The Fables of Aesop is out now!

Less is Less and That is the Point

Many classical Christian classrooms violate an obscure law about Sabbath rest found in Deuteronomy 14:21: “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” The mother goat’s milk exists to nourish her kid, not boil it to death. Likewise, a classical Christian classroom exists to nourish the souls of students with virtue and godliness, not boil them to death in the milk of massive reading lists, hours of nightly homework, and undue emphasis on grades. Academic pursuits should be restful pursuits, not exercises in cultivating a hatred for reading and math. I offer the following exhortations for cultivating rest in the classical Christian classroom and home.

Do less in the classroom. Instead of reading twenty books in your humanities course while squeezing in geography and poetry recitations and Scripture memory work and vocab and history timelines and whatever else, read seven or eight books deeply and slowly. Allow those other elements to flow naturally into the stream of the class; do not shoehorn them into an already crowded curriculum.

I take my senior omnibus students on a two-month trek through an abridged but thick edition of Les Miserables. They read every syllable of the text, stopping along the path to discuss topics such as fatherhood, romance, love, redemption, forgiveness, and justice. The seniors compose beautiful compositions in imitation of the author, learn new vocabulary words, evaluate the virtues and vices of the characters, and all while plodding through the text at a leisurely and deliberate pace. The students leave the novel behind with a rich, deep understanding of the text, and a genuine love for it.

Assign less homework, especially reading homework. Allow me to rip off the Band-Aid: your students do not complete their assigned reading. Instead, they finish algebra and biology before heading to basketball practice. When they return home, they stare at the 25 pages of Homer their literature teacher assigned and proceed to google “Iliad SparkNotes.” My students freely and frequently admit these realities. This is hardly the recipe for restful learning.

To guarantee your students will read Homer, Dante, Calvin, Burke, Austen, Hugo—and do so in a way that fosters restful learning—read out loud to them in class. The discussions produced as a fruit of this endeavor do not disappoint. The book’s content is fresh on everyone’s mind, including the teacher’s. Anything confusing from the text can be immediately addressed and discussed. Your students will inevitably retain and recall more of the text because they’ve actually read it.

Grade fewer assignments. In light of students’ tendency to blow off reading homework, some teachers turn to reading quizzes and the like to keep students honest. Used sparingly, the tactic will produce results. Used liberally, reading quizzes and other grade-based enforcement leads to teacher and student burnout (a clear antithesis to rest), stifles the cultivation of a love of learning, and places students’ focus on the idol of education—grades.

Grades are not a necessary evil; they are simply evil. The ends of a classical Christian education include virtue formation, cultivation of Christian character, and passing on the best of the Christian West to our children. Grades distract from those ends and become an end in themselves. Anxious, exhausted students chase good grades for the sole purpose of exchanging them on the educational market for college acceptance letters, scholarships, and pleased parents. I have written about this topic elsewhere, so I will conclude this point by insisting that you utilize grade-based enforcement sparingly in your classroom.

Limit or eliminate screen time. Devices such as tablets, smartphones, video games, and televisions keep students up at night and habituate distraction. This habituation of distraction hinders focus in the classroom because screens condition students to chase away boredom with the click of a button or the swipe of a screen. Of course, a 4th-grade boy who spends his evenings on Fortnite or a freshman girl who scrolls Instagram until midnight cannot focus while a teacher reads a story out loud or describes the structure of a cell. School is boring in comparison to the excitement of video games and social media. Both the 4th-grader and freshman have been trained to respond to boredom by escaping it via screens.

Classical Christian schools must prohibit screens from their campuses. School-issued laptops with monitored and limited internet access are the only exceptions. That fixes some screen-related issues, but the biggest problem, undoubtedly, is the access students have to screens at home. Classical Christian educators and administrators must encourage parents to severely limit, if not eliminate, student’s screen access at home. This can be accomplished through parent academies, guest speakers, newsletters, and the like educating parents on the dangers of screens. Perhaps most beneficial is a stringent admission process designed to sift the screen-temperate wheat from the screen-indulgent chaff. If a prospective family places no limits on their children’s screen use, then that family is not the right fit for the school.

“Less is more” is cliche. “Less is less” is practically revolutionary. Do not do less, assign less, and grade less in an attempt to make room for a different kind of “more.” Do less, assign less, and grade less because less is less, and that is the point. Get you and your students as far away from screens as possible. Trim the fat. Scale things back. Take a breather. Get some sleep. Quit boiling the milk.

1 thought on “Less is Less and That is the Point”

  1. Michael Shepherd

    Thank you. Thank you for saying what so many need to hear and do. We do no favors for our children by drowning them content and mis-naming it “rigor” or some other worldly euphemism.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Articles