The potential obstacles to education are numerous, but these four should be easy enough to recognize and avoid that most every teacher should be innocent of them. Coercive Learning The wisdom of recognizing that you can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink is so remarkable it has become cliché. But so is the response that you can surely salt his oats. Perhaps few initiatives have been more damaging to real education …
Category: On Teaching
Given parents are ultimately responsible for their child’s education (Ephesians 6:4), hiring a teacher does not mean parents are abdicating their responsibilities. They are wisely exercising the division of labor. It does mean, however, the responsibility for finding the right teacher falls under the umbrella of the parent’s responsibility. But what happens after that? Does the fact that the parents have hired the teacher mean they have the authority to dictate the way a teacher …
The form of education follows the function of education in the same way form follows function in architecture. A building’s form naturally follows its function. A hospital looks quite a bit different from a fast-food restaurant. And, until only recently, a church looked very different from a department store and a school looked very different from a penitentiary. To understand the function of Classical Christian Education, we need to begin by going to the Scriptures …
In the Prologue to one of the most influential works on Classical Christian Education, Norms and Nobility, David Hicks asks the question, “What is the solution to the paradox between educating for the world’s fight and for the soul’s salvation?” Answering this question is the teacher’s assignment, your assignment. What would a one-paragraph response answering this question look like? A one-page response? A 6-8k-word response? …
Those who go by the title of teacher and feel they have done their job because they have shown up to a classroom on time and spent their day dispersing the ideology of the school administration, passing on mere information to students, and assessing those student’s understanding and recall of said information before they clock out and leave for the day are deceiving themselves. They are not teachers. They are hirelings and fall dangerously short …
In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl R. Trueman writes, “We all live in a world in which it is increasingly easy to imagine that reality is something we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires, and not something that we necessarily need to conform ourselves to or passively accept.” The former is the doctrine of Disney. Nietzsche disguised as likeable, trusted cartoon characters has long been the modern child’s …