What Has Athens to Do With Your Classroom? The New Ancient Way to Educate
The educational landscape has changed drastically over the last 20 years, and that has only sped up with the growth in mobile technology and a move away from centralized learning. While our society heavily values the new and innovative (gotta get that new phone with that new feature!), there has been a resurgence of looking to the past to gain insight and models for fixing what’s wrong with education. One ancient model that is gaining increasing popularity is the Peripatetic model. Whether it’s training new doctors, or shaping tomorrow’s next musician, educators are looking to ancient history to understand what made them so effective. It’s this model that best exemplifies what makes the CHI tutorial method so effective.
What is the Peripatetic model?
The Peripatetic school started in Athens with Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student. Aristotle would meet his students outside the walls of Athens and walk (Gk: Peripateo) with them while lecturing on subjects as divergent as Logic to Zoology. Because Aristotle was not able to own land in Athens, he had several constraints that he had to work around. These constraints led to innovations that have become key features of this model.
Schooling was an event, not a place
Originally started at the Lyceum, a common-use land area dedicated to Apollo, Aristotle would meet with his students wherever he was able to lecture. Whether he walked with them through the gardens or met outside the gymnasium that was later built in the area, Aristotle’s educational model was able to adapt as his environment changed.
By emphasizing people and not buildings, Christian Halls International leverages this freedom to bring education into the context and lives of our students. Education does not need to be trapped in a building or room. The best education happens right where the rest of your life happens. That’s the whole point, right? To equip our students to live their lives well and with virtue? What better place to educate them than in the midst of where those challenges are taking place.
Learning was shaped by dialogue
Taking after his teacher, Aristotle’s early works were dialogues. While these conversations were probably idealized, it’s likely that his students had the opportunity to engage with their instructor and come face to face with the limits of their knowledge or root out inconsistencies in their beliefs.
When you think of a tutor, you commonly imagine someone who offers remedial education. He helps the student who “isn’t getting it” sufficiently through classroom time.
That’s not our model.
A CHI-trained tutor’s goal is to engage your student with the topic in the exact area where your student needs to apply it. Whether that’s a Bible tutor helping the student understand to what extent they have been shaped more by culture than the Word of God, or a Law tutor who is helping students adjust their idealism so they can still work for biblical justice in a broken system, the weekly tutorial is not focused on just information transfer, but virtue formation and real-world application.
Education was collaborative
Aristotle was not the only teacher at what was called his university. He brought in other specialists to teach in their fields, each working to integrate the whole.
CHI looks to find the best practitioners in their particular fields to come in and work with our students. These are not people who have made the academy their life;these are business owners, pastors, nurse managers, etc. who have spent a lifetime doing the work. Because we emphasize flexibility, we’re able to offer non-traditional opportunities that fill out skills and life experiences for our students. One example in the Mountain States is a new hall that is partnering with tradesmen like welders, electricians, and cement masons to ensure that their high school and undergrad students are leaving their academic programs with the knowledge and real-world skills to start their careers with an advantage.
The Peripatetic model in the Bible
I love the classics, but let’s face it: just because Aristotle was successful with it doesn’t mean we should adopt it. But if we go back to the commands in our Bible, we’ll find that this same model was happening right under our noses all along.
Consider Mark 1:16-20, where Jesus is traveling along the Sea of Galilee. Men, everywhere, are plying their trades. As He calls them to “follow me,” they leave their tasks to walk after their teacher.
Jesus regularly took advantage of the sights and sounds of the world around them, using their context to illustrate the truths of God. He uses a building to illustrate a spiritual truth (Matthew 24:2), or the observation of the weather to shed light on spiritual blindness (Matthew 16:2-3).
Other examples could be raised: Elijah and Elisha, Paul and Timothy. It turns out that the Peripatetic model looks a lot like discipleship.
Walking with the ancients
Completely converting your current educational model to the Peripatetic model doesn’t have to happen all at once for your students to start gaining some of the benefits. Here are a few simple elements you can draw from:
As much as possible, physically interact with what you are studying.
“Physical” here may need to be a metaphor, but if it means walking in a garden while studying biology like Aristotle, visiting a machine shop, or inviting someone from another country to discuss different styles of government, take some time to think about how you can help your students really interact with what they are learning.
De-emphasize knowledge transfer, and emphasize dialogue.
This doesn’t mean no knowledge transfer, but you can always teach just a little bit more. Having sat through classes like that, do you still remember everything you were taught? What stuck? The hard questions that the teacher forced you to grapple with and make your own. Like a pastor writing a sermon, before you begin your class, ask yourself what’s the one thing you want your students to leave not only knowing, but truly understanding. Find that, and then cover it from every angle. It’s even better if you can help your students come to that conclusion on their own.
Give them the resources to keep learning without you.
Whether you are their parent or a trusted professional who was brought in to teach a class, your relationship with your students will not stay the same throughout their lives. Because part of being a good student is learning how to learn, we need to teach our students what to do when they are on their own and encounter a problem. As you help them develop networks of trusted teachers and mentors in other fields, you’re also teaching them what kind of people they need to look for as they build their careers. This is the sort of lesson that will pay dividends for the rest of their lives.
