2022 Workshop Talk | 1:01:23 | All Grade Levels, General Classroom, Quadrivium, Virtue, Character, Discipline
Summary
Why the leisured human is better than the professional animal Grammar.
Logic. Rhetoric. Latin, and the Great Books. New curricula and pedagogies, world without end. We have the “information” of classical learning in great quantity today (thanks to greater access to the classical and medieval sources than perhaps at any other time in history). Indeed, today we have the opportunity to assemble a curriculum of books that would have made Erasmus envious. But our problem is not for want of information or even lack of books. Rather, it’s the opposite: we have too many books, too many things to do, and too little time. Even in his day, C. S. Lewis said they taught too many subjects. Things have arguably gotten worse with computers and digital media. Our curse is that we’ve forgotten how to (re)create the best conditions for study. We have forgotten why our English word for “school” comes from the Greek word for “leisure” (scholē).
Why does Joseph Pieper, for instance, argue that “leisure,” not work, was the basis for that thing healthy societies called “culture”? Why does C. S. Lewis, for instance, praise education as a way to actualize the potentiality for leisure”? Why does he also say leisure is the thing which separates us from the animals? (Hint: it’s not because these men thought work was bad or because they were just nerds and didn’t care about real life.) Jesus admonishes Martha for being worried about many things but praises Mary for choosing the “best” activity. The reason for this has everything to do with a right understanding of education and to what we are doing in the classroom. Today we live in a time where even our classical Christian schools might look more like Martha, suffering from a commitment to utilitarian concerns and pragmatic goals. In the liberal arts tradition, these questions could be answered and the meaning of “leisure” and education uniformly understood. If we are to be faithful to our mission as classical Christian educator
Speaker
Devin O’Donnell is the author of The Age of Martha (Classical Academic Press, 2019), a book on leisure and education. He is a classical hack, who came up through the manhole covers of learned society to find Wisdom crying out in the streets. In 2009, he and his wife joined some crazy families to found a classical Christian school in coastal California, where he later served as headmaster. He also was the Research Editor of the Bible publishing project Bibliotheca in 2015 and has worked in classical Christian learning for over 15 years. He has written for Salvo Magazine, Touchstone, the CiRCE Institute, Classis, CLT Journal, and others. Currently, he is the director of family & community education at The Oaks Classical Christian Academy. He and his family live in the Northwest, where he writes, fly fishes, teaches Great Books, and rules a meagre kingdom of fruit trees.
Additional Materials
The Association of Classical & Christian Schools presents Repairing the Ruins, the ACCS annual conference, copyright ACCS. You may make additional copies of this recording for use by your school but please do not sell any copies of the recording, or post it on the internet.
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