Some of us volunteer to speak. Some of us are volunteered to speak.

Chances are you have been asked to speak when you would rather not. If, like many, you have a phobia for public speaking, most of the time you would rather not. Perhaps you were asked to give a toast as best man or maid of honor at a wedding. We have all heard these speeches which range from surprisingly good to the cringe-inducing.

Speaking at a wedding can still be fun, and glasses are lifted high around the room; speaking at a funeral is not normally called fun. Weddings and funerals both engage the heart of humanity—and frame our lives from beginning to end. It is good to go to both, but far easier to speak at the wedding. At the wedding we look forward, at the wedding we look backward, but even as we look backward on the life of a departed friend, we look forward (soberly) to our own approaching, inevitable death. Who wants to speak then?

We read in Ecclesiastes that "It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart" (Eccl. 7:2). Is it better? Perhaps it is better even if bitter; there is something profound to take to heart, embodied in the old maxim memento mori (remember to die).

According to Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, in 431 BC Pericles—the Athenian general— was given and received the difficult assignment of giving the funeral speech for all of the Athenian soldiers who had died defending Athens from the invading Spartan army. Thucydides records (or recreates) his speech which is justly famous. He not only notes the bravery of the Athenian soldiers but the distinct way of life cultivated and enjoyed by the Athenians and which made them distinct from other nations and other Greek city states.

If you have never read it, please enjoy this text of Pericles’ oration as included in this chapter from the Humanitas Greece text—which includes 50 primary source readings from ancient Greece.

Download Funeral Speech

If you like listening to audio, here is the audio file of Pericles’ speech, followed by Thucydides’ description of the plague that infected Athens in 430 BC, the second year of the war. Here is the audio file:

Request: If you listen to the audio, I would love to hear your answers to these questions and have you take the poll below. Many thanks!

1. What do you think about using advanced speech technology (text-to-speech audio generation) to create recordings like this? Can you imagine classical students using it profitably or not?

2. What do you think of the quality of the audio?

This essay is a form of a presentation I prepared for the Great Hearts Symposium on Feb. 25, 2026. It reads like a speech…I will be updating this essay (with footnotes and additional content) in the weeks to come, so some of you might want to revisit it. In a week or so, it will also be posted at the Substack hosted by Great Hearts called On Classical Education.

The wealth of past experience is like wealth hidden in a mine—of service only to him who digs it out, and then only insofar as he know or learns how to use it.

—W. Kane, An Essay Toward Education

What Is That We Are Seeking to Renew?
I am going to speak to you about the history of classical education—challenging to do because history contains everything up to this moment. The founders like Jefferson and Franklin who helped craft our Declaration were inheritors of history and a tradition like we are. We have come to speak about our work as the renewal of classical education, and classical education is a tradition. It is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional, so we ought to try and define it. Like Augustine said about time—I think I know what it is until I am asked to define it.

If we are in the midst of a renewal of classical education, what is it that we are trying to renew? This is a question we are asked every day by those who learn of our schools; and if we are honest, it is a question we keep asking ourselves, trying to answer it better than we did yesterday—especially when we realize we don’t really know what we are doing: trying to give to our students what we haven’t received ourselves.

Asking What is classical education? is like asking What is democracy or monarchy? What is medicine or health? What is religion, Christianity, politics? It is big, long, deep, and broad—because it is the formation of a human being. We might as well ask for a pithy definition for how to raise a family. It can’t be that hard, right? Do you think there is a satisfactory one-sentence answer? Do you think there is a satisfactory lecture that will fully answer the question—like this one? Is there a sufficient conference? Is there a sufficient book (well yes, The Liberal Arts Tradition, published by Classical Academic Press).

You might–at first–think it can’t be that hard. After all, you were educated and you turned out okay. But then why can’t you even name the liberal arts? And if you can name them, why can’t you define them? How is geometry different from astronomy? Why is music considered mathematics? And why is it that you don’t know how they came about and for what reason, and don’t know why they are called liberal or why they are called arts? And why is it that you say you love literature but cannot recite a single poem? Or why is it that you teach science but don’t know when it was that scientists weren’t called scientists at all but philosophers—natural philosophers? Why did Newton call himself a natural philosopher and not a scientist? And why is it that you know that philosophy means the love of wisdom, but you cannot easily define wisdom, or distinguish it from prudence? And why is it that you pride yourself in speaking well but don’t know the difference between a preposition and a predicate, or a figure and a trope—and can’t name the rhetorical figure I am using right now? And why aren’t you curious about the language behind your language—your grandmother tongues of Greek and Latin? And why do you confess to others that you are not a math person, when clearly if you are a human, you reason with number and delight in number—which is why you love music, the incarnation of math—but why didn’t you know that? You say you love Shakespeare—or do you pretend to because you never really got Shakespeare?

I could go on berating our ignorance—an ignorance I share. In many cases we don’t know what we don’t know, and yet we presume to be teachers.

If you think you have been well-educated—even if you have been—something is off. Something is off morally. You should have long ago encountered one of the first paradoxes of learning: the more you learn the more you become cognizant of your ignorance. As the circumference of your learning grows, the boundary of your ignorance expands accordingly. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Socrates articulated this 2500 years ago; Solomon put it this way: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom—but even Solomon (some say the wisest who ever lived) regarded himself as always a beginner, and if you doubt that, read Ecclesiastes.

The educated person does exist, but he or she is always someone besides yourself. Interview that educated person—he will tell you that he is still a beginner. If you think him wise—and he really is wise—he will contradict you and tell you he is not. This is a primal paradox of education. Our greatest teachers—whom we hold up—regard themselves as perpetual students. How about you?

If we are to successfully restore classical education, we will have to be so wise as to think ourselves fools. At the very least we must regard ourselves as perpetual students, and shudder to be called an educator of the young. Socrates preferred the terms gadfly and midwife.

Socrates said his wisdom was his knowledge that he had not any. And yet for all this paradox contains, we confess that we seek to cultivate wisdom in our students and that this is the chief aim of classical education. And so the paradox doubles: we who cannot think ourselves wise must be models of wisdom to our students. This is reality. It is the way of human growth and education; it is the model of Socrates, the model of Solomon, the model of Christ. The humble must be our teachers, for the humble have seen more greatness than we—such greatness that they must always regard themselves as small.

If you encounter a classical teacher who boasts or insinuates that he is well-educated and wise, you should find another, for he is not truly a teacher in the classical tradition. He has not truly been in the grand museum that would have made him small; or perhaps he has turned the museum into an emporium for picking up snacks—like a quick run to the convenience store. He thinks he is present to bless, when he is not blessed himself. Of the many virtues he may have, he lacks the core virtue that is always a sign of deep learning: humility.

It is likely for these reasons that the epistle of James warns, “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” And we all remember the bit about millstones thrown around the necks of those who mislead the young. Anyone who would stand in front of a class of young students and teach should do so as Socrates, Solomon, or Christ.

Anything Good Can Be Corrupted
Anything good can be corrupted–including classical education. Anything corrupt retains something good–including progressive education. Somewhere in the Kristin Lavransdaughter trilogy we read, “All fires die out.”

Things don’t get better on their own or with the mere passing of time. When I leave my backyard hose alone, over time I find it a tangled knot. I don’t find that Tuesday is better than Monday because it came after Monday. Sometimes it’s worse. Herein lies the tension between tenets of entropy and evolution. If evolution is happening by natural selection, it is a process so slow we cannot observe it, making it out of bounds for most experimental science. Entropy we observe every weekend.

The early Darwinists (like Herbert Spencer) thought that if biological evolution occurred, then certainly there must be a social and historical evolution. Do human affairs, generally, get better and better as time goes by? From at least the time of Herodotus, humans have engaged in investigations (which is roughly what is meant by the Greek word historia) about human behavior in society and individually. What makes for a good life? What makes for a good society? Can a human being grow in virtue? Is it inevitable that he will? Can a human being grow in virtue and then fall prey to vice? If so, how can this happen? Is your life evolving to higher and higher moral forms?

It is in Herodotus (and quoted by Aristotle) that we read that a man’s life cannot be regarded as happy until he has died. This we learn from an exchange between Solon (Athenian lawgiver) and Croesus (king of Lydia). Solon tells Croesus that the happiest man he knew was Tellus of Athens:

• He lived in a prosperous city.

• He had fine and noble sons.

• He saw grandchildren born.'

• He died bravely in battle defending Athens.

• His city honored him publicly after his death.

In other words, Tellus had a good life and a noble death.

Why must we wait until a man’s death to assess his happiness?

• Human life is uncertain.

• Fortune (tyche) is unstable and changeable.

• Many who are rich and powerful end in ruin.

• Therefore, one must not call a man happy until his life is complete.

Are you happy? Good—but let’s see how it plays out and how you die.

Another startling principle from the classical tradition is that the ultimate aim of education aims at just this same thing: not just living well, but dying well; not just this life but the next life. Apparently the majority of the American population still believes in a life beyond death. So it must be true of most of us in this room. If life does transcend death, then should not education have that life in view too? But who, anywhere, speaks about education in these terms any more? Education for a good death? Education for the next life?

We can trace this back at least to Basil of Caesarea who said this in his short book addressed to young Greek scholars:

We, my children, in no wise conceive this human life of ours to be an object of value in any respect, nor do we consider anything good at all which makes its contribution to this life of ours only. Our hopes lead us forward to a more distant time, and everything we do is by way of preparation for the other life.

This is echoed by W. Kane writing in the 1940s in An Essay Toward Education:

All its significance comes from that which it aims, and all its details are measured by the definitive test of furthering an eternal achievement. (p.6)

We note something practical in this principle of education with death in view—and even the next life: this life is fleeting and we will all die, whether we believe in the next life or not. As Franz Kafka said somewhere: The meaning of life is that it stops. We read similar things in Herodotus, and we certainly see it in the dialogue Phaedo when Socrates happily drinks the hemlock, and we encounter it again in Ecclesiastes.

The reality of death (memento mori) prompts us to ask good questions about what constitutes a meaningful life, and bears directly upon education. How shall we live in our few short years under the sun? How shall we treat our neighbors if we regard them as fleeting—and even more if we regard them as immortal souls?

Solon was right that a man’s life could deteriorate and decay over time—even if he started well and rose high. Anyone who rises can fall, as we all know not just from books but from personal observation. The passage of time does not make for progress, by definition—not for persons and not for periods.

Periods of time, nations, empires, may start well, rise, and also fall. Tomorrow does not guarantee a better day, even though it is just a day away. Where is Babylon today? Where is Egypt of the Pharaohs? Where is the empire of Alexander, the empire of Rome? Where is Imperial Japan or the Third Reich?

The late and great historian Jacques Barzun (who died in 2012 at the age of 104) masterfully reminds us of these realities in his book Dawn to Decadence. He says he is no prophet, but he thinks we are declining as a civilization and will continue to, unless there is some kind of unexpected renewal. He is not without hope. In one place he says this about scholarship and learning:

The great idea of a university or of scholarship will not die; it will hibernate, and on reawakening will suggest to its renovators the plain duties they should take on.

We might say that classical education since 1890 has been hibernating, or sleeping underground during the winter of the last 100 years or so. It is now waking up. If we extend the analogy, we in the classical education renewal are waking up and walking, but still rubbing the sleep from our eyes. We need a good cup of coffee.

If we are like animals or daffodils waking up, it also means that we are part of a tradition that is reemerging and resuming. We are like homeowners who discover that the previous owners of our house planted seeds in the soil that we knew nothing of until the flowers appeared. We receive the blessing, beauty, and benefit on account of the labor and service of those who preceded us.

In the story I am telling, we witness the passing down of a tradition of heirloom seeds that blessed Americans with many splendid flowers. Great gardens of learning were created—though never complete, never perfect. Educational gardens of various kinds were created: from vital homeschooling to town grammar schools to small colleges to one-room schoolhouses on the prairie. Much of that good remains, much has passed, anything can be recovered. But before we consider the American story of classical education, we have to note the seed bearers who came before us.

The BackStory: Educational Transmission
Humans naturally want to pass on whatever they have received that they think is good to their children. I will risk stating that as a cosmic principle. If you have been blessed with something truly good—and then you have children (which is also something truly good)—then you want to hand it down. You want your son or daughter to know this blessing, this good thing—whatever it is that has helped you or delighted you—you try to hand it down.

This cosmic principle of handing down good things we might also call tradition. Tradition comes from the Latin trado, tradere, which means to hand over, or hand down, and sometimes even to surrender. We hand down small things and big things: a wool overcoat, a set of tools, a coin collection. Of course some hand-me-downs we might wanly receive, like a set of dishes from grandma that are not your style anymore. But family treasures, such as they are, are usually passed down. The same is true of practices—like the way we celebrate birthdays, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. If you came to our house, you would find that most presents are distributed on Christmas Eve, and my unfortunate dad—born on Christmas Eve—seldom receives truly twice the presents he deserved.

Another cosmic principle to which I think we can agree is this: our first teachers are our parents. In fact, our first and most important school is the home. It is so important that historians of education note that the school follows the home rather than the home the school. W. Kane writes:

The Romans built their state upon the family unit…the Roman state did not begin to decay until the family decayed… It must be repeated that schools do not lead social changes but follow them. The school of life always dominates the school of formula.

Language Lessons
Parents hand down not only coats and recipes but those most essential lessons that every human being requires to commence an education. By this I mean lessons in language—in our case the English tongue.

To those who are inclined to deny the importance of tradition, they must find themselves in the awkward position of debunking tradition using words and a capacity for words that were passed down to them carefully and repeatedly—first with pointed finger, and then with incessant and continuing verbal instruction. If you are a parent, you naturally, with delight, and without prompting begin teaching your daughter words, words, words. And what a delight when she speaks them back to you in her own novel combinations and intonations.

I was talking to my grandson (aged 5) Owen a few months ago and somehow we got to talking about how there are things that are real that you cannot see, or hear, or touch. I mentioned the wind, and then love, and possibly God. I said to him, “Just because you can see it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” A week later, in our yard he insisted he had gathered a heap of weapons under a tree. I said to him, “I don’t see any weapons,” to which he immediately responded, “Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

Language is acquired word-by-word as a tradition. Someone taught us our tongue and without this initial education there can be no (or at least very little) education. You have heard the maxim that students learn to read so they can read to learn. But there is a preceding maxim: a child must speak and understand words if anything is to follow; a child requires a tongue even before a book. A child’s mother is the primal teacher—and let us thank our mothers now for the words we know so well that it appears we were born with them.

Recognizing that language is a tradition, acquired by tradition, is a first principle that establishes a key element of education. Education is handed down by someone to someone else. Looked at from on high, “education is the transmission of the soul of society from one generation to another” (as Chesterton said). Looked at close up it is “telling the truth to the last baby born” (as Chesterton also said). Note that the “soul of society” is something that we must regard as good, even as we regard truth-telling as good, whether to a baby or an adult.

Now this leads us to another cosmic principle: a society—if it is a society—always wants to perpetuate itself. You will not find in the history books examples of societies or civilizations that held a vote and decided to annihilate themselves. This doesn’t mean that nations don’t do things (often foolish things) that result in their destruction—they regularly do—but they don’t intend their own destruction. This is a corollary to another universal principle: humans want to be happy. Try willing your own unhappiness. Aquinas says it is not really possible.

The Athenians wanted to extend their ideals to the next generation, as did the Persians. So what are our ideals? The ideals of a nation almost always end up incarnated in a curriculum. The Greek paideia was developed over centuries as a means of passing down Greek culture—the Greek way of thinking, living, and dying (and yes they studied how to die). We can trace the Greek curriculum, note its beginnings, witness its consolidation, observe its transmission. It is recognizable today as incorporated in our liberal arts: grammar, dialectic, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy.

The Romans imported the Greek paideia as their educatio, giving it particular Roman twists, blending the speculative idealism of the Greeks with their own virtues of austerity, frugality, severity, and order. And of course the Romans not only gave us the word education—which to them meant the rearing and raising up of a child into full-functioning adulthood—they gave us the word tradition. Chesterton calls it the democracy of the dead, for even they should have a vote at our meetings.

The Romans conquered the Greeks but their captives then captured them culturally (Horace). The Romans witnessed the cultural treasures of the Greeks and decided to pass them on to themselves, not with self-congratulatory victory cries, but with piety and respect for what they found. There is a reason Roman architecture looks like Greek architecture and a reason why, after reading Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Roman Virgil wrote the Aeneid. There would be no Aeneid without the Odyssey, and no Divine Comedy without them both. Often the Roman empire is called the Greco-Roman empire for this reason.

Most of us know that Christianity emerged in this Greco-Roman empire and that by 313 AD had grown so large that the emperor Constantine (who was on his way to becoming a Christian himself) signed the Edict of Milan that allowed Christians to worship freely. The new church was comprised of all kinds of ethnicities, but they were largely Roman subjects, and they generally spoke Greek in the east and Latin in the west. Just as the Romans had incorporated the culture of the Greeks, so did the Church incorporate and subsume the language, culture, and curriculum of the Greeks and the Romans as well as Jewish culture.

The Church received all that it thought good from the Greco-Roman tradition and placed it squarely into the church. It turned basilicas and temples into churches, replaced the worship of goddesses with the veneration of Mary, turned wells into baptismal fonts, and organized bishoprics according to Roman political jurisdictions—so that where there formally was a Roman governor there was now a bishop. The language of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca became the language of the Church and its liturgy, preaching, and theological writings. The Church too was, in an important sense, Greco-Roman. We might say it was traditional: it sought to incorporate all that it found good from its Greco, Roman, and Jewish inheritance. In it, the dead spoke.

That the Church spread throughout Europe such that we can safely call the early and late middle ages Christendom ought not to be controversial—the cathedrals and churches that still dot Europe are evidence of this. Where the Christians went, they brought their ideals with them, and this meant their educational ideals, their curriculum—their own adapted version of the Greek paideia and Roman educatio or humanitas. Yes, one of the most common Roman words for education was humanitas.

The Catholic lands of Europe (prior to the Reformation) adopted ways of teaching and learning that continued a course of studies recognizably still Greek and Roman though transformed by biblical teaching: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Theology became the governing discipline or “queen.” The church widened the scope of who could access this education, though it was not easily available and affordable to all—though generally improving over time.

This education took root throughout Europe, and certainly in England. In fact, the light of learning burned bright in England at a difficult time on the European continent (around 800 AD) when learning was diminishing for various reasons. You may have heard of the learned and devoted Alcuin of York who was recruited by Charlemagne to help revise learning in Europe.

The curriculum of the liberal arts and literature, philosophy, and now theology, prospered in England. Englishmen after even the Reformation did not refer to their curriculum and pedagogy as “classical education”—that phrase is relatively modern and only introduced in the late 1800s when progressive education emerged. Their education was “liberal” and sometimes called “learned.” It was the education for freedom and for free people: liberal in the sense of liberating, facilitating, and capacitating one for thought, service, and work in any profession.

Coming to America
We all know that the English were the first, and in the largest numbers, to settle America. Recalling our cosmic principle that any parent will seek to transmit the good he has received to his children, it naturally follows that the English men and women brought not only their clothes, pots, pans, and tools with them—but also their books and their tradition of teaching and learning.

Put another way, they brought who they had become—their full and developed humanity—with them to the shores of New England. While they had come to a new world, they brought old traditions that would have to be transplanted in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. We might say they brought seeds to be planted in new soil.

The Puritans of New England inherited the “grammar school” from England. Grammar school meant more than learning grammar—it meant learning grammar so that one could then read and study what grammar made possible: literature, literature of all types. Some etymology is fun: gramma is the Greek word for letter. We speak of “learning your letters,” and we know that letters form words, and words form sentences, and sentences combine to form literature of all kinds.

“Literature” literally means that which is composed of letters. Its use for a long time referred to learning derived from books of all kinds—poetry, philosophy, theology, as well as books on mathematics and science.

When the Puritans created grammar schools they intended that their children would study literature—all kinds of literature, though naturally selected according to their level and ability. Sometimes they called grammar schools “Latin schools” because students also learned their “letters” in that language so that they could eventually read Latin literature. They learned Latin and English side-by-side as was done in England in the 1600s. The simultaneous study of Latin and English illuminates both languages: one’s English improves on account of the Latin and one’s Latin is facilitated by the English tongue.

The Puritans (under John Winthrop) landed in Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Within five years they started the Boston Latin School. By 1636, they founded Harvard College to train ministers for the colony. By 1642, a law was passed requiring heads of households to educate children; by 1647, every town of fifty households was required to hire a teacher so children could read and write, and towns of one hundred households were required to found and operate a grammar school.

Harvard started as a small college with fewer than ten students and gradually grew over two centuries, slowly, to a range of 200–300 students.

By about 1770 there were nine colleges that enrolled about 1500 students—in all of America—meaning less than 1% of Americans were enrolled in college.

One can get a good education without going to college—have you noticed that? That was the case in early America. The clearest and most interesting survey of this fact is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835). He marvels at the literacy and learnedness among the general population—far surpassing what he had seen in France. He notes that America had fewer deeply-educated intellectuals—but a kind of popular intellect that put America in a class of its own. As we might suspect, however, he was not commenting on the African American population that was enslaved.

The Adams Family Across Four Generations

There may be no American family through whom we can watch the transmission—and gradual transmutation—of classical education more clearly than the Adams family. Across four generations—John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams, and Henry Adams—we see not merely a lineage of statesmen, but a lineage of schooling. And through their schooling, we glimpse the larger story of American education.

John Adams (1735–1826), our 2nd president and a signer of the Declaration, was formed in the full confidence of the classical tradition. At Harvard he studied Latin and Greek, Cicero and Virgil, rhetoric, logic, moral philosophy. The ancients were not antiquarian curiosities; they were living tutors. Rome to him was not nostalgia; it was instruction. For Adams, classical education formed men capable of liberty. “Liberty,” he wrote, “cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” Knowledge was not ornamental; it was the safeguard of self-government.

The classical curriculum did not merely inform him; it shaped his moral imagination. Cicero trained prudence. Tacitus warned against tyranny. Scripture formed conscience. Education, for John Adams, was about forming citizens capable of sustaining a republic—civic, moral, and theological all at once. And he transmitted this inheritance to his son with urgency.

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), a senator and our 5th president, may have been the most intensely educated child in early America. Tutored abroad while accompanying his father, fluent in French as a boy, steeped in Latin and Greek, disciplined in history and moral philosophy, he kept a diary from childhood—the diary of a young Christian Stoic. Classical education, for him, was not merely preparation for office; it was preparation for judgment.

He once wrote, with sober self-examination, “My whole life has been a succession of disappointments.” That is not the language of ambition thwarted; it is the language of a man measuring himself against inherited standards of virtue. His classical education (liberal education) had taught him to live under the gaze of history—and of God. In John Quincy Adams, the classical tradition reaches an American zenith: cosmopolitan, disciplined, morally serious, confident that the past still instructs the present.

By the time we arrive at Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886), the inheritance remains, but something has begun to thin. He too was educated at Harvard, he too traveled abroad with his father, and he later became ambassador to England. He too read the classics. He preserved family papers, wrote history, and served the republic–notably as ambassador to England during the civil war years. But the intellectual climate was shifting: romanticism stirred, industrialization accelerated, professional specialization began to fragment the older moral unity. The classical curriculum was still there, but it no longer stood uncontested at the center of cultural life.

And then comes Henry Adams (1838–1918), and with him the fracture becomes visible. Henry Adams too was educated at Harvard and travelled abroad extensively with his father, but he felt himself born too late for the world that formed his forefathers. “He was born in the eighteenth century,” he wrote of himself, “and he had to live in the twentieth.” The education that had shaped his great-grandfather for republican liberty no longer seemed adequate for railroads, the steamship, electricity, industrial capitalism, and the scientific materialism inspired by Darwin.

In The Education of Henry Adams, he describes himself as a “manikin” upon whom the garments of education were draped in order to see whether they fit. “The object of study,” he writes, “is the garment, not the figure.” The figure—the human person—becomes almost incidental. Education is no longer primarily about forming the soul; it is about testing the clothing–and for Henry the educational garments of the 18th century no longer fit.

And then comes a telling line: “The young man himself… is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force.” The vocabulary has changed. John Adams spoke of virtue and liberty. Henry Adams speaks of energy and force. The anthropological center has shifted. The student is no longer primarily a moral agent to be formed, but a bundle of matter and energies to be managed.

Henry does not reject education; he questions its coherence. The classical inheritance had assumed a moral cosmos—an ordered universe in which Cicero and Scripture still spoke meaningfully into political life. But Henry stands before the electric Dynamo—the machine, the power plant, the mechanical symbol of modernity—and feels that the older curriculum cannot interpret it.

He famously contrasts the medieval Virgin—symbol of spiritual unity—with the modern Dynamo—symbol of impersonal force. The Virgin represented a world in which education ordered the soul toward transcendence. The Dynamo represents a world in which education must adapt to acceleration.

This is the hinge. In Henry Adams we witness not yet the full architecture of progressive education, but its psychological precondition. If the world is no longer stable, if energy rather than virtue is the operative category, if change rather than continuity defines the age, then education must prepare students for flux. It must be adaptive, practical, forward-looking. The curriculum must loosen. The authority of tradition must soften. The aim shifts from transmission to preparation for a rapidly-changing material and technological world.

And yet—here is the irony—Henry Adams’ very lament is classical in tone. His prose is measured. His moral seriousness is unmistakable. His disappointment assumes that education ought to make sense of the world. His crisis testifies to the greatness of what he inherited. One does not mourn what one has never loved.

Across these four generations, then, we see something profound:

• John Adams: classical education as the guardian of republican liberty.

• John Quincy Adams: classical education as disciplined moral vocation.

• Charles Francis Adams: classical education preserved amid modern currents.

• Henry Adams: classical education strained by modern fragmentation.

The transmission does not collapse overnight. It thins. It shifts. It begins to translate itself into new categories. And eventually, in Henry’s world, the confidence that education transmits a stable moral inheritance gives way to the question: how must education change to keep up with the double-time march of history?

The Adams family tells the story of America’s educational arc—from confident classical formation to anxious modern adaptation. And perhaps their story leaves us with a question of our own: if the garments no longer seem to fit, is the answer to abandon the form altogether? Or is it to recover the measure of the human being for whom they were first woven?

C.S. Lewis says that when we have lost our way in the woods the quickest way forward to return home and the first to make that turn about is the most progressive man.

W. Kane notes that the history of education is always the history of new beginnings. And Chesterton notes that every revolution is a restoration–we move forward truly and best only by inspiration from the past, for the past is not dead, it’s not even past.

And T.S. Eliot writes:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Where We Are Now: Our Own New Beginning
Henry Adams died in 1918, in the midst of the War to End All Wars, using massive machinery that he saw quickly invented and deployed in his lifetime, which took him from horse and buggy to the airplane. He saw the forces he studied and feared play out in ways that stunned the watching world. America had become a great power and England no longer looked to it as a younger cousin but as a needed, stronger ally. The British empire was shrinking; the American one was rising.

What kind of education was needed now? While Henry had ambivalently welcomed the new, progressive education (he did not see another viable choice), he was not sure the new model emerging was healthy or good—though perhaps it was inevitable. The irony of the education Henry received is a common one: he received the old education which equipped him superbly to eloquently reject it and to adapt and find his way in the world as a professor, writer, journalist, and author. It is not unheard of for great rhetoricians to use rhetoric to eloquently critique liberal education—we see it as far back as Tertullian and Jerome, and nearly all the famous progressive pioneers used their eloquent pens to deride the arts that made them.

Critique of Progressive Education
We must, I believe, lament the rise of progressive education, but we must understand it and note that the progressives got a few things right, and the classical educators of the time got several things wrong. Our critique must be sharp and fair, and I prefer it to be brief because there is nothing so boring these days as critiquing mass education. Everyone does that. I know you don’t like modern education for several reasons—but what are you for? This renewal will not be sustained by negative energy any more than a friendship can be sustained by two people mad at the same person.

The progressives, like Henry, were responding to unprecedented change, wave upon wave: Darwinian evolution suggesting natural forces rather than human will were responsible for human destiny and history; waves of technological change—the train, the steamship, the telegraph, electricity, the telephone, the factory, the automobile, the airplane—all suggesting humans could engineer and remake virtually everything—so why not education? Add to this massive immigration of millions, many of whom did not speak English, doubling and tripling the size of schools in short spans of time. What would you have done?

What They Got Right
What did the progressives get right? They saw that, in the midst of remarkable change, traditional institutions did have to adapt, and they were willing to try. They noted that traditionalists were slow to adapt and often calcified, even ossified—stodgy and stuffy. Why? Because anything good can be corrupted, and in many cases it had been.

In many cases the tradition remained vibrant and sought to make a cogent case for the classics, even in 1917 when Andrew West, professor of classics at Princeton, published The Value of the Classics. But generally the traditional educators were caught flat-footed and out-maneuvered, blinking their eyes as a new generation of educational scientists took over first Columbia Teachers College and then, in the space of three decades, much of the nation.

The theory of the progressives was flawed at the foundation, thinking that education could be transformed into a quantitative science when it cannot be, since it is an art, as raising and cultivating humans has to be. Surely education is informed by science—but education is the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and piety by means of the liberal arts and the great books in a community of academic friends. Be careful, the logician says, of the insane first premise—because the rest is logic. Education is not a science. If this confuses you, it is likely because generally we no longer can distinguish between an art, a science, a discipline, or a subject.

Progressive educators do a number of things right, and perhaps mainly because there are good people who love children in progressive schools, earnestly seeking to help them. Despite progressive theory, they do much good. But education is not a science (though blessed by the findings of science), and that assumption ensures ongoing tinkering with a machine that will never work. If you like the analogy of progressive education as the attempt to build a perpetual motion machine—you can thank Alfred J. Nock, who describes it that way in his book A Theory of Education in the United States (1931).

Since education is complex—the cultivation of a child—it is easy to reason wrongly about it. It is easy to generalize and say that a part characterizes the whole (as people are doing right now with AI) when it consists of many parts in a complex synergy. No: classical education is not merely the incorporation of Latin into the curriculum. No: progressive education is not nothing but child-selected curricula and project-based learning.

Much educational heresy is simply taking things out of their natural human balance. Thus we are forced to pit the child against the teacher and choose either child-centered or teacher-centered classrooms; we are told we must teach the child not the subject, as if it is not possible to teach a subject to a child. We are made to choose between hands-on learning and whole-class instruction, or between discovery learning and direct instruction. This is like insisting that you must choose between breakfast and lunch, or between Monday and Tuesday, because plainly you cannot have them both. This, you might recognize, is the bifurcation fallacy as applied to teaching.

In theological terms, a heresy is often a truth held out of balance, and it is always some genuine truth that gives plausibility to a heretical pedagogy. Thus the free school, in which the child chooses what to study and when, seems plausible because it is true that we should encourage children to explore and pursue their growing interests. Thus affirming virtually all student performance—everyone gets an A—seems plausible because affirmation is in fact encouraging to the child.

E. D. Hirsch establishes this well in The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them:

Both formalism and naturalism are half-truths—the most pernicious kinds of errors because they appear so plausible. (p. 219)

Just as common is the straw man fallacy in which we trot forth the worst examples of progressive teaching or classical teaching we can find in order to discredit the whole. But I should stop. All this means is that we need to recover logic—the art of using reason well—as a liberal art. Certainly not some vague “critical thinking,” which means who knows what.

Pride Comes Before a Fall
Now, having studied and taught some logic, someone like me can find himself in trouble—and you too. I can start thinking more highly of myself than I ought (I know what bifurcation means!!). This is a more serious problem than slipping into a fallacy. As Lewis says somewhere, if we teach logic without love we just create more clever devils.

Just as our own education can tempt us and puff us up with pride and render us useless as teachers, so can the very success of the classical education renewal become our own undoing. Pride usually comes before a fall.

Classical education is now officially “a thing” on a national scale, and increasingly an international scale. Many more people than ever before have heard about “classical” education and are showing interest in it. There are about 1500 classical schools in the US and about 3000 classical homeschooling co-ops. Over 300 colleges now accept the Classical Learning Test. There is rapidly growing interest overseas in Africa, China, Europe, South America, and Australia.

We might be tempted to rejoice like the Israelites did at the end of Nehemiah—when they held a feast and festival after rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem after 52 days. That is a remarkable feat, and Nehemiah is a remarkable book that can instruct all of us. The walls of Jerusalem were built with permission and funding from King Artaxerxes of Persia. The Israelites returned from exile—and aren’t we returning from exile? 1Perhaps that is a pattern worth contemplating, alongside reawakening from hibernation.

We should read history for encouragement and instruction. We should read about the rise and fall of Rome, and the Third Reich. We should read the Old and New Testament. But we should not become utopians—a name that literally means “no place,” and there is no place for utopianism. The word utopia is a pun invented by Thomas More: ou in Greek means “no” and topos means place—hence “no place.” Yet eu means “good,” and so it also could mean “good place.” Utopia is a “good place” that is “no place.”

Jacques Barzun says that schools can teach but not educate any more than one can learn a civilization in a short course at community college. Mark Twain gets at the same point—at a knife’s point—when he says, “Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.” This is because education is full formation: intellectual, moral, spiritual, and physical. Schooling plays its part in education—meaningful but small, given a lifetime. We now expect schools to be medical clinics, nutrition centers, and counseling centers. There is no one place that can educate.

Some of us are drawn to a utopian outlook—the optimists in the room, of which I am one. Let me call on the history of Christianity: since Augustine and his magnum opus The City of God and the City of Man, Christians have believed that the wheat and tares (those in and out of the church) would grow up together in the same field of this world, intermingled. For Augustine, it meant Christians were to serve peaceably with those outside the church, seeking to be leaven in the bread (or salt of the earth) that benefits all; it meant Christians were to serve, love, and if necessary die, but always pray for the peace of the city. There will be no New Jerusalem on this earth until Christ returns—no earthly paradise, certainly no utopia.

This means that those of us who are Christians in this renewal are here to serve, not rule. It means we should collaborate, not dominate.

Christian Patriotism
It certainly means that we love the land in which we live—our country and our countrymen. It means we want the common good, or as Paul puts it in Romans 12, “as far as it depends on you, live in peace with all men,” and even bless those who persecute us. We Christians are instructed to ensure that “petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone—for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.” You might call this a Christian patriotism, a phrase I much prefer to Christian nationalism.

But the history of Christian education means something else that should be acknowledged. We who are Christians are heirs of a rich archive of classical education. We don’t own it, because much of classical education is first of all human—before it is Jewish, or Christian, or secular. Training in the liberal arts entails training in how to use word and number, which is according to human nature and fitting for any human being. We Christians would say that the liberal arts—discovered and developed by the Greeks and Romans outside the church—are rooted in the doctrine of creation. If you are a creation of God, then the liberal arts are for you, Christian or not.

We say the same thing about anything true, good, or beautiful—a lovely triad describing cosmic reality, articulated first by Plato but corresponding to biblical teaching. Every human being naturally loves and desires the True, the Good, and the Beautiful; every human being should have the opportunity to seek it and study it with good teachers. Yes, we believe the Trinity is the Author of all that is true, good, and beautiful, something obviously Plato did not confess.

Is it any surprise that in the history of Christian education, Christians welcomed Christians and non-Christians into Christian schools—including the poor who could pay no tuition? This was true of many monastic schools that educated Europe for centuries, from about 500 to 1400 AD. After all, Christians are supposed to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, take in the stranger. Are they not to teach as well?

The Christian tradition of classical education is rich and varied, and many—though not all—of the great books in the classical curriculum come from writers who were Christians: Augustine, Alcuin, Aquinas, Dante, Milton, Newton, Kepler. But there were other truth seekers like Socrates, Maimonides, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche who were not Christians. The Great Tradition is significantly populated with Christian writers but not exclusively so. Christians and non-Christians can study this tradition together; faith and reason can be welcomed into a public as well as a private academy. Whatever we make of “separation of church and state,” there should be no separation of religion and academic study in a classical school.

This means that the classical tradition, though historically steeped in the Christian religion (and at various times in Jewish and even Muslim traditions), can welcome the seeker as well as the stranger into Christian classical schools. Increasingly this is what Christians are doing—though they are free to restrict admission to Christian families only. Practices can vary, and do, for good reasons.

It is worth noting that we don’t yet know our own history very well, since this tradition has been hibernating or laying dormant underground until warm weather came. There are not yet many of us who have sufficiently read the history of the kind of education we are seeking to restore. This is a necessary irony, a necessary part of the renewal. We had to start when we knew we were not qualified to do so. We have learned on the job; we have stayed one chapter ahead. But that was nearly a generation ago, and matters are gradually starting to change. But how many of you know even an outline of the history of this tradition or its recent renewal?

We reawakened about 45 years ago—scarcely the span of one generation. We can trace the beginning of the renewal to four schools that started independently from each other within three years. To my knowledge, the first was the Trivium School, a Catholic school in Lancaster, Massachusetts, founded in 1979. Cair Paravel Latin School founded in 1980 in Topeka, Kansas. The DNA of that school descended from Columbia University (from the 1940s) to the University of Kansas to Cair Paravel. Two more schools—the Logos School of Moscow, Idaho, and the Trinity School at Green Lawn, South Bend Indiana—started in 1981. The DNA of Trinity was transplanted to the Great Hearts academies, and the DNA of Logos has often been placed into many Protestant and Reformed classical schools that are part of the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS).

In the mid-1990s, the Society for Classical Learning (SCL) started to serve Christian classical schools and has been growing robustly. Colleges have been renewing in parallel with the K–12 schools. The ecosystem now includes publishers, networks of schools, charter schools, Catholic schools, Protestant schools, Orthodox schools, a few Jewish schools, and homeschool co-ops—along with new efforts to help the vast majority of Americans who have never heard of classical education understand what it is and consider it for their families.

We are just now coming of age, able to order a bourbon. Now that we can drink, we will be tempted to drink too much. Our success, like a good old-fashioned, can go to our heads.

If we return to the daffodils as our analogy, we are now witnessing flowers blooming across a growing garden—a garden growing wild. Not only daffodils are breaking through the ground and blooming, but all manner of perennial flowers from different regions. No one is able to control or cultivate this spreading verdancy. Classical schools emerging in Texas have distinct species (along with a special focus on live music and barbecue); other varieties are blooming in California and here in Arizona (where apparently California has come), and in central Pennsylvania where I live—and even in Hawaii where a classical school studies Latin and Japanese. The flowers there are tropical.

This marks health. Yes, there is a need for preparing and training thousands of new teachers; yes, a need for good and better curricular resources; yes, a need for leadership training, funding, and excellent operations. But no single organization can curate this sprawling garden in this new Spring. No one “owns” this garden—if anyone owns it, it is humanity—for humanity made it, even if we Christians believe humans made it by the grace and benevolence of God.

Naturally as we co-labor, we will have to concentrate on our particular garden patch or plot. This means that at times we will compete for resources and find ourselves occasionally stepping on the boot of a fellow gardener. But competition need not be viewed as a negative win-loss affair. The Latin reminds us: competere means “to seek with.” Competition only becomes negative when there are two seeking some good for which there is only room for one. If we all seek to climb to the summit of Mt. Washington (in the summer please) we will find there is room for everyone at the top.

We at Classical Academic Press “compete” with several other classical curricula companies—and there are several good ones. I am glad to say that we are colleagues and friends seeking the same thing—and finding it.

The Roman and American Arena
People have come to America. Perhaps your people came to America. There is a peppy song in the musical West Side Story where Anita and her friends from Puerto Rico sing about how happy they are to be in America.

We want to be to America
It is OK in America
Everything free in America
For a small fee in America

America has been seeded with good seeds from Puerto Rico and from virtually every country on the planet. This is another reason why we are a garden growing wild, and truly e pluribus unum.

In the Roman Coliseum, there were gladiator fights, other games, and even martyrdoms. Often exotic animals from around the known world were brought into the arena (Latin for sand) to astonish Roman spectators. After the Christian era, when the games were ended (about 500 AD), beautiful and unknown flowers and fauna began to appear on the grounds of the arena—which became a kind of wild garden, an astonishment of an unexpected kind. Seeds traveled on the fur and in the stomachs of the many animals brought into the Coliseum, many of which were killed in simulated hunts. The seeds mixed with their blood and over years eventually germinated and sprouted in the Coliseum—a place of frivolous games, hunts, and martyrdoms—becoming a garden, something beautiful.

America is something of a vast arena. Heirloom seeds have come from the Great Tradition from many lands, over many years. So many seeds which have remained buried in the soil are coming to life. Let us be grateful for this gift—for we did nothing to make it ourselves or deserve it—we merely were born here or came here to find this inheritance preserved for us and handed down by those who came before us.

Rekindled Fire
Plutarch said that education is not the filling of a vessel but the kindling of a fire. That was said some 1800 years ago—a principle handed down to us—which describes human experience and so remains true today. All of us have a flame in our hearts that needs to grow. Every school is a blend of those flames, which creates its own indescribable incandescent beauty.

When this kind of incandescent school exists, like other beautiful things, you really can’t describe it well, can you? I recall learning this as a young headmaster: it was far more effective to show the school to prospective parents than to talk about it. Once I gave a tour to a young mom of a kindergartner or 1st grader, who after her tour of the school said to me, “I didn’t know that this is what I was looking for, but this is what I am looking for.” She was weeping. She saw children who loved their teacher, and who loved one another, who were at peace. She saw earnest attention and conversation; she saw happy chatter and shouts of glee on the playground. But as you know, these words fail to describe the beauty of a vibrant classical school that is truly good in the deepest moral sense of that word. What that mother saw was wonder and love and genuine friendship.

Let love for this present life and the life to come fix your aims, focus your work, and fire your hearts. If that happens in your school, your teachers will become a faculty of friends whom students admire and naturally emulate.

Preserve and tend this fire that has been rekindled for you. Let it grow in your school so that each child becomes a shining lamp that collectively illuminates your school like a candlelight vigil that attracts others by its beauty. Let that beauty draw others in, and then watch beauty do its eternal work of leading us all to goodness and truth.

I was talking to a colleague this weekend about the words we use to describe classical education. We both agreed that for better or worse we are stuck with the adjective “classical” for our modern project of renewing, well, classical education.

My wife Christine is a poet who has frequently pointed out to me that virtually all words have their origin in metaphor. Another colleague of mine, sometimes gets frustrated with the regular use of analogy to describe educational matters, saying at one point she would prefer a description that was straightforward, clear, and “right on the nose.” Metaphors are everywhere in our language but many have become dead, which means that we no longer remember or perceive the point—the way a word points to some object to make the point, like the tip of a nose.

Even our word language is a metaphor. It derives from the Latin lingua which means simply “tongue.” The word point is a metaphor but need I really point that out? Above I used the word describe, which means to “write out” (from the Latin) and straightforward, which when thought about makes for a gripping visual. There, I just wrote gripping—another handy metaphor.

So how can we talk about something as complex as education without the use of metaphor—after all we are using language? If metaphor is a figure (what, a figure?) of speech that speaks of one thing as if it were another, what is an analogy? An analogy is an extended comparison that explains or clarifies one thing by showing how it is similar to another, usually in a deliberate and reasoned way. It is important to note reason in the use of analogy because the “logy” in analogy is a reference to logos or logia—or reason. A literal rendition of the Greek is “according to (ana) reason (logia).”

To describe what education is, to describe what classical education is, involves something large, long, and old. Education has something to do with helping a child grow from infancy into adulthood. How does one do that? How does one talk about it?

According to Mortimer Adler, education is one of the 102 great ideas that humans have been discussing and wrestling with for millenia. Therefore we might ask what the ancient Greeks meant when they used words for “education.” Their favorite word was paideia, which means essentially formation, upbringing, and cultivation of character. We can’t help noticing that this word, too, contained a piquant metaphor. This is because the Greek word for child (one of them) was pais/paidos. To the Greek ear, paideia would sound something like “childing” or what you do with a child to form him into a fully-functioning adult and citizen. This is true of another very similar-sounding word in Greek: paidia. Paidia meant not so much what you do with a child but what a child does by himself—play.

The Greeks had other words for education too—such as trophe which means nourishment and upbringing. Think of our word atrophy—what happens when our bodies are not nourished and exercised. Paul uses the verbal form of this word in Ephesians 6:4 when he writes, “Fathers do not exasperate your children but bring them up (extrephete) in the training (paideia) and fear of the Lord.” Yes, Paul uses to two popular words for education in this single verse. Can we read into this verse the entire, formalized Greek education project? Probably not if we pay attention to how Paul use the word elsewhere in the New Testament. But the general sense of trophe as nourishing and bringing up and the sense of paideia as formation are present.

The Romans, following the Greeks, had their own favorite words for education. When Jerome translated Ephesians 6:4 into Latin, he did it this way: “sed educate illos in disciplina et correptione Domini.” I give you the Latin as is because even if you have not studied Latin you can read most of this sentence: “but educate them in the discipline and correction of the Lord.” In this sentence the educate is the Latin imperative (“raise up, rear, bring up” and it comes straight into English with the same spelling. But do we today mean by “educate” what Jerome intended when he used the Latin word? Words change as they are used and evolved, and it is not clear at all that American some 1600 years after Jerome mean the same thing by using the same letters e-d-u-c-a-t-e.

You will note that Jerome translates the Greek paideia with the Latin disciplina. This raises another common difficulty—how does one render a rich, multi-dimensional word like paideia with a single Latin word, or a single English word? You have heard that there is always something lost in translation. This is a classic case. One word will simply not do, but who would want to use three or four words in a translation? There are a few translations that attempt this but they naturally are swollen and not so enjoyable to read. Here are three that attempt to give us two or more words for extrephete/educate and paideia/disciplina:

• The Amplified Bible: “but rear them [tenderly] in the training and discipline and the counsel and admonition of the Lord.”

• The Expanded Bible: “but raise them with the ·training [discipline] and ·teaching [instruction] of the Lord.”

• The Interpreted Bible: “Instead, they are commanded to raise children using the "discipline and instruction of the Lord," which implies nurturing them with Christian values, loving structure, and consistent, godly guidance.”

One rich Greek or Latin word will justify more than one English one. Not only do we need more words—certainly more than merely “education” and even “classical education.” But how do we do that without becoming verbose to the point of dullness?

I think this brief survey shows that we have inherited a rich, complex tradition of education and words about education. We are humans, creatures with linguae (tongues) who speak and listen and also read and writes. We cannot teach well without words, we certainly can’t learn without them. While words can be quite slippery at times, they serve as well, and no one (that I know) would want to live without them. Perhaps we are terse and pithy, perhaps we are loquacious—but we are in want of words, and words used well.

Words evolve and change over time, sometimes accruing new layers of meaning, sometimes shedding them. Sometimes they change in ways as to become contradictions of their primitive use. The word “nice” emerges as an example—which derives from nesire (to not know, to be ignorant). In days gone by, it would be an insult be called “nice.” Now, well, it’s nice to be nice.

Who, then, will offer us a nice definition of education or even classical education? Who will tell us what the Romans meant by educatio, eruditio, instructio, and humanitas, or the Greeks by paideia, didaskalia and mathesis?

I will try, carefully, in coming posts. But if I had to choose one word for them all it would be formation. And of course that’s a metaphor.

They say that writing is rewriting and that good reading is rereading.

The wisdom we have inherited tell us again and again—or repeats for us—that anything mastered is done not once but many, many times. One Japanese saying is “a thousand times, then begin.” Quintilian tells us, “It is better to learn a little thoroughly and to repeat it often, than to learn much superficially.” Jerome writes, “Constant repetition is the mother of studies” and Seneca says simply “let us repeat often what we have learned.” This is one key way to deep learning or mastery.

Rightly conceived, repetition is a very good and human thing. We employ it to learn, perform, and enjoy music; we learn it to dance (and who doesn’t enjoy dancing), play tennis, and make a good old-fashioned. Children understand innately the virtue of repetition and even demand it: Read it again Daddy! One more time!

The root of this Latinate word is instructive—for it means to petition or seek…again. There are many good things to seek in life, worth seeking and finding over and over again, whether a great concert, a great drink, or a great book. In fact, we might regard the prefix “re” as sacred. We attach it to almost every good thing we encounter because want every good thing not just once but always or at least for a good long time. When will I tire of hearing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, or sipping a good old-fashioned?

The dictionary bears this out. In my Cassell’s Latin Dictionary (the short one) I count at least 350 verbs that begin with “re” like reportare (to bring back), renumerare (to count again), and respectare (to look again, to look back). In my micrographic edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, I find 400 pages with “re” words and an average of 15 words per page or 6000 “re” words. Perhaps only half of these are “re” verbs—and I think there are more—but that makes for 3000 English verbs modified with the prefix “re” from reassume to revive. Clearly, repetition is what we humans do and keep doing. Shall I say it again?

Of course there is a kind of repetition employed in education (and in other aspects of life) that merits the description “drill and kill” and “rote memory.” To seek again, to repeat, is deeply human and good thing. But anything good can be corrupted, and we corrupt the good of repetition repeatedly.

It is possible to review the causes for the Revolutionary War in a way that is dull and uninspiring (a regurgitation or retreading). Dull teachers do this regularly. But it is also possible to review (revisit, reconsider, remark, return, relive) the cause of the war in ways that are remarkable, refreshing, and renewing. Much depends on which verb you wish to attach the sacred prefix.

Much of bad teaching is bad repetition that equates to test prep. Such repetition seeks nothing but a grade on a multiple choice test, making such instruction repulsive because the teacher merely rehashes content and reveals no new sight, no refreshing perspective. Such bad repetition should be revoked and replaced with something… well, you can chose the word.

For those of you who have not yet seen the new book on pedagogy (The Good Teacher) that I co-authored with Carrie Eben—you can see it here and order at 25% of list price (until Dec. 20) for being my Substack subscriber. Just follow this link.

Note: Dr. Robert D. Crouse, whom Father Nathan Carr mentions as a professor in Trinity, Halifax, Nova Scotia, actually taught in the Classics Department at King's College and Dalhousie University.

We are entering the Thanksgiving season, and I thought I should send you a brief message and report mainly to express my gratitude.

First the gratitude. I have been blessed in so many ways by many of you have reached out to me, written to me, or greeted me here and there in my travels, and your travels. I have been blessed by the fact that some of you have chosen to financially support this newsletter, even though nothing is behind a paywall. Thank you.

But there is more. My wife Christine (poet, professor, extraordinary partner and wife) has been enduring an ovarian cancer diagnosis for two years now and many of you have upheld her (and me) in meaningful ways that I can’t adequately express. I am glad to report that she is doing well while bearing a rather heavy cross. She inspires almost everyone who encounters her—and I encounter her daily. Christine will be hosting a podcast with the Humanitas Institute (launching in January 2026), one indication of how well she is doing while carrying her cross.

I also want to bring to your attention a remarkable servant of the classical renewal—Joshua Gibbs—who recently suffered a stroke. Josh is as stalwart as they come, but who can stand up against the infirmities of the body without the help of friends and Creator. Please pray for him for a full recovery, if you are of the praying ilk. You can learn more about his stroke and how to help here.

It seems that as a country and a culture we are at a crossroads, which only conjures up the image of the cross that reminds us of daily death but also daily life, for the one who bore the cross did not keep it, and neither shall we.

Remember Christine and Josh—and be grateful.

A long time ago (14 years) I had an idea for gathering and curating film reviews that were anchored in the classical and Christian tradition. Some very good work was done over that time and many writers (including the inimitable Josh Gibbs) produced some excellent reviews and articles on FilmFisher.com. Over 400 films were reviewed over the years.

Now, however, the work is being renewed, refreshed, and relaunched on Substack at www.filmfisher.substack.com. The work is being led by two graduates of the film program at Biola University (and the Torrey Honors Institute)—Timothy House (senior editor) and Timothy Lawrence (senior writer). They have also recruited several talented writers as regular contributors. And they are looking for more.

And, yes, the reviews are written from a perspective informed by the Christian faith and the classical tradition. The great majority of the content on their Substack site is free, so I encourage you to hop on over, poke around and subscribe!

Simply click here to take a look: FilmFisher on Substack

I am writing to you as one of the paid subscribers to my Substack newsletter. First, I should simply say thank you! You are supporting this newsletter even though it is offered free to everyone. That means a lot to me.

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I was asked to speak at the Turning Point USA Educator’s Summit this July on what it means to be a wise educator. It was a challenging assignment: It is hard to talk about wisdom when we have forgotten what it is.

Like so many concepts related to education, wisdom remains as a word which we occasionally use but seldom understand. Imagine being called upon to offer pithy definition of what wisdom is, along with the justification for why it should be one of the great aims and fruits of a good education. How would you do? In another post (What Is Wisdom?), I try to define wisdom. In this post, I relate wisdom to contemplation and then contemplation to happiness.

If we don’t know what wisdom is—how can we presume to be cultivating it in our students? As we continue to recover a vital classical education, we continue to recover words and their meaning, for only by doing this do we recover the ideas and practices that comprise such an education. Here is an adapted and expanded version of my presentation at the Educator’s Summit.

The wise educator is the happy educator, and the happy educator is the educator who has learned to see. Learn to see what is true, good, and beautiful—and this will make you happy. Do this repeatedly over time and you will become wise.

Put another way, the wise educator is not merely knowledgeable, but perceptive, contemplative, intuitive. The wise educator knows his times but lives in an important sense outside of time. He’s not time’s fool…he is not merely a man of the age, but a man of the ages.

In fact, we can say that the wise teacher is a lover. He is a lover because he is a lover of wisdom, he is a philosopher in the original sense of the word. He is a lover (a philos) of wisdom (sophia). The teacher who longs to be wise will remove anything that blocks his way to the beloved, he will work to remove every hindrance, every impediment. Shakespeare in Sonnet 116 writes about the tenacity of the lover has for his beloved, a tenacity and ardor that will not, as puts it, admit impediments:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:[CP1]
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

A teacher who wants to be wise will bear many things during his many hours and weeks, and he will not admit impediments. This is another way of saying that the wise teacher has a measure of fortitude—he is ready to endure storms and other hardships that might push him to the edge. But if he can, and when he can, he will make his pursuit easier by removing barriers and impediments to his quest.

The Roman soldier, too, was familiar with an impediment—for it was the name of the large pack (impedimentum) he carried on his back for mile upon mile. The word literally means that which retrains one’s feet (pedes in Latin) making it hard to walk. Yes, it was hard to keep moving one foot after another with 60 to 100 lbs of equipment on one’s back.

The wisdom-seeking teacher becomes familiar with various impediments. There are many: Wasted time, distraction, frivolous entertainment, unguided reading, dabbling, poor company, poor health. In fact, anything that degrades his mind or body can become a hindrance; the wise teacher soon learns the worth of the ancient and monastic maxim of anima sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body).

When it comes to teaching, he learns to avoid heavily-scripted curricula that attempt to control how and what and when the teacher will teach; he avoids fast-paced test prep and the “covering” of material that is never mastered, and he rejects shallow books with twisted stories.

Like Shakespeare’s lover, the wise teacher is not time’s fool. He will read the old books (and yes, some new ones), the ones that are ever fresh, ever new, which is why we also call them the great books.

He doesn’t merely read these books, these books read him. And he has read these books patiently: the wise educator has not grown wise in spurts and fits but has grown slowly like a tree—when the fruit is fully ripe it appears quietly and fills the branches without the tree even knowing.

Prudential Wisdom

Teachers mature like fine wine. No teacher becomes wise after two years of teaching, or four years of college, though these can be very good starts, and there are in fact some who are wise beyond their young age. The wise teacher has become so with experience, and therefore time, but also the wise use of time, time spent reading (which is to live other lives before one dies), time spent in conversation with colleagues (which includes students), and time spent star-gazing, meaning not just the stars that burn like flames in the sky (well they are flames in the sky) but any burning wonder that is worthy of attention—Augustine is a star, Aquinas is a star, Shakespeare and Whitman are stars, Dickens is a star, Chesterton is a star, Tolkien and Lewis are twin stars.

The wise teacher is a prudent teacher that has learned how to see what is really real and who helps his students to realize1 what is true, good, beautiful, and holy. The prudent teacher may be busy (maybe too busy) like King David was busy. But King David, busy executive that he was, still found time to be a poet. And in one of his poems, he expresses the persistent longing for an activity far better than exercising his kingly duties. In Psalm 27 he writes that he wants only one thing—one thing he asks of the Lord—that he might dwell in the temple of the Lord all his days and gaze upon the beauty of the Lord all the days of his life. David longed to be in the temple, infusing our word contemplation with sacred meaning (cum + templum). The wise teacher contemplates.

The Latin word for practical wisdom was prudentia (and in Greek phronesis). Prudentia is one of the four cardinal virtues (along with justice, temperance, and fortitude). The wise teacher is prudent without being prude;2 he is providential in the sense that he can see things before they happen, so good is he at reading the circumstances that surround him. Providence (to see before) has collapsed into Prudence—and this ability to see what is really real, to discern, we can also call practical wisdom. If we don’t truly see what is real—how well will we conduct ourselves in the world, how well will we teach? If prudence is the art and virtue of seeing and discerning the real—then who will teach me to see? Who will take me before the true, good, beautiful, and holy and say: “Behold!” Who will instruct me by fixing and holding my gaze, until I become what I behold? Is this not the call of Christ in Luke chapter 6 when he says “When a student has become fully trained he will become like his teacher?” Is this not the embedded truth in the preceding question when he asks, “If a blind man leads a blind man, won’t they both fall into a pit?” A wise teacher is one who has seen something true, good, and beautiful but refuses to simply bring a report to his students. Instead, he takes his students by the hand and says, “Come, let me show you something” --the same impulse of the woman at the well (in John 4) who said to her neighbors “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did.”

Prudence is about sight, and not just physical sight but insight, the perception of what is real. If we become prudent, then we can teach. If we become prudent, we will know what is what, who is who, and what to do. To use Christ’s language again, if we learn to take out the plank from our own eye, we will see clearly to pull the speck from our brother’s eye, from our student’s eye.

Only the prudent teacher can teach justly, giving to each student his or her due. Only after perceiving the reality of the subject he teaches, the class dynamics, the talents, strengths, and weaknesses of each student, the time he has available to teach (and many other factors) can he bring about justice in the classroom—teaching the right art, at the right time, in the right manner, to the right students. Prudence, after seeing the real, will know what to do, when, and how. How do we get prudence?

Aristotle is right when he says that prudential wisdom comes from experience as well as training.3 Children, he says, cannot be prudentially wise, for they have not lived enough to learn and see how the world works. Instruction contributes to the acquisition of prudence but so do the various ways that we are schooled by thousands of observations and experiences.

Acquiring prudence activates and enables other great virtues—like temperance. Knowing the real, the prudent teacher will know how to curb or reign in his own desire to teach far more great content than his students are able to absorb and learn. He will temper his teaching. He will also know how to cultivate temperance in his students—since temperance also doubles as an academic virtue. Some students are intemperate by being lazy and need to be spurred, prompted, and exhorted; some students are intemperate by bounding ahead in their studies before they have truly mastered what is before them—and they need to be pulled back.

The prudent teacher will also know how to cultivate courage—evoking it in himself as well as his students. Students are often tempted by fear, cowering before a new concept, skill, or idea that they think is too hard, or beyond them. Sometimes they fear failure, or looking silly before their peers. The prudent teacher knows when students in fact can rise to meet a challenge, and thus grow their confidence and joy in academic work. He knows how to inspire and gently push, to bend without breaking. He knows how to do this with colleagues who are new teachers, and indeed he knows how to do this even with himself.

Sophic Wisdom

But the wise teacher is not only prudent or practically wise—He is also sophic. We might want to say sophisticated, or even sophistic, despite the bad reputation the ancient Greek sophists have given to this word. But there is a rare word that fits: sophic. The Greek word for prudential wisdom was phronesis, but the Greek word for cosmic wisdom was sophia. Sophia the noun, and sophos the adjective, live (with various meanings) in our words, sophisticated, sophomore (not just a second-year student at college but a sophos-moron or a wise fool), and in our word philosopher (who in the ancient world was a lover of wisdom). It also lives in the name Sophia, the name of my daughter-in-law, whom my son Noah was wise to marry.

To have prudence is to be practically wise, to have Sophia is to understand (as far as a man can) how the world works in every domain and relation. It is the Big Wisdom. It is the ways of God with man. It is at the heart of the questions that God asks Job, when Job finally gets his day in court with God: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Have you come upon the fountain of the sea and walked in the tracks of the deep?

How do we obtain even a measure of this grand wisdom of God who knows all things, and in whom all things cohere?

The short answer: A long-lived life during which one has been well-educated. It comes through a life of reading, study, and conversation with mentors, coaches, colleagues and friends. Here is John Henry Newman describing the fruit of a sustained, good education. He calls this “the perfection of the intellect” which does not indicate a flawless or even the best intellect, but one that has fully matured over time.

The Perfection of the Intellect

That perfection of the Intellect which is the result of education, and its beau ideal, to be imparted in their respective measures, is the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the fine mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it.

It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres.

I have italicized various phrases worthy of our attention. The well-educated mind has a vision of all things–the ways the various elements of the cosmos are harmoniously connected. That vision is characterized by clarity, calmness, and accuracy. The well-educated mind knows the human heart and soul because it has studied history and literature. This makes the mind prophetic (what has happened will likely happen again) and able to discern the heart of any man that appears before him (he has read and become familiar with many hearts in many poems, novels, and stories). The well-educated mind has a proper, broad perspective that can recognize truth from any source without being pigeon-holed by the latest intellectual fad. Such an educated person is at peace, seldom surprised by any opinion or event, trusting in the One who orders and sustains all things eternally and beautifully.

I know of no other short description that illuminates as well what it means to be educated and wise.

Newman, in this passage, is describing not merely prudence or practical wisdom but sophia, the “comprehension of all things.” Sophia, like prudence, is attained slowly and is never finally attained. In fact, the more you see of sophic wisdom the more it seems to recede before you (except to those who observe you). This is because the cosmos is infinite, and God is infinite, and because even your own soul is beyond any final and complete knowledge (much less your spouse—whom you thought you knew when you got married). If you are a mystery even to yourself, how will you finally know even one other person? How will you exhaustively know a nation, or the history of a nation?

Still a wise teacher can become sophic. This is because though we cannot know exhaustively, we can know truly, and we can make progress. And for Christians, we have a special advantage—Christos is the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24). The revelation of cosmic wisdom in the person of Jesus Christ who created the world (and all that is in it) and sustains it, can lead us to wisdom in this earthly life that is otherwise not possible.

Jesus is the Logos, the one in whom all things cohere (Colossians 1:17), and who enlightens every man (John 1:9). Everything that is true, good, or beautiful is an Analogos—derived from him and relation to him. Any truth is related to him who is the truth. Anything good is related to him who alone is the source of the good. Anything beautiful is related to him who makes all things beautiful.

Contemplative and Happy

We conclude then that the wise teacher is prudent and sophic—both words worth recovering. Certainly, he continues to seek these virtues. But he cannot become wise in these two ways without that most practical of all human activity: contemplation. Nor can he (or anyone) be truly happy without contemplation. Aristotle notes this in Book X of his Ethics, but I learned this most piquantly from Josef Pieper (pictured above) and especially in his book Happiness and Contemplation.

The wise teacher, therefore, must see the real to be happy and be happy in order to be wise. In this context, seeing reality—or perceiving the true, good, and beautiful—is contemplation.

The word and idea of contemplation is often fuzzy to us because of how little or how poorly we practice it. Perhaps more than ever, we are distracted by distraction to distraction. We likely spend nearly half our waking hours before some glassy, glowing screen or another—those magical devices that bring us inspiration and degradation, blessings and curses, good and evil, but which we are literally unable to turn off (do you even know how?).

But the highest human activity is not entertainment, certainly not amusement. The highest human activity is the unrushed, sustained engagement of our souls with something true, good, beautiful, and holy. It is closely related to wonder—that word we use to describe those times when we are drawn to gaze, consider, ponder, and savor an idea, an object, or an event that evokes astonishment and ignorance at the same time. There is no shortage of such wonders in this cosmos, if only we had eyes to see. We do have such eyes (wonders in themselves!) but they are ever seeing but hardly ever perceiving.

What’s more, our greatest happiness is the result of such wonder-ful seeing, and joy is always the follow-on of happiness. Perhaps this is the most practical truth of humanity and therefore of teaching: Learn to see the wonderful and you will become happy and then experience joy as a by-product.

All of us have experienced the happiness of contemplation even though such experiences are becoming increasingly infrequent. Can you recall a time when you stared in astonishment at some creature, some human face, some plant, some beautiful display in out-of-doors? Can you recall a time when a painting, a poem, a turn of phrase gripped you and compelled ongoing reflection? Can you recall a discovery of an idea or truth that was manifested to you like a secret revelation? Then you have contemplated.

It was Aristotle who first said that it is in contemplation that we are the most like the divine. He said only the gods (who had no need or concern to work for well-being or to satisfy thirst and hunger) could engage freely and regularly in contemplation and thus be blessed. The word Aristotle used for blessed is makarios in Greek.4 The gods were described as the makarioi (blessed ones) and only they could be makarios. But this is the word Jesus uses in the beatitudes in Matthew 5. Blessed (makarioi) are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed (makarioi) are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

Even our English translation for makarios suggests something sublime. Our word bless is a dance with our word bliss.5 Are you blessed, then you might be happy, you might even be blissful.

What would happen if our students were regularly taught by such prudent, wise, contemplative, happy, joyful, and blessed teachers? Their very presence would be a more powerful pedagogy than any teaching technique. Such wise teachers would themselves be the most transformative curriculum a school could obtain. One such teacher, as a model, can help to transform a child into a true student, full of zeal, humility, docility, and love for the true, good, and beautiful and the Author of them all.

Perhaps you have had even one such teacher—a teacher who far from being an educational technician, and slave to the script of some published textbook, was a living model of wisdom, someone growing in wisdom, virtue, holiness, and knowledge, someone far beyond the cliché of a “life-long learner” someone more like a muse that radiates love and humility, someone who inspires, kindles, and inflames, someone who takes young minds to gaze on new wonders virtually every week, someone who treats students as fellow sojourners, until they learn to seek and find, even when the teacher is absent.

Would that we all might become that kind of wise teacher—that students might follow us and see what we have seen and then slowly become wise themselves. If this is what their soul and mind long for…let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.

Suggested Reading and Books:

• The Idea of A University, John Henry Newman

• The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle

• The Intellectual Life, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, A. G. Sertillanges

• Happiness and Contemplation, Josef Pieper

• The Scholé Way, Bringing Restful Teaching and Learning Back to School and Homeschool, Christopher Perrin

• The Good Teacher: Ten Key Pedagogical Principles That Will Transform Your Teaching, Christopher Perrin
  

I am currently at the ACCS (Association of Classical Christian Schools) conference in Dallas, preparing to give a talk on what it means to be a good teacher. If you have followed this Substack, you know that by a “good teacher” I mean that a teacher should first be a good, virtuous person and second be a skilled pedagogue.

Just yesterday, the CAP team released pithy website that complements The Good Teacher book. For those interested, take a look at https://goodteacherbook.com/. The site makes it easy to review the ten principles of the book and also provides downloadable documents of all of the appendices in PDF format. These include a summary of the ten principles, a pedagogical checklist based on the principles, and a chart that lists the moral and academic virtues that we seek to cultivate in students.

I hope this new website will be a help to many of you wanting to grow as good teacher!

Well after about a year and half of writing and rewriting with my co-author Carrie Eben, The Good Teacher book is released. In case you have not heard, this book describes ten traditional pedagogical principles we think can transform the teaching of any classical teacher. If you are interested in pedagogy, I think you will enjoy the book.

25% Off and Thank You

To thank you for being a subscriber to my newsletter, I am glad to give you a 25% discount “coupon” for the book. Just click the link below and it will take directly to a shopping car with the discount applied. The coupon is good until tomorrow night (May 28) at 11:59pm. Once your “add to cart” the discount will automatically apply. Here is the link:

25 % Discount: The Good Teacher Coupon

Carrie and I have also recorded a ClassicalU course in which we teach through all ten principles in the book. You can preview the course and view sample content here:

ClassicalU Course on the Good Teacher

Thank you for partnership in the renewal of classical education.

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Every man has forgotten who he is... All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.

—G. K. Chesterton

This article is adapted and expanded from a section on wisdom from my new book The Scholé Way: Bringing Restful Teaching and Learning Back to School and Homeschool.

Many have noted that our age is an age of historical amnesia. In many ways, we have forgotten from where we have come. Most recently this was noted by the French writer Eric Zemmour in his article “Saving Christian Europe” in the June/July print edition of First Things. As we have forgotten our past, it follows that we have forgotten the meaning of words that the past has passed on. One such word is “religion.” We now think of “religion” in comparative terms, as worldviews that we can line up side-by-side for a disinterested analysis. Religion is also regarded as a private matter, generally to be tolerated as long as one’s religion does not lead you to address the public square.

But the word “religion” used to have other important connotations. It used to be that one’s religion not only informed how you addressed the public square (as well as your neighbor)—it was also regarded to be that which holds a civilization together. This is Zemmour’s point in his First Things article. Europe became Europe by being Christian. A Europe without Christianity will cease to be Europe.

Even the etymology of the word “religion” suggests this cohesive role. “Religion” comes from the Latin religio, which is likely related to the verb religare, “to bind again,” “to bind fast.” Think of our word “ligament” as a binding tendon within our own bodies. Religion is at root what holds a society together. What has happened to those societies that have sought to jettison all religion?

We would be wise to read our history, and certainly we would be wise to recover some lost words. I have argued this is necessary to recover a true and robust education and written about this here and here as well as in this podcast.

Another word we would be wise to recover is “wisdom.” It is another one these words like “liberal” and “art” and “liberal arts” that we use without a deep sense of their meaning. What are the liberal arts? Can you name them? Why are they called “liberal”? Why are the called “arts”? Why not “sciences”? What is the difference between and art and science? Most of us don’t know.

Try now to imagine yourself in front of a class in which a student asks, “What is wisdom really?” How would you respond?

In the classical tradition, “wisdom and virtue” are often cited as the chief ends of an education. If you are a classical educator, surely then you should know what wisdom is if it is the chief thing we are seeking to cultivate in our students.

Our word “wisdom” comes from the old English wisdom and is related to the Old Norse (visdomur) and German (Weistum). Our word “wisdom” has taken on a wide range of meanings, so we should take some time to specify what we mean when say that we are seeking to impart it to our students. As is often the case, it is helpful to go the Greek and Latin where we find four words (two in each language) that were used to describe “wisdom.”

There are two Greek words for wisdom–one is general and comprehensive, and one is more restricted and practical. We might call the first “cosmic wisdom” and the second “practical wisdom.”

Sophia (Cosmic Wisdom): The comprehensive, integrated way that all the parts of the cosmos fit and work together as an ordered, beautiful harmony. From sophia and the adjective sophos (wise) we get English words like “sophisticated,” “philosophy” (the love of sophia), and “sophomore” (a wise fool).

Phronesis (Practical Wisdom): The practical knowledge of what is actually the real state of affairs in any given circumstance along with a sense of what is best, therefore, to do. We get the rather rare academic word “phronetic” from phronesis.

As well, each of these Greek words has a corresponding Latin translation:

Sapientia (for sophia): When used as a translation for sophia, it means wisdom in very much the same way sophia is defined above. We get our word “sapience” from sapientia.

Prudentia (for phronesis): As a contraction of providentia, it can mean “a foreseeing” and also “practical judgment,” “good sense,” and “discretion.” Quite obviously, we get our word “prudence” from prudentia.

We can summarize these meanings in a table:

We can note that phronesis/prudence is also considered one of the cardinal virtues. It can be considered chief among the cardinal virtues since as the virtue that understands what is real, it informs the way the other cardinal virtues will be exercised–only after discerning what is actually real can we act effectively in the world.

This introduces some ambiguity to the phrase “wisdom and virtue.” Isn’t wisdom (if we mean prudence) already a virtue? Why not simply say that “virtue” is the end of education, and then explain (at some point) that “virtue” includes wisdom? But then which “wisdom” do we mean–sophia or phronesis?

In fact, both phronesis and sophia can be regarded as virtues because to have them is to become an excellent human being. Certainly there is nothing intrinsically wrong with saying that the chief end of education is virtue and then explaining that wisdom (both versions) is the highest virtue. Nor is there anything intrinsically wrong with using the phrase “wisdom and virtue” and then explaining that we include wisdom in the phrase because it is the chief or pinnacle of all the virtues.

Certainly to attain the wisdom that is sophia is a life-long endeavor that one never masters. A man may be relatively wiser than others but no man is supremely or completely wise. This is taught to us by Socrates and Solomon, and the Christian must confess that Christ alone is the power and wisdom of God.

Before the Christian era, Aristotle noted that wisdom is the possession of the gods, that men can only relatively acquire. To be wise (sophia), therefore, was to more closely approximate the status of the gods. He also taught that to acquire prudential wisdom (phronesis) takes a great deal of time and experience, learning to “see” reality and discern circumstances in order to know how to behave virtuously (excellently) in those circumstances. Children and youth, because they lack the experience that give us the eyes to see, cannot be virtuous or wise–both come with time.

After the incarnation of Christ, wisdom takes on new dimensions, because of the revelation and teachings of Christ. Christ shows us prudential wisdom in his words and actions–he always knows what to say and do in every circumstance. To grow prudentially wise, then, a Christian must seek to follow Christ, to study Christ, to be like Christ, to be his disciple.

When Paul calls Christ “the power of God and the wisdom God” he does not use phronesis but sophia. Note the passage below (1 Cor. 1:18-25, NKJV) with the Greek words added in parentheses.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom (sophia) of the wise,
And bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent (sunesis).”1

Where is the wise (sophos)? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom (sophia) of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom (sophia); but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom (sophia) of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser (sophos) than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

In this passage Paul is thinking of Greeks like Aristotle who seek after wisdom (sophia); Paul is very much aware of this Greek philosophic tradition. Paul does not criticize the search for wisdom–he simply asserts that the search culminates in the death and resurrection of Christ. Christ becomes the Ideal Man that the Greeks sought to become; the Christian gospel claims that rather than man ascending to the Ideal, the Ideal has come down to man.

This adds a new and radical dimension to the educational philosophy of the Christian. Christians must study in light of the resurrection of Christ who is the power and wisdom of God; Christians must regard Christ as always the true teacher in their midst that makes all study a prayer to the truth and to the one who is Truth.

Thus the move from the Greek tradition of education to the Christian one is not usually one of clash and collision but one of supersession and fulfillment.2 The Christian student can subsume or take in much of Plato and Aristotle–like the search of wisdom–but both his means and ends are transformed by Christ who is the wisdom of God and who gives wisdom generously to all who ask (James 1:5).