Classical Education Symposium 2025 Scholarly Talks
SCHOLARLY TALKS:
The Enterprise of Learning as Wonder toward Wisdom
David Diener
Throughout the liberal arts tradition, two definitional characteristics attributed to philosophy are that it begins with wonder and has wisdom as its goal. When philosophy is understood in the expansive way that it has been treated throughout the tradition, this journey from wonder to wisdom becomes a frame for understanding the enterprise of learning writ large. In this seminar we will examine what it means to have a sense of wonder and how we can cultivate such wonder in our students. We also will consider what it means to aim all learning toward the development of wisdom and how we can foster a love of wisdom in our students. Understanding the enterprise of learning as wonder toward wisdom provides helpful insights for classical educators as we work to holistically cultivate our students such that they flourish as human beings and live wise and virtuous lives.
Images of Images within Images: The Wonders of Plato’s Image of Education in the Allegory of the Cave
Charlotte Thomas
The central myth of the Republic, the Allegory of the Cave, is unlike any other myth within the dialogue or, one might argue, anywhere in the Platonic corpus. It resembles and illuminates other key images of the soul in the Republic, but unlike those other images, its elements are put into motion. It resembles in important ways the other two prominent myths of the Republic, The Ring of Gyges and the Myth of Er, but it is much more closely tied thematically to the other images of the soul Socrates employs throughout the dialogue. And it is an image of what Plato’s Socrates does with his interlocutors when he engages with them in dialectic. The Allegory of the Cave combines all of Socrates’s main philosophical and rhetorical modes. It also provides a map to the structure of the whole of the dialogue.
When Socrates introduces the Allegory of the Cave at the start of Book VII of the Republic, he tells us that it is an image of education (εἶπον, ἀπείκασον τοιούτῳ πάθει τὴν ἡμετέραν φύσιν παιδείας τε πέρι καὶ ἀπαιδευσίας.). He also presents it as an elaboration on the image of the divided line that immediately precedes it in the conclusion of Book VI. The Allegory begins with the description of a cave and prisoners who are chained at the bottom of it so that they can’t get up, and they can only look and listen toward the back wall of the cave where shadows are projected from artifacts (θαῦματα) paraded in front of a fire. We are told that we all begin at the bottom of the cave. This means that within the logic of the allegory, every one of us begins our education with access only to these images in an image within an image that Plato has carefully nested for us and challenged us to unpack.
Shop Class as Soulcraft
Matthew B. Crawford
Join Matthew B. Crawford for a moderated discussion with Brandon Crowe, Great Hearts Arizona Superintendent of Education, to consider what role the practical arts might play in education — not only for their practical application, but also as an avenue of intellectual and moral formation.
Ballet, the Soul, and Society
Lincoln Jones & Hannah Barr
The capacity of the body to teach the soul is not something we consider often in our society, but we can feel differently instantly by smiling, or by standing up straight. In fact, part of ballet’s origin was the intent to create physical nobility, and in the 15th century, when it was being developed, the body was considered a reflection of the soul.
Dance itself is an essential part of human experience, providing more than just physical fitness or catharsis, although it is rated as one of the most effective mood elevators. Dance provides the individual in society the rare opportunity to engage in genuine, spontaneous, and unedited response to something they enjoy (music), and to do so publicly while connecting with others. It is an activity that both exercises and reinforces the best in humanity, and builds openness and trust.
Ballet, a kind of science of dance, prepares the body to be an instrument of the soul, and helps teach the soul nobility through physical practice. For the young, it also teaches positive, confident relationships and sophisticated interaction with the opposite sex in a structured environment. It is the most sophisticated physical education available.
Our society suffers from a lack of structured, refined social dancing, both for what it can provide in enjoyment, and for social and communal relations. By making it a standard part of education, we will be improving both the individual lives of our children, and our society.
This talk was accompanied by demonstration by a dancer of the American Contemporary Ballet.
Feasting in the Land of Faërie: The Role of Enchantment in Education
Junius Johnson
Humans are dreamers by nature, and, alone among all of nature’s creatures, we are driven to try to realize what we dream. But where do dreams come from, and how do we keep the pathways to and from that place well-trodden, that we may be a people of dreams? They come from the heart, and they are especially prodigious in young hearts whose shores are regularly washed in the surf of wonder. The task of being human thus includes cultivating and guarding hearts full of wonder, which is a fountain of youth for the heart. And so the task of educating must be above all concerned with wonder: displaying it, responding to it, admiring it, protecting it. Together we will explore the dynamics of wonder and imagination both in the development of culture and in the formation of the soul.
If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem: How Appreciating the West’s Jewish Roots Moves Us to Wonder
Mitchell Rocklin
Have we forgotten Jerusalem, even as we remember Athens and Rome? Classical education has rightly focused on the Greco-Roman tradition and its medieval branches, and has also inspired students with an understanding of how Christianity built the West. We often fail, however, to recognize that the West was born through the transfiguration of Greco-Roman culture through a Jewish lens. The Greeks saw man as capable of searching for himself, but it was the Jews who insisted that God Himself is in search of man, giving us an imperative to join the search. This covenantal understanding allowed for a fundamentally new view of man and provided humanity with a new sort of wonder: the realization that, while but dust and ashes, man fills the role of a partner in divine creation. What could be more wonderous than the implication that man stands at the center of creation – indeed, that every man can say, as the ancient Jewish sages put it, that the world was created for me? It was this poetic intuition that formed the background for the development of Christianity. Nevertheless, classical schools usually fail to impart to our students even a basic knowledge of Judaism, let alone a sense of the divergent worldviews held by Jews and pagans. This talk will offer an explanation of how our civilization depends upon developments that originate in Judaism, before discussing opportunities to round out classical education with a more thorough treatment of Judaism and the Jewish people in the ancient Near Eastern, Hellenistic, and Roman worlds.
Reclaiming Plato’s Education Model: Why Classical Education needs Poetry, Outdoor Experiences, and a Tech Fast
Kyle Washut
Education, Plato says, begins with the gymnastic and the musical. Why? Because through the body’s unmediated contact with the natural world and through the experience of song and poetry, the student forms deep wondrous experiences that spark and sustain the journey from wonder to wisdom. Increasingly, however, educators and social scientists (like Jonathan Haidt) are noting that modern students, lacking engagement with the natural world and increasingly absorbed on their screens, are lacking the fundamental conditions that education, but especially classical education, presupposes. Educators increasingly need to actively cultivate the conditions necessary for the students to be born in wonder. While Wyoming Catholic College has become increasingly known for its policy that requires its students to fast from their cell phones for the semester, that cell phone fast is only for the sake of allowing students to have an immersive experience in nature, in poetry, and in song. By creating such an environment, educators can provide the necessary conditions that Plato saw as the foundations for transformative education. Giving examples from work with high school and College students, President Washut will describe the benefits to classical education that come from actively cultivating “gymnastic and musical” education, and offer some practical simple steps that the classical education movement can take to recapture a wonder based experiential education for the students entrusted to them.
T is for Timeless
Elizabeth Corey
What is it that allows children to live in the present, and to wonder at the world? To play? To have leisure in engaging in projects, which they enjoy? And what happens to us, to nearly every person, that squeezes and presses it out of us, so that we become utilitarians? How did we get here?
It isn’t as if we’ve never known how to learn with pleasure. Adults sense that we are valuable insofar as we are productive; children, in contrast, live in the present, which is why they are sometimes so difficult for adults to handle. I often hear from my daughter, “Mom you’re not very good at playing!” I wonder whether it is possible for adults to recapture the spirit of play.
In an essay entitled “On Early Reading,” the nineteenth-century writer Walter Bagehot commented that “[y]outh has a principle of consolidation; we begin with the whole. Small sciences are the labors of our manhood; but the round universe is the plaything of the boy. His fresh mind shoots out vaguely and crudely into the infinite and eternal.”
In this workshop I talk about children, early reading, leisure and wonder.
Imitating the (Democratic) Prince
Henry Olsen
Niccolo Machiavelli tells readers of The Prince that great rulers should imitate the examples of other great rulers. Does that apply equally to those who aspire to ruling in a democratic republic? Yes, it certainly does. Teachers can educate their students about certain habits and beliefs that successful democratic leaders exhibit and possess, thereby improving their ability to discern who is best suited to govern and inspiring the most politically ambitious of their charges to emulate those examples. This talk draws mainly from American political history and will explore how Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan created new political modes and orders through their rhetoric and statecraft. It concludes by offering some concrete rules that all of these great figures implicitly adhered to, showing that there is such a thing as democratic statesmanship.
Analog Math in a Digital Age
Satyan Devadoss
Over the past century, mathematics has become increasingly valued in our technologically driven world. Unfortunately, this has come at a great cost, where we prioritize digital over analog, and measurability over complexity, impacting all aspects of our lives. We offer a possible way forward to redeem our STEM obsessed world.
Wondering by Wandering
Susan McWilliams Barndt
In this talk, I explore the ways in which travel–and travel stories–can help to cultivate a sense of wonder. Going back to the ancient Greek idea of theoria–an official practice of travel that is also the basis for the contemporary English word theory–I discuss the ways in which thinking like a traveler can help us to see differently in ways that make us wonder anew. I focus on the writings and experience of James Baldwin, whose deep connections between wandering and wondering can inform our own thinking today.
The Cruelty of Gentle Parenting
Marilyn Simon-Crawford
Session Description: If gentle parenting is effective in eliciting right behaviours from children, why not endorse it? We may not want to because gentle parenting flattens the human experience into a series of choice options, none of which reflect any natural goodness or badness in the child, but which instead represent optimal or less optimal outcomes. This is crude behaviorist psychology, treating the human as a kind of input-output machine. Under this model, gentle parenting ignores the depth and complexity of a child’s soul – including the baseness therein – and, because it ignores it, the technique also fails to nurture the depth of a child’s soul, resulting in, unsurprisingly, children who have shallow souls. A child is denied her full humanity as a moral agent: everything she does is varying degrees of frustrated or rewarded will, but never is the nature of a child’s will regarded as anything other than good. This is to treat a child not as an equal, but precisely as somehow less than fully, richly, terribly human.
My own kids, teenage girls, laughed when I told them I was giving a parenting talk. “You?!” they said. They laughed because they assumed that a parenting talk would necessarily be about eliciting compliance, obedience, and right behavior, and they both know they fail at this. Right behavior is a good thing, and there is no question I’d like to see it exhibited in my daughters. But more than obedient children I would like to see deep children, individuals who understand the awful nature of their souls, their capacity for good and for evil, and the joy of grace.
▶️ Video Coming Soon
Why Am I Here? Thoughts on the Role of Science in a Liberal Education
Andrew Seeley
Modern science and classical education have been at war since the beginning of modern thought, and that war eventually led to the educational (and social and political and cultural) triumph of science over the humanities. The classical liberal arts revival has achieved much in the last several decades, yet without either eliminating or successfully integrating the STEM subjects, especially on the upper school level. In the spirit of contributing to a much larger discussion, I will draw from my decades of experience in the fully-integrated, original source curriculum of Thomas Aquinas College, and in the classical liberal arts revival to detail some of the many difficulties facing complete integration and make some preliminary suggestions for bringing it about.
Freedom to Wonder
Anika Prather
Based on DuBois’ essay on Galileo, this talk is about how Classical Education gives EVERY child the freedom to WONDER and like Galileo the freedom to wonder can inspire every student, no matter their backgrounds to make amazing discoveries.