“Because we are given more than we are”: Good habits, good stories, and why we need both

“Stewardship.” “Inheritance.” “Heritage.” We keep returning to these words when we talk about classical education. Add up Shakespeare, Euclid, Augustine, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and it equals a rich inheritance that can help teach us to be human and point us toward our Maker. We don’t have this heritage — these books and disciplines and traditions of thought — to make us subservient to dead human beings or pompous toward living ones. Rather, we have a responsibility to steward our inheritance well: to spend our lives wisely, to prune the errors of fallible human authors, to carry on the things that they got right. With stewardship in mind, here are three bits of wisdom on what it looks like to train human imaginations and virtues through good habits and good stories:

 

1. Here, in an article from NRO, “It Takes A Pirate to Raise A Child,” Daniel Coupland writes on the power of good stories to nurture virtue: “These tales of fantasy and adventure are an inheritance that provides concrete images of goodness and evil — often in vivid blacks and whites — to the still receptive minds of the young. Over time, these images become patterns, and the patterns become habits, and the habits become our way of looking at reality.”

He also makes an excellent argument for a “Less is More” approach to crafting a good curriculum (i.e. only assigning a few great books per year to allow for intensive close reading).

3. Finally, Christopher Perrin writes on the importance of habit and routine in education (as well as in marriage and in life!). His title, “Learning to Love What Must Be Done,” comes from Goethe: “Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.”

Speaking of “what must be done,” we are working on the next steps for our school endeavor and are excited to share them with you soon.