[Sidebar: That led us to another competition: highest words per minute (wpm) with acceptably high accuracy, for which we used TypingClub.com for baselining.]

After four same-day family attempts, we topped out at 190 of 197 nations in 15 minutes. (A week later, we reached 194. We still have yet to achieve a perfect score.)

It turns out that I don’t know Oceania. So I opened up the Maps of our World app and did the “Training” version. The app identifies 17 countries/island chains in Oceania. If you locate each correctly on the first attempt you get a score of 17. My score on my first attempt?

-3

My baseline knowledge of Oceania was so low that I couldn’t even achieve a 0. But a baseline is a starting place. And when you’re at -3, the only way is up. Well, I guess I could have made it further into negative territory, but it sure felt like a low starting point.

After a week of light practice? 14. Then 15. Then 17. Repeatedly. All it took was a little practice.

Start with your baseline

Every week, I lead learning is learned experiences for middle schoolers. This week we established a baseline for arithmetic skills using this web app. The beauty is that you can set your digit range, duration, AND your operations: make it as simple or challenging as you want.

The students know that forced, spaced, interleaved retrieval is a foundational principle of learning. This app elegantly provides forced, interleaved retrieval practice and delivers a score – the number of successes in a set period of time. And if students use it throughout the week, they add spaced retrieval practice as well.

I wasn’t prepared for how low the baseline of math proficiency would be. The students struggled with frustration and shame. I was grateful for my recent experience with Oceania. I shared with them that my baseline was -3. They laughed. It is a pretty low starting point. Yet in a week, I raised it to 17 with a little forced, spaced, interleaved practice. If they would use this math app for a few minutes every day, there’s no reason that they can’t see similar progress in math skill.

Learning is learned. They’re proving it. So am I. . . starting from -3.

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“Unless the global community urgently changes priorities, the potential of this generation of young people may well be lost.”

Priority #1 for UNICEF?

1. “Ensure all children learn, including by closing the digital divide.”

This threat is real, and is not confined to the parts of the world where UNICEF does its most important work. Every public school student in my community is issued a Chromebook and, if necessary, a hotspot or other access point to be able to participate in remote education. Yet some students are simply not showing up to learn. The reasons are many: lack of motivation, embarrassment of home sounds/sights being visible to others, care for younger siblings, antagonistic relationships with teachers, prior disappointing experiences in school, etc. 

Even in a community where we have the resources to bridge the digital divide for remote education, there is a very real risk of a lost generation, accelerated by COVID. The situation is even more dire for communities that lack the will or resources to connect with learners.

Who is not at-risk?

There is a group of students who are not at risk of being part of a lost COVID generation. They are defined not by zip code or socioeconomic status, but by having mastered the craft of learning.

Consider our local high school (which my daughter attends). This year they have shifted to remote, synchronous learning from 12:30 to 4:00pm Monday through Thursday. (Each of 8 class meets twice for 45 minutes during the week.) In the mornings, teachers are available for “office hours” where any student can “visit” the teacher on Zoom to get help with anything they need. Fridays are a blend of office hours, quizzes, tests, projects, and other asynchronous work. 

Who is thriving under the changed conditions of learning? Those who are able to identify learning goals, schedule their time, eliminate distractions, and ask for help when they need it. Remote learning has given this group increased agency in their learning. Now the things that typically slow institutional schools (passing periods, disruptive behavior, device management, etc.) don’t slow them down. For these students, learning has accelerated under COVID; they’re not itching to get back to the classroom.

That’s true for “disadvantaged” students too. For a middling student (one who is accustomed to getting C’s, but can earn A’s, and occasionally earns an F), who is susceptible to peer pressure, the new model is liberating. His buddies, who might draw him into distraction or mischief in-person, are removed from sight as he focuses on the direct instruction. Likewise, going to “office hours” doesn’t mean his friends see him leaving his lunch to get help from a teacher. He can learn without the social stigma of learning-averse youth cultures. If he manages his work well, he even has time for a part-time job.

How can we ensure that ALL children learn?

Autodidacts don’t typically suffer when schools are disrupted, because they are not fundamentally dependent on others for learning. An autodidact is a self-teacher, one who knows how to set a learning goal and achieve it. In order to know how to teach oneself, a person must learn to learn. Although we rarely teach our children the habits of autodidacts, this is not an unreasonable expectation for children in the age range of 10-12, as they enter the middle school years. If our children learn how to learn and cultivate agency in learning, then there are few disruptions that can significantly slow learning.

Learning is learned. It is learned explicitly – meaning that learners can recite the core principles of learning. Yet more powerfully, it is learned implicitly – by experience.

Implicit, experiential learning almost always trumps explicit, verbal learning. Why? Because implicit learning is always happening, and explicit learning almost always requires significant focused attention. Most of us have a tiny (and often distorted) explicit understanding of learning, but all of us have a lifetime of experience that shapes our implicit assumptions about learning and how we actually do it.

The answer to the question of how we “ensure that ALL children learn” is that we must teach them how to learn – both explicitly and implicitly – and equip them with the dignity and agency of taking responsibility for their own learning. 

Nobel laureate cognitive psychologist Herb Simon captured it well:

“Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.”

I am leading Learning is Learned experiences for middle schoolers in my community in an attempt to build three things:

1. Explicit knowledge of the principles and dynamics of learning.
2. Meaningful understanding of those principles and dynamics.
3. Skill in using those principles for learning in school and all of life.

Like UNICEF, I fear the risk of a lost COVID generation. But I believe that bridging the digital divide is not enough. We must help our children master the craft of learning, exercise agency in learning, and enjoy the delights of durable learning.

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As the husband of a physician, and the son of parents over age 70, I applaud this move. It seeks to preserve life by making sacrificial decisions.

Yet this decision also has profound implications for learning and society. It means that for the next two months, the center of gravity for learning will return home. And – in deference to my homeschooling friends – home is where it always begins, and now we must learn from you how to curate learning environments at home.

Your Children WILL Learn

There has been understandable concern about “lost” learning that may result from children not being in school. In fact, this unprecedented closing of schools should help us to distinguish two kinds of learning – one that will continue unabated, and another that may slow down, remain the same, or even accelerate.

Students of psychology are almost universally familiar with Henry Molaison (commonly referenced as H.M.) who, as a result of brain surgery to treat terrible seizures, lost the ability to acquire new explicit memories – like the names of his doctors. In short, it appeared that he lost the ability to learn. But researchers discovered that despite his complete inability to form new explicit memories, he was continually constructing implicit memories.

Researchers asked H.M. to trace an image reflected in a mirror. (In other words, he could only see the mirror image and the reflection of his hand, but could not see the image or his hand directly). Understandably, he struggled! They gave him the task again on another day. Of course, he didn’t remember having tried it before because he could form no new explicit memories. And they gave him the task again. Over time, H.M. improved at this challenging task. The man who couldn’t “learn” was learning!

This is the sense in which I confidently assert that during this tumultuous time, your children WILL learn. Their repeated experiences, deliberate practices, and focal attention WILL form them. This sort of learning will continue unabated.

Explicit Learning can Accelerate

Earlier this week, a friend, whose first-grade daughter is now home with her every day commented to me, “It is amazing what she can learn in one hour of focused work.” Using What Your First Grader Needs to Know, my friend was engaging her daughter at home. (If you’re not familiar with the Core Knowledge series from E.D. Hirsch Jr. and are trying to navigate the end of a school year, the grade level books could be a lifesaver.) Explicit learning – math facts, the capitols of states, bird names, etc. – is the kind of learning that is variable depending on effort and environment. With wise nurture, this kind of learning can accelerate at home.

The Learning Environment

If you’re a parent like me, suddenly working from home with kids who are learning from home, understanding how learning works is important. It matters because your child is learning and being formed by your home learning environment. Structure, challenge, support, and motivation are essential elements.

If you had the privilege of growing up in a vibrant learning environment, you may take these conditions for granted – and you may even be able to reproduce them for your children without significant effort. You have experienced the glorious goodness of implicit learning. However, you may have experienced this and not be able to reproduce it. Or you may have had only fleeting experiences of enthralling learning experiences – or none at all – and so the thought of being able to provide that for your children feels like a daydream.

In a culture where the conditions of optimal learning are not widely experienced, it is essential that parents and teachers cultivate explicit understanding of how learning works in order to help children learn. Over the coming weeks, that is what I’m going to explore in a series of posts, beginning with this primer.

Engage, Embody, Entrust

Not too long ago, I had the privilege of helping to train Sunday school teachers at my church. So I apprenticed myself to Jesus, the Master Teacher. I read through the Gospels, looking attentively at how He taught. Three themes emerged. Jesus engaged his audiences. He asked them questions (including stumpers), gave them riddles to solve, provoked them, gave them tasks, and told them stories. Jesus took bodily action – touching lepers, making mud to put on a blind man’s eyes, writing in the dirt, and welcoming children into his embrace – and called for bodily action – come and see, go and wash, fetch a donkey, prepare a meal, give me a coin, follow me, etc. Finally, he continually entrusted the work of learning to his disciples (a word that means “learner”), sending them out to do the work of the Kingdom.

These three principles – Engage, Embody, and Entrust – that I observed in Jesus’ interactions with people of all ages and social status, sound a lot like the best Montessori classrooms. As I’ve sought to practice this pedagogy (method of teaching) over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that my own learning design (I’m trained as an elementary school teacher) is deficient. I very often plan learning experiences that fail in one or more of the 3 E’s – despite the fact that I “know” explicitly that these are the dynamics of learning! Explicit understanding is not a sufficient condition for nurturing learning . . . and yet, when I am attentive and plan learning encounters that engage learners, require embodied response, and entrust the work of learning to them, I witness significant learning.

And so, over the past year, I’ve devoured books on learning. I’ve realized that as a classroom teacher, I had little or no explicit understanding of how learning actually works. Moreover, I was just plain wrong in some of my assumptions about learning.

Now, as we become a state – and perhaps a nation – of homeschoolers (at least for a little while), I hope to share some of those dynamics of learning so that the experience of learning at home can be formative in the best ways, and that explicit learning and delight in learning can increase.

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Magnet schools and programs don’t have this struggle. Their telos can be STEM, liberal arts, health sciences or something else. The goal gives unity and purpose to the course of study. The purpose of learning is intrinsic to educational design.

For school systems, like my own, that care about educational equity, this challenge is even more pronounced. We have students who are ambitious, want to be challenged, and are solid applicants to elite universities. We also have students who struggle to make it to the finish line of graduation – and then have few promising prospects. These students attend the same school; participate in sports, drama, and music together; and share some classes. Yet they can complete their high school years without and understanding of what makes our city work – and the role that they can play in it at any stage of life.

A Purpose for a Public High School

In our city, we have an 8-month, tuition-based program called Leadership Charlottesville in which class members work in teams to come up with viable solutions to various community issues. Participants come from all sectors of the city – executives, entrepreneurs, activists, non-profit leaders, retirees, local government employees, etc. The beauty of the model is that they learn how our city works in a cohort model, and then actively contribute to the well-being of our city through their capstone projects.

What if our public high school was defined by a course of study similar to Leadership Charlottesville? What if our students met civic leaders – elected officials, volunteers, minority business owners, foundation executives, university professors, general contractors, wedding photographers, graphic designers, engineers, electricians, counselors, and others – as a central part of their education on a weekly basis? What if they had the opportunity, 4 to 6 times per year, to visit non-profits, businesses, and government offices to see how our city works, and to meet the people who do that work?

Learning by Design

Great instructional design begins with clear learning goals. Here’s what I’m suggesting: At the end of four years of elective participation, students will:

1. Know how the public and private sectors differ, what each contributes to the common good, how they interrelate, and how they can work together.
2. Interact with civic leaders in government, business, and non-profits to gain a personal understanding of our city.
3. Understand what a business, non-profit, or civic organization must achieve in order to sustain itself and create value in the community.
4. Develop skill in analyzing and suggesting innovations to civic leaders that can help their organizations to thrive and create additional value.
5. Understand the characteristics of streets, buildings, and other urban features (train tracks, bridges, sidewalks, parks, pools, etc.) that contribute to a thriving or struggling neighborhood.
6. Cultivate skill in identifying and proposing changes to streets, buildings, and other urban features that would help more neighborhoods thrive.
7. Identify the knowledge, understanding, and skills required to create value in the various sectors and vocations that compose our community.
8. Develop a portfolio of vocations-of-interest to explore through internships, apprenticeships, and a capstone project.

Active Learning for Students

On this proposal, students would have responsibility for:

1. Active listening: Prepare questions for each civic leader.
2. Analytic Summary: Explain in writing what each civic leader does, and how this contributes to the civic substructure of Charlottesville. In so doing, students are writing for a purpose – documenting the civic architecture of Charlottesville.
3. Creative problem-solving: Suggest an innovation or solution that might help the civic leader.

Forming Students’ Vocational Imagination

How can a high school student possibly know all of the vocational possibilities that there are in a community? Their daily life involves going to school. They know their parents, teachers, relatives, and a few people in their neighborhood – and may not even know what all of them do for their vocations. Consistent interaction with civic-minded adults who can articulate what they do and the role that it plays in the community allows students to imagine themselves in a similar role.

For example, consider the General Contractor who presents to students. The GC explains that he oversees teams of tradesmen and women who have developed expertise in an area such as plumbing, electrical, framing, roofing or finish carpentry. The GC himself studied history at UVA, worked in the building trades in carpentry, then as a supervisor, and at age 30 established his own general contracting firm. He has to understand tax and labor law in order to know how to comply with it; he has to build a budget and create a profit and loss report; he must understand the physics of the buildings he’s constructing – as well as that of the tools that he buys, maintains, and uses – to deliver value for his clients. He also has to hire, fire, and manage employees to ensure that they deliver high-quality work on time.

A high school student who met this GC could see a path through the trades to business ownership that requires hard work in high school to master math, science, psychology, and economics. He could even ask the GC for an internship opportunity to try it out to see if the hard mental and physical labor is as rewarding as it sounds.

Establishing Critical Social Capital

Disadvantaged students, by definition, lack access to social capital. A course of study that put them continually in contact with civic leaders (who are potential mentors and employers) would multiply their access to networks through which they could explore vocational options. Not only would they develop an understanding of the various roles of public and private entities (a good in and of itself), students build the crucial relational connections with community decision-makers, mentors, sponsors, and employers.

Being Formed as Creators Rather than Consumers

The course of study I am suggesting entails two significant creative components:

1. Creative solution/innovation: For each civic leader who presents his or her work to students, every student writes a short suggestion, “Have you thought of . . .?” “Might it be helpful to . . .?” This practice is formative – engaging students in creative thinking about what makes a business or organization work better.
2. Capstone project: Having met a wealth of civic leaders over their high school years, seniors contact one of those leaders and ask if they might make some sort of meaningful contribution to that organization. It might be helping with an event at the ASPCA, or assisting with a donor letter for the Fountain Fund, or participating in a research project at Thriving Cities. The possibilities are truly unlimited. In this way, there is reciprocity between the civic leaders who share their time and wisdom, and the students, who share their time, insight, and passion.

Involving Civic Leaders in our Schools

Civic leaders can learn to tell their story to our students in ways that inspire and involve:

1. How does your organization create value for our community?
2. Is it public or private? If private, is it for-profit or non-profit? If for-profit, is it a benefit corp (b-corp)?
3. What is a problem that your business has that high school students might be interested in helping to solve?
4. What are the key areas of study that you needed to master in order to do your work well?

There is also the obvious benefit that civic leaders experience high school students as our kids. They act as first-person role models.

Meaningful Shared Experiences

This course of study presents the prospect of advantaged and disadvantaged students participating shoulder-to-shoulder in meaningful learning activities that help all of us to better understand and serve our city. The purpose isn’t to get a grade, or to pad a résumé; the purpose is to learn about our city, build connections with civic leaders, and develop a vocational imagination.

Collective Impact

To take this course of study a step further, students could actively participate in Collective Impact. Collective Impact (CI) is the commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem, using a structured form of collaboration.

Elective, or Compulsory?

The deepest learning is almost always self-chosen and self-directed. For that reason, the design of an interesting, attractive, low-stakes elective course of study is probably the best choice. I think it has the potential to become the signature of the high school – a compelling reason for families moving to Charlottesville to choose Charlottesville High School. Indeed, I think this is a course of study that would be valuable in any city.

Charlottesville High School students could get to know our city, how it works, and its many civic leaders across sectors. This could assist them to find meaningful employment directly after high school; to explore areas of interest through volunteering or internship; to discover local higher-ed opportunities at PVCC and UVA; and to provide a compelling reason (and connections) to return to Charlottesville after college elsewhere.

Reading for a Purpose

The natural anchor text to learn how a city works is The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Students who read Jacobs’ classic in high school – in conjunction with meeting civic leaders in their own city – will have eyes to see and appreciate how cities work.

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How are learning and personality related to each other? How are learning and temperament intertwined? Are learning and character linked? If so, which one impacts the other?

This blog is a place where I explore those questions. It is not primarily as a locus for discussion. (Blog comment threads are rarely places to find wisdom or virtue.) Rather, I hope that forcing myself to express my questions and observations will improve those powers of inquiry and attentiveness – and hopefully be of value to others who are asking the same, or similar questions.

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There are three essential elements of progressive mastery of any skill.

The first element is effort. It is easily visible to any youth soccer coach. If your players put in 50% effort to skill development in practice, they will progress toward mastery of the core skills of soccer than those who put forth their full effort. Effort, however, is not enough.

The acquisition of mastery depends equally upon focus. Back on the youth soccer practice field, the focus of players during practice is an excellent predictor of their acquisition of the skill in question. If the players are carrying on side conversations while the coach is explaining a drill, they won’t know how to execute the drill and acquire the desired skill. Yet even full focus and effort aren’t enough to attain mastery.

I can have a youth soccer team that is prepared to give full focus and full effort to practice. Yet if I fail to give them clarity of what the drill is and how to perform it well, I hamper their opportunity to gain mastery.  This is the clarity coefficient.

The goal of learning is mastery.

Mastery of a discrete skill is the ability to perform an action without full focus. Think of the 9-year-old right-footed kid learning to shoot with her left foot. It will take weeks of practice with full focus and effort with crystal clarity before she will be able to shoot left-footed without having to think about how to do it.

The post The Mastery Equation first appeared on Graham Scharf.

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I make eggs most mornings for breakfast. I make fried eggs, omelets, or scrambled eggs, depending on the day. All of them are good enough – but not truly excellent. I haven’t committed to the work that would be required to make truly the kind of breakfast eggs that would allow me to open a hopping brunch restaurant. And for my purposes, good eggs are good enough. I make mediocre eggs, and I enjoy them.

What is true of my eggs is true of virtually every enterprise of learning. A child who learns to write will naturally become a mediocre writer unless she commits the required effort and focus to excel. This presents a persistent challenge for every form of education.

• As a classroom teacher, this means that my students will naturally become mediocre unless I press and inspire them to something more.
• As a coach, I know that my players will naturally achieve mediocrity unless I can motivate them.
• As a parent, I know that in many learning endeavors, my kids will become mediocre unless they can sustain the effort and focus required for mastery.

Despite this reality, we live in a world in which people to absolutely amazing things. While mediocrity is normal, it isn’t necessary. One of my intellectual passions – which I explore on this site – is how successive mastery is attained.

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The Money: How hard is it? In one neighborhood in our city, the median income is $10,800 per year. Of those households, 92% are headed by a single mother. For a mother with two young children, that is $29.59 per day to pay for everything – food, shelter, clothing, and transportation . . . to say nothing of saving or planning for the future.

The Networks: Tragically, in this community, residents reported knowing only two or three other residents in the community. By contrast, I think my world is probably the inverse. I think there are only two or three families on my block of thirty or so homes that I don’t know.

The Opportunity: These precious families lack opportunity. Many of these mothers have developed amazing persistence and creativity to survive and care for their children. But nothing accrues from their work. They fight just to stay afloat. So what would happen if that extraordinary tenacity was directed to building capacity?

For the past 18 years the Jeremiah Program has been working with the most vulnerable section of society: low-income single mothers with young children. Believing that these families have the capacity to cultivate civic leaders, they have built an incubator model for nurturing those leaders.

Over the past two years, I have helped to establish 2 Gen Cville in order to plant a Jeremiah Program in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia. It is one of the reasons that this blog has been so neglected: my time and energy have been devoted to building a transformative institution.

So, what is it?

The Jeremiah Program is a place – a residential community for low-income single mothers whose children (upon entry) are under age 5. It does for these families what a business incubator does for a start-up: provide space, coaching, encouragement, and a trajectory out of the incubator. The mothers are enrolled in a degree or certificate program that is suited to a field of employment that is in demand, and pays a living wage. While these moms are working hard at their classwork, their young children are loved and taught in the on-site child development center. And in the evenings, there are “empowerment classes” that cultivate parenting skills, financial literacy, and goal setting. Even better, each site has a Life Skills Coach who meets regularly with each mom to help her meet the parenting, financial, educational and vocational goals she has set.

The Secret Sauce

The genius of the model is pulling together four keys in the context of a supportive community:

1. Safe and affordable housing
2. Career-track education (for mom)
3. Early childhood education
4. Life Skills

Basically, it hits all the key levers of generational poverty at the same time and over a sustained time (2-4 years) during the most sensitive time of relationship and brain development (early childhood).

Ridge Schuyler, a local leader and founder of Charlottesville Works summarized the situation of poverty in our community: “One third of Charlottesville’s families do not earn enough income to be self-sufficient. The vast majority of these struggling families consist of women and their children. Absent a sustained, methodical and intentional effort, a huge number of these children born into poverty will remain there the rest of their lives.”

This is that sustained, methodical and intentional effort to which I am giving myself.

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Jim Messina (D) and Kevin Madden (R) have broken that trend creatively and constructively in this joint memo. They argue that not only is early childhood a sphere in which there is strong electoral support – 60% of Republicans, 68% of Independents and 84% of Democrats – but that acting on this issue together can be proof to voters that lawmakers can work together on important issues of common concern. In effect, this is an opportunity to do good, and to restore trust.

In addition to restoring trust, early childhood interventions can actually “tangibly improve the lives of American families.” This is not just an area of common interest; it is one that can demonstrably improve health, education, and community.

What Madden and Messina don’t point out is that this is not merely a policy issue. It is one that requires action from virtually every sector of our shared life: family, neighbors, education, health care, and public policy. When lawmakers take policy action on early childhood, they need not alienate populists who believe passionately in street level action. Both are important, and both are necessary.

In like manner, new policies need not necessarily expand government programs, and thereby inflame those who are troubled by the scope and cost of big government. Wise policy can facilitate the efforts of families, foundations, preschools, early intervention programs and others who are already doing the important first-person work of equipping parents and supporting children.

This is an era of golden opportunity for early childhood. May our lawmakers seize it together.

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Educational journalist Paul Tough has written an important book on education, early childhood, and character called How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character. It appears on my recommended reading list. Tough makes a compelling case for the role of early experiences in forming character, which in turn powerfully shapes children’s educational and vocational prospects. When talking about children, education, and character, it is always important to define terms.

What do we mean by ‘character’?

In this interview, Paul Tough clarifies what Angela Duckworth and her colleagues mean by ‘character.’ The video starts at the 3 minute mark, and the following 30 seconds provide a good sense for the way that Tough uses ‘character’ in his writing, following the lead of those whose work he is reporting.

http://youtu.be/RRSBz69ubRY?t=3m

In short, ‘character’, as it is used here, is separated from its moral dimensions, and framed in terms of skills that make for success in modern society. That’s important.

Why does this matter?

If we define character narrowly as skills that make for success, then we have effectively – and drastically – narrowed the definition of the good such that a child could have all the skills of learning (self-control, perseverance, creativity, etc.) and entirely lack wisdom, kindness, honesty and integrity. At the family and classroom level, this is a recipe for disaster. The only way that any person can know how to apply self-control, perseverance and creativity is through a strong moral compass that is “morally loaded.” It says: “This is good and worthy,” and “That is reprehensible.”

Irony and Tragedy

The irony is that a definition of character that attempts to avoid being ‘morally loaded’ fails. It has a distinct moral compass. It points toward success, achievement, and earning as its telos or goal. Moreover, children who are guided by this moral compass internalize the ethic of success and achievement, as Harvard’s Making Caring Common Report makes painfully clear.

We asked youth to rank what was most important to them: achieving at a high level, happiness (feeling good most of the time), or caring for others. Almost 80% of youth picked high achievement or happiness as their top choice, while roughly 20% selected caring for others.

The tragedy is that the narrowing of character undermines the very qualities of character that can and should give purpose and focus to the skills of self-control and perseverance. Without a strong and true moral compass, those skills can just as easily be turned to ambivalent or evil ends as too good. In C.S. Lewis’ words, “Education with out values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”

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