My wife and I have been on the journey of recovering Classical Christian Education since around 2019. During that time, we have homeschooled and been a part of a Classical Conversations community. Rebekah has primarily focused on the day-to-day teaching, while I have been focused on researching curriculum, methodologies, and philosophy of Classical Christian Education. If you ever want book or podcast recommendation, let me know!

In the past, I have occasionally substituted for Classical Conversations, but this year I will begin formally teaching at a Classical Christian school and I couldn't be more excited.

About my classroom

Multi-Age

I will be teaching 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade in one classroom. Some would find this to be a daunting task (and to be honest, sometimes I do as well), but I believe that it is an important aspect of giving a better education to our children.

Age-segregated classrooms are an artificial construction of the late 19th and early 20th century education reforms initiated by Horace Mann, and continued by John Dewey, and are based on a Prussian model brought to the U.S. by Mann. Historically, children would have been taught in the home where, presumably, they would be surrounded by siblings representing a range of ages. Even in the early days of our own country's history, though children were sent to schools, they were "one room school houses."

Andrew Pudewa from the Institute for Excellence in Writing makes a great argument for mixed-age classrooms.

Soul-formation

Historically, education was far less about transference of information, and more about shaping hearts to love that which is good, true, and beautiful (which are all found in God, and emanate from God). When students seek truth, admire and create beauty, and pursue good, they will be able to learn, grow, and flourish in any discipline.

While I do desire to offer a rigorous education, my highest goal is the shaping of souls. 

In a recent class I took with Matthew Bianco of the CiRCE Institute, he pointed out that we can go back to the creation of the world and see that God taught through stories (soul formation, e.g. Exodus 12:26–27; Exodus 13:8,14) before he ever gave his law (transference of information, e.g. Exodus 19:1-20:21). This was his way of teaching the Israelites that he was good and loving, and teaching them to trust him and love him.

Integrated Subject Areas

All creation proclaims the glory of God. In the classical Greek & Roman eras, education was treated as the pursuit of wisdom, with philosophy (literally love of wisdom) at the center. In the early Medieval period, this took the form of the 7 liberal arts (the arts required of, and worthy of a free person). These 7 liberal arts were grouped into two broad categories:

  • The Trivium (arts of language)
    • Grammar
    • Logic (or Dialectic)
    • Rhetoric
  • The Quadrivium (arts of number)
    • Arithmetic (the art of pure number)
    • Music (the art of number as applied to time)
    • Geometry (the art of number as applied to space)
    • Astronomy (the art of number as applied to time and space)

These subjects trained the mind to reason well and were expected to be mastered so that one could pursue wisdom in the study of philosophy. There were 3 types of philosophy:

  • Natural philosophy (the study of the physical world),
  • Moral philosophy (the study of human action, ethics, and politics),
  • Metaphysics (the study of being, and ultimate causes).

The study of philosophy prepared the mind for the study of theology, which was considered the "queen of the sciences." Theology dealt with divine revelation, the highest truth, and in turn illuminated and ordered all the rest.

It wasn't until the Enlightenment that we see education begin to become specialized and have a utilitarian focus. Even during this time though, most schools still tried to educate the "whole person." Education was still more than job training.

History has seen a long line of polymaths, people skilled in a wide range of disciplines.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and scientist. He wrote on logic, metaphysics, biology, physics, rhetoric, ethics, and politics—and has shaped Western thought for millennia.

Archimedes (287–212 BC) was a mathematician, engineer, inventor, and astronomer known for mechanical innovations like levers and pulleys.

Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) was an archbishop, scholar, and encyclopedist. His Etymologiae preserved much of classical knowledge and earned him the title “last scholar of the ancient world.”

Al-Farabi (c. 872–950) was a philosopher, scientist, and music theorist, sometimes called the “Second Teacher” (after Aristotle).

Avicenna (c. 980–1037) was a physician, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer who was hugely influential in both Islamic and European thought.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was a painter, sculptor, engineer, anatomist, inventor, and mathematician. He is best known for The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, but he also filled notebooks with designs for flying machines, military devices, and anatomical sketches.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was a philosopher, statesman, scientist, and author and is often credited as being the creator of the scientific method.

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician, and engineer. He advanced telescopic astronomy, formulated principles of motion, and championed Copernican heliocentrism (the earth revolving around the sun).

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a mathematician, physicist, inventor, and Christian philosopher who wrote Pensées.

Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was a physicist, mathematician, and theologian.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was a statesman, scientist, inventor, printer, philosopher, and diplomat. He invented the lightning rod and bifocals, and was an important figure around the time of the American founding.

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), the third U.S. President was also a philosopher, architect, linguist, scientist. He designed his home, Monticello, and the University of Virginia.

Sadly, it is much more difficult to find such individuals today. I'd be hard pressed to think of a living person who is a true polymath. Elon Musk is the closest example that comes to mind, but I would consider him more of a serial entrepreneur than a polymath. From what I know of him, he seems very intelligent, but to my knowledge he is not mastering the technical aspects of each of his ventures. Instead, he has enough wealth to hire the top experts in of his pursuits.

It was only with the industrial age and modern mass schooling in the 1800s that we started to hyper-specialize, and started to focus skills in one particular area. Today, even the best educations are merely job training. Those working in the most prestigious careers are still engaging the servile arts, even the "lowly medical doctor" (5:08-7:21).

Mimetic Teaching

This summer, at the annual conference for the Association of Classical Christian Schools I joined a breakout session on mimetic teaching led by Andrea Lipinski of the CiRCE Institute. I found it so compelling that I took it twice!

I would like to eventually dig into the details of what I learned in these sessions, but for now, I will point you to a wonderful article on the topic on CiRCE's website.

Socratic Discussion

I'm less familiar with Socratic discussion, but it is an area that I would like to grow in. Targeted primarily at 7th grade and up, the teacher guides the student on a journey of seeking the truth by asking questions that reveal holes in the student's reasoning, and also asking questions that lead the student down the path of discovering the truth.

Narration

I also attended a breakout session on narration at the ACCS conference. Narration was popularized by Charlotte Mason, with Ambleside school being the most well-known modern day proponent of it. My current understanding of narration is that rather than using dry textbooks, teachers use "living books," or stories to convey the information they want the student to internalize. The students are then asked to tell back what they just heard in the exact words of the author, preserving the order and detail as much as possible.

Stories allow students visualize what is being taught, and better commit it to memory. The expectation that they will have to tell it back helps them to better attend to the story.

I just started reading A Classical Guide to Narration by Jason Barney. In the introduction, Barney describes how he first discovered narration, while observing a class during his college years.

I was ushered in to observe a Bible class of fourth and fifth graders who were reading the book of Jeremiah. After the teacher read aloud a chapter of an intense prophetic oracle, she asked the students to close their Bibles and then called on a student to narrate. I was astonished at the fluency with which a young boy told back much of the obscure poetic language of the passage. I vividly remember thinking to myself, "I'm a fairly bright college student with a double major in English and Ancient Languages and a minor in Bible, and I don't think I could have told back from Jeremiah nearly as well as this boy did."

He later taught at that same school. Early in his time there, he taught an eighth grade class which was reading The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. He describes the experience:

One of the literature books in our eighth grade curriculum was C.S. Lewis' classic The Great Divorce, a dense and difficult (but gripping!) dream-like tale of an encounter with the realities of heaven and hell...
...
[O]ne of the first assignments we did was a written narration...I read aloud the first two chapters of the book. Then I asked them to write a narration of the beginning of The Great Divorce...I assigned the task of finishing their narration for homework that night without consulting their book. Each of them came back the next day with 3-4 sides of writing as a testament to their vivid memory of the storyline, including many of the exact details.

The first literature exam came along 3 months later.

Because of our practice of narration, the school did not encourage students to study for exams; the fact that they attended well to lessons and narrated regularly should have ensured that they knew and remembered in a way that reflected their work throughout the semester. Exams, the school believed, were simply an opportunity to show what the students knew...for that particular literature exam...the prompt was to tell back the first two chapters of The Great Divorce. Now you should know that none of them had reread or studied it at all since that initial read. In grading those exams, I went back to compare them with the students' first written narration from three months before, and without exception, every one of those students had been able to tell back as thoroughly, if not more thoroughly, than their first written narration. So powerful is the practice of narration for locking content in long-term memory!

I look forward to continuing to learn more about narration and implementing it in my classroom.

Conclusion

I look forward to the year ahead. It has been a long time since I've felt this level excitement for work. I think the thing that drew me to computer programming was that it gave me power to do things that seemed impossible previously. While I never thought this exactly, I think the feeling of creating something ex nihilo (Latin for out of nothing) appealed to me. No one but God can truly create something ex nihilo, but since computer programming involves bits of data and not something that you can see and touch, it can give the illusion that you are.

Since that time I've learned the word telos, which comes from Greek and means "the ultimate object, or aim." It is the purpose for which something was made. The Westminster Confession says that "The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." Therefore, the telos of mankind, or humanity is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. How can we do that? One of the best ways I've found is to live in wonder at his creation. After all, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim his handiwork (Psalm 19:1). When we meditate on the beauty and mysteries found in God's creation, it causes us to wonder, to enjoy God, and to praise Him.

Where previously my work in computer programming allowed me to shape the world to my own liking (or at least to believe that I could), my new line of work allows me to focus on shaping parts of God's creation, namely students, towards the end for which he created them. Each student is unique in their personality, and their giftings, but all of us are working towards the same common end.

If a carpenter is hired to outfit a house with all the necessary furniture, each piece will be the same in their ultimate purpose (to serve the family) and each will share a reflection of the carpenter's skill in some way. At the same time, each piece will have a unique role to play (a bed to lay in, a table to eat at) and will be wonderfully unique because of the distinct grain of the wood that each piece is composed of.

As educators, we are working with the grain, but towards a common, yet glorious, end (telos). May God bless the hands of we the carpenters, equipping us with the skills we need, and allowing the marks that we leave on our students to be a thing of beauty.