“Instruct and delight” said Horace, is the purpose of poetry but it is also the sign of the good teacher, according to Carrie Eben and Christopher Perrin, authors of the book on that very subject—The Good Teacher. Eben is a CiRCE institute Master Teacher with MSEd in curriculum and instruction; she classically homeschooled her children via Classical Conversations, founded a K-12 classical school in Arkansas, and is finishing a PhD in great books from Faulkner University. Perrin is the CEO of Classical Academic Press, director of Alcuin Fellowship, former VP of the Society of Classical Learning, many letters behind his name and probably doesn’t need introduction in the classical education cosmos.
I have to admit that I’ve been peeking behind-the-scenes on this book, waiting for it to come out, eager for Eben and Perrin to write a classical education version of The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher (2004), which was the teaching book I was given when I first started teaching in a classical school in 2004. When I began teaching more than twenty years ago, I had zero training. I had a phenomenal liberal arts education with a strong great books core, but no one told me how to plan a lesson, assess for virtue, promote the joy of learning (while balancing students’ inevitable obstinacy or unruliness). I attended professional development sessions, but what I longed for was a reference guide, something to keep beside me and remind why and how I was to teach in a way that aligned with classical education’s noble ideals.
In 2018 Carrie and I founded a Christian classical school and encountered the same absence of material. We showed our teachers Perrin’s video “The Eight Essential Principles of Classical Pedagogy” (2014), but we needed the principles written out to be meditated on and interacted with. We also wanted examples and practical tips. The Good Teacher is the book that every classical school teacher has always wished for. Through these now ten principles, Eben and Perrin walk, like Virgils ahead of us, explaining not only how to instruct students in goodness but also how to delight in goodness as a teacher. If you’ve ever wanted to be a great teacher, they advise you to start by being good.
Each chapter clarifies one of the ten principles drawing on literature, personal anecdotes, teacher stories, and concludes with illustrations for grammar school, logic school, and rhetoric school for how to apply these principles. As the authors continually insist, these are principles, not techniques. And, all of the principles are directed toward a common end—forming virtuous—or virtue-seeking—human beings. The authors remind us, “Teachers should help students… to order their lives and their loves beautifully—in other words, to cultivate virtue.” These virtues are moral, intellectual, civic, physical, and supernatural, and the liberal arts are the means of study toward those high ends, while principles of pedagogy are the teachers’ means toward instructing and delighting in those goods.
While I recommend that every new classical school teacher read The Good Teacher and that classical schools purchase copies for new faculty, after two decades in classical education, I was still bolstered by the wisdom in this book. In the chapter Multum non multa, they quote John of Salisbury in his Metalogicon: “The ancients correctly reckoned that to ignore certain things constituted on of the marks of a good grammarian.” My teaching weakness is always to stuff my classes with all my favorite books, but I regularly lament having too little time for them. It feels like I’m flying through a room introducing students to the famed dead rather than allowing them time to sit over coffee and get to know Shakespeare or Wheatley well. I needed The Good Teacher’s reminders and encouragement.
The chapter on jingles, songs, and catechism was particularly delightful because I saw so many examples authored by veteran classical school teachers such as Carrie herself but also Jenny Wallis and Kyle Rapinchuk. What an example of tradition that we pass on the greatest books of the ages while also adding to it with our own voices! This chapter shows teachers the freedom in what Parker Palmer calls finding your teaching voice. Classical education is not a one-size fits all, but there is room for dynamic interaction and authentic innovation from within. Susan Wise Bauer has posited that we might better call what we’re doing “Neo-Classical Education,” and I think she’s right. This is “new” classical education, and the teacher illustrations and examples reveal how this old way opens space for new goods.
In our current culture, classical education is more needed than ever. On a recent episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast (May 13, 2025), he wondered whether “what we need to do is return to more classical education. Reading the great books” for students to be more humanized, more attentive, less alone. The conversation about education and AI was, in some ways, disheartening, for his interviewee could not specify exactly what teachers do. Rebecca Winthrop, director of Brookings Institute said, “Teachers do many, many things.” Her vague answer tried to attest to the necessity of relationship but centered on “skill development and knowledge transmission,” which she admitted could be substituted by technology. Substitution by AI is only possible when teaching is primarily a cognitive and transactional activity, rather than a holistic one. As I’ve said elsewhere, education is an apprenticeship in the tradition toward a contemplative life. AI is sidelined by such a definition of education.
In The Good Teacher the authors depict a promising picture of why teachers cannot be replaced by robots. When it comes to learning, students are apprentices. They are learning who they want to be. If we want our students to pursue virtue, the teacher must exemplify in his or her life these virtues. We have to instruct students in and cultivate delight in them for all the goods worthy of their love. “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how,” Wordsworth wrote. The Good Teacher shows teachers more than how to teach well but also how to be good.
The Good Teacher is very much directed towards the practices of a good teacher in a classical K-12 classroom. Certainly, the practical ends of nursing instruction for adults differ from an education in classical ideas, but the principles, the first principles, of good teaching The Good Teacher explains are also transferable to teaching per se.
Purchased