Andrew Kern
President of the CiRCE Institute; Vice President of The Lost Tools of Writing
Andrew Kern is the founder and president of the CiRCE Institute (Center for Independent Research on Classical Education), the husband of Karen, the father of five grown adults, and the grandfather of (so far) nine grandchildren. He has been researching, speaking, teaching, and consulting in the Christian classical renewal since 1993, during which he has been instrumental in the founding of three schools, consulted with over 100 schools and co-ops, and served as Director of Classical Instruction, Academic Dean, and Headmaster. Andrew speaks regularly at home school and classical conferences. In addition, he is the co-author with Dr. Gene Edward Veith of Classical Education, The Movement Sweeping America and, with Andrea Lipinski, of The CiRCE Guide to Reading. He also led the development of CiRCE’s classical rhetoric program, The Lost Tools of Writing, and he loves Homer, Shakespeare, Anne of Green Gables, and Endeavour. Like Shakespeare, he knows a little Latin and less Greek. Except a lot less than Shakespeare. Andrew and Karen have settled in Concord, North Carolina, where they attend Christ The Good Shepherd Orthodox Mission and watch their five grown children raise their children and pursue their callings.
Children are souls to be nurtured, not products to be measured. –Andrew Kern
2024 Speaker Topic
Logos-Centered Learning
The disciple whom Jesus loved famously taught that Christ was the Logos of God and that, “In Him was life and the life was the light of men.” There is only one Logos of God – Christ, the Uncreated Logos. And yet in a sense, everything is a “logos” of God – a created logos. In yet another sense, everything we humans make is an imitation of the logoi (plural for logos) of God – mimetic logoi. Education is teaching and learning how to know the Uncreated Logos, the created logoi, and the mimetic logoi, each as it can be known. Drawing on T.S. Eliot’s poem, Choruses from “the Rock”, Kern shows why it helps to think of things as logoi, how doing so makes us better teachers, and how we can teach, learn, and lead better when we are Logos-centered.
Temple-Centered Teaching
The biblical Temple is the key to interpreting the whole Bible. It’s also the key to knowing the world, ourselves, and our place in the world. It shows how we – made according to the Image of God – learn. Since, as Dorothy Sayers said, we should teach with the grain of the child, this presentation searches for insights into that grain, insights hidden on the very surface of the temple, so we can bring them into our classrooms. What is it about the temple that enables us to teach our students in a Christ-centered way, guide them to the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are found in Christ, and heal the breach between education and the spiritual life? Come and hear!