetoric to harness this power so we can use it wisely and well for the common good.

It is clear that rhetoric is useful, maybe necessary. What might a student encounter as a student of rhetoric?

As a liberal art, the study of rhetoric involves top down and bottom up work. The top down is the framework. Rhetoric brings together five main skills—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. These skills are straightforward, referring respectively to deciding what to say, in what order, and in what manner, committing that to heart and then saying it. These skills are called canons, from a Greek word that means measure. As measures, the canons are what educators might call standards, objective means of assessing a student’s progress.

If the top down is systematic, the bottom up approach is grass roots and experiential. Students devote themselves to poring over—reading, memorizing, reciting, imitating, and analyzing—texts that are well spoken and well written. As they do, something almost magical happens. Applying themselves to the canons of rhetoric, filling their minds and memories with good words, students begin to develop their own style. They find that they have something to say and a knack for saying it well. As students apply themselves in earnest, they achieve something the tradition calls copiousness, from a word meaning full. This wonderful image indicates the possession of a well-stocked store of good words to deploy at the opportune moment.

Classical education distinguishes itself most fully in its purpose, namely, to set students on the path to becoming wise and virtuous. With this in mind we should conclude this brief introduction with a few words about how rhetoric helps serve this purpose of classical education.

There is much to say about wisdom and virtue as the twofold goal of a classical education. Suffice it to say that they hold forth maturity as both moral and intellectual. The ancient Greeks enumerated their moral and intellectual ideals. Interestingly, one word makes both lists—phronesis. Morally, this word indicates practical wisdom, knowing how to apply principles in concrete situations. Intellectually, the term means judgement, knowing how to discern and to decide. The Greek philosopher Aristotle defined rhetoric as the power of perceiving all the available means of persuasion in a given situation. As a power of perceiving the available means of persuasion, it is a powerful tool of intellectual discernment. As a power of knowing the situation, it is essential to exercising practical moral judgment. Rhetoric cultivates growth in phronesis in both of these senses and serves as a hinge in a student’s moral and intellectual growth.

By John D. Mays
Contributing Writer, Humanitas Institute

To describe the Scientific Human, we must begin with the Human, that is, what God intends humans to be, as understood within the realm of classical education. Classically, a well-functioning human consistently exhibits wisdom and virtue; developing these is the goal of classical education. Biblically, a godly human lives according to the two greatest commandments, as articulated by our Lord: First, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and second, love your neighbor as yourself.

It is crucial to notice that Christ articulates both the two great commandments in terms of love. As the first epistle of John tells us—twice—God is love. This truth reveals a great deal about God, us, our purpose, and all of creation. The overflow of God’s love is why the creation exists. And the reason we are here in creation is to love. Loving is hard; in fact, it is exactly opposite our fallen, selfish inclinations. So, one could say that our reason for being here in the creation is to learn how to love. If we apply this to every circumstance we find ourselves in—quarrels with spouses or children, impatience in traffic, the discovery of a need that we have the means to address, inordinate desire for the things of this world, the temptation to drink too much, and so on—we will find ourselves growing in grace and becoming every day more like Jesus Christ.

When we consider the Scientific Human in particular, we are considering a person who is called to a life of love and the consistent exercise of wisdom and virtue. All these apply when we consider engaging in science. Despite what popular secular or materialistic definitions might say about science, I argue that engaging in science does not mean leaving your faith at the door. In fact, today scientists find themselves face to face with a growing assortment of hard questions with no answers, questions that make much more sense within the framework of Christian belief. Q: How could consciousness evolve? A: It didn’t; consciousness entered creation via the Logos, Christ, the instrument of creation. Q: How can homeostasis operate autonomously in organisms to keep all their physical parameters inside life-sustaining limits? A: While all organisms do this, they don’t do it autonomously. The life of the Logos sustains every living thing. Q: Why do we seek meaning if the quantum world is nothing but chance events? A: The fact that we all seek meaning indicates that the apparent randomness of the quantum world is not all that is going on. Scientists have learned a lot about the quantum world, but they have not found any subtleties explaining God’s action there, and they won’t.

Each of these questions demonstrates how Christian faith lifts routine scientific questions out of the meaningless mire of our nihilistic times and contextualizes them properly.

A good Scientific Human is a person seeking to live a life characterized by love, exhibiting wisdom and virtue, and bringing these to the study of creation—the overflow of God’s love. To add two more questions to the list above, one might ask: Where do we draw the line between things science has given us to power to do (a technical issue) and things we ought not do (a moral issue)?, and, How do we prioritize and manage our scientific research goals, funds, and personnel? Apart from a well-informed faith in the Creator, neither science nor politics can speak effectively to these questions. And in contemporary culture, making money and maintaining power are often the only factors that motivate decision making. Perhaps instead of developing new technologies that further exploit the earth, we are in a time when it would be wiser to invest in healing the earth and the communities (human and nonhuman) that have been harmed by contemporary industrial technologies and practices.

Classically trained Christians are people who seek first to love God and neighbor and who have the wisdom and virtue to do so effectively in contemporary culture. Their decisions and priorities are oriented toward realizing the Kingdom of God in the world rather than making money and maintaining power, and their classical training enables them to see the many factors that should be brought to bear on decision-making, factors such as the limits of ecosystems and the potential for unknown harmful side-effects, as well as acting justly, showing mercy, caring for the needy, and caring for the earth.

Uniquely among the many fields of human endeavor, over the past few hundred years, scientific knowledge has given us colossal powers for healing and for destruction. Christians manifesting wisdom and virtue have always been needed in our world for promoting decisions and practices aligned with the Kingdom of God. Today, they are needed as never before.

John Mays is an an engineer, physicist, educator, author, and founder of the Novare Science Curriculum. He speaks frequently about science and science pedagogy across the United States.

By Andrew Selby
Contributing Writer, Humanitas Institute

Rising from bed late at night the mother instinctively knew something was wrong. In the hallway, she immediately noticed the light coming from her daughter’s bedroom and muffled weeping. Opening her daughter’s door, she found the teenager sobbing into her hands over an open laptop with a cursor flashing on an empty document. She knew her daughter was stressed out by the mounting school work and the pressure to succeed, but it seemed like she had reached a breaking point.

“It’s so late,” she softly told her daughter with her arms around her shoulders, “Why don’t you go to sleep and let things be what they may? You work so hard.”

“But I have to finish this essay—and do well on it—so that I can keep up my GPA.”

“Why? You’ve done so well already. Just rest now.”

“I can’t! If I don’t finish in the top 10% of my class, I won’t get into a good college. And that will mean that I won’t get a good job. I don’t want to be a failure.”

The mom knew that everything in her daughter’s education was pushing this message. They might not explicitly say that she would be a failure if she didn’t go to college and do well there, but this vision for life was still there in the role models that were held up in alumni spotlights and in what the college counselor was saying. She had gone along with it, but watching her daughter start to snap under the pressure and noticing her growing tension and tears over the past months, the mother was beginning to wonder if there was a better way.

American Education: Instilling Anxiety for the Past 115 Years

Modern youth are taught to be obsessed with grades and jobs. For the past 115 years, when “Progressivism” overtook the American educational system, school has primarily been interested in creating cogs in the wheels of the economy, stressing the importance of career fitness. Grades—both the 1st through 12th grade levels and the “A” to “F” scale of assessment—were invented to organize students easily by academic achievement. That way employers would know what they were getting when an applicant came to them. The more standardized the education system can be, the more easily we can compare this person to that person. Our rigid system also tells us whether people will conform to what an employer wants or if a person might be less than compliant. It relentlessly communicates to students that they are in competition with each other for the best jobs. They are shown (rather than told) that they need to do better than their peers if they want to amount to anything. It’s no surprise that this environment breeds anxiety and, when we don’t feel like we’re measuring up, depression. ​​The government education of the last century functions like a factory churning out compliant (albeit frazzled) worker bees.

However, many Americans are waking up to resist the inhumanity of the way that we educate. We want our sons to be able to think for themselves and have resilience to move around in changing markets. We want our daughters to resist group-think and appreciate their unique giftings.

In the midst of an epidemic of anxiety and depression, where can we go to help our children learn to experience peace and optimism? It’s time to re-examine our goals. We must return to the purpose of human flourishing in education.

To find alternatives to the current educational regime, we could look at many different times and places in history. But since we’ve forgotten so much about how to educate well, a return to the roots of our civilization is called for. The Ancients loved to talk about the “end” or goal of education. Before we talk about what to teach our kids or how to teach them, we first need to know what it is we want for them.

The best of ancient education focused on purpose. The best educator of antiquity, Socrates of Athens, taught for flourishing.

Socrates, the Greatest Teacher of Antiquity

It might come as no surprise that Socrates did not operate within a formal school environment. He clashed with the Athenian government. They eventually killed him for “corrupting the youth”!

Socrates attracted a large following among young people in Athens. They flocked to him because he would ask them questions, meeting them where they were at and spurring them to test their assumptions about what was really true. They reveled in the way he would show the inconsistencies and folly of the ruling elite of the city. Those apparently wise people would claim to be experts in some area of life—whether politics, education, rhetoric, ethics, physics, etc. Socrates would begin questioning them about the deeper principles of their skill or perhaps about the purpose for which they exercised it. Quickly, it would become apparent that they hadn’t thought through what they believed. Despite their “success,” their lives were lacking.

(It’s the same lack that so many of our kids instinctively recognize in their own education and our society’s obsession with career advancement.)

By starting from a person’s desires and interests and then by leading that person to explore why he believed in that endeavor, Socrates almost always had an engaged audience. He dislodged them from being stuck in their ways. In this receptive state, Socrates could guide his conversation partner to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—the transcendentals that anchored his life and that all of us long for deep in our souls. Socrates’ students worked hard and grew wise, but they didn’t feel the overwhelming stress and anxiety of students today.

A Socratic Education in the Modern World?

Can we offer our stressed and anxious sons and daughters a more Socratic and less bureaucratic education? A growing movement in the USA and increasingly abroad is doing just that: classical Christian education. Schools in this movement guide their students to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. They care first and foremost about the souls of their students. Thus, their education is radically personal. Teachers in these schools ask questions. As students are pressed to articulate their deepest held beliefs they grow alive to the world and to ideas. They find out what they really think in community. Socrates-like, their teachers hold deep conviction, but guide their students toward God and good ideas by setting their souls aflame, not by imposing meaningless bureaucracy.

This education is an antidote to the toxic anxiety-ridden, mouse-on-a-wheel system of today. Rather than produce tears of frustration, classical education leads to flourishing and purpose.

Andrew Selby, PhD, is the an upper school humanities teacher at Trinity Classical Academy in Valencia, California, and a national fellow with the Alcuin Fellowship.

by Chris Hall
Contributing Writer, Humanitas Institute

Crafting fire by friction is miraculous. It’s also incredibly frustrating and inconvenient. With a bow drill under tension and a hearth board underfoot, apprenticeship usually starts with 52 Pickup as you retrieve the pieces that just flew off in all directions…. Through physical adjustment, refinement, and no small struggle with the self, proper mechanics resolve. The knee like this, breathing like so, and then comes the smoke. Not fire, just smoke. You think you’re done, but you’ve just arrived at the ground floor. Only with some additional effort do you advance to a red-glowing coal. Nestling that coal gently into a handful dry grass, fire is then coaxed into being with breath. Slow, and slow, and slow again until the nest bursts into flame, with heat, light, and warmth coming to fruition all at once.

When you see it done by a practiced hand, it looks easy. Then you try it, and it tries you. You flub it. Then you get close. Then you get it. Then refine it. Then master it. There are no commas in that process, only periods: periods of learning, periods of frustration, periods that end in sudden enlightenment or the need to walk away for a minute. Within each step, we return again to flubbing. But that’s part of the learning: failure has its lessons to impart, often more than success.

At some point, you become so accustomed to the craft that you simply know what to do. You are free as an artist not to write your own rules, but to work on the fly, to adjust, to surf the experience. You know what leads to success, and you no longer get in the way of it, you simply guide the givens to fruition. An inheritance of a thousand generations has come into new care with mature ownership. Years later, in the cold rain of a fall afternoon, when you’ve kindled one up under the wind shadow of a boulder and your hypothermia subsides, you know the gift of fire. The gift is immediate in the fire itself, but it’s also made manifest through a long line of learning, refinement, and sweat equity, with no shortage of meaningful blisters.

The process of making fire is similar to learning kickboxing, automotive repair, navigating by map, making a shirt, or baking chocolate chip cookies. Each of these arts has a parallel process of caricature-to-clarity, phases of friction and realization that lead us to learning. Most, maybe all, of the day-to-day arts that we leverage to meet our basic, embodied needs are experienced and learned in these ways. Gardening, working with tools and raw materials, knowing how to defend ourselves, and more fall into this category. Without these skills, we lose our ability to live freely and well in the world.

Called the common arts, these crafts and skills contribute not only to our survival, but to our ‘thrival’: they keep us alive through the provision of goods and services that sustain us, but they also make manifest learning that might otherwise remain abstract and ephemeral, and they bring us together as families and communities. When practiced with mastery, they bring both recipient and craftsperson to a new level of understanding and appreciation that is beyond the baseline of simple survival, continued breathing. There’s something more: we make things, but the process of making things also makes us. The way that we go about making and using these arts shapes our culture, our society, and our lives, family and inner, in profound ways.

Because of the history and dominant philosophies of our educational systems for the past 160 years or so, we have come to think of the common arts as precisely that: common. We have come to elevate the college path, while diminishing the common arts as ‘vo-tech’ or ‘trades’. With the rise of supply chains, our skills with these arts have fallen in proportion: we outsource, pay others to do these things for us, and in the process find convenience but also lost agency. A few decades ago, it was not uncommon for someone in the home to make his or her own clothes, or perhaps preserve summer’s fresh produce. Now, it would be challenging to find many people, particularly in suburban or urban environments, who know how to do these things.

In that substitution, we have lost an understanding of the givenness of nature. As we’ve kept this learning at a distance, we have lost an old, long-cultivated sense of how nature really works. Our ancestors needed that sense to reckon the time of day or the approaching weather. They needed it to find the best wood to make an ax handle or a dinner table, make a wall that wouldn’t fall, repair goods, find medicine, or know when to plant. Now there’s an app for those, and for the rest a readily-available paid contractor. We have come not simply to appreciate those services, but to rely upon them. We stand at a high point of empirical knowledge in science and mathematics, even as we lack a holistic understanding of how what we know manifests and how it connects. The abstractions we encounter as we walk the cram/pass/forget cycle of testing-based education rob us of a certain experience, of seeing the abstractions made real and given full form.

To reclaim this, we simply need to look to our hands. We stand at the leading end of a long tradition of great craft, from cathedrals to family homesteads, and many of us yearn to reclaim what we might otherwise have driven from us in a world that encourages convenience, reliance, and pay-to-play rather than ownership. To unify the skills of our heads, hearts, and hands, all it takes is that we take up to learn once more the common arts. When we do, responsibility returns. We rediscover our agency, that we can do, not simply have done for us, and that gives us freedom to act and operate in the world. We gain respect through capability and experience. Work re-situated is no longer simply for pay, but in service to our art and to the thriving of our communities. As we learn to value the work of our hands, we learn to recognize GOOD work: we begin to see and appreciate the mastery demonstrated by others. We see the math we never learned how to use, the science we crammed to pass, become useful in context. And we reconnect socially through shared craft, meals, and more. “Many hands make light work” is an old saying, and one to reclaim: a family that works together learns to value skills, shared sweat equity, and teamwork.

The common arts provide for our basic needs, but they also provide for our deeper needs, especially at our moment. When machines remember for you, others make for you, and computers reason for you through generative AI, reclaiming the common arts re-roots us to the baseline realities of ourselves and natural law. They bring us agency, connection, and constant reality checks in a world of increasing ephemera. Be inconvenienced, and in so doing become free, reclaim your inheritance, and thrive.

Chris Hall, M.S., is life-long learner and educator with a passion for integrating the liberal arts and the common arts. He is the founder of Always Learning Education and a national fellow with the Alcuin Fellowship.

by Gregory Wilbur
Contributing Writer, Humanitas Institute

From an anthropological standpoint, we are all musical beings. Making music is a universal activity throughout time and cultures around the world, and music is used for similar purposes within those people groups. For instance, there is music for worship, for working, for soothing children, and for play.

In our time, we are surrounded by music—in the grocery store, at the gas station, in our cars, at the pool, coffee shop, clothes store, and almost every public space. Because we hear so much music, we no longer hear it or attend to it. It has become a backdrop to life that we swim in but rarely think about. When we do pay attention, especially for the sake of educating our children, we tend to unthinkingly accept a certain category of “classical music” as the best way to introduce music as a fine art.

Because some scientific studies show that playing an instrument increases certain mental abilities, music studies could increase math scores on standardized tests. Knowledge of certain musical works and composers can make students more refined in their tastes and could help with social and employment advancement. From a schooling perspective, music studies can set apart our students and programs from other educational options. However, all of these examples are pragmatic reasons that seek to use music for another end and purpose, not as true musical knowledge for its own sake and not aligned with the particular reality of what which music actually is.

To make this clearer, the following list should sound familiar. Most of our experiences with music education focus on:

• music appreciation (composers and listening to musical works),

• music history (the context in which these pieces were written and performed), and

• making music (either simply with recorders or more intently with lessons on an instrument).

In this approach, the music and composers that are taught are almost exclusively secular instrumental music, written for the concert stage, and from the past 300 years. Examples of this would be Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Wagner, symphonies, concertos, etc. In addition, some time is usually given for discussing chant. In its place, these are good things to study, but this is only part of the picture. In this approach, music gets treated as extra-curricular, as a fine art, and as something that appeals to some students but is not necessary for all students. These are the pragmatic reasons given above.

While these are commonly held assumptions about music, this perspective is relatively recent with its practices and attitudes—a product of the past few hundred years. Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Augustine, and many other classical and medieval authors held a very different understanding of what music is, what it is for, and the necessity for all students to study music. Aristides Quintilianus, a third century Greek author, wrote in his book on music that “music is the foundation of all learning.”

Why would these esteemed thinkers, philosophers, and theologians consider the knowledge of music to be essential for everyone? What did they understand that we, in our time, do not? Simply put, the study of music was not particularly aimed at a checklist of knowledge but rather as a mode of thinking. Or put another way, the study of music is not less than music appreciation, history, and theory, but rather it is about so much more than that.

Perhaps an example from geometry would be helpful. If you study Euclid’s Elements, you will learn concepts of number and geometry, shapes and ratios, and logic expressed in geometric proofs. But the reason to study Euclid is not to learn logic—in fact, classical studies have a whole emphasis on logic other than from Euclid. Geometry facts and formula could also be studied from a variety of texts that are less arcane. However, the tactile and immersive beauty of working through Euclid’s Elements is that it changes how you think, it influences the way you see the world, and it develops a concept of numbers in relationship—an idea that is further developed in the historic study of music which is the discipline that traditionally follows the study of geometry.

Boethius was a sixth century Roman philosopher who integrated his Christian faith into his writings. His book, The Principles of Music, was the primary text for studying music until the time of the Enlightenment. Boethius codified much of earlier authors’ writings in his text. Perhaps one of the most significant contributions he made was his description of the three types of music: musica instrumentalis, musica humana, and musica mundana (or universalis).

Musica instrumentalis is “heard music” or that which is played on an instrument or sung. It also pertains to the study and creation of that music. So the study of composers, particular works of music, learning music theory, playing an instrument, and studying the history of music are all examples of this category of musical studies. This is the type of which we are most familiar.

Muscia humana is the music of the body and soul—the harmony of a human. What does it mean to live in harmony? This would include such things as use of time and resources which is a reflection of what Augustine called “rightly ordered loves” or affections. Is our heart “pure” and “undivided” as scripture says? Do we prioritize those things which are true, honorable, pure, lovely, and commendable and “practice these things” as Paul says in Philippians 4. He further says that the “God of peace will be with you.”

This Biblical idea of peace, or shalom, is the “rightness of things”—how things were meant to be. In other words, the true concord, or harmony, of living in the cosmos the way that God created it to be. Sin brought discord and brokenness into the world, but Christ’s reconciling work brought peace and harmony through the blood of the cross. This is a restorative movement from chaos, disorder, and discord to order, concord, and harmony—a spiritual reality analogous to resolving a musical piece to a place of rest. Musica humana is living in harmony with ourselves, our neighbors, the created world, and most especially with our God.

Musica mundana is the idea of the “Music of the Spheres” or the ordered dance of the created cosmos. It is the knowledge of the truth, goodness, and beauty of those things in relationship in time and in motion. Time and motion are attributes of music in their properly understood sense. This is the investigation of how God created and upholds the cosmos (which means “order”) and how He was revealed Himself and His divine attributes in the things that He has made (Romans 1).

There are many things that can be explored regarding these three divisions of music, but the significant point is that those who came before us had a much more robust consideration of what music was, what was its purpose, and the necessity of its study. Their understanding was expressed in their belief that the study of music and music itself was formative for a person’s soul and emotions, the training of their affections, and that music inherently had ethical components independent of lyrics. As such, music was a part of early education in the very formative years and then again as a number art in relationship to arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy (the Quadrivium).

Ultimately, the goal of music is to reflect God’s order in the world and create that order in and through music for the intent of instilling harmony in those who play and listen to it. This is the beauty and opportunity that awaits all who submit to the discipline of music and its study. As such, music brings together various disciplines of study for a unified understanding—“harmonia” means to fit together. Thus, the study of music offers a mode of thinking unique to itself and essential as the “foundation of all knowledge.”

Greg Wilbur is the founding president of New College Franklin, a composer, and a professor of Quadrivial Studies at New College Franklin.

By Christine Perrin
Contributing Writer, Humanitas Institute

Poetry acknowledges something deep within our nature - an urge to name, say, sing, grieve, praise, out of our solitariness, to another person. Poetry is our human inheritance—not just for English majors! Children deeply know this and learn it avidly and with great pleasure. I have experienced this firsthand in my own children’s lives and in the lives of countless students of all ages. There has never been a civilization without poetry; from the beginning of time, people have sought to turn their thoughts, feelings, and stories into memorable speech to share with others. The poet preserves something precious in the world by allowing us to live next to her, to see what she sees, to enter the experience she has built for us with her words and attention to the moment. It makes words into a material thing, hard and solid as a table, dense with significance. It comes from the body and the body is its instrument. It knows our body is as intelligent as our mind, and that the two intelligences are happily married.

From poets we can learn much about what it is to be truly alive. In the poem The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge names the state, which is worse than death itself, “Life in Death.” The name suggests that we are capable of having a heartbeat without being fully alive to the world around us. Human forgetfulness allows fresh beginnings, but it is also an infirmity for which we need to be treated. We need a daily pinprick of awareness to bring us back to what surrounds us. Poems are one dramatic source of this alertness. Because they are made by other human beings at a moment of full awareness, and they are spoken from privacy to privacy into the cave of our hearts, poems enliven us. They challenge us to find meaning; they defend the importance of individual lives and allow all sorts of voices to be heard. In addition to speaking to us, poems talk to other poems and teach us how to read conversationally.

Throughout time poets and writers have borne witness to history. Sometimes poetry is a witness to human cruelty. You might think of poems as just words, but during the Russian Revolution poets and writers were killed or threatened with death. Osip Mandelstam, one of those killed, said in a poem, “And for you, I am here, to burn—a black flare, to burn.” Nearly a century later, his words are still passed like a torch from reader to reader, illuminating Stalin’s unspeakable acts. We weren’t present for the Civil War, but Walt Whitman was and tended the injured soldiers and grieved terribly when Lincoln died:

Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,

For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,

There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

I once took students to the Gettysburg battlefields and cemetery, and we read this poem aloud as well as the Gettysburg address and it reminded me deep in my bones how much we need not only the heroic deeds but the songs about them to keep them alive in our hearts and minds. Poetic knowledge insists that beauty and truth can’t be separated. It reminds us that the rational alone will not take us to full knowledge and that we should be astonished by what is true. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, poets and readers of poetry, believed that myth restores reality to its mythic proportions, that we are living a lyric truth, a poetic story where every action has consequence, and that reading a myth or a poem makes us conscious of its enormity anew. You will find that there are other advantages to studying poems. Poetry fundamentally changes our relationship to language—we can no longer see words as merely serviceable vehicles. Poetry reminds us that the metaphor is the basic way of knowing the unknown and that we often describe one thing in terms of another. Poetry gives us images to cherish and to invigorate our daily experience. In April, I remember that T.S. Eliot claimed it is the cruelest month brining us close to spring and then suddenly far away again: “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” I possess Rilke’s picture of The Panther when I am caged or when I meet someone who is. Or even something as simple as Robert Frost’s tiny poem that is so much fun but also reminds us of how easily our hearts can be lifted—

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Your child will memorize this without trying in five minutes and every time it snows, or you have a hard day together it can become part of your shared language, your shared understanding that things can be heavy, but they can also turn around in a funny unexpected moment and save a part of a day. Try not to worry about what you don’t understand in a poem, as you live with it in embodied delight it will open itself to you. Your relationships will be different because you have the language to name the world in its particulars and in so doing to have a precise shared language with those you live life next to. The poet might be the last person in the world of machines that helps you to feel your deep fellowship with other human beings, some of them now dead but still near. These poems, in response to our love of what we see, remind us of what Adam felt like in the garden of the world naming and naming.

Christine Perrin, MFA, is literature professor, poet, and the host of the Composed Podcast, sponsored by the Humanitas Institute.

Of course a good education should be oriented toward… humans. This seems as obvious as saying that we want shoes for feet or books for reading. But it is precisely because we have adopted alien, dehumanizing ways of educating that we have to call ourselves back to what once needed no discussion whatsoever. We have become like the shoe shop that now tries to sell stilts as the best way to move from place to place or the bookshop that sells books segmented by color for decorative purposes in our grand room.

Of course education is for humans—but then why do we educate children as if they are merely workers who need to be slotted in a great industrial, technological machine?

A true education—education which is education and not something else—is oriented toward the cultivation of those things that are particular to us as human beings, those things that only we humans do, like count, name, measure, reason, moralize, and create art. If our education cultivates these things, we do best what only humans can do, and we do those these well we experience joy and delight. The frog says, “Lord, you made me to jump and how I love to jump!” What does the man say? What does the woman say? What do the boy and girl say?

We used to have ready, obvious answers to these questions. Now we do not. It used to be that we could say something like “that school has a great humanities offering” and we would know the meaning of “humanities” and know that its relationship to the Latin humanitas would not only mean “humanity” but more importantly mean education. To be fully-trained to do what humans do best was humanitas, was education.

The Humanitas Institute wants help renew a human education, which is to say what education used to be, should be, and can be again. Shoes are for feet. A true education is for human beings and according to our nature.

If you are tired of trying to walk on stilts or barefoot, join us on the journey to recover what has always blessed and cultivated our humanity—a human education.

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After a Year of Planning, Something New

The Humanitas Institute has been busy planning, collaborating, and strategizing. The Institute aspires to contribute to the rising tide that advances classical education by:

• Igniting Awareness

• Forging Connections

• Catalyzing Resources

Beginning in January, the Institute will release monthly, national-class videos stories that show the blessings and benefits of that kind of education that used to be called simply humanitas. Throughout the year, we will host various meetings and seek to introduce many to this remarkable tradition of education.

Visit our Website in February 2026

Not only will you find exceptional articles about what constitutes a truly human education here on Substack, you will also be able to enjoy a superb, resourceful website at www.HumanitasInsitute.org The website features short video stories that show more than tell what a human education is, two new podcasts, a rich resource center, and an easy-to-use classical school locator.

Enjoy Our Two Podcasts

Also beginning in February we will launch two podcasts designed for people not yet familiar with classical education, who would like to learn more.

4. Visit the Website Now!

We have updated this post in February, and so you can now visit the website which is live.