Metanoia & butterflies

The imago at work.

So we are advancing in another direction, as general Patton used to say.

You are starting your career as a teacher of classical curriculum. You are trying to shift your school toward a classical curriculum. You want to homeschool your own children (or others) in a classical curriculum.

Where do you begin? What should you do? How do you proceed?

Rest assured that teaching in what is called a “classical curriculum” does not entail that you have translated Seneca or annotated “The Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides.

The classical program is essential using the whatever works available to encourage students to begin inquiry into the world around them. “All philosophy begins in wonder,” says Aristotle and “All men by nature desire to know.”

Your facility in teaching in the classical mode will flourish if you keep in mind what the end goal, or telos, is for any good curriculum. In the ancients, the goal was self-knowledge leading to piety. Learning one’s place in the universe eventually leads to revering those things worthy of reverence. “Know yourself” (gnothi seauton) was the maxim of the peripatetic school in Athens.

Knowing yourself leads to repentance, or “metanoia” as the Greeks called it. The example for this transformation was to be found in the life cycle of the butterfly; pupa (the worm) to chrysalis (the shining shell) to imago (the butterfly).

So your work as an educator is to help lead forth students from their stage as worms to the stage of being a beautiful butterfly. It’s as simple as that.

How then do the various works you use fit into that? What works are best to accomplish that? What insights can you have