The Four Pillars of Education: Focus, Practice, Habits, and Guidance

Every person involved in education has, over time and as a result of one’s unique experiences and educational ideals, developed his or her own personal philosophy of education, whether consciously or unconsciously. After 20 years of working in higher education, I have zeroed in on the following four aspects of my own personal philosophy of education—the four pillars of education as I see them, which are partially grounded in the educational philosophies of the Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle:

• Focus

• Practice

• Habits

• Guidance

Focus

We often pull our students in too many different directions, to their detriment. Although I am the first to champion the cause of a broad liberal arts education, becoming a real expert on any particular discipline or skill takes focus, a conscious effort to prioritize a specific area of focus to the exclusion of other areas of development. It goes without saying that balance and focus are somewhat at odds with one other. To the extent that one prioritizes being a well-rounded student or person, one is not focused on a specific area of development. And to the extent one focuses on and prioritizes a specific areas of development, one is not being well-rounded. There are clearly dangers to both extremes, but we can’t expect our students to become real masters if we aren’t providing them an educational framework in which they can really focus on the big wins and the specific skills and parts of their chosen disciplines that they need to develop to become the next-generation leaders and masters of tomorrow.

Practice

My paternal grandmother, Velma Fruhling, was a choral teacher and pianist, and she taught me piano for several years when I was a preteen and teenager—at least whenever I was motivated, which wasn’t as often as I should have been, in retrospect. Having a music teacher for a grandmother gave me what I sometimes call a “piano practice” philosophy of education. If you want to become really good at a specific skill, whether playing piano, thinking philosophically, or balancing chemical equations, it’s not enough merely to focus; you have to practice, practice, practice—and then practice some more. As educators, we should be providing educational environments in which hands-on practice is the focus, even in the most abstract or heady of disciplines.

If we educators want our students to be good readers, we have to make them read, read, read—and then read some more. If we want our students to be good writers, we have to make them write, write, write—and then write some more. If we want our students to be good critical thinkers, we have to challenge their own assumptions, challenge them again, and then challenge them some more. The same is true in any discipline, no matter how practical or abstract. If we want our computer science students to be good programmers, wee have to make them design, plan, program, and create, again and again and again, day in and day out until they can solve whatever programming challenges they encounter while tap dancing with their eyes closed. If we want our formal logic students to be good at doing natural deduction proofs, we have to make them do proof after proof after proof until they become second nature. If we want our students to be the social and political leaders of tomorrow, we have to give them leadership responsibilities that give them practice being genuinely social and political, and so on—which is a good segue into the next pillar of education: habits.

Habits

The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that learning to be virtuous is a matter of habit formation. If you want to develop the virtue of courage, for example, you need to get regular practice taking courageous actions so that you develop the habit of acting courageously, learning to avoid the twin vices of cowardice and recklessness by cultivating courage as the virtuous middle ground between them. For Aristotle, learning to develop virtues of any sort, educational or otherwise, is a matter of training, cultivation, development, and habituation over time; virtue isn’t something that can be developed in a day, a week, a month, or a year, or even a semester of college, but something one works at consistently over a long period of time until one develops the habits associated with real mastery of the virtues in question.

What, then, does it mean, for us as educators, to cultivate virtuous students? Our role as educators is to help students not just develop knowledge, or even wisdom, but the habits that it takes to live a genuinely virtuous life. We are not merely bearers of subject-specific knowledge for our students; we are responsible for the development of their study habits, their habits of thought and critical thinking, their habits of reading and writing, their habits of ethics and morality, their habits of courage and conviction, and countless other habits that we cannot take for granted that they have previously cultivated in the years before they find themselves in our own classrooms—at any level of education from preschool to graduate school and beyond.

Guidance

The importance of habit formation dovetails nicely into the last of my four pillars of education—guidance. Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, famously held that students are like prisoners chained inside a cave staring at shadows on the wall. (See the Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of Plato’s Republic.) Our job as educators is to help students break free of their own prison with its mental chains, and from their own thought bubbles and comfort zones, dragging them kicking and screaming from darkness into the light, pushing them when necessary and pulling them to follow where you lead, even when they would rather stay safe and content in the darkness of their own comfort zones.

Plato’s model of education is necessarily adversarial, as he takes great pains to make clear that the vast majority of prisoners in his Allegory of the Cave do not want to break free, to learn about the world in the sunlight outside the cave, or to follow the guide in the challenging and uphill climb getting there requires. Our students likewise do not want to be pushed or pulled, even as we force them to do the things that we, as educators, know are good for them—making them read, read, read; making them write, write, write; making them think, think, think; making them practice, practice, practice; giving them challenge after challenge after challenge until they become real masters able to take their place as the experts and mentors, and the torch-bearers of educational virtue, for the next generation, again and again with each new generation, onward through the entirety of future history.

Whether or not our students resist or resent us for the effort, we educators must serve as the Platonic guides that push and pull and drag our students, kicking and screaming, and sometimes whining and complaining, to be the best versions of their future selves. We cannot let students guide their own education, as that would be akin to the blind leading the blind, like the prisoners in Plato’s cave who know only shadows on the wall trying to teach each other about the sunlight and the reality of things outside their shared experience in the cave. Real guidance takes teachers who themselves have been outside the cave, who have achieved real mastery and virtue, who know what’s best for their students better than their students themselves do.

According to Plato, then, it’s a basic fact of human nature than humans don’t like to be pushed outside their comfort zone, yet this is exactly the burden that we educators must shoulder if we are to do right by our students and by future generations, even if it means our students end up cursing our names along the way as we push and pull and challenge them to keep climbing instead of languishing in the darkness and in the tyranny of the present.

Conclusion

Having a philosophy of education is one thing; putting it into practice is another. Every educator in every classroom, real or virtual, must decide how to go about being a jointly Platonic and Aristotelian guide for his or her students—first of all lighting the way toward some ideal while pushing students outside their comfort zones (the Platonic component), and then giving students the focus, practice, habituation, and structure to develop the educational and personal habits it takes to get there (the Aristotelian component), and to really flourish in life even after the immediate hurdles of the classroom are transcended.

Much is made (sometimes too much) of the philosophical differences between Plato and Aristotle, in terms of their metaphysical views on the nature of reality, their theories of justice as it relates to their ethical and political views, and many other aspects of their overall philosophies—and even their quite different philosophical temperaments, Plato being more of a philosophical idealist and Aristotle being more of a hands-on proto-scientist. Yet the above reflection on the four pillars of education shows that there are an inherent harmony and a coherence to Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about education and human development. One cannot adequately practice a skill or develop the right habits if one doesn’t first have the right goals or Platonic ideals to aim toward, because there is an inherent danger in practicing the wrong things and developing the wrong habits, and thus in spending one’s time as teachers or educators unwisely and unfruitfully. And there is a danger in having mere Platonic ideals without the Aristotelian habit formation necessary to fortify our students for the journey ahead, whether in education or in the rest of life itself.

Without focus, practice, habituation, and the ideals revealed to our students by educators as guides, in the classroom or in life, we condemn our students, and sometimes even ourselves, to a life spent in darkness with no hope of ever reaching—much less understanding or dwelling in—the light.