classical

Community Worth a Change of Address

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About five years ago, something unusual started happening in the neighborhood surrounding a former Baptist seminary in north Richmond. Though not considered desirable real estate by many, the area swelled with families interested in attending a local school.

But it was not a public school, as is often the case. These newcomers were the parents and staff of Veritas School, a classical Christian school that had recently purchased the old Baptist seminary. The culture the families and the school have created together represents a fascinating example of a “moral ecology”—one that may provide valuable insights for parents and schools elsewhere, whether the schools are secular, Christian, public, or private.

One of the families in this Richmond neighborhood is the Kleinschusters. Dan and Dana Kleinschuster’s four children began attending Veritas 14 years ago when it was renting a Presbyterian church building, and the couple has always deeply appreciated the sense of connection among parents at the school. They realized that eventually their children would graduate, and that they would no longer interact with other parents—unless they were neighbors. So a year and a half ago, they sold their home in the Windsor Farms neighborhood and bought a house near the school.

“There are kids over five days a week, often spending the night,” Dan says. “We’ve had music classes held in our home. On Saturday night, every two weeks, we have Veritas families over for dinner. We love connecting people, older and newer families.”

The Kleinschusters’ youngest child is in eighth grade, but their desire to live near the school is long-term.

“We did it because we think that what is happening there might not be just for the next four or twelve years for our family, but for much longer,” Dan says. “Even after our kids are gone, we will still get to live and enjoy community with each other.”

Dan meets with fathers of his kids’ classmates after each child begins seventh grade—a stage at which many new families join the school. He hopes to ensure the fathers are unified in handling issues like cliques and dating.

“We want them to come into a culture that we have worked on,” Dan says. “You can influence culture in a lot of different ways. We are protective and mindful of establishing a culture that cultivates kids’ hearts to love things that are true, good, and beautiful.”

A love for such classical ideals is precisely what Veritas seeks to inculcate, and while the passionate engagement between Veritas families has grown independently and organically, it has also been intentionally cultivated. The school leadership works hard to connect families to the school and to one another.

At back-to-school night, the “Partnership at Veritas” slideshow includes a slide noting three events parents are expected to attend: the back-to-school night itself, a community dinner, and the spring forum. Veritas makes name tags for each parent, in part so that the unclaimed badges indicate who isn’t there. Attendance at these events is considered part of the covenant parents make with the school. Another slide lists 10 more types of parent meetings, from a speaker series to grade-level meetings to “curriculum coffees.” These are optional but strongly encouraged.

Head of School Keith Nix doesn’t apologize for the emphasis placed on nurturing the parent-school bond.

“We spend an inordinate amount of time on parent education and acculturation,” Nix says. “A classical education needs a classical home. We seek a culture where the parents are so on board with us that the teachers don’t have to do all the teaching.”

Creating this match between home and school begins during the application process. Parents must complete required reading on classical Christian education before they can even interview. Veritas also makes sure prospective parents agree with the school’s core goals and beliefs, including a “Portrait of a Graduate” document, a statement of faith, and an explanation of classical education distinctives. Their guidelines state, “Our published goals and beliefs make up the non-negotiable ‘90%’ that define us as a school.… When families and the schools agree on this 90%, the other 10% can be approached with graciousness and flexibility.”

Because of this up-front disclosure of its priorities and expectations for almost complete agreement, Veritas tends to attract compatible families to begin with.

“When a school is serving people of various and different approaches, you don’t know where a parent is coming from, and it can be challenging to exist in that environment,” says Jacquelin Aronson, whose four children began attending Veritas last year. “When you can be with families where you know they are raising their children in a Christian home, you get constant support without first having to figure out what others believe. Veritas has set the stage for that because they are crystal clear in their identity.”

Veritas is particularly proactive about transmitting its core value of raising children of strong character. Their flagship means of doing so is called “Veritas U,” an educational program for parents offered two or three evenings per year. Veritas U serves to unite parents around character formation topics and subjects central to classical education. To this end, parents can attend classes on anything from relationships and guidelines for technology use to Latin and theology.

The goal of these events is to have parents adopt the same principles and priorities that are valued within the school.

“When you have a partnership with parents—parent to parent, and school to parent—there is a lot less conflict between the messages a kid hears at home and what he hears at school,” Dan explained. “When there’s conflict, a kid says, Which message is more important? Which one do I listen to and which do I ignore? But because there is a strong partnership, kids are not trying to put on their scale two things that there’s a lot of conflict about. Similar messages are being told in all their spheres of influence.”

Sending the same message in all spheres of influence is what James Davison Hunter and Ryan S. Olson refer to as a strong “moral ecology.” In The Content of Their Character: Inquiries into the Varieties of Moral Formation, they define a moral ecology this way:

When social institutions—whether the family, peer relationships, youth organizations, the internet, religious congregations, entertainment, or popular culture—cluster together, they form a larger ecosystem of powerful cultural influences.

The quality and consistency of moral ecologies are so important because character is not formed in isolation. Messages about character are either strengthened or sabotaged by the various influences in a child’s life. Research has shown that the more coherent a moral ecology, the better a student’s outcomes. As Hunter and Olson write,

Moral ecologies can vary by how coherent or incoherent they are, how thick or thin, how well-resourced or impoverished, how articulate and inarticulate… Character is invariably formed in these moral ecologies and is reflective of them. The central question is the character and quality of the moral ecology.

There are now 95 Veritas families living in the two small zip codes that surround the school. According to Dan Kleinschuster, every time a home nearby comes up for sale, Veritas families consider buying it. The school—with its relational connectedness and consistency between home and classroom— is an unusually strong example of a coherent moral ecology. Such an environment is likely to create the moral discipline and moral attachment necessary to ensure the children will practice into adulthood the virtues they’re learning now.

The Veritas community’s values aren’t shared by every school community, of course. Still, Veritas’s parental initiative, its vigorous and reciprocal parent-school relationship, and in some cases, even its creation of a neighborhood of similar values are things schools can promote in an effort to ensure their students develop a moral character that lasts into the future.

Character in the Classroom: Transcript of Interview with Joshua Gibbs

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This is a lightly edited transcript of an interview conducted on August 13, 2019 with classical educator Joshua Gibbs. Mr. Gibbs teaches humanities at the Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of How to Be Unlucky: Reflections on the Pursuit of Virtue. Gibbs blogs about education here.

Joanna Breault: Thank you for joining us today. I just wanted jump right into our discussion of virtue. You have a book that was published back in 2018 called How to Be Unlucky: Reflections on the Pursuit of Virtue, and I noticed that it contains a statement that “effective education is primarily concerned with the acquisition of virtue.” I think there might be some watching this [interview] who maybe aren’t familiar with the term virtue, or [think] that can sometimes maybe sound old-fashioned. Can you explain, first of all, kind of what you mean by this term and then what you mean by the idea that education should be primarily concerned with acquiring it?

Joshua Gibbs: Well, when I say that education ought to primarily be concerned with the acquisition of virtue, I’m thinking of a claim that Walker Percy once made, which is that you can get all A’s and still flunk life. You can be very good at what you do and still be miserable in your life. And the way that you don’t flunk life is by pursuing virtue; the way that you succeed in life is pursuing virtue. And when I say virtue, I would define a virtue as “a quality of excellence in a human being.”

So, the ancient Greeks and Romans acknowledged four virtues: wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. And Christianity added three virtues to those, and those three virtues are faith, hope, and love. And so the kind of education that I offer my students, the kind of education which classical educators offer, is an education in all seven virtues: faith, hope, love, wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.

JB: Okay, thank you. That’s helpful. And so, I guess that answers the question, Then why they should be primarily concerned with that? You’re talking about succeeding at life and not just winning the game. In your pursuit of that, how do you go about that? How do you go about teaching those seven virtues? What kind of lessons do you find useful that seem to stick with the students after they leave your class?

JG: Well, a classical motto is “all things by imitation.” And so the modeling of virtue for students in my classroom is primarily done through the examination of classic texts, texts which have lasted, texts which have been submitted to the difficult test of time and succeeded. So I model virtue for my students or I tell them to model the virtue in—virtue as it’s presented in—a text like Jane Eyre or Paradise Lost or Frankenstein. Those are some of my favorite books to teach. Those are some of my favorite books to teach virtue from.

So, I wouldn’t hold up myself as an example of virtue. I would look at men and women who have contributed something great and something lasting to the world and look at faith or love or courage as they modeled it. And I wouldn’t say that there’s a difference between virtue and the pursuit of virtue. And so I wouldn’t tell my students, you know, “be like me”; I’m not worth imitating. I would tell them, “Be like Jane Eyre”; I would tell them to be like Solomon. I would point to someone whose life was really worthy of imitation. At the same time, you can’t just tell someone, “Go be good.” The response to that is, “Well right, but how?”

JB: Right.

JG: There’s something kind of strange and funny about the rookie preacher who just keeps shouting, “Stop sinning!” to the congregation, to which the congregation ought to respond, “Right…you know, how do we do that? That’s what we’re here for.” You have to tell them that. So I think that there are habits of life that are consistent with the pursuit of virtue, and those are really kind of where the rubber meets the road.

So as far as me and my students are concerned, there’s various habits that I would say tend towards the acquisition of virtue. One is respecting traditions that last. Another is reading generously: delving beyond first, not trusting first impressions or second or third impressions. I often tell my students that the work of an intellectual is to get all the way to sixth or seventh or eighth impressions. And to, you know, to dial it back. Use the common sense of your third impression and the nuance of your sixth impression and wait to speak until you really know what you want to say. Don’t speak off the cuff. But then the daily habits of prayer and the recitation of canonical texts I think are terribly important in the acquisition of virtue as well. All of my students daily—in class every day—recite lengthy portions of all the books that we read in class.

So those are some of the habits, those are some of the ways, in which we can pursue virtue. And I would model those practices to my students. Even if I didn’t say, you know, “I’ve obtained virtue; just be like me,” I would tell them, “I myself am trying to be like Jane Eyre; I myself am trying to be like Boethius or Solomon.”

JB: And so would those literary texts be what you would consider sources? Or I guess you’re saying they’re more models. Sources would be the Scriptures, the ancients. But those would be the models that you go to.

JG: Yeah, those would. Yeah, I would. So I’m not a Bible teacher. I’m not a theology teacher, and I think that while I reference scripture all the time and I reference biblical truths in class, I’m not a trained theologian. It’s my place at the school to teach classic literature, and I believe that you learn virtue from scripture. But I believe that God is very generous, and that he’s not stingy, and that he’s granted a great many people knowledge in virtue. And so when I read or teach Jane Eyre or Frankenstein or Paradise Lost, I believe it’s the generosity of God that’s being studied and understood in these books, even if it’s not a canonical scripture.

JB: Do you tend, with a piece of literature, to focus on one virtue? Or do you pull multiple examples of different virtues from one text?

JG: I would say I pull multiple examples. There are certain texts, of course, that tend towards a meditation on a certain virtue. There is a lot about the virtue of chastity and the vice of lust in a book like Jane Eyre. There’s a lot about the vice of idle curiosity and the virtue of steadfastness in Frankenstein. So I think all these books tend towards a discussion of a certain virtue and a certain vice, although you’ve got to be open, on every page, to what it is that the author has for you.

JB: I read recently a blog post that you wrote about teaching virtues through history. Can you talk a little bit about that?

JG: Yeah. So as a classical educator, I believe that the purpose of any class is teaching virtue, so if it’s a geometry class, if it’s a biology class—no matter what the class is—it’s about inculcating virtue in students. And I think that there’s often a temptation to view history as a discipline which is separate from the pursuit of virtue, there’s a temptation to treat history as just a catalog of names and dates and peace treaties and wars and body counts and generals and that kind of thing, and to not have any heroes in a history or to not recognize any villains in a history. And objective facts don’t train human affections; subjective judgments do, which means that when you teach history, you need to uphold certain people as worthy of imitation and you need to condemn other people as being villains and scoundrels who are not worth imitating, not worth modeling your life after.

And of course, you have to teach names and dates and facts and peace treaties and wars and all the rest. But the point of unloading all of that information on your students is aiding them in making judgments about who is good and who is evil, and who did good and who didn’t do good. And unless history class tends towards the upholding of certain men and women as worthy of imitation, you’re not going to capture the heart of a student. Merely throwing [out] a lot of facts and names and dates is not going to inspire love. But if you uphold certain people as being worthy of imitation—if you have heroes, if you admire people, if you love people…. No one ever loved a method. We love people, not methods, and so history class needs to have people worthy of love—and worthy of hatred, as well.

JB: How do you find students responding to this kind of approach to history? Are they more engaged than otherwise? What’s their response like?

JG: Well, that’s an interesting question. So it depends on what point in the student’s career you’re asking about. It sometimes happens that early enough in the year, students ask in the middle of a lecture on history, like, “When are we going to get to history?” And what they mean is, When are we going to get to a long catalog of names and dates and wars and peace treaties? And while I think those things are valuable and you can’t teach history without those things, the idea that history is mainly confined to those things is a weird assumption that a lot of students come into class with.

And so I think that early on, students can be a little put off by the fact that… teaching virtue through history is not necessarily a way of teaching history that’s going to boost your SAT score, because the SATs are not concerned with virtue. They’re not concerned with who was a hero and who was a villain. They’re concerned with rote facts that can be put on a list of multiple-choice options. And students know this—even students at classical schools know this, because they’ve taken standardized tests—and they realize that the way that the standardized test asks for information is different than the way that someone who’s teaching for virtue asks questions.

So I don’t give multiple-choice tests. I don’t give tests that are like SAT tests. The purpose of a test should not just be an IRS audit of the mind to see what you know. A test should be a learning experience. A test should be a transformative experience. Too many tests are just bureaucratic. And the primary way that students conceive of history is a kind of bureaucratic list of things to know that is then tested over in a bureaucratic-like document that is called a test. And so breaking students of the idea that there’s any value in that—that that kind of thing is transformative in and of itself—is something that can take a while.

JB: That makes sense. They’ve been so shaped by the culture to think of learning in a certain way; it makes sense that there would be a process there. So I know that your book contains some of your own story, your own journey, as related to this topic. Can you just share a bit of that story—how you came to the convictions you hold now?

JG: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been a teacher for—this would be my 15th year. I’m 38 years old. I was a terrible student in high school. I was not interested in learning. I was not interested in virtue. I was very interested in my friends. I was very interested in popular culture. Top 40 radio was a kind of sacred text to me that I studied with all the diligence that the ancient Hebrews would have studied the Pentateuch [with]. I was a very shallow person, and I carried that shallowness into college. And most of my time in college was wasted as well. I was very arrogant; I thought I knew better than anyone. I was a terrible student. I didn’t like to read.… I didn’t like to read until I got married. And something happened when I married. And you know, I was the kind of student that would brag about passing a test on a book that I hadn’t read—that’s the kind of high school student I was.

There was one thing I could do as a student. As a writer, I was a decent stylist. I had nothing of substance to say, but I was a decent stylist. And several years after I graduated high school, I was invited to teach a composition class at a very small private school in town. I was invited to be a composition teacher by some former teachers of mine in high school who knew that I was a competent stylist. And so I went to work at a very small private school teaching composition, and I was successful at it in my first year, and the second year I was asked to teach an additional class. I began teaching a history class the second year, and by the third year, I was teaching a history class, an English class, and a composition class. I just added classes year by year.

And it was during that time that a friend of mine got a job at a classical school, and he…kind of shoehorned me into this position at a classical school. But I got a job teaching classical literature having not read any classical literature myself.

I was a sham. I was a con artist. I got a classical education teaching classical literature—that’s really when it opened up to me. And the first book that ever really did it, as I described in How to Be Unlucky, was The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.

All my life I thought philosophy was an esoteric discipline that was always going to be over my head. But then I read The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, and it was the first work of philosophy that made sense to me. And that was a turning point in my life. I realized that I had to make this career as a teacher work.

And so I slowly started acquiring, on my own, the classical education that I was offered when I was younger but didn’t accept. So this meant, because I was receiving a classical education as I taught these books for the first time, that I didn’t come to these books with a strong sense of judgment over them. I didn’t condemn these books. I had no idea what the books were going to say—so I had to keep an open mind as I read them, often reading out loud, in class—for the first time—things that I was teaching! So, you know, I’m not proud of any of this—this is, you know, 12 years ago, 11 years ago now—but that really is how I got into classical education. I was a something of a scam who was forced to become authentic to keep food on the table, I guess you could say.

JB: That’s a great journey. I mean it’s refreshing, honestly, to hear that kind of transparency, and it’s just cool to hear how you got to where you are now. Going back to the whole topic of virtues: Pop culture is so strong, as it was in your teenage years—maybe all the more so now—how do you see the influence of pop culture sort of colliding with what you’re trying to teach at your school? Is there a lot of grappling that goes on? How do kids come in line with this idea that virtues are worthy of their attention?

JG: Well, one of the most important ways that I present virtue to my students is that a virtuous life is a stable life. A virtuous life does not require great personal upheavals. So, I mean, an example of this would be—I often tell my students, “Anything that you do today that you promise yourself you’re not going to do when you’re older you should just stop doing now.” So if you go off to college and you make it through college telling yourself, “I’ll drink less when I’m older,” well, you should start drinking less now. If you’re having to promise yourself these great changes in the future in order to imagine yourself stabilizing as an adult, you should try to move towards those changes that you know you’re going to have to make as soon as possible.

And one of the things about pop culture that I often try to persuade my students of is that pop culture is exceedingly ephemeral. It’s exceedingly passing; nothing lasts very long in popular culture. The most popular song in the country right now will be an embarrassment a year from now. The songs that fill the dance floor this year will clear the dance floor next year. The songs that everyone loves this year will induce groans just by mentioning them next year.

And students have often never thought about why things are popular and then they’re not anymore. Like, why is it that something was popular six months ago but it’s not popular now? And if you walk students through that, they say, “Well, you know, we got sick of it.” But why did you get sick of it? Why do we get sick of some things and not others? Why do we get sick of a Macklemore song, but 200 years later we’re still listening to Beethoven? Why is it that some things last and other things don’t? Why have we been reading Paradise Lost for over 300 years and yet the most popular books of ‘91, ‘92, ‘93, ‘94—I’m like, “No one reads these books anymore.” What is it that makes a thing last?

And one of the great things that I want students to come away from a classical education with is the sense that if you feed your soul with things that last, you will last too. You will know who you are. You will have a set of responsibilities that you subscribe to year after year, decade after decade, and when you turn 40 or 50 years old, you will not look in the mirror and say, “Who am I?” and not have a great answer to that question. Whereas if you love and feed your soul on ephemeral, sensual trash, if your soul is primarily sustained today by things that you will despise and laugh at five years from now, you will change with it, and you will not know who you are or what you’re supposed to do, because you don’t love the same things that you used to. And the kind of alienation and confusion that settles into the human heart that has not consistently loved things is what prompts people to spend their lives on terrible things, to do terrible things.

If you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what you’re supposed to do, and if you don’t know what you’re supposed to do, you’re probably going to do something terrible. So I encourage students to love things that have lasted and to try to relegate the ephemeralities of popular culture to a smaller and smaller place in [their] diet of things. I’m not saying that you’re wicked if you listen to a Top 40 song, but I am saying that you don’t want to become comfortable sustaining yourself on things that feel good and don’t last.

JB: That’s well said. Thank you. Is there anything else that kind of comes to mind as you think about this topic that you feel is important for educators think about—maybe educators who…the virtues are not part of something that they’re being told to teach? How they should work that in or change their thinking?

JG: I think I would encourage educators to regularly ask themselves whether they’re playing a long game. Do you have an eye on what kind of person you want your students to be when they’re 75 years old? Or do you merely care about getting them into a line of work when they’re 19 or 22, when they graduate high school or college? Is it all about trading grades for scholarships, trading scholarships for better colleges, trading better colleges for better jobs, better jobs for better paychecks?

Then what? If it never really gets beyond better paychecks, then you’re not really playing the long game, because society proves to us over and over again that better paychecks do not satisfy the human spirit; they do not satisfy us in the long run.

So I would encourage teachers to play the long game and to consider often how you’re helping your students become old. Like what are you offering them today that will be of value to them when they retire? And if you’re not offering them anything of value when they retire, then you’re setting them up for failure in the long run. So, you know, play the short game, be faithful today, but keep an eye on the long game as well.

 

 

 

Regents School: Peacemaker Training Across Five Dimensions

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In every setting—including the classroom—conflict is inevitable. How educators navigate it can have a massive impact on the culture of a school.

Back in 2010, the early days of the Regents School of Charlottesville, located in central Virginia, Head of School Courtney Palumbo visited other classical schools to gain ideas and insight. At two of them, she observed an approach to interpersonal classroom dynamics that made a huge impression.

“They were utilizing the ‘Peacemaker’ process, and we were blown away by how effective it was,” Palumbo said. “The conversation was about how we struggle to give a model for biblical peacemaking. This book is trying to give a framework.… It gives you a map. They were using it, and I knew we needed to use it.”

The Young Peacemaker is a curriculum that was created for parents, teachers, and youth workers to use with third through seventh graders, though many schools adjust it for use with all grades. The original program is faith-based, and a secular version—called Peacemakers in Training—is promoted by the National Center for Youth Issues. Both versions teach principles related to conflict resolution, including how to take responsibility for one’s fault, accept rather than deflect blame, see conflict as an opportunity, and truly extend forgiveness. It uses a “slippery slope” illustration to show children what three different responses to conflict look like, with peace-making responses in the center and negative responses—attack and escape—on either side.

Regents parent Joy Barresi has been amazed to see how much of the program her seven-year-old daughter Vienna retains and applies at home.

“Vienna understands these three categories: peacemakers, peace breakers, and peace fakers,” Barresi said. “I can ask her questions when she is having an argument with her sibling like, What is more important—the toy you are fighting about or your relationship with your sister? What can you do to reconcile with your sister? Because they [Regents] are doing the groundwork for me, it’s much easier for me to come in with the prompt, and then she comes in with the next steps.”

Parent Fay Pariello, whose three daughters attend Regents, noticed a similar dynamic emerge in her home. While normal sibling squabbles over toys haven’t disappeared, the way her children engage each other has changed dramatically.

“Before, they would compete to make their voices heard. They would speak over each other,” Pariello said. “Now they actually give time to each other to let each other talk. The three of them speak the same language that is kind of a common language in the house now.”

Through the Peacemaker program, it seems that character is truly being formed, its expression extending beyond classroom behavior. This kind of expansive influence on the relational engagement of students seems a mark of a program’s success. If so, the obvious question is, How is this achieved?

In The Content of Their Character, James Davison Hunter and Ryan S. Olson outline five dimensions that serve as components of effective moral formation. These elements may help illuminate the success Regents has enjoyed in their use of the Peacemaker materials.

 

1) Sources

Hunter and Olson write that one dimension is “the actual sources that elucidate the framework of moral understanding.” These sources include texts that serve as an authority for the principles being taught; they confirm that the values being delineated are not arbitrary, but are historical and tested.

At Regents and other public and private schools that use the Peacemaker approach, the Peacemaker materials themselves are a source. In the Christian version of the program, the materials also refer back to biblical passages like Matthew 18, which outlines what to do when a fellow Christian is doing wrong. These biblical references provide additional sources of moral authority.

 

2) Formal Articulation

Hunter and Olson call this dimension “the degree to which a moral culture is articulated, whether formally in the classroom or informally in the relationships between teachers and students.” Put simply, values must be verbalized.

Every school year, Regents takes time during the first three weeks of class to teach students the Peacemaker principles. Even returning students receive an in-depth review of how to handle conflict—a review that increases in complexity as they move up the grades.

 

3) Informal Articulation

Informal articulation also occurs. Barresi remembered overhearing a teacher speaking with a handful of students in the office one day.

“The teacher said, ‘It has come to my attention that so-and-so has been hurt. Did you guys have any information about what happened? Here is a challenge that we have: Someone is our classroom is hurting right now. What can we do to help them feel better?’” Barresi recalled. “I really appreciated how she did not put blame on the girls. She put it in their court, and she just asked them, ‘How do we solve this problem? Your friend is hurting.’”

Hunter and Olson refer to this kind of informal articulation as “catching.” In describing the “catching” that had been observed in a study of American high schools, they wrote, “The moral example of teachers unquestionably complemented the formal instruction students received, but arguably, it was far more poignant to, and influential upon, the students themselves.” Students are constantly watching, and teachers serve as vital models of how to act and be.

“We want our teachers to be humble enough to ask for forgiveness,” Palumbo said. “In this contentious, super-sensitive society, teachers and administrators don’t always feel safe to admit when they are wrong. But we are all wrong, all the time! I have tried to create an environment where a teacher can say, ‘Class, I was tired this morning and was a bit grouchy. Will you forgive me?’”

 

4) Practices

Students are formed not just by what they hear and see, but by what they do. Hunter and Olson call these “routinized actions—some formal, some informal—all oriented toward giving tangible expression to the school’s values and beliefs.”

At Regents, part of the formal lessons in peacemaking include acting out scenarios that help students remember what they should do in the heat of conflict. They are also reminded of the Peacemaker principles by materials on the walls of every classroom.

“I have seen even the more difficult children admit where they are at on the Slippery Slope chart, whether it’s in denial or playing the blame game,” Palumbo said. “Kids can be really honest when you ask them to be and create a safe situation for them to be.”

 

5) Social Ecology

The final dimension Hunter and Olson discuss in The Content of Their Character is “social ecology,” or the “social support surrounding the child” outside the school. They cite evidence that a child’s moral character develops when they receive the same messages from multiple influential sources.

Palumbo confirmed the impact of this dynamic, and it’s the reason she works hard to get parents on board. Palumbo explained, “We say to the parents, ‘This is the one book we need you to read after you join Regents. We want you to understand the language your children will be using. If you really want to partner with the school, you will want to know what they are talking about.’ At least 75 percent of parents read it, and that is what makes it work.”

* * *

It seems that Peacemakers is successful in part because it is involved in all five dimensions of  what Hunter and Olson call a student’s “moral ecology.” Of course, there is more to students’ character (and to their moral ecology) than how they resolve interpersonal conflicts, but resolving them well does represent a crucial element of their behavior toward others. It also promotes a more orderly and productive learning environment. And Peacemakers’ apparent success in this key area suggests that other elements of a student’s character can be more effectively formed if they span all five dimensions of a student’s moral ecology, too.

 

 

 

Dan Scoggin on “Filling a school campus with purpose”

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Great Hearts is a non-profit charter school network serving 16,000 students in Arizona and Texas. Our 28 K-12 academies offer a classical program alongside robust extra-curricular programs, creating a transformative experience for our students.

We believe that the highest goal of education is for students to become good, intellectually and morally.

Having said that, it might be strange to learn that there is no “character curriculum” at Great Hearts. The character curriculum is the school itself.

This is true of every school, for better or worse. What kind of art is in the hallways? How do the kids talk to one another in the lunchroom and then in the classrooms? How do the teachers befriend each other and serve the kids?  How do we address struggle and suffering? How do we honor excellence? Is the culture of the school unified by a mission? The answers to these questions reveal the “hidden curriculum” of character in any school.

In a school the lack of a mission becomes a mission— the vacuum of time, space, and meaning is always being filled by something, often anything. If educators and school leaders don’t fill a school campus with intentional purpose it becomes filled with unintentional confusion and cultural chaos. There is no such thing as an innate, happy, peaceful state of rest for any school.

At Great Hearts we view our intentional purpose as a restoration of a way of forming the habits and the tastes of the young that was once the hallmark of producing free citizens of a republic. Far too often the liberal arts are mislabeled as something archaic, impractical, or exclusive. Classical education stands out in public education today because, as one of our valedictorians put it, others have sat down.

The essential question—what does it mean to be a human being?—is the rightful inheritance of every child to address afresh. As such, liberal education should be both free and freeing. We love being inclusive public charter schools and working to fulfill Mortimer Adler’s anti-elitist proclamation that the “best education for the best is the best education for all.” The classics are inclusive and utterly scalable, and we Americans make them exclusive or private at our peril.

We believe a unified, coherent liberal arts education has the best chance of forming students who are happy and virtuous. The liberal arts tradition of the West allows us to confidently use terms such as virtue and truth without turning to religious doctrine. An education that assumes the reality of philosophy and forming character—just as much as it believes in the reality of chemistry, geometry, and economics—can work for our generation and within public education. In fact, public education is the rightful domain of such an approach. Like Socrates teaching in the public square in Athens, we must humbly submit that there are better and worse answers, and right and wrong answers, to how to live well and to how to pursue justice.

Character involves saying “yes” to a larger truth or beauty that encompasses and surrounds the self.  Forging character involves the moral autonomy of the individual to make free decisions on behalf of what he or she loves, to make private decisions when no one is looking, to defer desire for something they find ultimately compelling. Simply put, character is when creeds have become life convictions, when integrity becomes freedom. As the ancient Athenian statesman Pericles described the virtues of a free democracy and its citizens as, “. . . knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom, and the secret of freedom a brave heart.”

In the spirit of Pericles we named our public charter organization Great Hearts. It is a reminder to us of our heritage of freedom. But it also is a reminder to us of what we want our students to have, and who we want our students to be, as we inspire our students to fulfill their calling and prepare for the adventure ahead.

 

Timothy Hall on “Classical education: sharpening students’ humanity for the 21st century”

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What is classical education, and how is it distinct from other educational models?

Many educational models take the instrumentalist approach, which helps students achieve vocational goals. But from a practical standpoint, vocational goals have a limited scope.

I think back to my granddad, who told my father to work in the steel mill because “steel is forever.” It wasn’t; the steel mills are gone. My father told me to aspire to the paper mill; “paper is forever.” It wasn’t; paper mills are gone. Vocational goals are a means to an end, not the end.

Other educational models draw on the progressive approach, which focuses on developing good citizens in a democracy.

Yet that, too, is an insufficient end. Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers of Western tradition, was sentenced to death by a democratic Athens. He was convicted by good citizens, those who followed the customs, rules, and laws of their democracy. And he did not. And yet, who do we think was right in the conflict between “the best city” and “the best man”? So good citizenship is not enough either; it can be a good means, but not an end itself.

The classical approach differs from the previous two approaches. Rather than aiming for a mean, it educates for the humanity in each of us—an end in itself, not a means. In our humanity we can fail, but we can also triumph in the face of unsurmountable obstacles. In our humanity, we come to know and appreciate ourselves, and then appreciate the communities to which we are connected. Remember your Socrates: “Know thyself!” This admonition is the beginning of classical education.

But how can we go about doing this? Classical education continually asks the same essential six questions of Socrates:

  • What is virtue?
  • What is moderation?
  • What is justice?
  • What is courage?
  • What is good?
  • What is piety?

That is exciting stuff! And it is important stuff.

These are questions that students need to reflect on time and again. Each time they do, they will sharpen their humanity. It will change their lives; it will change your life, whether you teach in the classical approach, or are a parent of a classically educated student. And, its emphasis on cultivating our humanity can change our culture for the better.

Dan Scoggin on “Filling a school campus with purpose”

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Great Hearts is a non-profit charter school network serving 16,000 students in Arizona and Texas. Our 28 K-12 academies offer a classical program alongside robust extra-curricular programs, creating a transformative experience for our students.

We believe that the highest goal of education is for students to become good, intellectually and morally.

Having said that, it might be strange to learn that there is no “character curriculum” at Great Hearts. The character curriculum is the school itself.

This is true of every school, for better or worse. What kind of art is in the hallways? How do the kids talk to one another in the lunchroom and then in the classrooms? How do the teachers befriend each other and serve the kids?  How do we address struggle and suffering? How do we honor excellence? Is the culture of the school unified by a mission? The answers to these questions reveal the “hidden curriculum” of character in any school.

In a school the lack of a mission becomes a mission— the vacuum of time, space, and meaning is always being filled by something, often anything. If educators and school leaders don’t fill a school campus with intentional purpose it becomes filled with unintentional confusion and cultural chaos. There is no such thing as an innate, happy, peaceful state of rest for any school.

At Great Hearts we view our intentional purpose as a restoration of a way of forming the habits and the tastes of the young that was once the hallmark of producing free citizens of a republic. Far too often the liberal arts are mislabeled as something archaic, impractical, or exclusive. Classical education stands out in public education today because, as one of our valedictorians put it, others have sat down.

The essential question—what does it mean to be a human being?—is the rightful inheritance of every child to address afresh. As such, liberal education should be both free and freeing. We love being inclusive public charter schools and working to fulfill Mortimer Adler’s anti-elitist proclamation that the “best education for the best is the best education for all.” The classics are inclusive and utterly scalable, and we Americans make them exclusive or private at our peril.

We believe a unified, coherent liberal arts education has the best chance of forming students who are happy and virtuous. The liberal arts tradition of the West allows us to confidently use terms such as virtue and truth without turning to religious doctrine. An education that assumes the reality of philosophy and forming character—just as much as it believes in the reality of chemistry, geometry, and economics—can work for our generation and within public education. In fact, public education is the rightful domain of such an approach. Like Socrates teaching in the public square in Athens, we must humbly submit that there are better and worse answers, and right and wrong answers, to how to live well and to how to pursue justice.

Character involves saying “yes” to a larger truth or beauty that encompasses and surrounds the self.  Forging character involves the moral autonomy of the individual to make free decisions on behalf of what he or she loves, to make private decisions when no one is looking, to defer desire for something they find ultimately compelling. Simply put, character is when creeds have become life convictions, when integrity becomes freedom. As the ancient Athenian statesman Pericles described the virtues of a free democracy and its citizens as, “. . . knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom, and the secret of freedom a brave heart.”

In the spirit of Pericles we named our public charter organization Great Hearts. It is a reminder to us of our heritage of freedom. But it also is a reminder to us of what we want our students to have, and who we want our students to be, as we inspire our students to fulfill their calling and prepare for the adventure ahead.

 

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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