BY: Dr. Josh Herring
Dickens’ opening line from A Tale of Two Cities fits two opposing realities in contemporary education. When consulting national test scores, the latest scandal, or teachers’ unions calling a walkout, it is indeed “the worst of times.” And yet, there are signs of innovation, entrepreneurship, and recovery in unexpected places. The classical education renewal movement may result in “the best of times.”
Pedagogically, the classical renewal movement has revived old ideas; as such, they are accessible to public educators. Jeremy Tate, founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test, notes that “classical education is just normal education from 100 years ago.” A great classical teacher and a great public educator will often have overlapping pedagogies. Three such overlaps indicate that good public education and good classical education are adjacent.
First, the teacher-centric classroom. Some decades ago, education swung from the teacher-centric classroom to a student-centric pedagogy. Classical educators consider this change a mistake. The purpose of education involves bringing together those who know (the teachers) with those who do not know (the students). The teacher wields his authority to enable the student to encounter knowledge. While that encounter can happen in a variety of ways—lecture, notes, readings, projects (group or individual), worksheets—the teacher’s authority is primary. Mandi Gerth writes in Thoroughness and Charm that the teacher wears “her authority as a mantle and a crown.” These images are key—the mantle is an external conferring of authority that the teacher has (by virtue of standing in loco parentis and empowered by the state), and the crown is a visible representation of that authority. When teachers inhabit their role confidently, they exercise right judgment to cause learning to happen. Pedagogy begins with a right framing of the teacher’s role.
Second – the Socratic seminar. The seminar begins with identifying a meaning-rich text that can sustain serious mental engagement; the teacher then identifies the insight he wants students to arrive at. The seminar then proceeds through a group conversation. The teacher in a seminar plays Socrates, responding to student answers with follow-up questions and shepherding the conversation towards the chosen insight. Such a seminar ascends to the highest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy while modelling mutual submission to the text.
Third – A classical model for unit design. Depending on the district, some teachers may have the freedom to design their own units. They may find Mortimer Adler’s Three Columns helpful. In his Paideia Proposal, Adler contends that a classical education grounded in the Great Books is the proper patrimony of every child; he envisioned a classical education that could be executed in every public school in America. In his “educational manifesto,” Adler reduces pedagogy to three components: Lecture, Coaching, and Seminar. Didactic instruction, Adler contends, is necessary but should be minimal; coaching is the proper place for skill development; the high point of education is the discussion of ideas in the seminar. The teacher’s task is arranging the unit to best correspond with the student’s nature; students learn most, Adler contended, when they are actively doing. Coaching should make up the bulk of instructional time. These three pedagogies give rise in turn to three questions every unit plan should be able to answer:
• What will students learn in the unit? (Didactic)
• What will students be able to do because they completed the unit? (Coaching)
• How will students demonstrate what they have learned? (Seminar)
For classical teachers, these three questions map easily onto Dorothy Sayers’ Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric trifecta; for public educators, resonance with Bloom’s Taxonomy should be clear.
Both classical and public educators seek to educate the next generation so that they are prepared to take up the work of adult citizenship. Classical education brings a certain orientation to the soul, to virtue formation, to the Western tradition that progressive education does not share, but the ways in which we teach share substantial overlap. Public educators can look to the success of classical education as a model for ideas to bring into their own classrooms. As teachers improve in pedagogy, America grows towards “the best of times.”
Dr. Josh Herring is the founding Director of the Logres Institute for Classical Liberal Studies, author of Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C.S. Lewis’s Images of Gender, and Curriculum Program Manager for the Rafiki Foundation. He and his wife live in Wendell, NC.
