 Wendell Berry’s 1964 poem “The Wild” captures the poignant beauty of nature breaking through a world increasingly indifferent to its presence. Offering a stark contrast between a wasted city lot and the colorful flight of warblers and tanagers, Berry calls his reader to embrace the necessary beauty of the wild, receiving as a gift to modern man “its remembrance of what is.” We have never been more in need of such a gift.
Current research reveals startling statistics suggesting disconnection, depression, and a loss of exposure to and experience of the natural world—a series of terms not unrelated. Social media touts community at the expense of in-person relationships. Technological progress spins at a frenetic pace. And a main component of human life we know to combat these ills is strikingly absent for many. Children—and perhaps their parents—have traded the forest for screen time, nature writing for animé, the classics for the latest dystopian sci-fi binge. As a result, we’ve lost even the language to name and notice the natural world. Losing More Than Language British author and scholar Robert Macfarlane sounded the alarm on this phenomenon in his 2017 article in The Guardian entitled “Badger or Bulbasaur—have children lost touch with nature?” In his insightful book, Landmarks, Macfarlane notes the loss of nature literacy among children and contemporary society’s seeming indifference, as evidenced by the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s “culling of words concerning nature.” He suggests that “the substitutions made in the dictionary—the natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual—are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live.” In other words, the loss of language is indicative of a loss of experience. Indeed, he is not the first to note the significant connection between language and reality. . . .  I don’t want to be a hostile reader, nor do I want that for my students. My aim is to be a charitable one, one who acknowledges that reading has the potential to form me and my students not only for the better but for the eternal. I know, however, that it is easier to aspire to this attitude than to consistently embody it.
Deep Reading: Practices To Subvert the Vice of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age (2024) shares this view by encouraging us as readers, thinkers, and teachers to develop “practices that help us tend to what we read, the way we want to attend to our friends and neighbors.” Rather than viewing reading primarily as a means of getting students to arrive at the right beliefs or worldviews, authors Rachel Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel De Smith Roberts challenge us to view reading as a hospitable activity that might counter the age of distraction. Where has our ‘sustained, unbroken attention’ gone? In Part I, titled “Practices to Subvert Distraction,” training our attention becomes a way of fostering self-control, of “temper[ing] our desires for what is pleasurable with our need to focus on what is good.” Ideal for new teachers, these first two chapters address attentiveness while reviewing common sense methods for encouraging it in classrooms and other reading communities. They describe the practices of discussion, annotation, and close reading exercises in effective classrooms. While they discuss ideas such as lectio divina, field trips, or reading aloud, the most helpful ideas for my humanities classes come from their reading reflection questions that ask us to consciously think through what our real reading process looks like. . . .  No other author has so immediately affected my perspective on work as Josef Pieper. In my mind, work was separate from the rest of life. Working hours have always been a discrete part of my day since I took my first job as a teenager. Maybe this division is inherent to American culture and how I grew up, but in Pieper’s mind, work is part of our response to the gift of life.
Though published decades ago, German philosopher Josef Pieper’s commentaries on work, leisure, and festivity bring to light two deficits within our culture today—true community relationship and conscious introspection. His works, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948) and In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity (1965), posit not a solution to our culture’s dis-perspective, but a call to return to a meaningful and fruitful life. If we can’t recognize leisure, then our culture is endangered. But leisure is a tricky word in the twenty-first century. Is it welcoming visitors at our leisure? Is it reclining on a couch in a leisure suit? Is it being free from work demands? Is it the opposite of work? What kind of leisure is this? . . .  Reading is a liberating act. It produces agency, a sense of independence and freedom of thought. This access to ideas and understanding is a most precious gift—one that is worth laboring over in pursuit of liberty. In Reading for the Long Run: Leading Struggling Students into the Reading Life, Sara Osborne explores the riches and beauty of a deep reading life, most especially the unspoken experience of acquiring virtue through story, ‘A compelling vision of the goodness of goodness,’ as Vigen Guroian says. Reading can shape who we become, which as it turns out, is every advantage to readers who struggle. Osborne is clear. Disability does not mark students as other or deficient, but rather as human, human in that we, parents and teachers, are all weak. And in Christ, that is a strength. It’s a unique equation that forms us through years of daily effort. The difficult path to the reading life produces a kind of character that is born through hardship. Both student and teacher are shaped by weakness—his manifest through the struggle to read, and mine through the struggle to teach him.” Through her personal journey as mother and educator of a son whose learning did not follow a predictable map, Osborne hospitably portrays the reality of the long road to reading. She first describes the ideal, the power of story and our ability to identify with characters, a distinctive process akin to Charlotte Mason’s idea of relationship with people and characters of the past, present, and future. Exposing young minds to plentiful rich language from every avenue is praiseworthy, but it is realistically accompanied by what Osborne calls the “unglamorous hours” of doing the work itself with a modest, oftentimes laborious, pace.
 It was a simple tweet. I posted a picture from the second day of school, showing my own annotations of a C.S. Lewis essay with the caption, “Teaching students annotation means modeling my own.” To my surprise, author Stephen Chiger responded that he taught the same, most notably in his book Love & Literacy published in 2021 for Uncommon Schools, a public charter network in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
Intrigued, I wanted to see if a design to foster reading and literacy in urban public schools might share some practices with classical education. The premise of the book is a true ideal: “This is what love in a literacy classroom looks like: a love for the conversation, love for the text, and love for the ideas they both spark. When that includes all students, magic happens.” I kept reading.  “As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a Dream. . . .” Simple metaphors work.
Education is a journey, Alex Sosler argues, one that cannot be separated from spiritual development because the journey itself is formation. “You have to learn who you want to be and practice being that person.” In other words, college will shape you whether you are aware of it or not. In Learning to Love: Christian Higher Education as Pilgrimage, Sosler directs students to “re-image” the potential of the years following high school because “what a student loves most has great control over the life they pursue.” And he clearly asks students to identify what they love most, even if it’s themselves. This open and frank dialogue is one of Sosler’s strengths as he introduces the history and philosophy behind Christian liberal education. A Christian liberal arts education should reflect our view of mankind with the purpose of reflecting God. These man-made institutions may be imperfect, but they do have the resources to help a student pursue the path of their soul’s formation as they learn of the true, good, and beautiful in their coursework. . .  It was like watching part of some half-lost hero tale, something that belonged to an older and darker and more shining world than mine.--Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shining Company In my personal quest to find worthy reads for my middle school students, I am returning to novels published decades ago. I want my students to learn not just about peoples, places, and dates, but also to experience a time, a life, in the range of centuries known as the medieval era. I didn’t plan it, but each story happens to take place in Great Britain.
Elizabeth Alder’s The King’s Shadow (1995) is a magnificently detailed historical read for upper middle grade and young adult readers. Beginning in 1063, this living history follows the life of thirteen-year-old Briton, Evyn, during the reign of Edward the Confessor. . .  Siloam Springs, AR. Centuries ago, devotion implied a commitment to God, a dedicated piety. We are devoted when we give of ourselves, to God and to others. For many of us, our devotion is an understood part of our teaching or parenting philosophy. We give time to prepare, think, plan, and collaborate to benefit our students and our children. Some call devotion “giving it your all” and see it as a standard of excellence. Others call it a virtue.
That’s how I would describe the steadfast quality in Booker Taliaferro Washington. Beginning in the 1880s, on almost every Sunday evening at Tuskegee Institute, Washington collected his students, teachers, and visitors to speak to them. The gathering wasn’t called a chapel service or a Bible study, it was simply “Sunday Evening Talks.” . . .  Since we’ve moved to Siloam Springs, I’ve spent plenty of time watching my cat happily climb the old dogwood tree by our garage. Bark chips off as he climbs higher. He often looks back at me as if he wants to know whether he should jump or keep going on his elevated scratching post.
It brings to mind the wonder of tree climbing when I was a kid. I thought of trees as my friends, especially growing up in muggy Mississippi. In my mind, I can easily see a majestic magnolia with its fat arms resting on the ground. To climb under those branches, then into the cool cave of shade by its smooth trunk, was a magical experience. As a kid, I knew that tree. Yes, I climbed its branches, read in its shade, maybe I secretly carved initials or a symbol in its bark. I rubbed a leaf between my fingers and let its curved shape become a boat. I peeled off bits of bark with my fingernails, broke off a small branch to dig at a hole in the trunk. I wiped a spider web from my face and learned the sound of the wind as it hit the waxy leaves. I knew that tree. Understanding a tree begins with the experience of it as a whole and a realization that all knowledge about that tree is connected. I didn’t need a botany lesson to label things. I encountered the parts of the tree. This understanding is a central root to classical education. . . .  I confess. I have asked students to make revisions to their essays. In fact, I may have casually said, “You just have some light revision work,” or “This needs heavy revision.” It sounds flippant to my ears now. Trite. But those comments all beg the same question—what does it really mean to revise our writing?
One of my former students reached out for help with a long essay. As a hopeful history major, Eric wanted to submit a college application essay on a historical subject he loved—the French Revolution. He had narrowed the topic to the role of Royalist journalists and had completed all the research, including the discovery of digitized letters and propaganda from that time period. Unfortunately, the essay had practically become a list of quotes and sources and key figures. Some connections among them had been made, but it wasn’t coherent. Yet. |
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