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The answer is not edutainment. I can’t even believe that’s a word. Neil Postman said in Amusing Ourselves to Death: “It’s not the things we hate and fear that are ruining us, but rather the things we have come to love that are ruining us instead.” Isn’t that true especially in our consumeristic, entertainment based culture. On the other hand, the solution also is not just gritting it out and focusing on the brain and making kids smarter. As C.S. Lewis said, we don’t just want to graduate clever devils. We want our young men and women to have tough minds, but also tender hearts. So, this is hard and there isn’t an easy answer. I remember when I was first teaching many years ago struggling with this with students. I so wanted them to love the classic literature and ideas that I taught, but for some reason no matter how excited I was and how well I planned, there would still be some students less interested and engaged than I hoped. This is normal. And tonight I don’t have a silver bullet for you. 

In fact, I think it’s actually helpful for us all to have realistic expectations here in the short term, even if or especially because we have such a high set of aspirations for our graduates. We don’t expect that every student is going to love every subject, or have warm affection for every book or exercise. I view tonight’s talk as a conversation starter, suggesting a general approach to this challenge, followed by 2 indirect methods and 2 direct methods for capturing our students’ hearts and training them to love what lasts.

So, first is the general approach. Embracing the call to help students love what lasts requires us to be patient and persistent. This is the type of work that calls for mindset of a farmer. “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good” (Eccl. 11:16). Hang in there with the indirect and direct methods that I’m going to share with you. Try stuff. Some things might not work, others will. Shaping students’ affections takes time, and is not a quick fix. Sometimes it takes years. I’ve heard story after story of a student waking up in college after a classical Christian education, and realizing, ‘Wow, I really have something different from my peers; I care about things they don’t; I love learning; I am a different person because of the education I have received; I am so grateful for how my parents invested in this sort of education for me.” 

Ordering our students’ affections capitalizes on a slow drip over time, rather than a waterfall attempt, one heroic week that you decided to care about aesthetics and learning in the home. In many ways, it’s about the little things, repeated consistently over time. We all need to be okay with the fact that our students are in process, they are on a journey. They might not appreciate the full value of where we are leading them right now. And that’s okay, it’s normal. I think sometimes at classical Christian schools we can start to freak out if a student isn’t loving what lasts, and in one sense, we’re right, because our work hasn’t yet paid off fully in the right ways that we want it too. But we have to be willing to think about education on a longer time horizon. The apostle James said, “See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains” (James 5:7b ESV). It’s the same with classical Christian education; the best benefits take time to accrue, and those are often the benefits of the heart. 

And when we don’t think this way we can fall into a trap in our partnership as parents and teachers of engaging in blame-shifting because we don’t like what we’re feeling and seeing about our student’s challenges right now. Parents can think, “The teacher must be doing something wrong; she’s not getting through to my child’s heart.” Or the teacher thinks, “It’s because of what’s going on at home.” Now it’s true that our weaknesses as parents and teachers can have an impact on students’ hearts, but the vast majority of the time, speculating about the impact of the other side of the equation is not helpful. Instead, we need to embrace the brokenness of the here and now, and focus on proactively partnering with each other on how we can help foster those loves, how we can help build those habits, and cultivate those virtues that we want to see, even while at the same time realizing that any one thing we do might not give the breakthrough. In education we’re dealing with people not products. Education isn’t something you do to someone, it’s something you do with someone. That means it’s messy, but it’s still so worth it to be doing this work together. 

So, that is the general approach I recommend to capturing our kids’ hearts, patience and persistence, a slow drip over a long time horizon, where we avoid blame-shifting but embrace the brokenness of our kids’ in a fallen world while actively partnering together for their spiritual, intellectual and moral good. Now let’s look at indirect methods, first. I’ve got two I want to talk about: modeling and stories. 

Indirect Methods:

1. Modeling (caught rather than taught)

First is modeling, and the big picture idea here is that what to love is something that is caught rather than taught. There are direct methods, but they are not the front line. We all know that it’s really hard to influence our own feelings, emotions, and sentiments in the moment. In a similar way, our children will naturally tune to us for what they should value. 

The worn out advice here is to practice what you preach. If you want your children to love reading, are you taking the time to read and maybe to read with them? If you don’t want them glued to a smart phone when they grow up, are you making sure to be present at home? Reading the Bible as a family, taking trips to the library, having family dinners, discussing ideas together, giving to a ministry, serving the needy–we all know more ways that our affections should be rightly ordered than any of us is living out perfectly. The message here is to deliberately model what it means to love what lasts, and to be on a journey ourselves as adults to grow in loving the things that are lovely, excellent and praiseworthy in God’s sight. 

I was recently convicted anew of how materialistic our culture is, and this passage from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount came to mind:

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matt 6:19-21 ESV)

Our children can see through our pretense, and it’s important for us, not to be perfectionistic here, but to be sincere with our kids as we try to love the things God loves. In Colossians, Paul says to fathers, “do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged” (Col 3:21 ESV). I think one error we can fall into in training the affections is to provoke them by a poor example, expecting more of them than we are willing to sacrifice for them and their good. 

 2. Stories 

Stories are so powerful in helping shape the direction of a person’s life. This is why I’m so excited about the Show & Tell table of all the inspiring literature we’ve got in our curriculum and some great resources for you in the back table, like The Read-Aloud Family, How to Raise a Reader and Honey for a Child’s Heart. I think of stories as the front line way to capture a child’s heart. Going back to the classical era, we have known and capitalized on the ability of stories to stoke a person’s imagination, inspire them to virtue, and instill in them a foundation for character. 

The reason is because stories help us walk in the shoes of another human being, experience their emotions, their choices, and discover for ourselves the natural outworkings of events. Stories in the classical and Christian tradition have typically been written with the goal of moral transformation in mind. Of course, all throughout time stories have also been used to mislead, to propose new intellectual ideas, and test the outworking of various philosophies. While we recognize the place for reading stories that are fundamentally counter to a Christian worldview in the right time, way and place, feeding our children’s souls on stories that we know represent many true, good and beautiful ideas is crucially important, especially as they are growing up. 

Stories don’t just have to be in literature. Telling your own stories from childhood and youth, and sharing what you learned and how you grew as a person, can be an incredible source of wisdom for your children. I think we neglect this way too often. Opening up our hearts and past to our kids in this way could be the very thing that unlocks their hearts to us. I also think that we can use stories as illustrations or parables in order to bring a point home or help a child see what they’re struggling with. What doesn’t hit home as a lecture can penetrate their hearts and lead to lasting change when we accompany it with a story. I think of how the Prophet Nathan told David the story of a rich man who stole his neighbor’s sheep. In order to tell a story that connects with a student, we need to really spend time and thought and prayer about the struggle they are dealing with and how we can get through to them. Don’t just worry about your student, pray for them, and ask the Lord to give you the right words, the best analogy or example, that will help them understand.

Direct Methods:

1. Habit training (outside in)

This leads us to direct methods. And I left these for last, because I think we can tend to over-rely on direct methods of intervening in what our children love and don’t love, when we should be playing the long game. Our children are persons, created in the image of God. And part of what that means is that they naturally have some measure of autonomous will that resists force. We all know that if someone tries to directly make you feel one way about something, a little part of you naturally puts up defenses and wants to be ornery. If this is true of us, it’s also going to be true with our kids. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use direct methods. I just think it means that we shouldn’t rely only on direct methods like rewards and punishments, where the heart is concerned. 

The method of habit training involves 1) sowing the idea of a better way through an intentional conversation with the student, 2) establishing an alliance with the student to engage his will in a process of growth, and 3) giving proactive reminders with tact, watchfulness and persistence to ensure that the student establishes a better habit. Even here in this direct approach to capturing a student’s heart, Charlotte Mason encourages us to be gentle, maybe even subtle. She says, “It is possible to sow a great idea lightly and casually and perhaps this sort of sowing should be rare and casual because if a child detect a definite purpose in his mentor he is apt to stiffen himself against it.” We don’t want mere outward conformity, we are aiming at character. And so, we want to get a student’s heart on board.

Now that doesn’t mean that in matters of right and wrong, school obligations and expectations, we can just leave off if the student isn’t feeling like it. The ability to persevere because it’s right, whether or not one wants to do something, is one of the major things we’re trying to instill in children. But the way we go about influencing and habit development should show a certain respect to children, should empower them in their ownership of the habit. There is so much more that could be said here, but hopefully you all know our habits of the heart: attention, obedience, respect and responsibility. We’re going to go discuss some more specific habits and virtues at your student’s age in a bit. My concern is to encourage you to build into daily life some specific habits that you are working on for each child, not too many, maybe just one. And that will help shape their loves and capture their heart over time.

 2. Bonding over shared experiences (the power of association and relationship)

I might have put this first, and we might use terms like family traditions or family activities, maybe even liturgies, like family dinner, family devotionals, family game night, etc. But the big idea here is to associate family bonding with something good, true and beautiful that you value and that you want your kids to value. I remember going to national parks for vacation when I was a kid. I love natural beauty today because of how our family cultivated that. I also remember reading aloud to my family while we were driving, believe it or not. I now love reading aloud to my kids. 

A way that you can turn something like this from a chore into a delight is the power of association. So, don’t just have family read aloud night, bake cookies or have some other special treat go along with it. We do this at school when we have Egyptian Day or field trips, or class parties, or reading by the rug. We want to use the natural bonding experience of human beings to attach our hearts to things that are lovely, excellent and praiseworthy. We are social beings. This is one of the ways that a classical Christian school is so different from other models, because we intentionally want to pass on a love for what lasts, for classic literature and art, for good, true and beautiful ideas. We don’t think of education as just information transfer, but the formation of souls who value things rightly in God’s created order. 

If your child is struggling to love, or maybe even to like, something that you want them to, don’t bribe them with a reward, but add something tasty or enjoyable to your experience of doing that thing with them. Don’t do edutainment, but you can make learning genuinely fun and enjoyable. In fact, kids naturally love to learn and are curious; sometimes we just have to help get obstacles out of the way. So, be patient and play the long game, use indirect methods like modeling and stories, and use direct methods like habit training and bonding, and let’s partner together well as we seek to spread a love for what lasts to the next generation. Let’s pray.